The agency of women in Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

This thesis examines the extent to which Frank Herbert’s best-selling science fiction series, the six-book Dune saga, can be considered feminist by studying the representation of women across the series. It analyzes the characters of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood by engaging with contemporaneous second-wave feminist theories and cultural context. Focusing especially on feminists’ demands for women to have control over their bodies, it looks at the high degree of female embodied agency in five different avenues—mind-body synergy, reproduction and motherhood, voices, education and memory, and sexuality—in order to conclude that women are depicted as agential and influential as well as constrained at times by their body and their membership in a larger organization. The thesis explores how the series anticipates and addresses some of the second-wave feminist movement’s concerns and how it handles the contentious issue of sexual difference. It also discusses the Dune series within the context of twentieth-century American science fiction and argues that the critical neglect of feminist elements has resulted in its exclusion from proper consideration as a text of the New Wave period and of feminist science fiction. The thesis therefore challenges the existing critical discourse of mid-twentieth century science fiction and seeks to establish Herbert’s Dune series as making a significant contribution to the genre’s representation of women