Free Thinking 2013 - Wombs on Legs?
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2014
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From HG Wells and Margaret Atwood to Battlestar Galactica, science fiction texts and tv series have long used birth control as a metaphor for the limits on individual freedom. New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon, from the University of St Andrews, looks at the roles for women which science fiction has imagined and asks is sci-fi sexist? Recorded on Saturday 26th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids |
| 0:25.5 | the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a special download from the BBC Free Thinking Festival. |
| 0:35.9 | For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio three. |
| 0:41.9 | Kara Thrace is everything a modern, liberated woman might wish to be. |
| 0:47.5 | Physically strong, sexually independent, professionally successful. |
| 0:52.5 | A skillful fighter pilot, she holds her own in the tough Air Force culture, |
| 0:57.8 | nurturing talent and ambition equal to any of her male colleagues. But when she's wounded in an ambush, |
| 1:05.6 | she's told by her doctor during an internal examination that her reproductive system is her most valuable asset. |
| 1:14.1 | Bang, just like that, the fighter pilot is brought down to Earth by the start reminder that whatever |
| 1:20.3 | else she is, she is also, and always, just another womb on legs. |
| 1:26.8 | Except, of course, this isn't Earth. |
| 1:28.8 | It's the planet Caprica, one of the 12 colonies inhabited by human civilization in the American TV series Battlestar Galactica. |
| 1:37.9 | Kara is no ordinary modern woman but a key soldier in the fight for the survival of the human race. |
| 1:46.0 | And the doctor is not human, but an enemy Cylon, prepping her to become a baby-making machine. Kara's episode on the Cylon |
| 1:53.5 | breeding farm reminds its viewers that contemporary women's liberation is dependent on our ability |
| 2:00.0 | to control our reproduction. |
| 2:02.1 | When that control is taken away from us by enemy cyborgs or by an overbearing state, |
| 2:08.2 | everything else that we are is taken away too. |
| 2:13.2 | Opening with Battlestar Galactica also reveals how useful the genre of science fiction is |
... |
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