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Despite what Linda Hutcheon notes as a proliferation of hybrid forms in contemporary fiction (Politics), too often critical commentary about it seems intent on invoking established genres and subgenres than on identifying productive border crossings.(1) As Frederic Jameson has pointed out, this critical strategy can be helpful in "mapping" a literary work discursively, culturally, and historically ("Toward"). However, according to Hutcheon, it can also have the counterproductive effect of reifying genre and reinscribing the totalizing representations that genres promote (Politics 37, 63).(2)
Even the breakdown of a particular genre into subgenres serves this purpose. Science fiction, for example, now often goes by the blanket acronym "sf," as a result, during the last two decades, of the formation of such subsidiaries as "speculative fiction" and "science fantasy." Good old-fashioned "science fiction," with its characteristic male-determined and male-serving applications of technology, remains corporate headquarters. Considering this corporatizing tendency in the genre of science fiction, then, it should be no wonder that one of the two academic journals devoted to sf criticism retained, over most of the years in its existence, the adhesive diacritical conceit of a hyphen in its title: Science-Fiction Studies. Interestingly, rarely in the writing published within its pages does any writer observe this convention. Perhaps all too aware of the genre's "low culture" origins and continuing mass-market appeal, this journal's authors seem to appreciate the potential for "franchising" and so wisely eschew the hyphen in their own essays -- a trend that finally editors recognized and followed, eventually dropping the hyphen (see for example Volume 26, 1999).
It is thus no accident that feminist sf is just as often referred to as "feminist speculative fiction" due to the masculinist aura surrounding the generic term "science fiction." A more dramatic example of this distinction taking place with sf subgenres occurs in the term "cyberpunk" versus the opposition term "feminist cyberpunk." While the former subgenre evokes a Founding Father, William Gibson, and a sort of Constitution of Virtual Reality, Neuromancer, the latter consists of myriad "cyborg daughters" (Ben-Tov 137), what Lauren Berlant might call "Diva citizens" bent on "strategically misrecognizing" what counts as the virtual nation (223-26). Whether or not feminist speculative fiction and cyberpunk count as "generic citizens" of sf remains a spirited debate...