Feminist speculations and boundary collapse in Latin American science fiction

Three recent novels and one short story by female writers from Latin America approach the meaning of science and of the scientific method in ways that both dialogue with and collapse the boundary objects of science fiction. These disruptions encode political and artistic intent while signifying the genre and hierarchical fluidity of the continent’s contemporary fiction. Through close reading of the novels and their historical context, we will see how these Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking writers appropriate SF’s tropes as a mass-cultural and global shared language. In doing so, they break down the constitutive elements of the genre to challenge literary hierarchies between speculative and realist literature.