Mind over matter: Telepathic paraspaces in science fiction

Within science fiction, a genre dedicated to creating reality experiments, and cognitively estranging social situations in the contemporary world to explore the realm of the possible, there still exists an anti-body taboo which limits the genre from exploring matters of sexuality and gender relations. Some authors have attempted to use hyper-rhetorical areas of the text, or Paraspaces, as a means of moving outside of the text and thereby skirting such a taboo and addressing these matters. Some examples of this are Grass by Sheri S. Tepper and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. If matters of sexuality are to be further complicated and explored, though, science fiction must take up the challenge set down by theorist and critic Angela Carter and become a literature unafraid to use graphic depictions of sexual situations, as well as other body-centered encounters, as a way of breaking its own taboo-structure.