The Bodypolitics of Feminist Science Fiction: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s Le Silence de la cité

Whether Utopian or dystopian, feminist science fiction is an emerging field of interest in Cultural and Literary Studies, as well as Women's Studies, and to use Jenny Wolmark's phrase, is "at the cutting edge of culture" (113).^Fromfreedom of sexuality to pregnancy and childbirth, feminist science fiction writers are exploring the female body in space and imagining its liberty, and sometimes in Dystopia, its bondage.This essay centers around the emergence of feminist science fiction as the realm wherein women writers reinvent themselves and their bodies, thus the process of reproduction.This theme of reproduction as oppression is what Sara Lefanu calls "the hallmark of the feminist incursion into science fiction" (57).Also, I would like to promote, as does Marleen Barr in Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, the canonization of what she calls "feminist fabulation," and correspondingly, the instructional validity of the genre.^AsBarr states: "... patriarchy... continues