Barr, Marleen S
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1953- ) US academic, feminist theorist and author, who received a Pilgrim Award in 1997 for her work in applying the arguments and insights of Feminism in general and to sf in particular. Her first anthology devoted to this project, Future Females: A Critical Anthology (anth 1981), marked out the territory that she (and other critics like Joanna Russ) had begun to explore and elucidate, with especially conspicuous success in the delineation of "patriarchal discourse" in sf. Her own Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (1992) effectively consolidated her presentation of these issues, and her later work began to branch out into topics like Afrofuturism and the often fraught relationship between sf and "the literary", particularly as understood in the context of cultural studies. This latter pursuit also became a major focus of the important special topic issue of PMLA, Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium (anth 2004), which Barr coedited with Carl Freedman and introduced herself. Her own comic sf novel, Oy Pioneer! (2003), follows a feminist sf critic named Sondra Lear who acquires a Fulbright Scholarship that takes her into outer space; Barr's own Fulbright lectureships carried her only as far as Germany. A follow-up is Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir (2015). After receiving her PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo, Barr went on to teach at multiple schools in the New York City area and elsewhere, including Fordham University. She currently teaches at the City University of New York. [JC/TSM]
Marleen Sandra Barr
born New York: 1 March 1953
works
- Oy Pioneer! (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) [hb/]
- Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir (Seattle, Washington: NeoPoesis Press, 2015) [pb/]
collections
- When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction League Quashes the Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber (Kiowa, Washington: B Cubed Press, 2018) [edited by Bob Brown: pb/Maria Chavez]
nonfiction
- Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987) [hb/nonpictorial]
- Suzy McKee Charnas, Joan Vinge, Octavia Butler (Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont House, 1987) with Richard Law and Ruth Salvaggio [anth: edited by Roger Schlobin: the Charnas essay is by Barr: Starmont Reader's Guide: pb/Stephen Fabian]
- Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992) [hb/]
- Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) [coll: hb/Debora Greger]
- Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000) [coll: pb/]
works as editor
- Future Females: A Critical Anthology (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981) [nonfiction: anth: hb/]
- Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1983) [nonfiction: anth: hb/]
- Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- Envisioning the Future: SF and the Next Millennium (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2003) [anth: hb/Mandy Sand]
- PMLA Special Topic: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004) with Carl Freedman [anth: in the form of a special issue of the PMLA: May 2004, Volume 119, Number 3: pb/]
- Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2008) [anth: stories and essays: hb/Chris Ofili]
- Reading Science Fiction (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) with Matthew Candelaria and James Gunn [pb/Mel Hunter]
links
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