The Phantom Heroines and Gendered Worlds in Liu Cixin's Science Fiction

Abstract Gender in Liu Cixin's fiction is hardly considered a promising topic, given the flat portrayal of his men and women, while his gendering of nonhuman lives, objects, and worlds receives little attention. This article examines the gendering of conventional and alternative beings in Liu's novels, especially his Three-Body Trilogy, to argue that whereas Liu's human characters help confirm an essentialist view that reduces women to an atavistic, ghostly existence, the nonhuman bodies and cosmic history open up spaces for a reading that destabilizes gender stereotypes and disrupts an ostensibly masculine historical narrative. An overlooked dimension of time that can be traced from the human characters complicates gender in tech-enabled new realms and cosmic-scale spaces, while alternation between and fusion of masculine and feminine qualities on various levels unsettles gender binaries and lets in abundant ambiguity. Instead of an androcentric enclosure uninhabitable and uninheritable to feminist readers, Liu's science fiction world harbors enough inconsistency to justify our “rebellious” reading against both popular impressions and the ostensibly antifeminist dictation by the trilogy itself.