Marleen S. Barr

"Randall Amster explores homelessness as both a social and spatial problem. Homeless people are on the front lines of a struggle to preserve places that are theoretically open to anyone regardless of status. Urban spaces in particular manifest a complex ecology comprised of people, culture, architecture, technology, and the natural environment, expressed through gentrification, redevelopment, and privatization. In this ecology, homeless people are criminalized for performing basic activities such as sitting or sleeping. These trends are evident across the U.S. and internationally, linking local issues with wider forces of globalization."--BOOK JACKET.

What do Amsterdam prostitutes, NASA astronauts, cross-dressing texts, and Star Trek characters have in common? In Genre Fission, Marleen Barr wittily and eccentrically revitalizes cultural and literary theory by examining the points where such vastly different categories meet, converge, and reemerge as something new. -- from back cover.

The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing - feminist fabulation - which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the relationship between women writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, Feminist Fabulation is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women. Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether. Barr offers very specific plans for new structures that will benefit women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. Feminist fabulation calls for a new understanding which enables the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. Barr forces the reader to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just its membership list - and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent reading by all scholars, feminists, writers, and literary theorists and critics.