TY - JOUR
AU - Boaz,, Cynthia
AB - Abstract Fictional universes can be treated as discrete units of analysis in which we see the operation of international relations theory. This article discusses insights gleaned from a course created at Sonoma State University called “Gender and Geopolitics in Science Fiction and Fantasy,” in which feminist theory and international relations approaches are integrated, and science fiction and fantasy texts serve as the mechanism through which to examine the key themes and questions. This article provides an overview of the pedagogy to highlight the usefulness of speculative fiction in teaching. Each of the fictional universes is treated as a separate system where gender and political dynamics manifest in ways that observers of international relations will recognize. The core texts are Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, Jessica Jones, Star Trek, Misfits, and Watchmen. The major theories and approaches explored here have implications for gender studies and feminist theory, the concepts of metaphor and allegory, and game theory. Resumen: Los universos ficticios pueden tratarse como unidades discretas de análisis en las cuales vemos el funcionamiento de la teoría de las relaciones internacionales. En este artículo, se analizan ideas recogidas de un curso creado en la Universidad Estatal de Sonoma denominado «El género y la geopolítica en la ciencia ficción y la fantasía», donde se integran la teoría feminista y los enfoques de las relaciones internacionales, y los textos de ciencia ficción y fantasía sirven como el mecanismo a través del cual se examinan los temas y los interrogantes clave. El artículo ofrece una reseña de la pedagogía orientada a destacar la utilidad de la ficción especulativa en la enseñanza. Cada uno de los universos ficticios se trata como un sistema separado donde la dinámica de género y política se manifiesta en formas que los observadores de las relaciones internacionales serán capaces de reconocer. Los textos principales son Battlestar Galactica, Juego de Tronos, Jessica Jones, Viaje a las Estrellas, Misfits y Vigilantes. Las principales teorías y enfoques que aquí se exploran tienen implicancias para los estudios de género y la teoría feminista, los conceptos de metáfora y alegoría, y la teoría de juegos. Résumé: Les univers de fiction peuvent être traités comme des unités d'analyse discrètes où nous pouvons observer la théorie sur les relations internationales. Cet article aborde les informations glanées à un cours créé à l'Université publique de Sonoma, intitulé «Les genres et la géopolitique dans la science-fiction et l'univers fantastique», où sont intégrées la théorie féministe et des approches des relations internationales; les textes de science-fiction et de genre fantastique servent de mécanisme permettant d'examiner ces thèmes et questions clés. Cet article offre une vue d'ensemble de la pédagogie pour mettre en exergue l'utilité de la fiction spéculative dans l'enseignement. Chaque univers fictionnel est traité comme un système séparé où la dynamique des genres et de la politique se manifeste de manière à être reconnue par les observateurs des relations internationales. Les textes principaux sont Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, Jessica Jones, Star Trek, Misfits et Watchmen. Les principales théories et approches étudiées ici impliquent les études de genres et la théorie féministe, les concepts de métaphore et d'allégorie et la théorie du jeu. science fiction, fantasy, gender politics, feminist theory, pedagogy, metaphor, game theory There is a reason that writers are among the first people targeted at the dawn of authoritarianism. Writers—particularly those who work in the genre known as speculative fiction—can offer their audiences inroads to truths inaccessible in other public realms. Because tyrants have a need to be seen as the only legitimate source of truth, stories—which are often cloaked deep in metaphor—sometimes become the only tools with which citizens can counter state propaganda. While regimes gaslight1 populations into acquiescing publicly to what Soviet dissidents under Stalin often called The Big Lie,2 citizens retreat to their imaginations as a way, ironically, to stay tethered to reality. In an extended footnote in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, author Junot Diaz (2008, 97) ponders this dynamic in the context of the Trujillo-era Dominican Republic: What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and the Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like. The competition between dictators and writers of which Diaz speaks is the contest of winning hearts and minds. Although this dynamic is waged urgently and dramatically in authoritarian settings, these regimes do not hold the market. Speculative fiction also plays an important role in more democratic and open societies. Dyson (2015) writes about this in the context of understanding international relations. He asserts that IR theory is packed with imaginary constructs, much like the realms of science fiction and fantasy, and that the questions asked in science fiction mirror those asked in international relations (e.g., “Why does war happen?” Dyson 2015, 2–3). In other words, science fiction and fantasy can provide us ways of understanding subjects that may be too provocative or controversial for citizens and audiences to tackle directly. Examples include explorations of racism, xenophobia, and privilege. In a particularly adroit analysis along these lines, Rowley and Weldes (2012) use the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel series (aka the “Buffyverse”) as a way to example complex discourses in the subfield of security studies. Although most university students are capable of grasping these concepts in the abstract, they often have a very difficult time acknowledging their own participation in institutions and systems that perpetuate these phenomena. The defensiveness is natural but it is not helpful. As social scientists our job is not just to know how systems work, but to propose constructive solutions to problems.3 Films like District 9, which reimagines a history in which an extraterrestrial species crash-landed on Earth several decades ago and has been living since as stateless refugees in South Africa, offer a way into the subject matter that gives students a tangible frame of reference and forces them to draw parallels to their own and others’ experiences. As Hernandes (2009) points out, District 9 manages to humanize a question social scientists have been attempting to answer for decades: why and how do otherwise “good” people become complicit in mass atrocities, even genocide? In speculating on the film's impact, she writes: Watching Wikus [the white protagonist/antihero] is a reminder that a good number of people do not feel any meanness about it, but they nevertheless quietly and overtly support the corporate and private military removal of refugees and poor people. It happens in the United States with great frequency now as public housing units are torn down and families are displaced while most Americans stay silent. (Hernandes 2009) Anecdotally, I found that after watching this film, students were willing to openly engage in discussions of their own complicity in similar systems. The metaphors provided enough distance that the students felt safe to engage in a kind of veiled but rigorous self-examination. In a nutshell, the concept of being invaded by aliens helps us push past and see more clearly our prejudices toward other humans (Thorpe 2015). It was with the goal of provoking students into a deeper examination of the hard questions in political science that I developed an upper division political science course at Sonoma State University in California called “Gender and Geopolitics in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” In the course, I integrate feminist theory and international relations approaches and use science fiction and fantasy texts as the mechanisms through which to examine key themes and questions raised by feminist and IR scholars. This paper offers an overview of the pedagogy I developed for that course. We started by laying a foundation of key theories and approaches in both international relations and gender studies. I built on that foundation by introducing a new set of tools and concepts each week that could be used to analyze the texts. Some of the tools were drawn from political science and international relations (such as game theory), and some came from other social science or humanities disciplines (like the use of metaphor and allegory one week or the study of ethics and philosophy in another). These concepts were treated as though they were all part of one larger analytical toolbox and not isolated themes. Each of the fictional universes examined in the class is a separate unit of analysis in which gender and political dynamics manifest in ways that Marx, Machievelli, and even Hannah Arendt would recognize. To some degree, the course is inspired by the work of Dyson (2015, ix), whose book Otherworldly Politics argues that science fiction and fantasy “offer alternative realit[ies] that . . . enrich our notoriously data-poor discipline” and that “the imaginative worlds built in sci-fi and fantasy . . . illuminate the array of possibilities for the future of international politics.” The core texts in the course were Battlestar Galactica (television series, 2004–2008),4Game of Thrones (television series, 2011–2017), Jessica Jones (Bendis 2001, and television series, 2015), Star Trek (television series, 1966–1969), Misfits (television series, 2009–2013), Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons 1995), Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy 1985), Otherworldly Politics (Dyson 2015), and The Ethics of Star Trek (Barad and Robertson 2001). The students were also assigned approximately fifty articles during the semester, along with a few recommended novels including The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood 1985), Oryx and Crake (Atwood 2003), Parable of the Sower (Butler 1993), and Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro 2005). All of the fictional texts have large and loyal audiences, and there is reason to believe that as cultural artifacts they can tell us much about what social and political themes resonate with contemporary audiences. As mentioned above, the course utilized a number of major theories, approaches, and concepts to analyze the relevant themes in the text. I have selected several to highlight here, including gender studies and feminist theory, metaphor and allegory, and game theory. Why Science Fiction and Fantasy? Science fiction and fantasy are both genres of speculative fiction, and in most bookstores the two share a set of shelves. However, there is a small but important distinction between the genres and it is helpful to understand what sets them apart. Both science fiction and fantasy take the audience out of the real world and into one that both has some familiar characteristics and many new ones as well. But whereas science fiction focuses on what is considered feasible (or at least not impossible) technologically or scientifically at some point down the road of human existence, fantasy introduces concepts that are considered to be entirely implausible, such as magic and mystical creatures like dragons and griffins. Some series such as Star Wars blur the line between the genres by including fantastical characters from extraterrestrial species and giving humans supernatural “Jedi” powers. Most superhero narratives are closer to fantasy, but some, such as Batman and Iron Man, fall into the science fiction camp. I drew equally from both genres for this course, as I consider them comparable and similarly valuable, albeit in slightly different ways. The artificial intelligence and cyborg themes of many recent science fiction novels, films, and series get at important questions such as “what defines personhood?” or “how and why are wars fought?” and “what is the nature of good and evil?” while the outrageousness of fantasy such as Game of Thrones and Harry Potter allows us to look at recognizable social or political phenomena like class conflict and racism though lenses that keep the audiences safely one step removed from the issues (Nexon and Neumann 2006; Ruane 2012; Dyson 2015). Research in the disciplines of psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy and ethics have all looked at the benefits of reading and watching science fiction and fantasy. There is an emerging school of thought in philosophy that asserts that engaging with science fiction texts makes us more ethical (Mukerji 2014). Moral philosophers, Mukerji (2014, 79) argues, should take an interest in fiction because it helps add to our understanding of moral matters. In a book dedicated entirely to an examination of the ethical issues in the various Star Trek series, Barad and Robertson (2001, 59–60) argue that every major ethical theory from relativism to utilitarianism to social contract theory is represented in the Star Trek series and that the three major characters—Kirk, Spock, and McCoy—can be seen as metaphors for the three parts of the soul, corresponding respectively to spirit, reason, and irrational desires. Indeed, Star Trek gets at the deepest questions posed to humans: “What is human nature?” “How do we understand the concepts of good and evil?” And “what is justice?” Barad and Robertson (2001, 358) conclude that the ethical framework represented in the Star Trek universe provides a blueprint for a civilization built on the virtues of virtue, duty, and existentialist teachings—a civilization, presumably, where class, race, and religious conflicts are nonexistent, where all genders share rights equitably, and where concepts such as wars of aggression are just myths. Conversely, speculative fiction can also provide an early warning system for political, social, economic, and environmental dystopias (Atwood 1985, 2003; Piercy 1985; Butler 1993; Ishiguro 2005). Fans of the very popular Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale, which is based on Atwood's novel, can attest to its eerie relevance for present-day social and political crises, referring to it as “prescient” and “terrifyingly possible” (Valenti 2018). The show has inspired dozens of popular weekly podcasts devoted to parsing out the significance of the show's themes for women—young, old, straight, queer, cis, trans, white, nonwhite, rich, poor, educated, and uneducated alike—in Donald Trump's United States.5 Research in psychology also submits that reading speculative fiction stimulates moral imagination (Bury 2013). A recent study from two cognitive scientists suggests that science fiction reading promotes abstract thought and improves theory of mind, key dimensions in the development of both critical thinking skills and empathy. Kidd and Castano (2013) found that reading literary fiction, including graphic novels, enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships. In a series of five experiments, one thousand participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as Danielle Steel and Gillian Flynn or more literary texts including (what the scientists designated as good) science fiction. The pair then used a variety of theory of mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or nonfiction texts (Kidd and Castano 2013). The value of using fiction books as course texts in the social sciences has been well established. There is also data that suggest that using visual media like movies and television is equally valuable, as students’ comfort with the medium is often more likely to engage them in the subject matter and to help them retain ideas longer afterward (Lambert 2009; Woofit 2015). For purposes of this article, I will be discussing written, visual, and graphic novel texts interchangeably and conceptualizing audiences (in this case students) as users of all three forms of media.6 As a pedagogical device, using science fiction and fantasy as mechanisms though which to enter discussions about difficult political and social problems may serve several functions. It encourages us to think not just about the problem or policy at hand, but to provide some cognitive and psychological tools to speculate on possible futures and work through creative solutions toward constructive ends. For example, the final episode of the second season of The Handmaid's Tale depicted a group of Marthas (domestic servants, mostly women of color) coordinating an underground railroad–inspired escape for one of the characters. It was undoubtedly intended to be a moral inspiration as well as a reminder about the power of collaboration and networks. Science fiction and fantasy can also be inspirational by providing representation where it is otherwise lacking (the Netflix series Sense8 is a radical example of this regarding the trans community) and for people struggling with oppression, an empowering message that it is possible to resist even the most repressive or omnipotent-seeming oppressors (Nexon and Neumann 2006; Barratt 2012; Ruane 2012).7 The movement known as Afrofuturism is one example of how activists from social movements have used or created speculative fiction to represent their struggles: “[t]he movement uses elements of fantasy and magical realism to examine narratives from the African diaspora and construct stories of the future” (Michel 2015). In fact, activist and organizer fans of science fiction writer Octavia Butler produced an anthology of short stories from around the world, combining elements of radical speculative fiction with social movements. They called the anthology Octavia's Brood, in homage to the writer's influence on creative tactics and what Gandhi once called “constructive program”—actions taken within a community to build structures, systems, processes, or resources that are positive alternatives to oppression (Imarisha 2015). Having thus established a justification for the use of science fiction and fantasy texts in pedagogy, the question becomes how specifically can we use these resources in the social science classroom. Because the course is an upper-division international relations class with a gender focus, I will limit discussion to examples of how speculative fiction can work in these areas.8 Gender Analysis in Alternate Universes Students were asked to engage in a gendered analysis of every text we encountered in the course. Here I will discuss one example, Jessica Jones. We used both the visual and written texts of the series. To open the unit, I introduced students to several tools with which to engage in a feminist analysis of the texts, starting with the concept of the male gaze. The theory, developed by Mulvey (1975), asserts that film audiences are forced to view women and women's bodies through the lens of a heterosexual male. Mulvey (1975, 62) writes that, “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” It is a patriarchal construction that women characters are treated as passive objects, bearing the “burden of sexual objectification” and tied to the concept of desire. Women seen through the lens of the male gaze are unidimensional and rarely bring anything of substance to the narrative—they are simply there to be looked at. Common examples of the male gaze include close-up shots of women from over a man's shoulder, xshots that pan out and then fixate on a woman's body (often with her head completely out of the frame), and scenes in which a man (typically the protagonist) is actively observing a passive woman. Even when the scene just involves a conversation between two or more men, there is often an attractive, sexualized woman in the background. Films or series that utilize the male gaze are inherently antifeminist as they send not so subtle messages about the asymmetry in power between the sexes.9 What makes Jessica Jones unique in this regard in that the show actually flips the perspective so that instead of having Jessica be the subject of the male gaze, we see the world, other characters, and Jessica, primarily through her eyes. A second tool is the Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who first introduced the concept in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel largely credits the idea to Virginia Woolf, who wrote, “I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men” (Woolf 1929). The original Bechdel test is very simple, and a film or episode passes if it (a) has a scene with two women, (b) who talk to each other, (c) about something besides a man. About 57 percent of films pass this test, and although it is blunt, it is also a straightforward measure of gender parity in film or television.10 The Bechdel test has been heavily discussed in recent years for its oversimplified notion of what makes a film feminist (Waldman 2014, Douglas 2017). Possible improvements could include the requirement that the two women don't talk about men subsequently, that the scene between the two women is at least a minute (or two or three) long, that there are no men present in the scene at all, including as observers or in the background,11 that at least one of the women is not white, that at least one of the women is queer, that the conversation would still make sense if it were two men,12 and that one of the women cannot be replaced by “a sexy lamp” (Wiegand 2019). Even the most “feminist” films and series in the genre (Battlestar Galactica, Wonder Woman, and Mad Max: Fury Road) struggle to pass many of these stricter tests. A third tool is the Mako Mori test, which was created by a Tumblr user after the film Pacific Rim faced widespread feminist fan criticism for not passing the Bechdel test. A movie passes the Mako Mori test if it has (a) at least one female character who (b) has her own narrative arc that (c) is not about supporting a man's story (Romano 2013). While the Bechdel test emphasizes female relationships as the marker of feminist representation, the Mako Mori test emphasizes female independence and self-reliance (Mignucci 2013). Both tests are simplistic, and passing either test does not automatically make a film feminist; however, together the tests provide a useful measure of the scope and quality of women's representation in film. To complicate matters, there is also the trend of writing stories with a strong female character existing in the patriarchal setting of a universe still dominated by men. This describes the “hard-boiled feminist neo-noir” of Jessica Jones (Weidenfeld 2015). From a feminist perspective, Jessica Jones is fascinating on multiple levels. It is clearly a show about unprocessed trauma: every major character is dealing with the fallout of some form of abuse—physical, sexual, or psychological, and sometimes all three. When analyzing the Jessica Jones series from the feminist point of view, Doyle (2015) offers a helpful perspective: This is what actual feminist media looks like: Not just plotlines in which abusers are villains and feminists are heroes, but the depiction of realistic, complicated, interesting women living in a real-ish world. It's telling stories about women, without running them through a lens of male fantasies or fears. To be sure, Jessica is no one's foil, background eye candy, or reference point. The show has been labeled as feminist largely because of its unusual for Hollywood ratio of female to male characters (56 percent to 44 percent), and the show has even been accused of being misandrist just on this basis (Booth 2015). But these critiques misunderstand a critical piece of (intersectional) feminism: it is not just about equality, parity, and representation for women. It is also about representation of queer characters, people of color, people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different nonbinary genders, people with mental illness, characters struggling from addiction, abuse survivors, and more, all of whom are visible and for the most part central in Jessica Jones. On the flip side, reviewers argue that the Kilgrave character—the show's villain—is a metaphor for consent (Zutter 2015), white male privilege (Kukla 2016), and patriarchy itself (Berlatsky 2015). Berlatsky (2015) hits upon the simultaneously sinister and highly topical nature of the character when he writes: Kilgrave isn't just a single domestic abuser and rapist. He's a one-man system of hierarchical violence—a disease that can spread to, and control, others. [Even] law enforcement, which is supposed to serve and protect the weak, actually works for the abuser—a phenomenon hardly unknown in real police departments. The most insidious part of the villain's power is not that he gets other people to do his bidding—it is that he gets them to believe they want to do his bidding (Berlatsky 2015). This is an extremely powerful summary of the nature of patriarchy: the inability of those of us embedded in it to recognize our complicity. By linking patriarchy with the use of (state) security forces, the series takes the social criticism to a whole other level. Jessica Jones the character is unique among feminist antiheros. Not only is she personally complex, but the way she represents feminism is complex. In large part, Jessica defies gender norms. She isn't depicted wearing a superhero costume, she is edgy, dark, a hard drinker, aggressive and often rude, dresses for comfort rather than the male gaze, and doesn't seem to care much about other people's perception of her. She is neither hypersexualized nor asexualized, two common tropes for women in the superhero/science fiction genre. And, her superpower—enhanced strength—is a trait traditionally tied to men and masculinity. She is literally a strong female character.13 Jessica Jones is clearly written from a feminist perspective, but her character is not necessarily a good feminist because Jessica does not fight for feminist reasons. The character is depicted as both damaged and flawed, which renders her relatable but less than inspirational. We can never be certain that Jessica is going to do the right (read: feminist) thing. Instead of being a feminist icon, Jessica fits better into the category of female antihero; she fights for her own reasons and for her own values/beliefs and sometimes quite selfishly and destructively. While the show is clearly feminist in the way it pushes beyond common norms and tropes, the character herself turns out to be more complicated. At the end of the first series, Jessica defeats the villain Kilgrave, the symbol of toxic masculinity and white male privilege. Does this make Jessica Jones a metaphor for the feminist struggle? Do her motives matter when considering the implications of her actions for women's representation? What does Jessica's narrative say about the types of power women are allowed to hold? What must women sacrifice in order to have power like Jessica? How does the Jessica Jones narrative work outside of the developed Western world? It is worth mentioning that two other texts—Game of Thrones and Battlestar Galactica—have a lot of interesting things to say about gender as well. Game of Thrones operates in a universe that is simultaneously highly patriarchal and dominated by strong women, and it offers many opportunities for discussion of gender roles. As Carpenter (2012, 3) points out, the universe in which Game of Thrones takes places is highly misogynistic, but this doesn't make the stories themselves necessarily sexist; “rather, they force the audience to confront the violent reality of feudal gender relations.” Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, has been posited as a “genderless universe” in that there is almost total gender parity, and the concept of gender roles—barring the most essentialist examples such as childbirth—is pretty much absent. As Belec (2013) points out, men and women serve equally in the military and politics, and are all addressed as “sir” regardless of sex. Bunks and showers in the barracks are unisex. Queer relationships are treated as unremarkable, the most stereotypically masculine character is a straight cis woman, and so on. In fact, “[Battlestar Galactica] shows what our egalitarian future could be” (Belec 2013). Sojberg's (2010) discussion of the “beautiful soul” narrative is a useful tool for understanding the complexity of the women in all of these texts. In contrast to the idea that women are beautiful, nurturing souls who must be protected by the men around them, and indeed whose protection or possession is treated as the justification for the wars themselves, Jessica Jones, Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), and Daenerys (Game of Thrones) defy feminine stereotypes and refuse to fit into common tropes of women in conflict situations. They are characterized by male counterparts at various turns as not-normal women: Daenerys is accused of being a witch, Starbuck is called crazy and erratic, and Jessica Jones is considered to be emotionally unstable. They are also all disparagingly and repeatedly referred to as promiscuous, as none are married and, to the horror of some of the men around them, all approach healthy sexual relations between consenting adults in the same ways as their male counterparts. Most interestingly, all three characters are fighters: Jessica Jones in the guise of private investigator and occasional superhero, Starbuck as the most skilled fighter pilot of a fleet of humans at war with a race of sentient robots, and Daenerys as the commander of an army of savage warriors set on restoring her to the throne of Westeros. Sjoberg (2010, 55) writes, [a] victorious story that people believe about a war is essential to legitimate that war and inspire people to fight in it, pay for it, and suffer for it. The plot includes the hero fighting the enemy in order to gain something important or meaningful and winning despite long odds and extreme hardship. This becomes problematic when the hero in question is the woman who is supposed to be, according to the beautiful soul narrative, the “cause that men die for—the life back home” (Sjoberg 2010, 55). In fact, these characters defy all three of the criteria for the narrative: that women are different from men (specifically that they are more innocent and peaceful), that there is a clear distinction between the private sphere (home, where women belong) and public (where war takes place), and that protecting femininity itself is the justification for the war and/or the reason to fight for peace (Sjoberg 2010, 57). The challenges these kinds of fictional characters present for audiences (read: students) accustomed to understanding gender dynamics only through the usual tropes are pedagogically useful when placed into the context of lenses like the beautiful soul narrative. The Power of Metaphor and Allegory in the IR Classroom Another tool we used to analyze the social and political messages in the various course texts was metaphor. The use of metaphor in science fiction is prolific, and it can be powerful when attempting to make a statement without having to say it directly. The major text used for this was Alan Moore's graphic novel, Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons 1995). Before we discuss how Watchmen can be used in an IR setting, it seems prudent to say a little more about the power of metaphorical messaging. In a groundbreaking work of cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that conceptual metaphors are essential to the human ability to make sense of reality. Humans will use often one cognitive metaphor to help shape understanding of another concept, such as the notion that argument is war (e.g., “she won that argument” or “he attacked my argument”). Perceiving argument as war affects how we engage in the process of argumentation. And changing metaphors, for example, referring to tax “relief” as opposed to tax “credit,” can affect how an audience perceives the issue by tapping into core values.14Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) provide a similar example with regard to the use of metaphors in politics. They created a study in which crime was described to two different groups of people using the metaphors of “beast” and “virus,” respectively. The groups were then asked to provide solutions to the problem of crime. The metaphor was the only variable in the experiment; all other information given to the participants was identical. Those who received the beast metaphor tended to suggest solutions that involved law enforcement and punishment, such as increasing the number of police officers and building more jails. Those who received the virus metaphor were much more likely to suggest social reform policies, such as improved education and after-school programs. Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) also found that the power of the metaphor was twice as strong as party identification in predicting the types of solutions people would offer. And perhaps most tellingly, they found that people were neither conscious of the metaphor nor the effect it had on their perceptions. When asked what factor most contributed to their perceptions, both groups said it was the crime statistics, which as noted above, were identical for all respondents (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011, 13). This is significant in how it suggests that something as simple as a shift in metaphor via the use of a single word can alter how an audience perceives meaning about a phenomenon. Possibly the only language more powerful cognitively than linguistic metaphors are visual ones, and the DC graphic novel series Watchmen is infused with visual metaphor. Watchmen was first published in 1986 near the end of the Cold War and during the heart of the Reagan years. This was a time of changing global norms and new anxieties, and Moore's universe reflects these elements. The story reimagines an alternate history in which costumed superheroes emerged after WWII and, because of them, the US won the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal was never exposed, and Nixon remained president. Stokes (2009) theorizes that each of the Watchmen characters represents one component of America's national identity: the Comedian is aggressive military adventurism, Ozymandias is (corrupt) capitalism, Rorschach is a metaphor for (mangled notions of) justice, and so on. But the most intriguing character is Dr. Manhattan, who is very clearly a metaphor for the nuclear bomb: And let us be clear: the Bomb is what Watchmen is all about. The Watchmen version of Vietnam has Dr. Manhattan pretty much singlehandedly wiping out the Viet Cong. If you remove the superhero business entirely, it still works as a piece of alternative history: what would have happened in a world where the United States used its nuclear arsenal early and often? Even the parts of the book that don't involve Dr. Manhattan directly are tinged with nuclear dread (Stokes 2009). The series provides a creative entry into discussions about the possibilities of nuclear conflict for students who were born after the end of the Cold War and for whom the Cold War is just an abstraction on the pages of a history textbook. The superheroes of Watchmen are also notable because they are mostly not very good people. Or at the very least, they are complex people who manifest all aspects of human nature, from good to evil and everything in between. This leads to the key question begged by the series: are human beings capable of holding nuclear power responsibly? In the Trump era of post-post–Cold War foreign policy-making, where both US isolationism and the threat of nuclear proliferation and war are back on the table, and North Korea has recently demonstrated that it has at least medium-range ballistic missile capabilities, this question is suddenly more relevant than ever. Another more recent example of the strength of metaphor comes from the British television series Misfits, which first aired in 2009. The series follows several young adults who have been placed on community service under Britain's antisocial behavior ordinance laws for minor offenses like vandalism and drug possession. Each character represents an archetype or trope: there's the athlete, the class clown, the socially awkward nerd, the pretty girl, and the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. On the first day of community service, an unusual lightning storm hits south London, and suddenly the protagonists find themselves imbued with superpowers. However, these superpowers are not necessarily what the characters would have chosen for themselves. The athlete gets the ability to roll back a couple minutes of time, but only when he is upset (he lives with the regret of an athletic play he wants the chance to redo), the class clown gets the power of immortality (he is scared of being alone), the socially awkward nerd gets the power of invisibility (he is afraid of not being noticed), the pretty girl gets the power of driving people mad with lust at a single touch from her (she seeks to be desired), and the girl from the wrong side of the tracks gets the power of telepathy (she is fixated on what other people think of her). In each of these cases, the “superpowers” are metaphors for the character's deepest fears. The show then presents a useful opportunity to discuss why humans desire power and whether we can ever use it responsibly. As with Watchmen, the series adds the dimension of making the characters mostly not very good people, which leads to viewer to ask whether only some people are deserving of special power, and if so, what kinds of character traits might qualify a person as worthy. Some texts go beyond metaphor and employ allegory as a mechanism for conveying the message. Allegory can be conceptualized as extended metaphor. Where a metaphor uses a word, phrase, symbol, or character to represent an idea, an allegory uses a narrative in its entirety to express an idea or teach a larger lesson. For this unit, the class studied Game of Thrones and learned that we could have spent the entire semester on this text. Both the book series and television series are so popular that they have already been assiduously studied within international relations and related fields, even though they are relatively recent.15 There are some prominent theories, in academic journals and presented at professional conferences, that put forth the argument that Game of Thrones is an allegory for climate change (Carpenter 2012; Loris 2015; Borden 2017). Carpenter (2012, 5) writes, [The story] is about the mistaken belief that industrial civilization can stand against the changing forces of nature. The slogan “Winter is Coming” is meant literally as well as metaphorically: planetary forces are moving slowly but inexorably toward climatic catastrophe as the infighting among kings and queens distracts them from the bigger picture. If Game of Thrones is an allegory for climate change, it is also therefore an allegory for the collective-action problem, describing the situation in which multiple individuals would all benefit from a certain action—pooling resources and fighting the White Walkers together. But collective action has an associated cost—the sacrifice of some sovereignty. And, it is implausible that any individual can or will undertake and solve the situation alone (though the Night's Watch gives it the old college try). To extend the allegory, we can imagine the Lannisters, Starks, and Targareyns as representing the United States, Russia, and China. The Night's Watch represent climate scientists and/or science in general, and the people of Westeros are citizens of realms both rich and poor, but all under threat from the same foe (Plantz 2015). Instead of dealing with the threat, the noble houses of Westeros fight among themselves and for the most part deny the existence of the threat until it is too late. And as with all stories like this, the people who end up suffering the most are those who are poor and lacking in basic resources. There is another debate about whether Game of Thrones is actually an allegory for class conflict. Mason (2016) offers a Marxist interpretation of the story with which Kriss (2015) takes issue: Mason's central argument is that the debt and ruination suffered by Westeros during the War of the Five Kings provides a fantasy analog to our own history's late medieval crisis (also, confusingly, to the current crisis in the eurozone). The realm is ripe for a bourgeois revolution—as he puts it, “Westeros needs capitalists”—but, because of the limitations of the high fantasy genre, this can never happen. The social system in these fictions can decay, but it never actually collapses. Instead, fantasy feudalism will pant through its crisis by finding new land and resources across the Sunset Sea to the West … What Mason's describing isn't a feudal crisis, but a capitalist one. (Kriss 2015) Class dynamics would be central to any story set in a feudal universe, but the vibrancy of discussion around the class dimensions of Game of Thrones by scholars suggests that there is something here worth examining more closely. At the most basic level, we know that the divide class and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few lords create animosity and suspicion between the two major classes. As tensions increase and the ruled begin to become ripe for a violent rebellion against the unpopular line of Baratheon/Lannister rulers, the High Sparrow (religious leader of the poor and downtrodden) and Faith Militant (the High Sparrow's military wing) step in to provide some leadership and moral rationale to the cause. Religion becomes the opium of the masses. Even the naïve young King Tommen, to the horror of his mother Cersei Lannister, is seduced by the righteousness of the message. As such, Game of Thrones invites analysis employing several international relations theories including realpolitik, dependency theory, and world systems theory. At the very least, the series offers great insight into how oppression and exploitation work (Greene 2015) and is therefore rich with material for discussion by IR students trying to understand complex political and social dynamics. Following on the theme of exploitation and oppression, there is also the theory that Game of Thrones is one big allegory for competing IR worldviews (realism vs. idealism, primarily),16 and more so, for the concept of humanitarian intervention and the international norm of responsibility to protect (Dyson 2015). The responsibility to protect (aka R2P) is an emerging norm that sovereignty is not a right but instead entails responsibilities for states to provide protection and security for their populations from four major sets of crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Under R2P, if a state cannot protect its people or is itself doing the oppressing, it relinquishes the right to sovereignty, and the international community as a whole has a humanitarian obligation to intervene on behalf of the targeted peoples. In the context of Game of Thrones, the character of Daenerys Targaryen (aka Khaleesi, aka Mother of Dragons) is central to this thesis. She becomes a “crusading humanitarian” (Dyson 2015, 84), freeing one slave city after another using her skills as a negotiator, her natural charisma, and the only fire-breathing dragons in the world (possibly seen as metaphors for nuclear weapons), who happen to belong to her (Pasick 2011).17 But the allegory does not end there. Daenerys soon learns that there are consequences of her humanitarianism: the former slave masters are not going away willingly, and more concerning, many of the liberated slaves are uncomfortable with their freedom. Daenerys finds that if she is to truly liberate the former slaves of Essos, she cannot simply cut their physical chains, she must stay (i.e., occupy) the region, impose and enforce order, and see that a new social structure and norms develop. In her idealistic naiveté, Daenerys was caught completely off-guard by the “challenges and limits of humanitarian intervention” (Carpenter 2012, 5). This nuance is exactly what make the show ideal for discussion in an IR course. There is also much to be said by doing a gendered analysis of Daenerys’ actions and decisions; one possible interpretation being that she symbolizes the role of motherhood in the story, and everything she does is with the goal of protecting her “children” (the people of Westeros and Essos). And finally, the series calls for intersectional analysis, particularly the obvious allusion to Daenerys as an archetype of the white savoir complex. This culminates visually in the final scene of third season finale, when, after freeing the slave city of Yunkai, flaxen-haired Daenerys is held aloft by a mob of dark-skinned former slaves rapturously chanting “Mother” over and over again. Teaching Feminist Theory, IR Dilemmas, and Game Theory through Battlestar Galactica Lastly, science fiction and fantasy also provide endless IR scenarios that are ideal for analysis using game theory. Game theory is the study of human behavior in strategic settings, specifically conflict and cooperation between rational decision-makers. It can help us explain and understand why people behave the way they do, or what actions they are likely to take. Simple game theoretic concepts can be used in the classroom with audiences new to the subject to better develop and understand difficult sociopolitical themes addressed by science fiction writers. None of my students had been introduced to game theory prior to this class, and given time constraints, I was only able to give a rudimentary overview of the subject. Nonetheless, they grasped the basic strategic usefulness of games and were able to use them to model a number of different scenarios from various visual and written texts. Battlestar Galactica presents many opportunities for using games to analyze policy-makers’ decisions. One such example from the series involves both gender and geopolitical considerations. Humans suffered a nuclear attack by cylons, sentient robots created by humans, and have fled the planet. The president of the human colonies, Laura Roslin, is presented with a dilemma. A young woman named Rya seeks both an abortion and political asylum from her very fundamentalist community, the colony of Gemenon. This example worked well in class because of its unusual degree of contemporary relevance. Students immediately drew parallels to real-world refugees seeking safe haven from repressive regimes and the public debates around that. They also saw connections to real-world religious and cultural clashes that have emerged as the result of crossing borders. And lastly, they commented on the obvious congruencies with current debates about reproductive rights in places such as Ireland, where many women have had to travel outside the country to seek to terminate a pregnancy. In the show, President Roslin finds herself facing a double dilemma. By acting according to her own personal beliefs—upholding preattack abortion laws (it was legal in most of the colonies) and granting Rya asylum—she risks angering a major religious, prolife constituency in her upcoming presidential campaign.18 To complicate matters further, she is soon presented with the alarming prediction that humanity will go extinct within decades if no action is taken to proactively encourage population growth. Thus, President Roslin is forced to consider taking a position that she has heretofore opposed under normal circumstances (banning abortion colony-wide) and is meanwhile also responsible for the fate of the Gemenese woman.19 In order to better understand why Roslin makes the choice she did, the class created a decision tree. Faced with multiple dilemmas, the president has eight options available to her, also represented in the tree (Figure 1) below: Option 1: Keep abortion legal; send Rya home, allow her an abortion anyway Option 2: Keep abortion legal; send Rya home, but don't allow her an abortion Option 3: Keep abortion legal; grant Rya asylum, but don't allow her an abortion Option 4: Keep abortion legal; grant Rya asylum, allow her an abortion Option 5: Ban abortion; send Rya home, but allow her an abortion anyway Option 6: Ban abortion; send Rya home, don't allow her an abortion Option 7: Ban abortion; grant Rya asylum, but allow her an abortion Option 8: Ban abortion; grant Rya asylum, and don't allow her an abortion Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide President Roslin Decision Tree Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide President Roslin Decision Tree As a class, we assigned probability values to each payoff according to their perceived weight vis-à-vis the character's decision-making history in the series. For example, because we assigned increasing humanity's chances of survival a higher value than not increasing humanity's chance of survival (and we considered this the biggest of the decisions facing President Roslin), it will be impossible for any option that involves not banning abortions to outweigh the benefit of banning abortions. All of the values are derived from observing the character and her motivations in the series until this point (for example, gaining or losing support of a particular lobby was given a value of + or –5). We also assigned values for President Roslin adhering to or betraying her own values and/or betraying the girl by sending her back to her parents against her wishes (versus incurring the anger of the Gemenon community). Each set of probabilities resulted in the payoff given at the final node of each decision set. Ultimately, Roslin selects the option (number 7) outlawing abortion in the future, but ensuring that the Gemenese woman is both given asylum and allowed to terminate her pregnancy. It is the option represented with the biggest payoff at +15 in Figure 1. But this is both a painful and risky compromise for Roslin. For the sake of raising humanity's chances of survival, President Roslin reversed her longtime pro-choice position and “[her] ideals and [her] politics become two separate things” (Britt 2012). Roslin chose the option that she calculated would both be the most politically expedient and would allow her to ease her conscience. But as with all choices in politics, with no reliable probability distribution (Schwartz-Shea 2002), the payoffs, as in the real world, are both not guaranteed and come with incomplete information. She has already betrayed her own long-held values, and now Roslin cannot predict with any certainty what level of backlash she might face from prochoice voters, and she also risks losing Gemenese support by granting the pregnant girl asylum and allowing her an abortion. Even the ultimate payoff—keeping humans from extinction—cannot be guaranteed. But despite the uncertainty, a game theoretic approach can provide a very useful tool for mapping and subsequently better understanding diplomacy and the decisions and motivations of foreign policy actors. The example I have provided models a snapshot of one decision by one character in one episode, but an iterated game theoretic approach could be used to model the evolution of several characters’ decisions over the course of a season or entire series. I have offered the simplest possible use of games in this context, but instructors wishing to utilize game theory in more sophisticated ways will find plentiful options in these alternate universes. Conclusion As the preceding discussion illustrates, there are numerous ways to use science fiction and fantasy texts to introduce current dilemmas related to gender and international relations. From the male gaze to the Bechdel Test to the beautiful soul narrative, there are many theoretical tools available to instructors seeking to expand students’ understanding of gendered systems and how they operate. Concepts such as metaphor and allegory are useful in stimulating deeper discussion on themes such as class conflict, collective-action problems, immigration and refugees, and power inequities that may provoke defensiveness in some students if approached directly. Analytical tools such as game theory can help students use fictional crises to better understand real-world dilemmas. I have just scratched the surface in this overview, but if there is one lesson to convey, it is that many favorite films, series, and novels are not just forms of entertainment, but they are also vehicles for the delivery of powerful political and social messages. When done well, they are the manifestation of creative minds addressing political and social problems in strategic ways that can inform real-world dialogue. With more space and time, I would cover a number of other themes that that I did not have the space to touch upon here, such as racism, nationalism, global governance, ethics and morality, ecofeminism, propaganda and conspiracy theory, and civil resistance.20 In the spring of 2016, on the Al Jazeera show “The Stream,” Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor asserted that Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is the most relevant dystopian novel in the Trump era, even more so than Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In the interview, Okoafor notes that Parable features a presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, who rises to power by promising to “make America great again” and whose supporters are known to form mobs to burn and tar and feather those who don't quite match Jarret's rigid versions of Christianity and patriotism. As an instructor, I like to think that the best use of speculative fiction is to help students more deeply consider the systems in which humans exist, the long-term consequences of decisions we make, and how to avoid a descent into real-world dystopia tomorrow. Footnotes 1 Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation designed to get the target to question their own perception of reality. 2 The claim that the regime is omnipotent and it alone has the right to rule. 3 Starting with the first social scientists and constitutional engineers whose analyses were concerned with civilization's most fundamental questions, like how to organize just human societies. 4 We used only the reimagined series, not the 1970s original. 5 The show has even inspired resistance-related t-shirts, bumper stickers, and more, depicting the now instantly recognizable handmaid uniform of a red cape over a red dress capped by a white winged bonnet, with the word “RESIST” superimposed over the image. 6 The subject for another paper is obvious here: a comparative analysis of the instructional value of using different forms of media to teach the same content. It is beyond the scope of this paper (and the class), but I do acknowledge that for the sake of discussing the substantive content, I am not doing full justice to the question of how different media may work pedagogically. 7 This is the classic fantasy series trope and is found in Star Wars, Mad Max, Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and many more. 8 But I see just as much potential in the other subfields of political science, as well as other disciplines, particularly sociology, anthropology, and history. 9 It should be noted that the male gaze tends to view gender in terms of the binary. Heterosexual cis men are the subjects and heterosexual cis women are the objects. Anyone who falls outside of these strict categories is not represented, either as the viewer or the viewed. 10 According to Bechdel Test Movie List: http://bechdeltest.com/statistics, accessed July 30, 2017. 11 Notably, according to IMDB.com, the George Cukor film The Women (1939) not only had an all-female human cast, but all the animals used in the film were female as well. 12 Inspired by the “Willis Test,” which applies specifically to song lyrics (Carmon 2011). 13 I credit one of my “Gender and Geopolitics in Science Fiction and Fantasy” students, Madison Williams, with making a number of these points in class discussion and written assignments and giving me the opportunity to develop them further here. 14 Although both of these metaphors were used to refer to the tax credit program during George W. Bush's first term, Republican strategists smartly encouraged the president and supporters to use the metaphor of “relief,” which reinforced the frame that taxes were an affliction, that taxpayers were the afflicted, and that the entity that relieved the affliction, the Bush Administration, was the savior. George Lakoff has discussed this example in multiple forums for many years. 15 We used just the television series, not the books, in class. 16 Dyson (2015, 10) suggests that the Lannisters are the symbols of harsh realism while the Starks are naïve idealism. 17 There is no consensus over whether the dragons are meant to symbolize nuclear weapons, a large conventional air force, or something else. What is clear is that they represent Daenerys’ control over superior military technology and her role as the closest thing that the series has to a superpower. “Dragons are the nuclear deterrent, and only Dany has them, which in some ways makes her the most powerful person in the world,” series creator George RR Martin told Vulture in 2011. 18 Roslin serves both a national and international constituency in the context of the series. She is president of all that remains of the human race, and there are no countries, only remnants from former “colonies,” whose closest parallel are states in a federal system. However, the religious, cultural, and other distinctions between the colonies are marked and more closely resemble the behavior of nation-states, which is what makes this example relevant for the study of geopolitical concerns. 19 This example is borrowed with permission from Sofia Jamall, a student in the “Gender and Geopolitics in Science Fiction and Fantasy” course. 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TI - How Speculative Fiction Can Teach about Gender and Power in International Politics: A Pedagogical Overview
JF - International Studies Perspectives
DO - 10.1093/isp/ekz020
DA - 2020-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/how-speculative-fiction-can-teach-about-gender-and-power-in-sniVoH0L1W
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -