Gendering Science Fiction Films

In the 1950s, science fiction invasion films played a complicated part in supporting and criticizing Cold War ideologies. By reading these invasion narratives as performances of middle-class, white Americans' excitement and anxiety about social and political issues, George shows how they often played out as another round in the battle of the sexes.

"Gendering Science Fiction Films reminds us that marginalized films, such as science fiction invasion films, are a rich site for cultural conversations about weighty social issues. Taking for granted that depictions of women are central to the genre, George's cogent analysis helps us see how in the 1950s these films often used genre conventions against themselves in order to address and challenge conflicting gendered concepts such as momism, female desire, and a bread-winner masculinity." - Sarah Projansky, Associate Dean and Professor of Film and Media Arts and Gender Studies, University of Utah, USA

"Susan A. George is exceptionally knowledgeable and remarkably perceptive about films that almost everyone interested in movies has seen, but that few have recognized as culturally significant. By detailing both the SF silver screen's adherence to and resistance toward the dominant American ideologies of the Cold War era, George has created a thought-provoking, well researched work that is a must-have for college libraries, cinema scholars, and science fiction fans alike!" - Mary F. Pharr, Professor Emeritus, English, Florida Southern College, USA, and co-editor of Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy

"Gendering Science Fiction Films offers many insights into the formative period of a genre that today is technological culture's most important forum, while reminding us of the varied voices that always speak through our films. Using science fiction 'invasion' films of the 1950s as a lens, George's book reveals the subtle ways in which alternative attitudes and values have frequently been articulated and, in the process, joins with the films it describes in doing important cultural work" - J. P. Telotte, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Susan A. George is Lecturer in the Karen Merritt Writing Program at the University of California, Merced, USA.