Louise Sands

PhD Research project: Carrier bags and Tactics: Dystopian reality and Feminist Social Sci-Fi
 
Research Field:
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Lou's research asks whether science fiction can be reimagined as a feminist tool: a genre and platform that collects women’s lived experiences, foregrounding the feminine condition for critique through cognitive estrangement. Social Science Fiction (soft SF) is defined here as speculative fiction that uses imagined technologies or futures to interrogate social structures, lived experience, and power relations, rather than scientific or technical innovation. From its pulp origins in the 1930s through Swift, Huxley, and Orwell, Social SF has provoked moral reflection, but rarely through female subjectivity. Even in contemporary science fiction, women’s voices remain marginalised. As Bronwyn Lovell notes, “The mainstream science fiction industry acts as a patriarchal power system in which female and minority voices have historically been marginalised and are still less visible” (Lovell, 2022, p. 70). In response, Lou's project proposes Feminist Social Sci‑Fi (FSSF) as a counter‑hegemonic form within this power system: a carrier bag of testimony, imagination, and resistance.

Her methodology is a deliberately recursive practice, returning to the source material, guided by women’s voices gathered in interviews and creative documentaries, to inform speculative FSSF texts, such as those that echo estrangements in Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City (2024), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1988), or Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (2022). These texts evolve into stories that cycle between testimony and speculation, reality and estrangement. Her process draws on Stella Bruzzi’s Approximation (2020, p.3) to foreground the instability of representation, while echoing Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), in which storytelling is not conquest but collection. In this way, her research acknowledges that no single narrative is definitive; together, these fragments form a collective act of resistance.

Theoretically, her work critiques power through Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Foucault’s theory of discipline, and Fraser’s theory of capitalist crisis, shaping women’s dystopias. Resistance tactics from De Certeau’s everyday practices align with quiet politics, guided by Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, which is then extended through Haraway’s cyborg politics and critique of technology. Lefanu’s exploration of whether “science fiction, despite its preponderantly male bias, offers freedom to female writers” (Lefanu, 1989, p. 2) and Lovell’s statement that “writing stories is a way for women to claim power from a patriarchal culture that has historically denied women agency in their own narrative” (Lovell, 2022, p. 68)

Through this triangulation of theory, practice, and storytelling, Lou looks at FSSF as an emergent method and genre: gathering voices, estranging the everyday to reveal dystopian reality, and returning to counter-stories that resist structures of power. The outcomes offer not heroic singularity but a carrier bag of possibilities: fragmented, collective, and transformative for feminist media and activism.