The Future is Female! An Interview with Lisa Yaszek

Posted October 2, 2018

External Article: Women Write About Comics

Lisa Yaszek, a professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Literature, Media, and Communication, was interviewed about her recent book, The Future is Female! 

Here's an excerpt:

How does this collection address intersectionality? On page xvii of your introduction you list “a host of issues, including sexism, racism, environmentalism, colonialism and capitalism”—how are issues of gender, sexuality, race and class linked in these stories?

Lisa Yaszek: Given that intersectionality is technically a critical frame first advocated by black feminists in recent decades, and that most of the women in this anthology were white women from the first part of the twentieth-century, I was actually surprised to find as much intersectionality as I did in these stories! Perhaps not surprisingly, women often used the figure of the alien other to explore interlocking systems of oppression. We see this as early as Leslie F. Stone’s 1931 story “The Conquest of Gola,” which uses a brutal (and sometimes brutally funny) interplanetary battle of the sexes to map the connections between gender discrimination and environmental and economic exploitation. (In fact, it’s interesting to note that while Stone specifically connects masculinity to imperialism, she also recognizes that powerful women might well indulge in sex and gender discrimination as well as any man.)

Read the full story here.

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.