The Routledge Companion To Gender and Science Fiction

“Science fiction has been questioning gender norms since before there was science fiction
(think Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman). This lively and
comprehensive new volume, edited by leading scholars in the field, surveys science fiction’s
powerful techniques for exploring difference and exposing injustice. The essays demonstrate
how far both the genre itself and scholarly responses to it have come since the early days of
feminist critique. Contributors look at thought-experiments about queer or nonbinary societies
and gender systems derived from non-European cultures as well as at the explosion of science
fictional thinking in animation, comics, and other media. As new discoveries about the varieties
of human experience and new technologies turn absolutes into mere possibilities, books like
this serve as tour guides to a new reality.”
—Brian Attebery, author of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction and Fantasy: How It Works
“The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is a comprehensive, ambitious, and
thought-provoking volume with invaluable research and resources for students and scholars.
Bringing together science fiction writers, established scholars, and new voices, this book
establishes important links between gender studies and science fiction studies. As this anthology
shows, science fiction offers a unique site to explore gender issues including identity, bodies,
social issues, race, animal studies, among many other topics. Readers of the Routledge Companion
to Gender and Science Fiction will receive a graduate-level course in the relevance of science
fiction for gender, and gender for science fiction. The book’s sophisticated analysis is presented
in accessible and engaging prose.”
—Robin Roberts, author of A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction
and Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons
“Fritzsche, Omry, Pearson, and Yaszek bring together an array of established and emerging
critical voices in science fiction and gender studies to create this comprehensive companion.
A wide array of scholarship ranging from theory to history to media studies addresses canonical
authors like Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood alongside discussions of Black, Indian, Mexican,
Chinese and Japanese authors and creators. The editors’ inclusion of BIPOC and global voices
and topics is a deliberate choice to move beyond a white, Western view of feminism and gender
studies in science fiction scholarship. Essential reading for anyone interested in representations
of gender and identity in science fiction literature, theory, and media.”
—Joy Sanchez-Taylor, author of Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color
“This unique collection emerges from what Donna Haraway has referred to as ‘situated
knowledge,’ that is, knowledge firmly embedded and contextualized in the particularities of
histories, cultures, and social formations. Its chapters demonstrate the inextricably intersectional
nature of gender and sexuality as these messy and complex categories are embodied in all their
differences in speculative fictions from around the world and through equally wide-ranging
scholarly considerations. None of the sections here are identified by geography: no privileged
works or sites or voices dominate this wide-ranging conversation. Queerness and diversity are
the norms, and with skill and panache the editors have put together a collection that comes very
near to the realization of their utopian ambitions.”
—Veronica Hollinger, Science Fiction Studies
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO
GENDER AND SCIENCE FICTION
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is the first large-scale reference work of its kind,
critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in science fiction (SF) especially—but not
exclusively—as explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists across the world.
This global volume builds upon the traditions of interdisciplinary inquiry by connecting established
topics in gender studies and science fiction studies with emergent ideas from researchers in different
media. Taken together, they challenge conventional generic boundaries; provide new ways of
approaching familiar texts; recover lost artists and introduce new ones; connect the revival of old,
hate-based politics with the increasing visibility of imagined futures for all; and show how SF stories
about new kinds of gender relations inspire new models of artistic, technoscientific, and political practice.
Their chapters are grouped into five conversations—about the history of gender and genre, theoretical
frameworks, subjectivities, medias and transmedialities, and transtemporalities—that are central to
discussions of gender and SF in the current moment. A range of both emerging and established names
in media, literature, and cultural studies engage with a huge diversity of topics including eco-criticism,
animal studies, cyborg and posthumanist theory, masculinity, critical race studies, Indigenous futurisms,
Black girlhood, and gaming.
This is an essential resource for students and scholars studying gender, sexuality, and/or science fiction.
Lisa Yaszek is Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, US, and past president
of the Science Fiction Research Association; her recent books include Literary Afrofuturism in the
Twenty-First Century (2020) and The Future Is Female! series (2018–present).
Sonja Fritzsche is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean at Michigan State University, US,
and focuses on Eastern European science fiction and the amplification of global science fiction studies.
Keren Omry is Senior Lecturer of contemporary US fiction at the University of Haifa, Israel, where
she researches and teaches on Alternate Histories, Science Fiction, and African-American literature.
Wendy Gay Pearson is Chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western
Ontario in Canada whose research focuses on queer and trans science fiction; with Veronica Holinger
and Joan Gordon, she is co-editor of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008).
THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO GENDER
AND SCIENCE FICTION
Edited by Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry,

and Wendy Gay Pearson
Designed cover image: Derek Newman-Stille, “Surreality” (2022)
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren
Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay
Pearson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-53701-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-53702-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08293-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of Figures xiii

List of Contributors xiv
Acknowledgmentsxix
PART I
What: Gender and Genre 1
1 Introduction: A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction, and the

Science Fiction Anthology 3
Lisa Yaszek
2 Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction 11

Ida Yoshinaga
PART II
How: Theoretical Approaches 21
3 Introduction 23
Lisa Yaszek
4 Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaid’s Tale26

Jonathan Alexander and Sherryl Vint
5 Beyond Survival: Climate Change and Reproduction in The

Handmaid’s Tale, Birthstones, and The Fifth Season33
Anna Bedford
vii
Contents
6 Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many 41

Beyond Gender Research Collective
7 Queer SF 49
Ritch Calvin
8 Renovating the System: The Matrix Resurrections

and Trans Resistance to Neoliberal Integration 57
Terra Gasque
9 Buffalo Gals and Talking Jellyfish: Feminisms and Animal Studies

in Science Fiction 65
Joan Gordon
10 Asexual and Genderless Futures 72

Anna Kurowicka
11 Making the End Times Great Again: Postapocalypses, Preppers,

and the Politics of Patriarchy on American Television 79
Carlen Lavigne
12 Decoding Masculinity in 21st-Century Science

Fiction by Men: Two Case Studies in Reconceptualizing
Patriarchy87
Sara Martín
13 “I Came for the ‘Pew-Pew Space Battles’; I Stayed for the Autism”:
Martha Wells’s Murderbot 95
Robin Anne Reid
14 The Womanist Speculative Archetype in Alexis Pauline

Gumbs’s “Evidence” 102
R. Nicole Smith
15 Feminist Science Fiction Art 108

Smin Smith
PART III
Who: Subjectivities 117
16 Introduction 119
Wendy Gay Pearson
viii
Contents
17 “All Hail the Trans Cyborg”: Autonomous as an Analogy of

Trans Becoming 124
Jacob Barry
18 Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, and Utopian Insurgency 131

Peyton Campbell
19 Like “A Bolt out of the Blue”: Stories of Gender Transformation

From the German Democratic Republic 138
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming
20 New Pronouns and New Uses: Gender Variance and Language in

Contemporary Science Fiction 145
Misha Grifka Wander
21 Not Just Boys and Toys: Gender and Intersectionality in SF for Children 153
Emily Midkiff
22 Speculations Against Gender Discrimination: A Study of Indian SF’s

Growing Engagement with Gender Issues 160
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
23 Feminist-Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunk’s Hetero-Masculinism 167

Graham J. Murphy
24 Trans Without Trans?: Gender Identity and the Relationship Between

Transness and Sex Changing in the Works of John Varley 175
Wendy Gay Pearson
25 Unruly Bodies: Corporeality, Technocracy, and Same-Sex Desire in

Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl183
Agnieszka Podruczna
26 Good Wives and Mothers in the Universe: Explorations of

Traditional Chinese Gender Roles in Chi Hui’s “Nest of Insects” 190
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker
27 Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids: Sexual Pleasure and Desire in the

Speculative Fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Nalo Hopkinson 197
Sara Wenger
ix
Contents
PART IV
Where: Media and Transmedialities 205
28 Introduction 207
Keren Omry
29 Representation and Performance of Gender in Speculative Video

Games and Game Mods 210
Paweł Frelik
30 Parodying Captain Kirk Through the ‘Drift’ in Cultural Memory 218

Danielle Girard
31 Subverting, Re-fashioning, or Re-inscribing the Power of the Male

Gaze: Feminism, Fashion, and Cyberpunk Style 225
Rebecca J. Holden
32 Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappiness 234

Susan Knabe
33 Afro-Feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction 241

Nedine Moonsamy
34 Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club248

Jaime Oliveros García and Alejandro López Lizana
35 The Queer Non Sequitur 255

Alex Prong
36 Gender and Sexuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Its Adaptations 262
John Rieder
37 Meet My Alien Sex Fiend: Iterations of Otherness in Recent

Mexican Films 269
Itala Schmelz
38 A Young, Black, Queer Woman in Metropolis: Janelle Monáe

and Sci-Fi Queerness 276
Erik Steinskog
39 Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American

Internet Culture 283
Dagmar Van Engen
x
Contents
40 Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime: The Time-Traveling Girl 292

Candice Wilson and Tobias Wilson-Bates
PART V
When: Transtemporalities 299
41 Introduction 301
Sonja Fritzsche
42 Naomi Alderman’s The Power and New Feminist Science Fiction

Superheroes304
Marleen S. Barr
43 Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia 310

Laura Collier and Kathryn Prince
44 Science? Fiction? SF by Anglo-American Women in the Magazines 318

Jane Donawerth
45 Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction 325

M. Giulia Fabi
46 Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave 332

Szilvia Gellai
47 Restorative Nostalgia and Historical Amnesia in The Handmaid’s

Tale Protests 343
Kam Meakin
48 Tracing Second-Wave Feminism Through Women in the Dune Series 351

Kara Kennedy
49 Complicating the Super Men: Evolving Masculinities in

US-American Science Fiction 358
Michael Pitts
50 Between the Stove and Emancipation—Conservative Women

and Anti-utopian Imaginations in Early German Science
Fiction Literature 365
Katharina Scheerer
51 “Mistress of a World”: Margaret Cavendish, Gender and SF in Early

Modern England 373
E Mariah Spencer
xi
Contents
52 A Riddle About a Stick Figure: Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity,

and Misrecognition in Adam Roberts’s Bête380
Jessica Suzanne Stokes
53 The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century 388

Mengtian Sun
Index395
xii
FIGURES
1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022) 1

46.1 Monroe Schere’s Novelette “Rosie Lived in a Bubble” 334
46.2 “The Girl in the Glass Sphere” 335
46.3 Women inside of glass skulls 336
47.1 Handmaids against Trump, London 2019 347
xiii
CONTRIBUTORS
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at
the University of California, Irvine, US, and is the author of many books on rhetoric, popular
culture, and writing studies.
Marleen S. Barr is an independent scholar in the US. She is the author of Feminist Fabulation:
Space/Postmodern Fiction, Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies, and Alien
to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory and received the Science Fiction Research
Association’s Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Jacob Barry is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, working on an arts-based participatory action
research project that explores the experiences of gender-diverse folks accessing and engaging
with care in New Brunswick, Canada.
Anna Bedford is a science fiction scholar and a Teaching and Learning Specialist at St. Mary’s
College of Maryland, US, where she also teaches Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Beyond Gender are a group of researchers, activists, and practitioners engaged in collective
close readings of queer/trans/feminist science fiction, among their number are the authors of
the chapter included in this volume: Amy Butt, Tom Dillon, Rachel Hill, Sing Yun Lee, Sinéad
Murphy, Eleonora Rossi, Smin Smith, and Katie Stone.
Ritch Calvin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY
Stony Brook, US, and the author of Queering SF: Readings (2022).
Peyton Campbell is a PhD student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the Univer-
sity of Western Ontario in Canada whose PhD research explores the potential of queer hope in
resisting climate fatalism and heteronormative futurity.
Laura Collier is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, where her research is
in the intersection of emotions, activism, and speculative fiction.
xiv
Contributors
Carol Anne Costabile-Heming is Professor of German in the Department of World Lan-

guages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of North Texas, US, and has published extensively
on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture.
Jane Donawerth is award-winning Professor Emerita of the University of Maryland, US,

author of Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1997) as well as many publica-
tions on women’s SF, Shakespeare, early modern women writers, and history of rhetoric.
M. Giulia Fabi is Associate Professor at the University of Ferrara, Italy, and the author of Pass-
ing and the Rise of the African-American Novel (2001) as well as of many publications on early
African-American speculative fiction and on women writers.
Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Warsaw, Poland,
where he teaches and researches science fiction and video games.
Sonja Fritzsche is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean at Michigan State Uni-
versity, US, and focuses on Central and Eastern European science fiction and the amplification
of global science fiction studies.
Terra Gasque is a PhD student in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, US, where she is completing
her dissertation on “Transgressive Narratives: Using Queer Failure to Expand the Boundaries
of Epiphanic Narrative Structure.”
Szilvia Gellai is a faculty member in the Department of German Studies at the University
of Vienna, Austria, and the author of Glass Scenographies. Notes on Spaces of One’s Own (2023).
Danielle Girard received their PhD from Lancaster University, England; they are currently
working on both an edited collection and special issue on new queer television.
Joan Gordon, US, is an editor of Science Fiction Studies and a recipient of the Science Fiction
Research Association Award for Lifetime Achievement in SF Scholarship.
Misha Grifka Wander is a PhD candidate in the Ohio State University English department,
US, specializing in video game studies, comics studies, and speculative fiction studies, using an
eco-critical and queer lens.
Rebecca J. Holden is Principal Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, US, and
a critical scholar of feminist and African-American science fiction.
Kara Kennedy, PhD, is an independent scholar in New Zealand and author of Women’s Agency
in the Dune Universe: Tracing Women’s Liberation through Science Fiction (2021).
Susan Knabe is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the
Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario
in Canada; her current research focuses on queer temporalities.
Anna Kurowicka works at the American Studies Center at University of Warsaw, Poland, and pub-
lishes on asexuality in popular culture, disability in science fiction, and gender in speculative fiction.
xv
Contributors
Carlen Lavigne is the author of Post-Apocalyptic Patriarchy: American Television and Gen-
dered Visions of Survival (2018) and Cyberpunk Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction
(2013); she is Head of Communication Studies at Red Deer Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada.
Alejandro López Lizana, PhD, is Associate Lecturer at University of Granada, Spain, where
he researches German literature with a focus on Comparative Literature and Transmediality.
Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and author of Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British
Novel (2020).
Kam Meakin is a doctoral researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Sussex, England,
researching feminist dystopian fiction and UK-based activism.
Emily Midkiff teaches about children’s literature and literacy at the University of North
Dakota, US, and is the author of Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children.
Nedine Moonsamy is Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa,

whose scholarly research focuses on contemporary South African fiction and African SF; her
debut novel, The Unfamous Five (Modjaji Books) was shortlisted for the HSS Fiction Award (2021)
and her poetry was shortlisted for the inaugural New Contrast National Poetry Award (2021).
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Manikchak College, affiliated with

the University of Gourbanga, India. His doctoral research was on Anglo-American spy fiction.
Graham J. Murphy is Professor with the School of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College
in Toronto, Canada and co-editor of Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022), The Routledge
Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020), Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018), and Beyond Cyber-
punk: New Critical Perspectives (2010), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
Jaime Oliveros García, PhD, is Visiting Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain, and a
researcher of identity and video games.
Keren Omry is Senior Lecturer of contemporary US fiction at the University of Haifa, Israel,
where she researches and teaches on Alternate Histories, Science Fiction, and African-American
literature.
Wendy Gay Pearson is Chair of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University
of Western Ontario in Canada whose research focuses on queer and trans science fiction; with
Veronica Holinger and Joan Gordon, she is co-editor of Queer Universes; Sexualities in Science
Fiction (2008).
Michael Pitts is Lecturer of English at the University of New York in Prague and author of
Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man (2021).
Agnieszka Podruczna, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice,

Poland, who researches various aspects of speculative fiction (particularly North American spec-
ulative fiction by writers of color) in the context postcolonial studies.
xvi
Contributors
Kathryn Prince is Associate Professor and Vice Dean at the University of Ottawa, Canada,
where her research focuses on possible futures expressed in both fiction and non-fiction.
Alex Prong recently completed their MA from Western University in London, Ontario, Can-
ada, and is looking forward to beginning work on a PhD in the near future.
Robin Anne Reid, PhD, was Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at
Texas A&M University-Commerce, US, for twenty-seven years before retiring in May 2020 to
pursue independent scholarship.
John Rieder, US, author of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), Science Fic-
tion and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), and Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account
of SF from the 1960s to the Present (2021), received the Science Fiction Research Association’s
Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.
Katharina Scheerer is a PhD candidate at the University of Münster, Germany and co-editor
of Where Are We Now? Orientierungen nach der Postmoderne (2022).
Itala Schmelz is a philosopher and curator in Mexico and author of the book Codigofagia.
Mexican Cinema and Science Fiction.
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at

Heidelberg University in Germany who received her PhD in Chinese Studies from the Free
University of Berlin in June 2021.
R. Nicole Smith, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at Spelman College, US, and researches and pub-
lishes on Womanism, Black speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism.
Smin Smith is a researcher in science fiction art studies, a member of the Beyond Gender
Research Collective, and Lecturer at University for the Creative Arts, UK.
E Mariah Spencer is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator in the US with a PhD in Eng-
lish from the University of Iowa.
Erik Steinskog is Associate Professor in musicology at the Department of Arts and Cultural
studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and author of Afrofuturism and Black Sound Stud-
ies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (2018).
Jessica Suzanne Stokes is a disabled poet, educator, scholar, and PhD candidate at Michi-
gan State University, US, and co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker
Series.
Mengtian Sun is an independent scholar in science fiction studies who has worked in universi-
ties such as the University of Melbourne, Australia, and City University of Macao.
Dagmar Van Engen is Honors Faculty Fellow and Director of the Barrett Writing Center at
Barrett Honors College, Arizona State University, US.
xvii
Contributors
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Culture Studies and English at the University of Cali-
fornia, Riverside, US, and is the author of many groundbreaking books in the field of science
fiction studies and speculative narrative.
Sara Wenger is a PhD candidate in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural
Thought (ASPECT) program at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, US, whose research
interests include feminist technoscience studies, humanoid sex technologies, feminist science
fiction, and representations of robots and artificial intelligence in popular culture.
Candice Wilson is Associate Professor at the University of North Georgia, US, who researches
transgressive women in Japanese cinema.
Tobias Wilson-Bates is Assistant Professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, US, who works on
nineteenth-century narrative histories of technology, ecology, and temporality.
Lisa Yaszek is Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, US, and past
president of the Science Fiction Research Association; her recent books include Literary Afrofu-
turism in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and The Future Is Female! series (2018–present).
Ida Yoshinaga is a sansei media scholar who teaches science fiction and fantasy, screenwriting,
and film and TV studies at Georgia Tech, US.
xviii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors wish to acknowledge everyone involved directly and indirectly with this collection
that was imagined and set into motion in pre-pandemic Earth times. Since then, many of our
families and communities around the world have been impacted by COVID-19 as well as new
and existing social justice challenges and traumas. Those who were unable to join us in the
collection, you are in our thoughts, and we wish you well until we meet again. Those who were
able to submit and finish, we are grateful for your perseverance, wisdom, and critical visions
of better futures. Beyond this, we also wish to thank several institutions by name for providing
funding to support the production of this volume: the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech, the
College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University, and the Israel Science Foundation (grant
no. 733/20). We also wish to dedicate the collection to Nichelle Nichols (1932–2022) for her
courage, resilience, and vision.
xix
PART I
What
Gender and Genre
Figure 1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022)

1
INTRODUCTION
A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction,
and the Science Fiction Anthology
Lisa Yaszek
Introduction: The Long History of Gender and Genre

Fantastic fictions that challenge conventional ideas about the relations of science, society, and
gender are as old as speculative storytelling itself. Looking backward, we might begin this tradi-
tion with stories including the 10th-century ad folkloric tale Kaguya Hime, in which a princess
from the moon rejects courtship by Japan’s emperor for the company of her own people; the
1666 proto-novel The Blazing World, in which British author Margaret Cavendish casts herself as
a dimension-traveling philosopher warrior queen who uses an alien army to save her homeland
from invasion; and Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, which gave us both our first science
fiction (SF) archetypes—the mad scientist, the misunderstood monster, and the imperiled scien-
tist’s love interest—and the first modern critique of patriarchal science as dangerously unmoored
from feminine and feminist sensibility. Traveling forward through time and space to the early 20th-
century United States, we see women writers take inspiration from their suffragist counterparts to
demand equal representation both in the present and in our many imagined futures. In 1902–03,
African American artist Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood thrills Black audiences and anticipates the
Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) by over a century with its vision of a hidden, high-tech African
society protected by elite warrior women. Two decades later, White and mixed-race authors Clare
Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, and Lilith Lorraine bring similarly shocking dreams of female
futures to the emergent SF community. Their tales of daring lady astronauts, telepathic alien
queens, and strong-willed love interests who rescue themselves do not go unnoticed: while the
progressive-leaning editors of some magazines “like the idea of a woman invading the field [they]
had opened” (Stone 101), a small but loud minority are less enthusiastic. In 1938 teenaged fan
Donald G. Turnbull declares in a letter to the editor at Astounding that SF magazines should focus
on “good wholesome free-from-women stories” because “a woman’s place is not in anything
scientific,” and a teenaged Isaac Asimov agrees that “when we want science fiction, we don’t want
swooning dames” and that “many top-notch, grade-A, wonderful, marvelous, etc., etc., authors
get along swell without any women” (qt. in Larbalestier 119, 124).
Flash forward to recent decades, and at first it seems the song remains the same: the increas-
ing visibility of women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC artists in the global SF community leads to
hateful events including the RaceFail’09 flame war, the Gamergate controversy of 2014, and
the block-voting controversies of Puppygate 2015 and 2016. In each case, a relatively small
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-2 3
Lisa Yaszek
group of United States-born White men loudly (and in some cases, violently) proclaimed that
women and LGBTQ+ artists, especially those of color, were out to ruin the fun of popular
culture for everyone with their insistence on exploring issues of diversity and social justice. And
yet, women and nonbinary artists persist and thrive in SF across media and cultures today. Con-
sider, for instance, Margaret Atwood’s award-winning The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1980 feminist
dystopian novel that has spawned a film and an award-winning TV series by the same name and
whose iconic red handmaid’s uniforms have become equally iconic symbols of feminist political
protest; the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix film series, which neatly eviscerates Western culture’s
most dearly held myths about the singular male Chosen One while meditating on the power of
women, minority communities, and trans-consciousness; and Jeanette Ng’s 2019 Hugo Awards
speech at the Dublin Worldcon, in which Ng celebrates SF as a “wonderful, ramshackle” genre
that has outgrown the limiting influence of midcentury SF tastemaker John W. Campbell who,
as an editor, was “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to
this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonizers, settlers
and industrialists” (Ng). Meanwhile, the global SF community has sent a firm message to the
architects of Puppygate by giving the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 2016, 2017, and 2018
to African American author N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, thereby making her the first
author of any race or gender to win SF’s most prestigious award three times in a row. Clearly,
people of all genders do indeed want to see female and LGBTQ+ heroes remaking the world
in their own image.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (RCGSF) introduces readers to the
ways that SF artists communicate their ideas about gender across centuries, continents, and
cultures. The serious study of these issues has been an important part of the SF community
since the 1970s, when women artists and fans were inspired by the revival of feminism and the
creation of the first gender studies programs to create cons, fanzines, and publishing venues of
their own. At the time, “gender” was often used as a euphemism for “women,” but the decades
since have seen a more expansive view of the ways in which SF can question gender, including
bringing feminist and queer perspectives to bear on masculinities and recognizing the existence
and importance of transgender and nonbinary folx as both creators and consumers of SF. Gen-
der has also been an important part of SF studies in academia since the field’s inception around
the same time, generating numerous scholarly articles, monographs, special journal issues, and
anthologies. The scholars and artists featured in RCGSF build upon these traditions of interdis-
ciplinary inquiry by connecting established topics in gender studies and science fiction studies
with emergent ideas from researchers in different media. As such, our Companion is the first
large-scale reference collection of its kind to address new theories of gender intersectionality
and diversity as they inform SF production around the globe.
Defining the Debate Over Gender and Genre: A Brief History

of the SF Anthology
The RCGSF directly owes its existence to the conversations about gender and genre that
have been part of the SF community for well over a century. Fittingly enough, many of these
debates unfolded in and around the historical development of the SF anthology itself. This is
especially true in the United States, where SF came together as a unique popular genre in the
all-story magazines of the late 1800s and the specialized genre magazines that flourished in the
early and mid-20th century. By the 1940s, however, readers were increasingly able to access SF
through book collections as well. Anthologies were popular in an era dominated by ephemera
such as newspapers and magazines because they were “less fragile, kept in print longer, [and]
4
Introduction
available in libraries,” offering interested readers quick introductions to SF, its history, and its
themes—indeed, genre anthologies were some of the earliest spaces where these subjects were
first articulated. As expensive, hardcover publications, anthologies also made SF “more accept-
able to parents” and even offered this newly named mode of storytelling a certain cultural
legitimacy—especially important in an era when decency codes sometimes required shop keep-
ers to store their SF magazines under the counter with other kinds of “lurid” literature (Nichols
and Langford).
Much like their feminist counterparts in the political sphere, the main issue that women
writers of this era grappled with was one of representation. In 1946 two respectable publish-
ers commissioned the first major hardcover SF anthologies: Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis
McComas’s Adventures in Time and Space (Random House) and Groff Conklin’s The Best of Sci-
ence Fiction (Crown Publishers). Taken together, these anthologies seemed to confirm the adage
that SF really is all about “boys and their toys.” Although women in the SF community made
up “about 15 percent of all contributors” at that time (Yaszek) and both anthologies included
over three dozen stories, Conklin included just two women in his collection—Leslie F. Stone
and C.L. Moore, co-writing with husband Henry Kuttner under the Lewis Padgett penname—
while Healy and McComas included just one: C.L. Moore, again co-writing with husband
Henry Kuttner under the Lewis Padgett penname. As the first canonical histories of SF, both
anthologies minimized the impact of women writers in the genre: Moore was a well-established
SF luminary in her own right by that time but was only represented through collaborative
work with her husband under a male pseudonym, and Stone’s gender was essentially erased by
Conklin who thought she was a man (despite the fact that her picture was often printed with
her stories, in the fashion of the time) and who, upon learning the truth from Stone’s husband,
blurted out, “are you telling me I used a story by a woman? I didn’t believe women could write
science fiction!” (Stone 101). A few years later, when SF luminary Judith Merril began what
fellow editor Anthony Boucher described as her “practically flawless” SF anthology editing
career (which stretched over three decades and included her groundbreaking “Year’s Best” series
from 1956–67), the import of her work was diminished by disaffected male colleagues who—in
a rhetorical move that anticipated Puppygate—cast her as the architect of an SF “mafia” who
threatened to ruin the fun of the genre by “imposing literary standards essentially alien to the
field” (Latham 203–4).
SF anthologies took on heightened importance in the 1960s and 70s, when authors of
experimental or “New Wave” SF placed their most groundbreaking work in the original story
collections that were quickly replacing magazines as the center of generic innovation due to
their “high pay, perceived prestige, and selectivity” (Horton). Over the course of the decade,
authors and editors associated with anthology series including Damon Knight’s Orbit (1965–80),
Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions (1971–81), Terry Carr’s Universe (1971–87), and Harlan
Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1968 and 1972) earned a “remarkable number of Hugo and Nebula”
nominations and wins (Nicholls and Langford). While women still comprised a small but sig-
nificant 15% of the SF community at this time, they were suddenly far more visible within the
genre, taking home 19% of all Hugo Awards and 25% of all Nebula Awards—often for stories
that first appeared in one of the original anthologies of the era. Male anthology editors were
well aware of their female contributors’ star power. As Harlan Ellison succinctly put it: “the best
writers in SF today are the women,” and in the late 1970s, Robert Silverberg gave the edito-
rial reins of his prestigious New Dimensions series to award-winning feminist SF author Marta
Randall (Ellison 229).
Feminist SF author and editor Pamela Sargent recalls that the “atmosphere of change” her-
alded by the New Wave attracted women to the genre because it suddenly seemed that their
5
Lisa Yaszek
stories “were likely to find a more receptive audience, even if [they] violated some of the tra-
ditional canons” (14). Inspired by the revival of feminism and the recovery of women’s history
in newly established gender studies programs across the country, women writers of this era pio-
neered the first SF anthologies of their own, including Sargent’s Women of Wonder (1975), which
established a herstory of women’s SF from the pulp era to the present and spawned a number
of successor anthologies over the next two decades; Virginia Kidd’s Millennial Women (1977),
in which all of the stories are written by women and have female protagonists; and Vonda N.
McIntrye and Susan Janice Anderson’s Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976), which offered readers
visions of the many truly strange new futures humans might inhabit after achieving gender
equality. Today, feminist editors continue the project of recovering women’s SF in all its diverse
forms with Detlef Münch’s The Woman of the Future 100 Years Ago: 7 Forgotten Feminist Utopias
from 1988–1914 (Die Frau der Zukunft vor 100 Jahren: 7 vergessene feministische Utopien
aus den Jahren 1899–1914, 2008); Alex Dally MacFarlane’s The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by
Women (2014); Ann VanderMeer’s Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology
(2015); Emmanuela Carbé, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Le Visionaire: Fantascienza,
Fantasy, Fantasy e Femminismo: U’antologia (2018); and Lisa Yaszek’s The Future Is Female! series
(2018–present).
The past three decades have also seen the rise of anthologies that, much like modern gender
activism, challenge and expand our ideas about gender and genre. In 1987 Kimberlé Crenshaw
coined the term “intersectionality” to help other feminists understand that women’s experience
of gender was not universal, but dependent on the complex and sometimes contradictory
relations of both race and gender—an insight that subsequent feminists would extend to class,
sexual orientation, physical ability, etc. By the turn of the millennium, women would become
leaders in producing new SF anthologies organized around issues of intersectionality, including
Sheree Thomas’s Dark Matter series (2001, 2005); Nalo Hopkinson’s Whispers from the Cotton Tree
Root (2000) and So Long Been Dreaming (2004); Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán’s
Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2003); Grace Dillon’s
Walking the Clouds: An Indigenous Science Fiction Anthology (2012); and Nerine Dorman’s Terra
Incognita, New Short Speculative Stories from Africa (2015). Indeed, insofar as these anthologies
collect stories by BIPOC authors not usually found in traditional Eurowestern SF publishing
venues, they ask us to reconsider not just who writes SF, but where it is written as well. In a
similar vein, LGBTQ+ authors generate still other fantastic histories of SF with anthologies
including Nicola Griffith and Steven Padgett’s Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998); Brit
Mandelo’s Beyond the Gender Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Science Fiction (2012); the
Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction series (various editors, 2016–2019);
Joshua Whitehead’s Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction
(2020); and Paula Guran’s Far Out: Recent Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy (2021).
Defining the Debate Over Gender and Genre:

The SF Studies Anthology
Like their artistic counterparts, feminists and other progressive-minded scholars have long been
interested in the relations of gender and genre in SF. Indeed, early feminist SF scholarship often
came from within the genre community itself, including Joanna Russ’s landmark essay “The
Image of Women in Science Fiction” (1970), which argued that “there are plenty of images of
women in science fiction . . . [but] hardly any women” (39) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “American
SF and the Other” (1975), which depicted SF as a “baboon patriarchy” with “rich, ambitious,
aggressive males at the top” and “then, at the bottom, the poor, the uneducated, the faceless
6
Introduction
masses, and all the women” (210). While Russ placed her essay in the Red Clay Reader, scholarly
journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies had featured essays about women writers since
their inception in 1959 and 1973, respectively, and by the mid-1970s both were publishing
decidedly feminist analyses of SF such as Le Guin’s “American SF” (which first appeared in
Science Fiction Studies) and Mary Kenny Badami’s “A Feminist Critique of Science Fiction”
(Extrapolation, 1976). Perhaps not surprisingly, this era also saw the publication of the first
feminist SF studies anthology, Marleen S. Barr’s Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981)—a
collection that spawned the subsequent volumes Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices
and Velocities (2000) and Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New
Wave Trajectory (2008). The same era also saw the beginning of serious studies of sexuality
and non-normative gender expression with the publication of Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo’s
comprehensive annotated bibliography, Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science
Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (1983).
As the trajectory of Barr’s anthologies indicate, over the past half century, SF scholars, like
their artistic counterparts, have become increasingly interested in expanding our ideas about
gender in SF. By the 1980s and 90s, the development of new communication and information
technologies coupled with the advent of global capitalism led a new generation of feminists to
propose that thinking carefully about the relations of science, society, and gender should be a
central priority for all women. This argument was advanced perhaps most famously by cultural
theorist Donna Haraway, who appropriated the figure of the part-organic, part-technological
figure of the cyborg from SF an ideal metaphor for modern political activists and argued that
feminist SF authors are “our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-
tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs” (173). This notion is very much at the heart of
much feminist SF scholarship of that era as well, especially in anthologies such as Takayumi
Tatsumi’s Cyborg Feminism (Saibogu feminizumu, 1991); Jenny Wolmark’s Cybersexualities:
A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace (1999); Fiona Hovenden, Linda Janes, Gill
Kirkup, and Kathryn Woodward’s The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (2000); Mary Flanagan and
Austin Booth’s Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (2002); and many of the essays in
Karola Maltry et al.’s Gendered Future: On the Transformation of Feminist Visions in Science Fiction
(Genderzukunft: zur transformation feministischer visionen in der science fiction, 2008). This
line of investigation continues today with Sherryl Vint and Sumeyra Buran’s edited collection,
Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction
(2022) and Ramona Onnis, Anna Chiara Palladino, and Manuela Spinelli’s Feminist Science
Fiction: Imagining Gender in Contemporary Italian Culture (Fantascienza femminista: immaginare il
genere nella cultura italiana contemporanea, 2022).
Like their literary peers, feminist scholars also produce anthologies of criticism dedicated
to issues of intersectionality in SF; indeed, this is perhaps the fastest growing area of feminist
SF inquiry today. Such anthologies include Wendy Gay Pearson, Joan Gordon, and Veronica
Hollinger’s Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008); Francesca T. Bartini’s Gender
Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction (2017); and Cristina Jurado and Lola
Roble’s Daughters of the Future: Science Fiction, Fantastic and Marvelous Literature from a Feminist
Perspective (Hijas del futuro: Literatura de ciencia ficción, fantástica, y de lo maravilloso desde la
mirada feminista, 2021). Intersectionality is also central to transmedia studies of gender in SF,
including Valerie E. Frankel’s Outlander’s Sassenachs: Essays on Gender, Race, Orientation, and the
Other in the Novel and Television Series (2016); Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B.V. Olguin’s
Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2018); Elizabeth Erwin and
Dawn Keetley’s The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the
Television Series and Comics (2018); and Anne Gjelsvik and Rikke Schubart’s Women of Ice and
7
Lisa Yaszek
Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements (2016). While most anthologies
of feminist SF criticism are, logically enough, published by academic presses, the feminist SF
publisher Aqueduct Press has also made important contributions to feminist SF scholarship with
the eleven-volume WisCon Chronicles Series (2007–17), edited by authors and scholars including
L. Timmel Duchamp, Rebecca J. Holden, and Jaymee Goh. As an archive of the various events
that take place at the world’s largest and oldest feminist science fiction convention (held annually
over Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin), each anthology directs readers attention
to different conversations unfolding amongst artists, editors, scholars, and fans in the feminist
SF community at any given time, including “Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future”;
“Shattering Ableist Narratives”; and “Intersections and Alliances.”
Even as they look forward to the future of gender in genre fiction, feminists engaged in
SF scholarship also produce anthologies honoring the accomplishments of the pioneering
women writers and critics who came before them. Many historically oriented collections focus
specifically on women’s contributions to the utopian tradition, including Barbara Holland-
Cunz’s Feminist Utopias: The Dawn of a Postpatriarchal Society (Feministiche Utopien: Aufbruch
in die postpatriarchale Geselleschaft, 1986); Jane Donawerth and Carol Kolmerton’s Utopian and
Science Fiction: Worlds of Difference (1994); and Sharon R. Wilson’s Women’s Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (2013). Meanwhile, the feminist scholars featured in Helen Merrick’s Women of Other
Worlds: Excursions through Feminism and Science Fiction (1999) and Justine Larbalestier’s Daughters
of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006) more directly celebrate the
accomplishments of women in SF proper. Feminist scholars have also produced essay collections
honoring the accomplishments of pioneering feminist SF icons real and imaginary, including
Lindsey Tucker’s Critical Essays on Angela Carter (1988); Farah Mendelsohn’s On Joanna Russ
(2012); Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl’s Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices,
and Octavia E. Butler (2013); and Linda Mizejewski and Tanya D. Zuk’s Our Blessed Rebel Queen:
Essays on Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia (2021).
In 1995, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards provocatively declared that “on a
personal level feminism is everywhere, like fluoride” (18) and that certainly seems to be true at
least in the realm of SF scholarship. Thematic SF essay collections tackle a wide range of topics,
ranging from Sherry Ginn and Michael G. Cornelius’s The Sex Is out of This World: Essays on the
Carnal Side of Science Fiction (2012) to Nadine Farghaly and Simon Bacon’s To Boldly Go: Essays
on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe (2017) to Bridget Barclay and Christy Tidwell’s
Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018). Many thematic SF essay collections explore
how issues of gender and genre change not just over time, but by culture as well. Such work
began in 1992 with pioneering feminist SF fan Janice Bogstadt’s dissertation, “Gender, Power
and Reversal in Contemporary Anglo-American and French Feminist Science Fiction” and
continues today in collections such as Silvia G. Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel De Rosso’s Science Fiction
in Latin America: Criticism. Theory. History. (2020) and Ramona Onnis, Anna Chiara Palladino,
and Manuela Spinelli’s Feminist Science Fiction: Imagining Gender in Contemporary Italian Culture
(Fantascienza femminista: immaginare il genere nella cultura italiana contemporanea, 2022).
Essays on SF and gender also feature prominently in non-SF collections such as Debra Faszer-
McMahon, Victoria L. Ketz, and Dawn Smith-Sherwood’s A Laboratory of Her Own: Women
and Science in Spanish Culture (2021) and Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey’s Ecofeminism in
Dialog (2018). And finally, perhaps the greatest testament to the pervasiveness and diversity of
thinking about gender in SF are the dozens of essays collected in Robin Anne Reid’s Greenwood
Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2009), a two-volume collection that offers
both surveys of major topics including sexual identities, fandom, and science as well as more
focused examinations of authors and literary traditions.
8
Introduction
Section Overview
Building upon the work of their predecessors, the authors featured in this volume provide
protocols for critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in SF, especially—but not
exclusively—as explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists. Taken together,
they challenge conventional generic boundaries; provide new ways of approaching familiar texts;
recover lost artists and introduce new ones; connect the revival of old, hate-based politics with
the increasing visibility of imagined futures for all; and show how SF stories about new kinds
of gender relations inspire new models of artistic, technoscientific, and political practice around
the globe. Their chapters are grouped into five conversations—about how the SF community
treats issues of gender and genre, important ways of theorizing gender and genre, the SF scholars
and artists who have led such efforts, the moments that have enabled paradigm shifts, and
how these paradigm shifts are enacted—that are central to discussions of gender and SF in
the current moment. Additionally, this Companion includes original cover art from nonbinary
Canadian artist Derek Newman-Stille, whose use of mixed media forms and aesthetic traditions
mirrors the expansive energy of the gender- and genre-bending SF storytelling considered by
our contributors, and each section or conversation begins with an original piece by Israeli artist
Gili Ron, who was inspired by feminist artists such as Georgia O’Keefe and Eva Hild to create
a sequence of computer-generated shapes and patterns that explore mathematics, nature, and
gender in ways that orient—and reorient—readers to the topics at hand in each section.
The first section of this book, “What: Gender and Genre,” begins with the current chapter,
which reviews the long history of debates over the proper relations of gender and genre in the
SF community, especially as they intersect with the process of creating SF as a distinct mode of
storytelling through anthologies of stories and criticism. Next, SF film scholar Ida Yoshinaga
talks with SF authors Joyce Chng, Jaymee Goh, Lehua Parker, Bogi Takács, and Andrea Hairston
about their favorite examples of gender expression in both their own work and SF across media.
In Part II, “How: Theoretical Approaches,” scholars from around the globe survey different
theoretical approaches to issues of gender in science fiction, including feminisms, queer studies,
Black women’s studies, disability studies, and ecocriticism. The authors featured in Part III,
“Who: Subjectivities,” explore how different scholars and artists reflect on nonbinary gender
identities, dynamic subjectivities, and new and old critical positionalities that are politicized,
aestheticized, and often materialized in works of science fiction art and criticism. The authors
collected in Part IV, “Where: Media and Transmedialities,” examine the different media in
which genre and gender frameworks are developed, the political and aesthetic possibilities
opened by such media productions, and the ways such productions invite us to think through
larger issues of science, technology, and society. Finally, those included in Part V, “When:
Transtemporalities,” do not aim to be all encompassing but address moments and movements
in SF and in gender studies where paradigms have shifted, thereby allowing audiences to look
towards futurities, alternate temporalities, and all manners of futural and historical thought.
Bibliography
Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
Boucher, Anthony. “Recommended Reading.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September
1954, p. 93.
Ellison, Harlan. “Introduction to Joanna Russ’s ‘When It Changed.’ ” Again, Dangerous Visions. Doubleday,
1972, pp. 229.
9
Lisa Yaszek
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–181.
Larbaleslier, Justine. Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan, 2002.
Latham, Rob. “The New Wave.” A Companion to Science Fiction, edited by David Seed. Blackwell, 2005,
pp. 202–216.
Le Guin, Ursula. “American SF and the Other.” Science Fiction Studies, vol 2, no. 7, part 3, 1975, pp. 208–210.
Ng, Jeanette. “Acceptance Speech for the 2019 John w. Campbell Award.” Medium, 18 August 2019,
https://medium.com/@nettlefish/john-w-campbell-for-whom-this-award-was-named-was-a-fascist-
f693323d3293.
Nicholls, Peter, and David Langford. “Anthologies.” The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. https://sf-encyclopedia.
com/entry/anthologies.
Russ, Joanna. “The Image of Women in Science Fiction.” Red Clay Reader, November 1970, pp. 35–40.
Sargent, Pamela. “Introduction.” Women of Wonder: The Classic Years. Harvest Books, 1995, pp. 1–20.
Stone, Leslie. “Day of the Pulps.” Fantasy Commentator, vol. 152, 1997, pp. 100–103, 152.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Introduction.” The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women from Pulp
Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin. Library of America, 2018, pp. ix–xxi.
10
2
AUTHOR ROUNDTABLE ON
GENDER IN SCIENCE FICTION
Ida Yoshinaga
Introduction
According to Phillip L. Hammack, director of the Sexual & Gender Diversity Laboratory at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, the current generation’s willingness to frame their
personal stories through a growing corpus of categorical identification demonstrates “the
contemporary availability of language to make meaning of their experience of gender and
sexuality, that aligns with an internal sense of self ”—an historical trend which Hammack labels
“radical authenticity.” Radical authenticity, he says, has meant that prior authoritative sources
on gender and sexuality “have been upended,” in a time of “heightened social creativity” among
queer and nonbinary youth.
Through their imaginative labor, science fiction and fantasy (SFF) writers have always
worked to upend conventional categories of gender and sexuality, envisioning storyworlds in
which the binary, exploitative structures of heteropatriarchy can be exposed, challenged, even
overcome. Now is an era where K-12 educators fight to use the simple word “gay” in their
classroom curricula; where anti-trans bills attack children’s equitable access to healthcare, sports,
and bathroom facilities; and where women’s (and other people’s) reproductive rights have all but
evaporated due to misogynist legislators, governors, and judges.
An act of hope for a liberatory future, this panel gathers together international BIPOC and
LGBTQ+ SFF authors who have made gender and sexuality a playground for imagining radically
authentic society: Joyce Chng, Jaymee Goh, Andrea Hairston, Lehua Parker, and Bogi Takács
(with Ida Yoshinaga facilitating). Revealing their personal-best own work of transformative
gender and sexual imaginaries achieved through genre storytelling, they share their desires for
the types of feminist and queer tales they themselves wish to read (view, experience, etc.) in the
speculative/fantastic corpus; discuss viable publishing venues for SFF writers who explore such
topics; reflect on reader safety and character consent considerations for writing stories post-
#MeToo; and exchange ideas on their favorite feminist or queer authors and texts.
joyce chng (awolfstale.wordpress.com and @jolantru on Twitter; pronouns: she/her,
they/their), writer of fiction appearing in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See a Different
Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing the Future, and co-editor of The Sea Is Ours: Tales
of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh, has published recent space opera novels dealing
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-3 11
Ida Yoshinaga
with wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan) and vineyards (Water into Wine) and, as alter-ego J.
Damask, writes about werewolves in Singapore.
jaymee goh (silver-goggles.blogspot.com) is a writer, reviewer, editor (TachyonPublications.
com), and essayist whose work has been published in a number of SFF magazines and anthologies,
who graduated from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2016, and
received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside, for
her dissertation on steampunk and whiteness.
andrea hairston (andreahairston.com/bio), a multiple award-winning author who serves as the
Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College and the Artistic
Director of Chrysalis Theatre, is author of the novels Will Do Magic for Small Change, Mindscape,
and Master of Poisons; a collection of essays and plays, Lonely Stardust; and many short stories.
lehua parker (lehuaparker.com) writes award-winning speculative fiction for kids and
adults, often set in her native Hawai‘i, including the Niuhi Shark Saga trilogy, Lauele Fractured
Folktales, and Chicken Skin Stories, along with many other plays, poems, short stories, novels,
and essays.
bogi takács (bogireadstheworld.com/about-me; bogiperson on Twitter, Instagram, or
Patreon) is a writer, editor, and reviewer; a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/
emself or they pronouns); and an immigrant to the US. E is a winner of the Lambda award for
editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, the Hugo award for Best Fan
Writer, and a finalist for other awards.
ida yoshinaga
What was your proudest, most challenging, or most satisfying story that addressed soci-
etal notions of gender?
joyce chng: My Water into Wine (Annorlunda), a bittersweet novella, centered on the thoughts (often mono-
logues) of Xin, a transmac nonbinary Chinese individual bequeathed a vineyard by their late grand-
father. Xin took their elderly mother and three children to the planet of the vineyard. When they
thought they had it all figured out (setting up a wine-making business), war broke out, with a love
story thrown in between. Water into Wine looks into the effects of war and tumultuous change, loss,
fragmentation, and dislocation of self and place—at pain in its multileveled aspects. I lost my grand-
mother during the course of writing/revision; I wove that experience in.
I also explored issues of being nonbinary and transmasculine, aspects of Xin. The unease
felt by their ex-husband was written in. Even when trans identities were accepted in the story’s
universe/setting, I wanted to show that there would still be people in the future who would be
transphobic (though they would deny it). The trick (and main goal) was to question what makes
us us? Who are we? Is there masculinity and femininity? Or is it all a spectrum? Why are we
gatekeeping gender? Xin came to the conclusion that they were their own person, even coming
up with their own pronoun (gar).
bogi takács: My novella out this year, “Power to Yield” (in Clarkesworld), explores sexuality more than gender,
but some people called it a trans story. Not just because it was written by a trans person, but because
it had a trans sensibility/approach, I think?
Several years ago, when people on Twitter raised the issue about what an aromantic romance
story would be like, I thought to write something people-focused and relationship-focused, fol-
lowing romance beats, but without the relationship being romantic or sexual. I was also troubled
about how people had talked about “autistic obsessions”—this was before the term “special
interests” became widely known. I found “obsession” pejorative . . . but I knew it was possible
12
Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction
to have what I would now call a special interest that is difficult and/or dangerous. And one can
have a special interest in specific people—to my mind, that is a different dynamic from falling in
love, though the two can co-occur. I tried to investigate these concepts.
jaymee goh: In “Eruption” (in Anathema Magazine), I wrote from the perspective of a perpetrator of vio-
lence. This short story was about a young teen who had suffered from gendered violence not
only from the slave masters but male family members. She goes on to help build a society free
from cisheteropatriarchal violence, though women of her generation and earlier suffer from
trauma of the massacre.
I had a dream in which a ball was disrupted by a slave uprising, with slaves literally breaking
through the floor to attack from below. Then, women slaves began to slaughter the men. It was
traumatic to wake up to, and I struggled to express the concept for a long time. On Twitter, we
had for a time joked about the hashtag #killallmen. This provoked a lot of questions for me:
why? How would it happen? What would be the outcomes? I still go back and forth on the idea
of gendered violence to establish gender freedom, and wonder if such uncertainty is part of the
condition for a queer utopia of gender equality.
andrea hairston: I am also trying to figure out how to better organize ourselves given our “hierarchical
natures.” Co-operation and a sense of moral/ethical soundness are foundational for biological
entities—we are, to quote Lynn Margulis, a symbiotic planet. How do we as human beings
create social frames, narratives, political systems that center on that?
Writing Master of Poisons—my 2020 novel—I was thinking of how gender is/has been defined
in world cultures throughout history. Unlike the Victorian/European notions that I grew up
with in the 1950s and 1960s, many cultures have articulated three or more genders. In some,
you choose your gender when you come of age, or gender is fluid—people change over the
course of their lives.
In Master of Poisons, I decentered European notions of gender that pervade many epics and
explored conflicting gender ideas within societies where folks from different cultures are thrust
together—initially because of empire and conquest. My characters must use wisdom from a
range of perspectives to solve global catastrophes. Readers have said they are excited by the
world building and the challenges I offer to the master narrative, in response to the European-
default setting.
lehua parker: My most challenging was a Native Hawaiian rewrite of The Little Mermaid, called Pua’s Kiss.
After contracts were signed with the original publisher, the marketing department changed
the target audience from those who like genre-bending and avant garde tales, to readers who
like contemporary romance with a speculative twist.
I flipped the story: the protagonist, Pua (Ariel), does not want to be human. The daughter
of the ocean god Kanaloa, she’s a shark that has the ability to appear as human. She doesn’t
want happily ever after; she wants a no-entanglements-fling on the beach with a tourist—
whom she may or may not devour in the end. She owns her sexuality in a way that resonates
with historical Hawaiian chiefesses and deftly manipulates Justin (the Prince) into a memo-
rable night on the beach.
Reading deeper, there are themes of predatory manipulation, innocence, rape, colonization,
taboo, free-will, and how fulfilling momentary desires can have huge consequences. Audience
13
Ida Yoshinaga
reactions have been predictably mixed, especially if they expected a fluffy Disney mermaid and
got a mouthful of pointy shark teeth instead.
ida yoshinaga:
What ideas have been important for you to illustrate, play with, or interrogate
related to gender and/or sexuality?
joyce chng: Themes like transformation, transfiguration, change and family (biological and found) often
pop up in my stories. I write a lot about werewolves (mostly female/feminine werewolves),
intersectionality (straddling of worlds/identities), and sexuality (orientations, etc.).
For example, My Soul Is Wolf (Anathema Magazine) looks at werewolves and sexuality as well as
all the in-between identities. Or the Starfang trilogy (Fox Spirit), basically an Asian werewolf
space opera.
bogi takács: I agree with Joyce on this (though I don’t have stories about werewolves!). I feel that gender
and sexuality are not separable from e.g., ethnic or religious background, or embodiment.
I try to show the specific details of how these all interact. With the caveat that it can be frus-
trating when people try to reduce my writing to my transness and ignore all other aspects—
this seems to happen most often with transness and not e.g., being Hungarian, Jewish, a
migrant.
I also like to experiment with form and structure, or build on structures that are not common
in English-language SFF. Gender/sexuality might not be the focus, but ultimately everything
interrelates.
jaymee goh: Writing anything set in, or responding to, contemporary times, I consider the body as the site
of the problem. Embodiment within the world as a gendered person, or an agender person in a
gendered world, gives space to write about the interiority of a person responding to that world.
Writing sex scenes is always fun, not just in terms of “where are my body parts, what is this
other hand doing, did I accidentally write two penises and three hands?!” but writing about
consent and exploration. So much media out there lazily relies on a heteropatriarchal erotic—
men taking the lead, women submitting, consent being assumed or subsumed by the emotion
of the moment.
andrea hairston: The stories we tell, tell us how to be in the world. In writing Redwood and Wildfire (2011)
I focused on turn-of-the-20th-century folks who acted in Minstrel and Wild West shows. As
live spectacles, these performers became the source of stereotypes/caricatures of race, class,
gender, ethnicity, and sexuality that migrated to fiction and film and still haunt us today. I found
much I did not know, researching this era: more women film directors then than now; and,
besides minstrel men dressed as women and defining femininity (creating fragile white ditzes,
angry black jezebels, delicate Asian handmaidens, and stoic, silent Indians ready to die for white
lovers), female artists dressed as men to perform non-minstrel notions of their cultures.
lehua parker: Prior to Western colonization, the entire LGBTQIA spectrum was present in Polynesia,
and (based on my research into Hawaiian culture), no more remarkable than being right- or
left-handed.
I try to reflect that mindset and diversity in my characters’ personalities and relationships but
rarely comment on them directly. Cultural insiders generally pick up the tells; Western audiences
14
not so much. My stories focus on empowerment, transformation, and overcoming barriers of

exclusion, abuse, trauma, or implied destiny. For me, leaving things open allows the story to
resonate in meaningful ways as readers fill in the blanks with their own experiences.
ida yoshinaga: Who’s your favorite SF (or other) genre writer when it comes to depicting gen-
dered and/or sexual subjectivities—identities or internal perspectives—and why?
joyce chng: One of my favorite SF writers is C. J. Cherryh whose Chanur books I now happen to be
reading.
Looking at nature v. nurture, Cherryh explores the concepts of masculinity and femininity, nature
versus nurture, in an expansive space opera/adventure saga where the human is the alien and the
main protagonist is a felinoid captain whose world’s structures and systems are reminiscent of lion
prides. Her Hani women are captains of freighters and hunter ships, important administrators
looking after holdings, waterways and space stations. While Hani males are either pampered clan
heads or young exiles who challenge clan heads so that they could take over the clan.
bogi takács: My first impulse is to answer with R. B. Lemberg (my spouse)—we discuss and are mutually
influenced by each other’s writing considerably. Around gender subjectivity, my pick has to be
Rivers Solomon. Both An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep are strong portrayals of interior-
ity and how gender—and culture, Blackness, dis/ability, individual and group history—ties
into that.
These are also important as intersex books by an intersex author. It has meant the world to
me as an intersex person to feel that we do not have to settle for less, just because there are fewer
books altogether, and mostly memoirs/nonfiction. We can have stories that are unquestionably
exceptional and not just because they are intersex stories, but because they are stunningly good
and happen to be intersex stories.
jaymee goh: I don’t tend to read authors for gendered characters, but I’ve been re-reading Charlotte Per-
kins Gilman’s Herland at least once a year, because of how she rebuts many gender norms of
her time, which remain eerily similar.
I recently read What Diantha Did, Gilman’s slice-of-life/utopic novel of a young middle-class
woman who eschews the conventions of her class by setting off to work as a housekeeper for
someone else. Gilman’s female characters cover a range of responses to the patriarchal norms
of their time, from sad, confused disappointment, to indignant rage, to cheerful outward obei-
sance. She also writes male characters of various masculinities.
andrea hairston: No real favorites but here are writers who challenge us. Classics: Susan Stinson, Octavia But-
ler, Ursula K. Le Guin. Recent works: G. Willow Wilson, Nisi Shawl, Charlie Jane Anders.
These authors create characters who come from the center and margins of their societies. The
labor they perform is not a measure of their spirits. Diversity is power, and they must figure
out how to be different together and transform their worlds.
lehua parker: Just one favorite? I can’t—I’d be drawn and quartered. But the stories that I enjoy most have
a few things in common. If a character’s gender or sexual identity is vital to the plot, then
the complications, options, and stakes need to reflect that. For example, a gender-queer
character walking into a bar is going to read a situation and react differently than a cisgender-
heterosexual character would.
15
Ida Yoshinaga
Fortunately, stories that take something as common as a casual pick-up line in a bar and end in
unexpected, but authentic ways to an LGBTQIA individual’s lived experience, are now widely
available through indie and small presses.
bogi takács: Andrea’s comment on “how to be different together” resonates with me. It’s interesting that
the vintage Eastern bloc science fiction that I grew up on was opposite in the sense that there
was an expectation for multiethnic/racial casts, but the differences were often portrayed as
surface-level, as characters were all supposed to be good Communists foremost and were usu-
ally written by ethnic/racial majority writers . . . and discussion of queerness was generally
disallowed.
I would like more explorations of differentness together, with characters figuring out how to
collaborate, even when it is difficult. Focusing on this decenters the majority.
joyce chng: Lehua, I am also published by indie and small presses who are brave and courageous when it
comes to seeking out marginalized and diverse creators, often from non-American regions.
However, some small presses do not have the cashflow and resources of the bigger houses.
I hope, by one day, they have the same or similar standing to match.
ida yoshinaga: Give your original idea for an SF story centered around a gendered temporality, a
gendered future, a gendered past, or a gendered way of existing through time.
joyce chng: A nonbinary Zheng He (Cheng Ho) in space (space opera). Zhen, an admiral of the Celestial
Empire, travels across the Known Galaxy with an impressive fleet, and then rebels against the
Empire by becoming the leader of the Alliance with their life-mates. (Author’s note: Now,
I want to write it . . . actually revise a current story.)
bogi takács: I always want to write more ancient-era Jewish historical fantasy, and I would love to write
something with Talmudic intersex concepts, because I identify with some of those terms. It is
difficult because a lot of those concepts are often only discussed in relation to transness while
erasing the intersex aspect.
jaymee goh: My story idea: the bissu of New Nusantara govern their planetoid enclave with a loose hand,
and the celestial divine sends them children from all over the known galaxy like shooting stars
seeking safe orbit.
andrea hairston: In my next novel Archangels of Funk, Cinnamon Jones is a bisexual scientist, artiste, and hoo-
doo conjurer surviving along the digital divide after climate change and Water Wars have
scrambled the world. She and her Circus-Bots are part of a community of Motor Fairies,
Pedal-People, and Co-Ops trying to hold on to who they’ve been while coming up with the
next world.
lehua parker: One of the big questions in Hawaiian history revolves around Queen Liliʻuokalani’s decision
in 1893 to have her guard stand aside when a group of merchants illegally backed by the US
military began what became the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Valuing human life,
she placed her faith in international treaties and the rule of law. In a twist, my story follows the
completely hypothetical what ifs as though her original decision was to fight. At that moment,
Liliʻuokalani is granted a wish from the alien Thuul: to journey across the multiverse to see
the future consequences of her actions. The Queen connects with seven descendants of the
Kalākaua line and asks the question dear to her heart: do we thrive? Returning to her own
time, the Queen faces the most critical decision of her reign: fight or diplomacy. Does she
choose the revealed future or gamble on a new destiny for her people?
16
By voyaging through time and space to meet futuristic Hawaiians, the story is open to explor-
ing themes like colonization, cultural legacies, and how a benevolent ruler views her kuleana
(stewardship). Crazy and weird, but I’m kinda liking the story possibilities.
jaymee goh: Lehua, I think having Queen Liliʻuokalani’s decision as a Jonbar hinge for an alternate history
would be incredibly fruitful! In steampunk, our Jonbar hinges rely on the concept of accelerated
technology to successfully prevent colonization, but it also depends on who had institutional
power at the time (one perspective now in Malaysia is that the old Malay sultans essentially sold
out their people to benefit economically from treaties with the British) and their decisions.
utside of print fiction, what recent media examples of gender and/or sexual
ida yoshinaga:
O
expression created by others do you find thought-provoking, speculative, or cogni-
tively estranging?
joyce chng: Star Trek: Discovery with the inclusion of a nonbinary character; Farscape (when childbirth was
tackled in an unabashed manner!); Xena: Warrior Princess.
Mmm, I would like to explore the concept of wearing prosthetics; to see updated the “punk”
in cyberpunk (which is outmoded); to try the incorporation of technology—cyborgism. I look
to the amazing work of Naomi Wu who incorporates cutting-edge tech and STEM in her life.
Most of all, I want to tackle the sexism and internalized misogyny in gender expression for
femmes, the abhorrent transphobia and sex-negativity in certain “feminist” circles.
bogi takács: There is a lot of groundbreaking work in independent comics: Elements edited by Taneka Stotts,
the first Alloy anthology Electrum edited by Der-Shing Helmer with Kiku Hughes, the Power &
Magic queer witch comic anthologies edited by Joamette Gil. Many anthologies that focus
on race/ethnicity or other marginalizations also have a considerable gender/sexuality aspect.
Recently I’ve enjoyed work by Sloane Leong who explores gender, embodiment, decoloniza-
tion and more—the first volume of Prism Stalker left me eager for more.
One thing that comics can tackle really well in SFF is showing the visual aspects of empire, then
engaging with them beyond the classic Anglo-American SFF take where you’re supposed to
feel awe.
jaymee goh: The Smut Peddler anthologies feature many characters unconventional to erotic comics—fat
bodies, very thin ones, aliens, robots. The visual medium allows for the artist to create characters
who cannot fit neatly into visual assumptions of binary gender.
Writing in English can be difficult because the characters need pronouns—this is a problem
completely dispensed with a visual medium. Plus, it must be nice to not have to account for
what that other hand (or third penis!) is doing with extra words because you can just . . . draw
where it is.
andrea hairston: Sinéad O’Dwyer, a fashion designer, makes silicone life casts of her friends’ bodies then uses
the molds to create innovative garments which bear traces of these bodies. Not normalizing the
size 6–8 fashion-standard bodies that engender self-loathing and body dysmorphia, O’Dwyer
interrupts our common notions of who can/should be a model. She wants people to feel they
don’t have to be thankful for inclusion.
17
Ida Yoshinaga
Kimberly Drew, an art curator, fashion icon, and co-editor of Black Futures, blogs as Museum-
Mammy. Her book collects images, essays, interviews, tweets, memes, poems, screenshots, sto-
ries, and recipes addressing the question: What does it mean to be a Black person around the
world, then, now, or in the future? Possible answers include a glimpse at Black marine biologist
meditating on ocean justice; Black trans visibility; Black farming, music, hair, fashion, sexuality,
and politics.
lehua parker: Like Joyce, I’m enjoying Star Trek: Discovery.
Also fun is The Umbrella Academy TV series exploring gendered power dynamics, family rela-
tionships, and all kinds of love. At FanX and other conventions, I see lots of cosplayers embrac-
ing the gender-fluid characters. They’re excited about Vanya and Klaus’s pansexual relationships
and Five’s arguably objectophilian love for Dolores, a mannequin. Interestingly, Vanya and
Klaus’s pansexuality was added to the Netflix series. It’s not in the original comic books. Now
that Ellen Page has transitioned to Elliot Page, I’m curious to see if that affects his characteriza-
tion of Vanya in Season Three.
ida yoshinaga:
What SF story (or type of SF story) do you most desire to read in the future related
to gender and/or sexuality—and why?
joyce chng: I would like to see an Asian SFF anthology of stories written by Asian and Asian diaspora creators
from across the globe (like Jaymee Goh, Eeleen Lee, Eve Shi, Stephanie Soejano, Neon Yang,
etc.) where we co-create a world or joined worlds exploring gender and sexuality with mixed
media (art and text), plus exploring all the “-punks” (windpunk, solarpunk, steampunk, etc.).
I would also very much request it now.
bogi takács: I’d love to read that too!
I would like speculative spaces to be more open to intersex people, so that people would not
have to feel that they can be open about their belonging to other letters in the acronym but not
the “I,” or that it is disproportionately harder.
While we’re at the acronym, one other thing I’d love to see is speculative work exploring being
undecided about your gender or sexuality without a pressure to come up with a decision by the
end, for “narrative closure.” It’s okay not to know! Often non-marginalized editors and publish-
ers want diversity on a surface trappings level, but not structurally; everything needs to adhere to
Anglo-Western norms including “this is what a story needs to look like.” I wonder if this is where
the “disabled characters must be cured by the end” trope comes from, too. There has been a lot
of deserved pushback against that one, but not so much the “your gender must be decided by the
end” one, which has at least some similarities (at least that’s how I feel as a disabled person).
joyce chng: Bogi, I would like to see more SFF by intersex authors too! You have brought up an important
point: that we would like to see more speculative work exploring being undecided re: gender
or sexuality without any pressure to come up with a decision. There is pressure, indeed, felt/
experienced by marginalized authors and writers to write according to “benchmark.” Hence,
the anxiety and fear that we are writing wrong.
jaymee goh: I’d like to see a “no binary, neopronouns only” story.
andrea hairston: I want to see what I haven’t thought of. I want so many writers/creators telling their stories
that I’m not counting how many of us are there, because we are ubiquitous, because I can’t get
to it all, because I haven’t met half of everybody writing, because I would never have imagined
what these creators are coming up with.
18
lehua parker: Good news! Those wished-for titles are in the works. Big Five traditional publishing houses and
agents are open to diverse submissions, particularly now that indie and small press titles have dem-
onstrated a demand—a hunger—for these stories. While “disability must be cured” or “sexuality/
gender must be decided” by story end isn’t a requirement I’ve heard from editors and publishers,
they are still looking for stories that follow a Western story structure.
19
PART II
How
Theoretical Approaches

3
INTRODUCTION
Lisa Yaszek
In 1931, pioneering science fiction (SF) author Clare Winger Harris, the first woman to publish
SF under her own name, also became what we might call the first SF critic when she offered
her fans and colleagues a list of sixteen “Possible Science Fiction Plots”—many of which she
herself popularized and that we continue to enjoy today, including “interplanetary space travel,”
“gigantic insects,” and “natural cataclysms, extra-terrestrial or confined to the earth” (426–27).
However, sustained critical inquiry into the relations of gender and SF did not emerge until the
rise of SF criticism and the revival of feminism and other progressive politics in the 1960s and
70s. The first question asked by the first generation of largely White, male, cisgender authors
was a simple one: where are all the women? While SF author and critic Brian Aldiss successfully
argued for Mary Shelley as the mother of modern SF most scholars of the era simply concluded
that there was little to say about sex and gender in SF because historically speaking, the genre
seemed to attract few women or authors of any gender interested in the future of science, soci-
ety, and sex.
Yet even as male critics lamented the limits of SF history, women and queer folx were actively
making that history new through the creation of the first feminist SF conventions, publications,
and presses and through their increased visibility in the SF award system. In the 1970s alone,
women comprised about 15% of the SF community, but won 19% of all Hugo awards and 24%
of all Nebula awards (see Yaszek). Significantly, a number of these authors, including Joanna
Russ, C.J. Cherryh, and fellow feminist Samuel R. Delany, also publicly identified as queer,
while Jessica Amanda Salmonson did the groundbreaking work of documenting her transition
for the SF community in prominent fanzines. Not surprisingly, these authors provided readers
with the first critical appraisals of gender and speculative fiction, including essays by Russ col-
lected in the 1995 volume To Write Like a Woman and Salmonson’s histories of warrior women
in literature and culture, collected in the introduction to her award-winning 1981 anthology
Amazons! and in her 1991 reference book, The Encyclopedia of Amazons. Other feminist artists
contributing to the nascent field of feminist SF scholarship included Pamela Sargent, whose
Women of Wonder anthology introductions provided readers with the first histories of women
in SF, and Ursula K. Le Guin, whose earliest thoughts on gender and genre are featured in the
1979 collection Language of the Night. Many of these early feminist critics drew on insights from
the newly established fields of gender studies to answer the question of representation posed
by their male colleagues, demonstrating both the patriarchal assumptions limiting speculation
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-5 23
Lisa Yaszek
about sex and gender in genre fiction while celebrating the often-forgotten history of women
in SF and the rise of a distinctly feminist SF in their own historical moment.
At the same time, feminists in academia were creating an SF scholarship of their own with
essays including Beverly Friend’s “Virgin Territory: Women and Sex in Science Fiction”
(Extrapolation, 1972), Mary Kenny Badami’s “A Feminist Critique of Science Fiction” (Extrapo-
lation, 1976), and Marleen S. Barr’s 1981 Future Females: A Critical Anthology. In March 1980
the academic journal Science Fiction Studies published the special issue “Science Fiction on
Women—Science Fiction by Women” and 1982 Extrapolation followed suit with the special
issue, “Women in SF.” The first full-length monographs on feminist SF appeared soon afterward,
including Sarah Lefanu’s 1988 In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction,
and in 1999 Batya Weinbaum founded FEMSPEC, the first academic journal dedicated to the
serious study of gender across speculative genres. As they staked claims for themselves in SF
criticism, scholars of gender and genre demonstrated the natural compatibility between feminist
SF studies and other new modes of critical inquiry. Jenny Wolmark’s Aliens and Others: Science
Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism (1994) used new theoretical ideas about identity and differ-
ence to explore SF as an ideal space for exposing and redefining both gender and genre, while
Robin Roberts’ A New Species: Gender and Gender in Science Fiction (1993) and Jane Donawerth’s
Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1997) used ideas drawn from science
and technology studies to demonstrate the rich history of women writers who have used SF
to participate in widespread cultural debates about the proper relations of science, society, sex,
and gender. Like their activist counterparts, feminist SF scholars of the 1990s and early 2000s
were also eager to explore how Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ideas about the inter-
sectionality of race and gender might apply to SF, as demonstrated by the essays collected in
Elisabeth Leonard’s Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic (1997) and Marleen S.
Barr’s Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New Wave (2008). Finally,
in the 2000s, new digital tools and new theories about accessing literary and cultural archives
proposed by Lev Manovich and other digital media scholars enabled new histories of gender
and genre in SF including Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002),
Brian Attebery’s Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), and my own Galactic Suburbia: Recover-
ing Women’s Science Fiction (2008).
All of these trends and more flourish in feminist SF studies today. Sherryl Vint’s Biopoliti-
cal Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021) and Antonia Szabari and Natania
Meeker’s Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (2019) point to the continued usefulness of
science studies frameworks for feminist and queer scholars, while insights generated by critical
race theory inform Esther Jones’ Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2015)
and Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color (2021). Perhaps the
most exciting recent development in contemporary SF studies has been the explosion of interest
in queer theory and disability studies, especially as they allow SF scholars to further refine their
idea about intersectional feminism and SF. Notable contributions in this vein include Alexis
Lothain’s Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (2018), Kathryn Allan’s edited col-
lection Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure (2013), and Sami Schalk’s
Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Science Fiction (2018).
The chapters featured in the following section of the RCGSF provides readers with a cross-
section of the issues and themes that interest theorists of gender and SF. While the first two
generations of feminist SF critics cast their gaze primarily on print fiction, the prominence of
media SF in global popular culture has prompted increasing interest in the affordances—and
limitations—of such SF for artists interested in speculating about the many possible futures of
science, technology, sex, and gender. For example, while Carlen Lavigne demonstrates the
24
Introduction
persistency of patriarchy on “doomsday prepper” television and Terra Gasque considers Lana
Wachowski’s blockbuster film The Matrix Resurrections as an example of genuinely intersectional
and queer SF, Jonathan Alexander and Sherryl Vint examine the Hulu production of The Hand-
maid’s Tale as a complex and often contradictory representation of feminism that sometimes
repeats the very power hierarchies it aims to critique. Meanwhile, Smin Smith’s “Feminist Sci-
ence Fiction Art” and the Beyond Gender Research Collective’s “Collective Close Reading:
Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many” demonstrate the liberatory potential of specula-
tive digital and performance artwork that reorganizes not just conventional notions of gender
and genre, but also our powerfully gendered assumptions about art and the individual artist
themselves.
Of course, critical interest in print SF continues to flourish, especially as authors from around
the world also use digital tools to record and disseminate their stories in greater numbers than ever.
As the success of Ohio State University Press’s New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Speculative series indicates, intersectionality is very much at the heart of much modern SF schol-
arship, represented in this section most prominently by R. Nicole Smith’s exploration of woman-
ism as a model for queer, female Black community in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Evidence” and
Smin Smith’s discussion of feminist SF artists Sophia Al-Maria, Sin Wai Kin, and Danielle Brath-
waite-Shirley as engaging in collaborative worldbuilding techniques to make space for BIPOC,
queer, and trans ways of knowing the world. Queer theory has also been an especially productive
analytic framework for scholars of gender and genre and is at the heart of Ritch Calvin’s review of
oblique, direct, and narratively central representations of LGBTQ+ issues in recent SF and Anna
Kurowicka’s exploration of asexuality and genderless futures in the speculative stories of Samuel
R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ann Leckie. Finally, Robin Anne Reid and Joan Gordon
challenge readers to think about intersectional gender and genre identities in even more complex
ways by using key concepts from disability studies and animal studies to demonstrate how authors
including Martha Wells, Carol Emshwiller, Nnedi Okorafor, and Charlie Jane Anders replace old
notions of personhood based on binary sexual and species identity with generous new ones based
on the entanglement of all living organisms.
Bibliography
Harris, Clare Winger. “Possible Science Fiction Plots,” Wonder Stories, vol. 3, no. 3, 1931, pp. 426–427.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Introduction.” The Future Is Female! Volume 2, the 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories by
Women. Library of America, 2022.
25
4
FEMINISM, VIOLENCE, AND
THE ANTHROPOCENE IN THE
HANDMAID’S TALE
Introduction
Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which began streaming in 2017 and, as of this writing in 2021, fin-
ished its fourth season with a fifth season in production, offers an exemplary case study of how
issues of gender and sexuality broadly and debates about and within feminism specifically play
out in a major science fiction (SF) television series. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel,
the series follows the tribulations of June in a near-future dystopia, where she is assigned the role
of handmaid in a post-American theocratic society called Gilead. Given a radical global decline
in human births, different political orders have mandated an array of approaches to fostering
reproduction; Gilead returns the United States to a Puritanical and patriarchal social order in
which fertile women are assigned to couples of the ruling order so that they can be impregnated
by men, the offspring raised by the couple while the handmaid is reassigned. Brutal in its depic-
tion of this theocratic regimen, The Handmaid’s Tale began airing in the wake of the election of
Donald Trump and the resurgence of patriarchal, evangelical, and fascist ideologies in the US
and on the global political stage. In this article, we argue that The Handmaid’s Tale forefronts not
only violence against women but also debates within feminism and concerns over the politics of
representation. As such, the series serves as a compelling if sometimes vexed, contradictory, and
critiquable televisual introduction to contemporary thinking about gender and sexuality. In the
remainder of this chapter, we unpack some of those debates and contradictions as they play out
in this speculative televisual narrative.
Violence as Spectacle, Erasing Intersectionality

One of the most noticeable aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale is its extremely well-crafted and often
highly stylized use of visual rhetoric. With that said, however, its aesthetics are in tension with
its apparent commitments to feminism. This is especially true in terms of how the costumes are
used to evoke visual spectacle in the series, especially in the frequent use of aerial shots. The
most iconic of these shots channel Gilead itself and are meant to be precisely that, the aesthetic
embodiment of its fascist regime that uses the visual beauty of the color composition—blues for
wives, red for handmaids, pinks for girls—to reinforce Gilead’s view of itself as just and orderly.
The orderly procession of handmaids in a line, their flowing gowns and winged headdresses
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-6 26
Feminism, Violence, the Anthropocene in The Handmaid’s Tale
obscuring both their individuality and their capacity to perceive their surroundings, produces
a televisual image that reinforces the ideology of Gilead. The handmaids are interchangeable,
images or symbols rather than people, and the power that Gilead’s patriarchy has over their lives
is mirrored by the power of the camera to capture their performance as lines of flowing color
arranged in pleasing patterns. In the funeral for those handmaids killed in the bombing of the
new Rachel and Leah Center, in “After” (S2E7), the narrative viewpoint is overwhelmed by
the carefully staged spectacle of the procession of handmaids with the coffins of their fallen
sisters; filmed from above, almost as if in a dance performance from classical Hollywood film,
the red handkerchiefs that cover their faces and their red scarves appear in stunning contrast
with their habits. Both they and the brilliantly red coffins stand out brightly against the snowy
background and the handmaids are truly mourning as they stand in processions, removing the
red gauze covering their faces in unison. And yet the ceremony they participate in, organized
by Gilead, regrets the dead women’s loss as biological resources not as people but as resources.
Beauty also suffuses the opening moments of “God Bless This Child” (S3E4) in which rows of
segregated citizens, differentiated by their social role, walk in procession to celebrate the babies
born in their district.
Interestingly, the costumes for the series, as beautiful as they are, have been adopted in real-
world protests that seek to draw attention to the restrictions on women’s bodily and reproduc-
tive freedoms, and the homophobic attacks on all queer people, central to politics of the right in
America today. The uptake of that costume for political resistance and protest may be powerful,
but its comparable use in the series is more vexed. In the conclusion to Season 1, June claims
this image as a symbol of empowerment, asserting in voiceover, “They should never have given
us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army,” and as stirring as this statement is, it also
points to the tension between the narrative and thematic commitments of the series and its
aesthetic choices, especially when it concerns the handmaids as a collective spectacle. Indeed,
the feminism of the series is largely limited in any nuanced understanding of intersectionality, or
the ways in which different racial, sexual, and class experiences might impact one’s understand-
ing of the relationships amongst gender, identity, and power. The casting of the series might
seem to belie this lack, with major female characters being Black (Moira), lesbian (Emily), and
ostensibly from the working class (Janine or Rita, who is also Black). But consistently, what is
foregrounded in the series is the generalized problem of violence and sexual lack of consent that
these women experience in Gilead under patriarchal domination. In scene after scene, June,
Moira, and Emily are manipulated, abused, and tortured, but any particularity of their experi-
ence of such abuse due to their different identities is largely left untold.
A perhaps unintended consequence of foregrounding gender at the expense of other more
complex representations of power and resistance is that the show consistently centers violence
against women as its primary issue. Unfortunately, and undoubtedly, the most problematic aspect
of The Handmaid’s Tale in reading it as an exemplar text of feminist SF television is this very
tension between aesthetics and meanings, the representation of violence and the supposed con-
demnation of such. The skill by which the series depicts the brutality of Gilead is effective in
conveying the extent of the damage it does to those living within it, but it can also sometimes
feel damaging to be a viewer of the series. Especially in Seasons 1 and 2, an emphasis is placed
on the physical torture of women to get them to comply with what is asked of them by this new
state. Indeed, there is a certain logic to displaying some of this cruelty and use of terror to estab-
lish characters such as June or Emily as sympathetic protagonists even though they comply with
demeaning ceremonies demanded of them within Gilead and for the most part do so demurely.
June’s voiceovers are another technique used predominantly in Season 1 to offer a doubled
vision of her experience, outward compliance, and inward causticness. Yet at times it seems
27
that the series almost revels in the spectacle of women suffering, especially in the sequence in
“June” that implies—though, importantly, does not show—that each handmaid who joined
June in refusing to stone Janine to death, for the crime of putting a child at risk, will have her
hand cooked as it is handcuffed to a stovetop burner. The horror of this punishment is in excess
to the logic of Gilead’s professed prioritization of reproduction: while a burned hand does not
preclude one becoming pregnant, the health risks of such extreme physical punishment would
surely be a deterrent to damaging their bodies so severely for disobedience, suggesting that
something else is at work in the series which frequently indulges a desire to see women’s suf-
fering bodies.
Even further, the relative lack of attention particularly to race creates some interesting visual
tensions in the series. In the first episode of the third season, “Night,” June has the opportunity
to see at a distance her daughter, Hannah, who has been placed with a Gileadean couple. Her
daughter is of mixed race, but the couple currently raising her is visibly White. Interestingly, the
series shows us a “blended” family, but it is completely not remarked upon within the universe
of the narrative. The fact that June, a White woman, had Hannah with Luke Bankole, a Black
man, is equally unremarkable, despite how much narrative backstory we see of their lives pre-
Gilead; their interracial relationship, occurring just a few decades after the overturning of mis-
cegenation laws, encounters no residual racism, either externally or internally for that matter.
Such elided commentary suggests that, when the population is declining, racism or concerns
with racial difference seem to recede, allowing a reemphasis on gender roles rooted in biology.
Curiously, the theocratic and fascist colorblindness is paralleled by the colorblindness of the
casting of the series, which seems to have aimed for a diverse cast without thinking through the
implications of racial identification on behalf of its characters.
The narrative around Emily, the lesbian who has been compelled into handmaid service, is
comparably not as thoughtful about the situation of gay women, despite the fact that lesbian
feminism, much like Black feminism, was a source of significant debate within second-wave
feminism during the 1970s and 1980s. Such debates attempted to forefront how any concep-
tualization of gender must be thought in relation to experiences of race and sexuality. But in
Gilead, such differences are largely elided in favor of biological gender essentialism. It does not
matter that Emily is lesbian; she can bear children so she will be a handmaid. To be sure, within
Gilead, her lesbianism is illegal, and the Martha with whom she had had a love affair is hanged
before her eyes; the Martha, not able to bear children, is expendable as a “gender traitor,” use-
ful only as an object lesson about the proper relations amongst bodies within an order ruled
by an imperative to reproduce. The closest we come in the series to seeing how a particular
lesbian or queer approach to Emily’s character might play out comes when Gilead orders that
her clitoris be removed as punishment. The horror of Emily being robbed of a significant form
of sexual pleasure gestures to a politics of sexuality that celebrates the right of women to enjoy
their bodies. Black and lesbian feminist thinker Audre Lorde had powerfully argued for the
political importance of what she called the “uses of the erotic” in the feminism of the 1970s,
and the brief scene of mutilation in the series constitutes one way in which The Handmaid’s Tale
demonstrates awareness of the complexities of feminist thinking. With that said, however, the
remaining storylines involving Emily do not substantively return to this point of mutilation.
Instead, while the show downplays issues of female pleasure as a form of empowerment,
The Handmaid’s Tale seems quite comfortable focusing energy on female anger and rage. The
overarching narrative increasingly plays out June’s growing rage at her rape and torture within
Gilead. She becomes strident in her desire not just to destroy Gilead but to seek vengeance on
those who have hurt her and other women. When she and Emily are part of a therapy group
in Canada to help them cope with the trauma they have endured, June encourages the other
28
women in the group to fantasize about the violence they could commit against their oppressors
if they were able. And when one of the “aunts” (the brutal female supervisors and trainers of the
handmaids) who had turned Emily in also escapes Gilead, confesses to Emily, and hangs herself
out of guilt, Emily’s response is chilling: “I’m glad she’s dead. I hope I had something to do with
it” (S4E8). Emily’s, June’s, and the others’ fantasizing of vengeful violence, however understand-
able, is rendered visually as nearly orgiastic. Curiously, Moira, the lone Black woman in the
group, cautions against stoking the psychic fires of such fantasies. Such a depiction strikes us as
complicated: on one hand, we understand the desire to avoid portraying Moira as a stereotypical
angry Black woman; on the other hand, however, we cannot help but wonder why she should
be any less angry than the other women who have endured the tortures of Gilead, even if she
might be concerned that anger could be directed against her.
Such narrative choices serve ultimately to downplay racial and sexual differences and focus
our attention on the anger of June, a White woman. Ju Oak Kim, in “Intersectionality in
Quality Feminist Television: Rethinking Women’s Solidarity in The Handmaid’s Tale and Big
Little Lies,” argues that the series, despite the presence of characters of color, “has recentralized
White women’s leadership in feminist social movements” (9). For Kim, the focus on a White
woman’s struggle, especially at this late date in the development of feminist thinking, might
have damaging effects on viewers of color in that it potentially “desensitize[s] the experiences
of other minority women within the patriarchy, leading them to internalize such architecture
and marginalization” (11). At the very least, the focus on June’s story displaces a more nuanced
understanding of diverse women’s experiences.
Indeed, the aesthetic choices made by the series’ writers and producers reinforce the failures
of the series to think feminism from an intersectional viewpoint since these mutilations are
visited upon the bodies of women other than June. Although June endures significant physical
suffering, she is never mutilated as are Emily (who is queer) and Janine (whose background is of
a lower class than June). Perhaps most egregiously, while the series ignores the historical reality
that women of color have been dehumanized and had their fertility manipulated in ways similar
to the events depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale, it also casts a Black actress (Ashleigh LaThrop)
to play Natalie/Ofmathew, a handmaid who seems sincerely committed to the pious rhetoric
of Gilead and her role of producing healthy children for it. Natalie reports on the Martha who
is helping June to see her daughter, and when she later has her own fears about being pregnant
with a girl, in “Unfit” (S3E8), the other handmaids ostracize rather than support her. Natalie
eventually breaks down under the strain, tries to kill Aunt Lydia, and is shot by Eyes, reduced
by this injury to a biological container for her unborn child and kept alive by machines until the
fetus can survive outside of her body. In her quest for vengeance, June subtly encourages Natalie
to her extreme actions and smiles softly as she sees Natalie attack others. The next episode,
“Heroic,” shows June coming to sympathize with Natalie and seek to protect her from further
dehumanization as a living incubator but focuses on the psychological breakdown June endures
because she is forced to stay by Natalie’s hospital bedside rather than on Natalie’s backstory or
perspective. To a degree, the series merely inherits these issues from Atwood’s novel which is
similarly inattentive to racialization, but it also makes its own mistakes in multiracial casting
choices that allow a diversity of actors to appear in the series while failing to interrogate how
their ethnic identities intersect with the series’ themes.
In the wake of such elisions, other possibilities for thinking of feminism robustly and criti-
cally remain largely nascent within the series. June’s mother, for instance, whom we get to see
in some of the series’ pre-Gilead flashbacks, is portrayed as a feminist activist from the 1970s.
June’s mother’s feminism contrasts interestingly with that of June herself; June’s political con-
sciousness seems to have consisted primarily of brunchtime discussions with Moira while her
29
mother’s feminism is depicted as far more activist and built around solidarity, marches, and col-
lectivist action. While June’s mother makes limited appearances, her presence suggests that the
show’s writers are aware of the history of North American feminism even if they do not pick
up some of the implications of it and its subsequent developments—an elision that has led some
scholars, such as Fuentes and García, to characterize the feminism in the show as “nostalgic” for
a simpler set of terms, avoiding the “complications” of race and gender and centering instead
the primacy of gender identity.
Feminism and Queerness in the Anthropocene

While we have been critical of The Handmaid’s Tale in this chapter, we want to consider now
how the series might serve to forward engagement with ecological feminisms, queer radicalism,
and Indigenous critiques, even if such remain largely nascent or merely aspirational within the
narrative. To its credit, the series raises important questions about the possibilities and limita-
tions of solidarity and reconciliation, asking us to recognize that historical injustices cannot
simply be forgotten or ignored, but also asking us to consider whether a justice system rooted in
vengeance can provide a pathway forward. In his book Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven draws
on Indigenous thought to articulate a politics that acknowledges the validity of anger over his-
torical inequalities and injustices, but at the same time seeks an imaginary that looks beyond
simple reversal as a way to escape the circularity of the politics of revenge without denying the
anger that mobilizes such stances. He argues that
whereas revenge fantasies fixate on retribution in the coin in which the original injury
was dealt, and thereby risk perpetuating that economy, an avenging imaginary dreams
of the abolition of the systemic source of that injury and the creation of new econo-
mies of peace and justice. (2)
In terms of The Handmaid’s Tale, we would argue that missed opportunities to imagine sociality
and reproduction through queer and Indigenous rather than heteronormative logics limit its
vision to the politics of revenge, whereas what is required is an abolitionist, avenging imaginary
of a new sociality that rejects both Gilead and the liberal society which came before.
One particularly interesting dimension of The Handmaid’s Tale is the show’s representation of
queer people. Fascist state-sponsored homophobia and anti-queerness remain constant in both
Atwood and Hulu’s versions of Gilead. But a major difference between the two narratives is
the latter’s active inclusion of queer characters, the development of storylines about them, and,
most notably, the assumption of an anti-Gilead, liberal approach to and acceptance of queerness
outside the boundaries of the former US—most notably in Canada, which serves as a refuge
for Gileadeans fleeing sexual, gender, and political oppression. In essence, queer identity has
become a transnational remnant of “freedom” and “democracy” left behind in the collapse of
the United States.
With that said, Jasbir Puar, amongst others, has usefully critiqued this yoking of the
acceptance of gays and lesbians with liberal attitudes of freedom and democracy as a form of
“homonationalism”—a deployment of sexual identity tolerance that serves as a kind of “virtual
signaling” while essentially erasing racial histories of sexual and sexualized violence and oppres-
sion. Atwood has famously said that there’s nothing that occurs to characters in her original
novel that hasn’t actually occurred to people throughout history. But her use of predominantly
White characters—a casting only somewhat mitigated in the Hulu adaptation—completely
elides the fact that the kinds of sexualized violence depicted in the narrative against White
30
women has largely happened historically against women of color and Indigenous women. Colo-
nial settler oppression of Indigenous people throughout the Western hemisphere frequently
occurred through the rape of Indigenous populations and the forcing of heteronormative famil-
ial structures on native populations. Atwood and by extension Hulu’s failure to acknowledge
these histories makes the “apocalyptic” scenarios of The Handmaid’s Tale an apocalypse for
mostly White women.
An even more compelling queer approach to The Handmaid’s Tale might hinge on the nar-
rative’s unquestioned centering on the reproduction of the species. In his polemical book No
Future, Lee Edelman sees an investment in futurity as one of the most pervasive hegemonic
dimensions of heteronormativity, which requires that we sacrifice our current pleasures and pos-
sibilities so that we can ensure better futures for children. Such “better futures,” though, rarely
include expansive notions of intimacy and love but rather focus on the maintenance of socially
stabilizing family norms. Turning attention specifically to speculative narratives, Rebekah Shel-
don, in The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe, notes how the child is increasingly
becoming in a time of impending ecological apocalypse the promise of the future. Sheldon asks
what forces are mobilized to protect the child and how does the child come to symbolize the
enactment of new biopolitical orders designed to ensure the survival of the species. Gilead’s
social, sexual, and gender politics is all about the sacrificing of pleasure in the pursuit of making
children to replenish the population.
An even more powerful critique might arise from a queer Indigenous approach to The Hand-
maid’s Tale. Kim TallBear, a queer Indigenous Canadian scholar, has contributed to Adele Clarke
and Donna Haraway’s Making Kin Not Population, joining other feminist, queer, and Indigenous
scholars in critiquing the heteronormative drives toward reproduction and human expansion
that contribute significantly to climate change. TallBear argues that the monogamous couple
form has largely been one foisted on Indigenous populations by Western colonial settlers, with
Indigenous kindship practices and nonmonogamies stigmatized, forbidden, and punished to
this day. She describes the ways in which Indigenous children were often taken from their
extended families to be raised by White settlers—a grotesque practice replicated by Gileadean
commanders who take other’s offspring to raise as their own, even as the narrative largely erases
the racial histories of such a practice. Most interestingly, TallBear asserts that, particularly at this
time of anthropogenic assault on the environment, what is needed is less reproduction, more
kinship. TallBear’s nonmonogamy is in the service of extending pleasure, working the sexual as
a modality of creating community and extending kindship. In her words, some Indigenous kin-
ship practices might very well be “culturally, emotionally, financially, and environmentally more
sustainable than the nuclear family”—particularly as sex is re-understood as primarily creating
ties, not just producing children. The Handmaid’s Tale comes close to enacting such an ethic in
the triad of June, her husband Luke, and her Gileadean lover Nick, who is Nichole’s father. The
triad gestures obliquely to a polyamorous possibility in that Luke acknowledges how important
Nick has been to June, particularly in helping her survive the horrors of Gilead, and he assists
her in seeing Nick to get word of how Hannah, her first daughter, is faring in Gilead and to
tell Nick about how his daughter, Nichole, is doing in Canada. Their relationships are not quite
polyamorous, but they signal a possibility for a communal raising of children amongst complex
intimate relationships. It remains to be seen where, if anywhere, these relationships will go in
the remaining season of the series.
Ultimately, the queerest approach to the Anthropocene of The Handmaid’s Tale might focus
less on the fate of people with particular identities and far more on questioning wide-held
cultural assumptions about the necessity of family and human reproduction and how such
assumptions support the rise of fascism. Even more, a feminist and queer approach might want to
31
imagine the Anthropocene of these narratives as an opportunity to unseat human reproduction

as the necessary or even desirable focus of our response to declining birth rates specifically
and human impact on the environment more broadly. Such would fulfill decades of feminist
thinking, theorizing, and activism that foregrounds identities and bodies as sites of pleasure and
personal agency over and beyond mandates for maintenance of a heteronormative status quo.
Although we have offered significant critiques of The Handmaid’s Tale as an exemplar of
feminist SF television, it is worth bearing in mind, as we conclude, that the history of feminist
thought itself reflects a similar trajectory of correction, revision, and expansion. Thus, we can
praise the series for bringing to the screen the tensions and debates within feminism that make
it impossible to discuss feminism as a monolithic positionality. Yet it is important to reiterate
that this vision is deeply compromised by its failure to acknowledge White supremacy as equally
central to the authoritarian politics it critiques as is patriarchy. For the most part ethnicity is not
a topic of analysis within the series. And finally, prioritizing fertility as the central issue of the
series also has consequences for its capacity to think capaciously about sexuality, gender, and
futurity. As we have argued, a queer perspective on such matters offers multiple other political
possibilities for how one imagines a thriving society, but perhaps most importantly a queer per-
spective encourages us to decenter biological reproduction and motherhood in ways that would
radically transform the series’ capacity to represent a diversity of women.
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.
Fuentes, María José Gámez, and Rebeca Maseda García. “Nostalgia and the Dialectics of Contemporary
Feminisms in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2021, pp. 77–93.
Haiven, Max. Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable
Debts. Pluto Press, 2020.
Kim, Ju Oak. “Intersectionality in Quality Feminist Television: Rethinking Women’s Solidarity in The
Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies.” Feminist Media Studies, 18 February. 2021, doi.org/10.1080/1468
0777.2021.1891447.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2004.
Sheldon, Rebekah. The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe. University Minnesota Press, 2016.
TallBear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” Making Kin Not Population,
edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway. University Chicago Press, 2018.
The Handmaid’s Tale. Created by Bruce Miller. The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017–2021.
32
5
BEYOND SURVIVAL
Climate Change and Reproduction
in The Handmaid’s Tale, Birthstones,
and The Fifth Season
Anna Bedford
Over the past half century, women writing climate change science fiction have explored the
relation between the patriarchal and colonizing drives to control nature and women’s bodies,
especially in futures where it seems the very survival of the human race is at stake. As the
impact of nuclear weapons and human pollution became increasingly clear after World War
II, science fiction became increasingly preoccupied with environmental issues. Environmental
science fiction gained impetus in the 1950s and 60s with books including J.G. Ballard’s The
Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964) and Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make
Room! (1966). It continued to grow in subsequent decades with popular works such as Allan
Folsom’s New York Times bestseller The Day after Tomorrow (1994) and critically acclaimed stories
including Ursula Le Guin’s “Newton’s Sleep” (2005) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science
in the Capital Trilogy (Fifty Degrees Below, 2005; Forty Signs of Rain, 2004; and Sixty Days
and Counting, 2007). In 2007 a new term was coined to describe an emerging generation of
environmental science fiction stories: “climate science fiction” or “cli fi.” Such stories take
to their logical extremes climate change-related problems including elevated temperatures,
increasingly dramatic weather patterns, sea level rise, and endangered species. Feminists have
been especially innovative authors of cli fi. In particular, the authors of recent feminist climate
change dystopias warn that, to preserve the status quo of their own power, ruling institutions
are likely to downplay or ignore environmental degradation, focusing instead on initiatives to
control the bodies of women as fetal environments. Invoking recurrent themes of infertility and
looming extinction, the institutions imagined in such fiction violently appropriate women’s
bodies as national or global resources. This chapter explores the gendered treatment of bodies
and the environment in the feminist dystopian cli fi of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985), Phyllis Gotlieb’s Birthstones (2007), and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015). In each
of these novels, communities struggle with questions of survival and reproduction, using the
bodies of women and racial others to ameliorate the communal pain of climate change.
Women writing science fiction have long made reproduction, motherhood, and domestic
life the focus for their narratives and, more recently, drawn connections between environmental
and familial disaster. This tradition begins in the 1950s with anxiety about nuclear weapons and
their impact on the nuclear family. As cold war science fiction scholar M. Keith Booker writes,
“science fiction of the long 1950s responds in a particularly direct and obvious way to the threat
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-7 33
Anna Bedford
of nuclear holocaust” (4). This was especially true of women’s science fiction, which addressed
that threat from the vantage point of imperiled family life and through what Lisa Yaszek calls
“the unhappy housewife heroine” (“Unhappy Housewife Heroines”). Such midcentury stories
provided the template for later feminist explorations of geopolitical disaster and its potential impact
on women’s lives. As Rachel Carson’s bestselling 1962 popular science book, Silent Spring, made
clear, the catastrophic impact of a deteriorating environment upon human health and the non-
human world had become even more immediately pressing than the threat of nuclear war.
Inspired by the revival of feminism and other progressive political movements in the 60s and
70s, women science fiction writers of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first centuries
imagine birth defects, imperiled reproduction, and distorted family life under the smog of pollution
rather than the atomic mushroom cloud that haunted their midcentury sisters. Like their atomic-
age precursors, the authors discussed in this chapter make political interventions in their texts
through depictions of imperiled or destroyed families. However, they identify the patriarchal and
colonizing responses to imperiled reproduction as the cause of this family breakdown. In feminist
dystopian cli fi, forces that cause environmental destruction also threaten human reproduction;
however, rather than dealing with the root cause of this problem, those in power attempt to
control women’s maternal bodies while letting the devastation of the natural world continue
unfettered. The elimination of maternal relationships as families are destroyed is tragic for both the
individuals involved and society as a whole because in destructive patriarchal and racist regimes,
practices of mothering represent important oppositional possibilities for radical caring.
In her 1976 groundbreaking treatise on motherhood, Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich makes
an important distinction between “motherhood” and “mothering,” identifying the former as
an institution of the patriarchy and the latter as a potentially empowering feminist practice
of care. Rich claims that the act of feminist mothering holds the potential for social change,
both through the education mothers offer their children and through the collective actions
that women undertake in the name of their shared identities as parents caring about future
generations. This claim seems to be borne out by the number of women engaged in social and
environmental justice movements for the sake of their children (see Di Chiro, Kurtz, and Taylor).
Indeed, the gendered experiences of caring (and particularly caring for the next generation in
the context of environmental threats) can be a catalyst to activism. Ecofeminist Karen Warren
outlines an “ethic of care” based on practices traditionally associated with mothering, nursing,
and friendship as the necessary corrective to the patriarchal treatment of both women and non-
human nature. Modern works of feminist ecological science fiction dramatize these insights,
demonstrating how the curtailing of mothering prevents the kind of caring that could lead to
political and, ultimately, ecological change.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Thwarted mothering is central to one of the earliest and—as its various film and television
iterations attest—most enduring feminist science fiction stories in this vein: Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale. Written in 1985, Atwood’s novel is set in the near-future Republic of
Gilead, a totalitarian theocratic regime that has replaced the U.S. government. The Republic
is installed as an emergency measure after a staged attack—supposedly perpetrated by Islamic
extremists—kills the U.S. president and most of Congress. These events are used as a pretext to
suspend the constitution and start a revolution. A right-wing fundamentalist group known as the
“Sons of Jacob” takes power and institutes drastic measures such as freezing the bank accounts
of “undesirables”—including all women—to protect the country and ensure subservience. The
Sons of Jacob invoke a narrative of threatened family and imperiled fertility to necessitate
34
Beyond Survival
a systematic sorting of women into categories of “Wife,” “Handmaid,” “Aunt,” “Martha,”

“Econowife,” and “Unwoman.”
At the start of the novel, the female narrator, only known to readers as “Offred,” is
collected by the Sons of Jacob, re-educated, and then, as a fertile woman, assigned to serve
one of the families of the ruling class as a surrogate and concubine known as a “Handmaid.”
The regime’s rhetoric is national peril and duty, yet it is belied by the fact that the society
is organized around power and privilege rather than truly optimizing reproduction. For
example, the Commander’s Wife’s suspicion of her husband’s infertility is considered heretic
and so left unaddressed, although acknowledging male infertility would help the birthrate.
Similarly, while it might help the birthrate for Offred to have sex with another man, such
efforts are illegal and could result in the death of the fertile woman herself. Meanwhile,
clandestine sterilizations continue when they are convenient for men in power; for example,
women who are not submissive enough to be reincorporated as Handmaids but whose bodies
are still useful to elite men are branded as “Jezebels,” sterilized, and used for extramarital sex.
As Margaret Atwood explains:
The despotism I describe is the same as all real ones and most imagined ones. It has a
small powerful group at the top that controls—or tries to control—everyone else, and
it gets the lion’s share of available goodies. The pigs in Animal Farm get the milk and
the apples. The élite of The Handmaid’s Tale get the fertile women. (“In Context” 516)
The goal is not only to breed more Caucasian children to become citizens of Gilead, but
children in the right households and in the right hands. Some children conceived before
the revolution, like Offred’s daughter, are reallocated to the families of the new regime
leaders—much like the bodies of fertile women. “I will never be able to fade, finally,
into another landscape,” laments Offred; “I am too important, too scarce, for that. I am a
national resource” (75).
All the while, the abused earth is in the background, glimpsed through descriptions of the
toxic “Colonies” where undesirables are sent as punishment. Moira tells Offred:
They figure you’ve got three years maximum at those [Colonies], before your nose
falls off and your skin pulls away like rubber gloves. They don’t bother to feed you
much, or give you protective clothing or anything, it’s cheaper not to. Anyway, they’re
mostly people they want to get rid of. (260)
Rather than genuine restoration efforts, the Colonies are simply useful mechanisms through
which the Sons of Jacob extract compliance. Instead, the regime focuses all its efforts on
“protecting” women’s bodies, which must be guarded against contamination, kept from
exertion or other dangers, and subject to paternalistic rules that forbid women from wearing
heels, drawing baths, or consuming caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol. In this way the women of
Gilead are guarded against both escape and themselves because if they are environments, they
are potentially hostile and hazardous ones, or as Offred puts it, “treacherous ground” that must
be carefully managed (83).
The subjugation of women in general and of the Handmaids in particular as breeders for
the elite is justified both by reference to the Old Testament, and by the rising infertility that
Offred’s society struggles with before the revolution. Rather than addressing the clear envi-
ronmental factors leading to that infertility—which affects both men and women—the regime
ultimately claims that women are to blame because of the “unnatural” practices of birth control
35
Anna Bedford
and abortion in the previous era. The dual menaces of environmental destruction and women’s
rights are clearly established and interwoven through Gilead’s re-education program:
The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with
toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into
your body, camp out in your fatty cells. . . . Women took medicine, pills, men
sprayed trees, cows ate grass, all that souped-up piss flowed into the rivers. . . . Some
did it themselves, had themselves tied shut with catgut or scarred with chemicals.
How could they, said Aunt Lydia, oh how could they have done such a thing? Jeze-
bels! Scorning God’s gifts! (122)
When Aunt Lydia—one of the women tasked with teaching and re-educating Handmaids—
asks “how could they?” she refers only to women avoiding pregnancy and motherhood, not to
men spraying trees or society destroying the earth. Clearly, the patriarchal government of Gilead
is responding with extreme measures not so much to the threat of environmental collapse,
but to the perceived threat of second wave feminism. The citizens of Gilead derogatorily dub
feminist women as “Women’s Libbers”—a group that includes the narrator’s mother, an anti-
pornography crusader and single mother by choice (48–49). Gilead is a response to and backlash
against a political women’s movement that fought for precisely what is repressed in Gilead:
reproductive control, bodily autonomy, and sexual freedom.
Atwood underscores the tragedy of a world without feminist mothering by contrasting
Offred’s passivity, which borders on paralysis, with Offred’s memories of her politically
active mother. While her mother fought for change for future generations of women she
might never even know, Offred does not even fight to be reunited with her own daughter;
she survives by choosing to “give in, go along, save her skin” (261). In Gilead, where
families have become a patriarchal parody of domesticity, the absence of mothers means
a dearth of brave maternal feminist agency on behalf of future generations. The loss of
mother-child relationships, then, is not merely a personal tragedy for individual Handmaids
and their children, but, rather, a key dystopian element in the society at large. There’s little
hope for change in Gilead because amidst the Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids, and Wives,
there are no “Mothers.”
Birthstones (2007)
In Birthstones Phyllis Gotlieb depicts women literally confined to their reproductive roles through
the horrifying image of Shar mothers: women who are imprisoned in Mother Halls, where they
are forcibly subject to multiple cycles of impregnation, birthing, and nursing until their bodies
give out. The planet Shar and its people suffer from the effects of extreme pollution, exacer-
bated by the activities of extra-planetary corporations mining Shar for resources. The Shar are
beholden to these alien corporations for the food they are unable to produce themselves in their
toxic smog-filled planet, and for the financial means with which to purchase the resources they
need. With a world becoming increasingly less inhabitable, drastic measures are called for, and,
again, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, female bodies are literally appropriated to provide a solution to
the ecological crisis at hand.
At the start of the novel, with the people of Shar battling for survival, the interplanetary
Galactic Federation (GalFed) promises, “true mothers for your children, [to] help you beget
whole ones of your own, and make your world clean” (13). As the story unfolds, however, it
becomes clear there are no plans to detoxify the planet. Instead, the corporations are “unwilling
36
Beyond Survival
to interrupt the mining of precious metals, gems and liquid fuels” (69), and GalFed officials
decide to kidnap women from another planet and experiment on them to carry healthy Shar
children. Scientific experimentation upon women’s bodies, then, is made to stand in for
meaningful changes with the environment; the relationship of Shar health to the health of the
Shar planet is willfully ignored.
The barely sentient mothers of Shar are used as wombs and sent out of the city to die from
neglect once they are no longer useful, just as Atwood’s Handmaids are sentenced to toxic
Colonies if they fail to (re)produce. Though scarcity is a real problem on Shar, the distribution
of resources is overtly patriarchal. For example, the Shar Emperor Aesh is himself sterile, and
while he is somewhat embarrassed and saddened by this, it does not inhibit him from partaking
in resources or succeeding socially and politically. In the same way, the infertile Commanders of
The Handmaid’s Tale are allowed to deny their impotence and blame women, even as Handmaids
and resources are expended upon men who will never be able to reproduce. While an infertile
man can prosper in the highest ranks, the Shar women who are no longer useful for birthing
and nursing purposes are left to die.
To deliver “true mothers” to the Shar men, the GalFed, of course, needs to take them from
elsewhere. GalFed officials plan to enlist women from a race of people called the Meshar.
The Meshar, originally part of the Shar population, fled as refugees, with assistance from
GalFed, when they were persecuted for continuing to bear non-mutant children during “The
Change”—the period during which Shar women began producing daughters with terrible
birth defects and were eventually transformed into barely sentient “birthstones.” The unaffected
group of women and their families were moved to a livable but unappealing planet of their
own. Their resilience to the genetic mutations afflicting the Shar and their indebtedness to the
GalFed leads the interplanetary body to demand repayment in the form of fertile women (25).
The response to environmental crisis in Birthstones is patriarchal science that includes
kidnapping, forced insemination, and a crossbreeding program. It’s a scientific project intended
to benefit an exclusively male society on the Planet Shar and the women’s lack of consent is
taken matter-of-factly:
Great civilizations would use their sciences and learn new skills to rectify the DNA of
the Shar males, and Meshar women would be called to serve as the First Mothers of
the future. No one expected them to serve willingly. (25)
In this rhetoric, those in control of the science are both “great” and “civilized” while the Meshar
women’s consent is made irrelevant, abnegated by the requirement of “service” and survival.
The novel is a damning critique of patriarchal science: even outside labs, pregnant Meshar
women are objectified by the scientists, and unborn babies are nothing more than “fetal tissue”
to be examined (195). As one GalFed scientist excitedly puts it, upon learning of a Shar mother
carrying twins, one of which is a mutant: “If it works out it’s one more for the population and
one for the research” (194). Understood in the context of Gotlieb’s broader canon, the nameless
planet that is home to the Meshar has a history of scientific abuses. A very brief reference to
earlier inhabitants as scientists and robots called “ergs” identifies it as the setting of Gotlieb’s
earlier story, O Master Caliban! (1976), a novel which “clearly critiques the treatment of living
creatures as the subjects of experiment” (Grace 31). In Birthstones, then, Gotlieb’s critique is
extended to the objectification of and experimentation upon women and mothers.
The central mother in Birthstones is the Meshar woman Ruah, who, like Offred, is separated
from her own child because she’s needed to produce future children for others. During her
reluctant journey, one of the people who shows compassion for her is the GalFed scientist and
37
Anna Bedford
fellow mother, Natalya. In the GalFed labs, Natalya is a lone example of scientific compassion,
empathy, and perhaps morality—traits once again clearly coupled with mothering characters.
She compares the mistreatment of Shar women to that of “lab animals,” expressing compassion
for both: “No one of them chose to come here” (34). Critic Jane Donawerth has noted that
“women scientists as characters in women’s science fiction” are “a legacy of the earlier feminist
utopias, which represented the dreams of women for education in the sciences” (Frankenstein’s
Daughters 5), yet Natalya’s discomfort with the scientific culture around her indicates that a
feminist utopian vision of science must not only include women as scientists, but also allow
those women to change the practices and culture of science itself.
Ecofeminist Irene Diamond explains that the dominant discourses around reproductive
technologies in our own world typically celebrate technoscientific expertise to alleviate the
individual trauma of infertility or the fear of malformed babies. The notion that the health of
individual bodies is related to the health of the social body and the ecosystem that sustains all
bodies recedes into the background and “the power of heroic experts is extended, the toxicities
of late capitalism persist, and the poisoning of the Earth can continue. Thus, the challenge of
transferring our relationships with each other and with the Earth is postponed” (“Babies” 210,
203). In Gotlieb’s novel, “heroic experts” in the form of GalFed scientists are called upon to
modify Shar sperm and inseminate Meshar women, yet they ignore the continuing problems
of a toxic planet. Gotlieb insists that coercing mothers and reducing women to wombs will not
solve the problems of an environmentally damaged world, even if that solution has the backing
of a scientific community: ultimately the scientific project of “First Mothers” is literally blown
up by terrorists. Gotlieb offers hope, instead, in two unexpected discoveries that happen out-
side of the surveillance and control of the GalFed scientists: a healthy fetus that results from the
consensual relationship between a Meshar woman and a Shar man, and the discovery of healthy
females in the remote territory on Shar.
The Fifth Season (2015)

The first novel in N.K. Jemisin’s award-winning Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season, is
both post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic, which is to say that the characters are trying to survive
on an already devastated planet where further environmental catastrophe is imminent. As in
Atwood and Gotlieb’s novels, the people of Jemisin’s future “live in a perpetual state of disaster
preparedness” (8) but attempt to deal with disaster by controlling the bodies of gendered and
raced Others rather than restoring the environment. Indeed, Jemisin frames her entire story
with this problematic. The novel opens, “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t
we?” and offers two endings, one “personal” and the other “writ continentally” (1). In the
continental ending a powerful “orogene”—a person who can manipulate tectonic energy—
literally breaks the earth to free his fellow enslaved psychics, creating a winter that will last
thousands of years (6–8). In the personal ending, an orogene mother, Essun, sets off on a quest
for her missing daughter after she discovers her 2-year-old son has been beaten to death by his
father. Here is an ecological dystopia where the end of the world encompasses the destruction
of both the Earth and the family.
Throughout The Fifth Season (and indeed, throughout her entire trilogy), Jemisin imagines
an Earth racked by unpredictable and violent seasons that can last decades or centuries. The
blame for this rests squarely on humans and their exploitation of the environment (379). Human
attempts to survive these seasons include organizing into small enclaves or “comms,” building
walls, digging wells, storing food, making buildings that withstand tremors and quakes, and
sorting people into use-castes, including “breeders” to keep the comm’s population stable. At
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Beyond Survival
one point in their history, Jemison’s humans attempt to deal with their changed planet by
creating the orogenes who can sense or “sess” seismic activity. Despite their incredible talents,
orogenes are ostracized and killed or, if they are “lucky” and regular humans believe they can
be controlled, they are placed in the service of the Fulcrum, which compels them to “serve the
world” (34) by training them to stop geological shakes without compensation and forcing them
to breed with other orogenes.
The most disturbing scene of enslavement and lost humanity in Jemisin’s novel might be the
adult orogene Syenite’s discovery of the orogene children who are kept underground, naked,
sedated, intubated, and wired-up to prevent earthquakes. Syenite discovers these children
with her master/partner Alabaster, the Fulcrum orogene to whom she’s been assigned for
reproduction purposes. The horror of a system predicated on orogene children’s suffering and
set up to benefit the same people that exploit the orogenes is felt profoundly both by Alabaster,
who believes he has fathered twelve children, some of whom have likely suffered this same fate,
and by the potentially pregnant Syenite, a future mother fearing for her yet-unborn child.
In this dystopia there is no room for orogenes to develop healthy and loving familial
relationships. Orogene children born outside the Fulcrum are either given to the Fulcrum, or
else killed by mobs and even their own parents. Meanwhile, the orogenes of the Fulcrum are
carefully bred, raised without parents, and trained by ruthless Guardians. Despite their lack of
familial relationships, and perhaps because they are the ones suffering rather than inflicting the
suffering, the orogene characters in the novel are some of the most humane. For instance, when
a Guardian takes the orogene child Damaya back to the Fulcrum, he breaks her hand both
to assert his authority and to begin her training in psychic self-control. Despite this violence,
Damaya continues to care for the Guardian because he “is the only person left whom she can
love” (99, 104). Significantly, Jemisin repeats this scene of violence later in the trilogy when,
in The Obilisk Gate (2016), Damaya, now going by the name Essun, breaks her own daughter’s
hand to teach her to control her orogeny. Essun re-enacts the trauma she suffered at the hands
of her Guardian upon her own child because she knows no other way to teach her, to protect
her, and to love her. Like the Handmaids and the Meshar First Mothers, orogenes are not free
to have and keep children of their own. Their bodies, their reproductive capacities, and their
offspring belong to the Fulcrum, necessary resources for others’ survival—and that prevents
them from truly mothering themselves and their own children. Again, in the service of survival
we are given a depiction of something worse than the end of the Anthropocene.
Jemisin illuminates what slavery, hatred, and racism can do to individual families and
humanity as a whole. At one point, the orogene Essun (who is the person the child Damaya and
the Fulcrum orogene Syenite become) “tears the world apart” as she smothers her baby boy to
death to prevent him from being enslaved: “She will not let them take him, enslave him, turn
his body into a tool and his mind into a weapon and his life into a travesty of freedom” (441).
As Jemison makes clear: “survival is not the same thing as living” (441).
If science fiction can provide warnings about ecological disaster, it can also provide
warnings about our responses to them. In all three novels discussed here, the patriarchal and
racist responses to climate change and imperiled reproduction are at least as devastating as the
environmental destruction that precipitates them. In the patriarchal, scientific/eugenic, and
colonizing solutions in each of these texts we see controlled and forced reproduction and the
disruption of feminist mothering: Handmaids’ children are forcibly taken from them; a Meshar
woman is kidnapped and forced to abandon her child; mothers kill their orogene children
to prevent their exploitation. Like the women science fiction writers before them, these
authors warn us of horrors to come through their depictions of family life destroyed. The
narratives are permeated with a sense of loss that comes from the destruction of families and
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Anna Bedford
practices of mothering as well as the poisoning and destruction of the environment. In these
future societies, the population survives, but the family does not. Ultimately, they warn us that
survival amidst ecological devastation is not only at stake but also not enough.
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Vintage, 1996.
Atwood, Margaret. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context.’ ” Science Fiction and Literary
Studies: The Next Millennium, vol. 119, no. 3, 2004, pp. 513–517.
Booker, M. Keith. Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of
Postmodernism, 1946–1964. Greenwood Press, 2001.
Di Chiro, G. “Defining Environmental Justice: Women’s Voices and Grassroots Politics,” Socialist Review,
vol. 22, no. 4, 1992, pp. 92–130.
Diamond, Irene. “Babies, Heroic Experts, and a Poisoned Earth.” Reweaving the World, edited by Irene
Diamond and Gloria Orenstein. Sierra Club Books, 1990, pp. 201–210.
Donawerth, Jane L. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse University Press, 1997.
Gotlieb, Phyllis. O Master Caliban! Harper & Row, 1976.
Gotlieb, Phyllis. Birthstones. Red Deer Press, 2007.
Grace, Dominick. “Frankenstein, Motherhood, and Phyllis Gotlieb’s O Master Caliban!” Extrapolation, vol.
46, no. 1, 2005, pp. 90–102.
Jemisin, N.K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.
Jemisin, N.K. The Obilisk Gate. Orbit, 2016.
Kurtz, Hilda, E. “Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the Boundaries of Public and
Private Spheres.” Gender, Place & Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2007, pp. 409–426.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton, 1995.
Taylor, Dorcetta. “Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism.” Ecofeminism: Women,
Culture, Nature, edited by Karen Warren. Indiana University Press, 1997, pp. 38–81.
Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Unhappy Housewife Heroines, Galactic Suburbia, and Nuclear War: A New History of
Midcentury Women’s Science Fiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44, no. 1, 2003, pp. 97–111.
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6
COLLECTIVE CLOSE
READING: QUEER SF
AND THE METHODOLOGY
OF THE MANY
Introduction
At the beginning of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novelette, “The Shobies’ Story,” we are introduced
to a group of people from across the Ekumen who have gathered together to test an
experimental mode of instantaneous space travel. We meet them in their “isyeye,” a word that,
in the dominant language of this fictional universe, means “ ‘making a beginning together,’
or ‘beginning to be together,’ ”—a period in which a number of individuals consciously
and consensually coalesce to form a group (“The Shobies’ Story” 75). However, as both
characters and readers learn, the process of group formation is never truly over; it is always
continually negotiated. As they initiate the new method of space travel, the group cohesion
dissolves and each individual experiences their new location differently. They must relate
their varied experiences to each other to regain their group identity and make their return;
partial, fragmentary, and contradictory as they are, these stories nevertheless create a narrative
whole whereby the group can construct a shared reality. The telling of stories, then, both
performs and prefigures, bringing the world into being by enacting it through narrative.
Finally, these various stories, like the narrative threads themselves, weave bonds of care
between the individuals, remaking them as the Shobies.
Le Guin’s tale, revealing as it does the constitutive interplay between storytelling and socially
constructed “reality,” speaks to how we, as the Beyond Gender Research Collective, put science
fictional ideas into practice. In particular, it inspires us to create both new modes of art and
new modes of kinship based on the celebration of communal activity and the politics of affinity
rather than conventional ideas of individual excellence and biological identity. In this chapter
we demonstrate our method for reading and enacting science fiction, which we call “collective
close reading.” First, we outline our understanding of this methodology before applying it to
“The Shobies’ Story” and then connecting it to our collective practices of performing science
fictionality and empathetic friendship.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-8 41
Like Le Guin’s Shobies, the Beyond Gender Collective is formed through collective play and
communal care, in this case, dedicated to explorations of queer and feminist science fiction (SF).
Our own “isyeye” (never complete, always in process) began in 2018 when a group of researchers
and students met to discuss our shared joys and frustrations with SF and SF studies. The group
continues to grow. Though we have found in SF, in the words of our Beyond Gender Manifesto,
New worlds, forgotten ways of being, creatures whose strangeness show us the strange-
ness in ourselves. . . . We expect more. . . . We believe that SF has an ethical obligation
to disrupt the prevailing logics of the suffocating now, to instead envision and bring
about emancipatory futures, futures which multiply, rather than reduce, our ways of
being in (and beyond) the world(s). (Beyond Gender 10)
Shobie-style, we meet to read, tell stories, write, play, and care for one another—acts that, as in
the best SF, make and remake the world. Also like the Shobies, who operate from a convergence
of emotions and affects and who combine the organic and the inorganic in their journey across
the galaxy, we are what Jasbir K. Puar describes as a “queer assemblage,” which, with “its
espousal of what cannot be known, seen or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows
for becoming/s beyond being/s” (128).
As Beyond Gender we form, and are formed by, the practice of collective close reading
(CCR). Collective: we choose messy multiplicity over the illusory unity of the sole authoritative
voice, the single story. Together we fight. The academy’s demand for definitive individual
scholarship; modernity’s fetishization of the single male genius; neoliberalism’s untenable
valorization of unending competition: these threefold pressures conspire against us, trying
to separate us, to turn us against each other. But we refuse to capitulate to these atomizing
demands. Close: instead, united in joy, galvanized by anger and protected with friendship, we
draw closer to each other through, by, and with SF. We fiction ourselves into being as an
ever shifting collective, a multitude, a crew. Reading: is always rereading, an act of (re)creation.
Never a definitive or complete object, we encounter texts as collaborators; we find openings
which forge collective modes of subjectivity; we generate ways of being together which, in
turn, repotentialize texts. With increasing intimacy, close reading blurs the distinction between
reading and writing. We know that to analyze is to retell stories in another language. Never
closed, CCR is our polyvocal praxis of utopian worlding.
At the conclusion of “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) Donna Haraway argues that the
cyborg, as a metaphor for feminist politics, “is a dream not of common language, but of a
powerful infidel heteroglossia. . . . It means both building and destroying machines, identities,
categories, relationships, space stories” (181). Haraway’s rejection of common language
restates the cyborg’s rejection of gender essentialism, arguing for a more open collective
feminist politics based on difference rather than shared biological experience. The alternative
to common language, suggested by Haraway, is heteroglossia: the coexistence of seemingly
contradictory, conflicting voices. Haraway posits heteroglossia as a powerful tool for rewriting
and remaking both the world and the self. As collaborative practice, this brief quote suggests
that heteroglossia not only deconstructs but also builds alternative worlds and ways of being
together. Such a practice, central to Beyond Gender, is enacted in “The Shobies’ Story”
around the hearth of the ship: the multiple and contradictory stories told by the crew resist a
single “true” narrative of events and instead build a complex reality constructed from clashing
and complementary voices. It is with this polyvocality of selves that we collaborate with SF,
that we sift through, unearth, and rewrite its infinite codes. It is as a multitude of multitudes
that we together become SF.
42
Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many
Performance
In “The Shobies’ Story,” Le Guin writes:
The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a

crew—you could call it believing in the crew, or just being it—Right? So, maybe, to
churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving
ourselves as . . . as transilient—as being in the other place—the destination? (101)
Our reading of SF is an open process which extends beyond any given text, an invitation to
create and interact with the world in a science fictional way. In exploring how to communicate
these ideas to and with each other we can find ways to act using SF, and as science fictional
beings. Here, Le Guin utilizes both context and language to lead us into a realm of multiple
possibilities, and estrangement occurs on a bodily level as well as a cognitive one; in short, it
occurs in the fabric of the story and in the construction of that fabric.
In our work, science fictional thinking gestates and makes possible science fictional praxis.
Two members of Beyond Gender, Sinjin Li and Raphael Kabo, worked together to create
Loving Allness, a multiplayer game with an objective of world-building and future-making
through collective storytelling (Li and Kabo). It asks each player to share a story which is then
added to by others, these multiple strands are then reassembled by all players creating shared
responsibility for the collective storyworld. The designing and making of the game shared many
of the qualities of playing it as a group, exercising our capacity for imagining, dreaming, and
building together.
A key component of the game’s design is the use of an abstract visual language (in the form
of pictorial tiles) to act as storytelling prompts. In using these we depart from the relative
comfort of language-based thinking and writing, creating an intimate space to share subjective
and multiple interpretations of these tiles—a heteroglossia particular to that group and the
freshly made stories shared by its members. This act of telling and listening, of inhabiting
worlds of each other’s creation, evokes trust between and compassion towards each other. It
has contributed to our practical understanding of collective thought and action as both an
emotional and intellectual undertaking. The act of collaboration is not only what is created
as a result of our coming together but is our lived experience of each other’s presence and
communication in our day-to-day lives, in our work and our recreation. Loving Allness is an
expression of our interest in non-binary thinking and future-making, and a medium to explore
relating to each other via imaginations and friendship. It allows us to insist upon expansive and
generative possibilities in our collective futures.
In “The Shobies’ Story,” being in a place, or reaching a destination, requires the same conscious
shift in perception as “being a crew,” a creative act of utopian prefiguration through collective
storytelling which is both process and realization. Our work as Beyond Gender in the design
and playing of storytelling games similarly celebrates and recognizes the utopian possibility
contained within the making and sharing of storyworlds.1 In these games, the use of visual art
allows us to explore ideas which precede or surpass language, while the physical motions of
reading, making, and building allow us to rehearse the construction of these imagined futures in
our collective present. The art is not a product, a distinct object, or destination, but the ground
upon which we stand.
The creation of “the Shobies” as a shared and collective identity requires a process of both
meeting and naming, realized in the gathering together in a specific time and location where
this act of becoming can take place: “they met at Ve Port more than a month before their first
43
flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the
Shobies” (“The Shobies’ Story” 75). Rather than being “named” after the ship, which implies
the hierarchical bestowing of a name, this crew calls themselves into being. This self-calling is
a statement of intention, a harkening and awakening to another way of being together which
reaches outwards and enfolds the space of the ship.
The potency of coming together to share a collective act of performance is one that we
explore throughout our work, and just as the place of our gathering has included meeting rooms,
galleries, living rooms, and online spaces, our collective identity is re-created and re-made in
each performance of meeting. The importance of place was particularly evident in our work at
“Future Impermanent,” a workshop and exhibition which saw artists discuss their work within
a structure designed and made by the gathered group. Such collective constructions create
moments of slippage “between the act of imagination and the act of inhabitation” (Butt 20).
This act of calling into being through the creation of a place dissolved the edges of the Beyond
Gender collective to create a new affinity group delineated by the hazy edges of this shelter.
Within this shelter, members of Beyond Gender shared Le Guin’s short story “The Ones
Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The story had been cut into fragments and those present each
took a scrap of paper and read aloud in turn. In doing so it became a story told in multiple
voices, dismantling the “I” of the reader into conflicting and contradictory voices made apparent
in the variations of each speaker’s tone. As an act of CCR, huddled within a single shelter and
allowing our voices to move into one another, it seemed to demand that we take responsibility
for the world created by the act of telling (Stone 16). Much like the Shobies, we performed an
act of calling into being through polyvocal performance.
Such performances of being and speaking together were also foundational to the Utopian
Acts festival curated by two members of Beyond Gender, which shared “acts which insist on the
possibility of another world in the present” resonating outwards from “localized micro-instances
of utopian action” (Stone and Kabo 2019). The fleeting nature of these utopian moments in
no way undermines their depth or significance. As utopian scholars Ruth Levitas and Lucy
Sargisson discuss, the “when” of utopia is located both on the horizon and within the present
moment, apparent in each making of a beginning together (13–28). In our work of CCR, the
moment of performing is the product.
In “The Shobies’ Story,” the criteria for being a Shoby is acting as a Shoby:
So Lidi looked around, like the violinist who raises her bow to poise the chamber
group for the first chord, a flicker of eye contact, and sent the Shoby into NAFAL
mode, as Gveter, like the cellist whose bow comes down in that same instant to
ground the chord, sent the Shoby into churten mode. (89)
Nothing connects these spacefarers, who come from different worlds, different societies, and
are differently gendered beings except their shared belief in the crew, their conscious formation
of a collective “we.”
This is the way in which we believe in, or are, Beyond Gender. We are a group brought
together not by inherent connection but by a shared commitment to imagining the world
differently. In her Foreword to This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga states of the
contributors: “We are not so much a ‘natural’ affinity group, as women who have come together
out of political necessity” (viii). Similarly, Hortense Spillers asks: “Could we say, then, that
the feeling of kinship is not inevitable? That it describes a relationship that appears natural, but
that must be cultivated under actual material conditions?” (76; emphasis in original). It is this
tradition of unnatural feminist kin-making that we seek to uphold. Following Donna Haraway,
44
we understand SF as a field in which there is no relation which can be accepted as a given

because all kinship networks are “derivative of theory, not of nature” (“The Past Is a Contested
Zone” 23) and thus are open to interrogation and transformation. Like the Shobies, we are
unnaturally drawn together by our desire to investigate the impossible.
Justine Larbalestier has argued that “SF is not a genre exclusively made up of written texts
but a community or series of communities,” and it is in this spirit that we as Beyond Gender
collectively read and play, perform and create, critique, and become SF (iii). Our challenge
to those who consider it impossible and unnatural to move beyond binary and essentialized
understandings of gender is not just one of literary representations but of resource distribution
and workplace conditions. We read collectively both in seminar rooms and on the picket line.
For us, coming together with university and college union (UCU) strikers and distributing
scraps of SF to read as a group was a way to demonstrate that a challenge to one form of
impossibility is a challenge to the boundaries of possibility itself.2 To say that we are Beyond
Gender is thus to join in solidarity with those who refuse the designation of increased pay,
secure contracts, and manageable workloads as “impossible.” By coming together in this way,
we “demand the impossible” (Moylan i).
Friendship
Our mission to think with the Shobies also entails exploring the value of kinship and solidarity
created by affective bonds that exist outside those of the heteronormative family. During a
talk delivered at the Riga Biennial, Sophie Lewis noted that the Covid-19 pandemic has made
“it painfully obvious that the nuclear family is not an infrastructure up to the task of looking
after people under conditions of lockdown and bodily precarity and vulnerability and need”
(“Mothering”). As we continue to exist in isolation, with a sense of distance that is intensified by
the fraught separation of the United Kingdom from a precariously bonded European Union, we
rely on SF to unite us, and on co-production to continuously reforge and reinforce our slippery
coming together in a myriad of online spaces. Holding up the Shobies’ nearly instantaneous
journey from Hain to M-60-340-nolo as our model, we celebrate the messiness of their mission
together, which relies not on a model of hierarchical control, but rather on the spontaneous
emergence of instances of communal agreement, forms of interdependence which “might
be called supervising or overseeing if that didn’t suggest a hierarchic function. Interseeing,
maybe, or subvising” (88). This is the basis of “churten theory,” the Shobies’ mode of travel
based on shared imagination, social cohesion, and mutual agreement as to the object of the
group’s perception. Embracing this methodology of togetherness in otherness, we, as Beyond
Gender, rely on shared utopian imagination in our collective work. In our view, “assuming that
solidarities are forged through emulation risks ignoring how likeness is actively produced,” and
we embrace the elements of becoming-together which present productive tensions, recognizing
that “ways of articulating solidarity are always partial, limited, and situated” (Featherstone 22).
These ideals informed our panel for the Unfair Cities conference in Limerick in
December 2019. We placed closely read texts in conversation with one another, using
Raccoona Sheldon’s short story “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light” (1976)
as an anchoring thread with which to think through the ambiguous utopianism encoded in
the cityscapes of the other texts under consideration. We dedicated much of the panel to live
discussion between ourselves and with the attendees on the continuities and discontinuities we
found in this project. In our collective work, we leave space for unresolvable tensions between
texts—indeed, we foreground and extrapolate from these, recognizing the generative potential
of comparative analysis which favors affiliation over filiation. This echoes “The Shobies’
45
Story,” when Shan takes care to talk through the nuances of two crew members’ interpersonal
relationship with everyone else in the crew as “the tension between the mother and son had
to be understood to be used effectively in group formation” (78); Beyond Gender similarly
considers the potentiality of differences to be procreative rather than limiting, and asserts that
this gestatory potential lies in the capacity of the group to “mutually interverify” (“The Shobies’
Story” 83). In this sense, our methodology resonates with Paul Kincaid’s ideas in “On the
Origins of Genre” around the “family resemblance” between SF texts. Any “unique, common
thread” or “unique, common origin” that binds such texts together is contingent, since
science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things—a future setting, a
marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar jour-
ney, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking
for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more subtle—which are braided
together in an endless variety of combinations. (Kincaid 415–17; emphasis added)
This contingency does not detract from utopian potentiality, but rather opens up emergent
spaces for it: to us, it is deeply meaningful that delivering our panel at Unfair Cities the day
after the UK general election in 2019 was the venue at which a conference attendee Dr. Hanna
Musiol suggested “collective close reading” as a way of conceptualizing the persistent utopianism
of our work in the face of collective dismay.
“The Shobies’ Story” is an exemplar of Le Guin’s work in reimagining family, summarized
by Haraway as a longing for “models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in
friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality,
and persistent hope” (Modest_Witness 265). As we call on one another to participate in the
utopian project of working as a collective, not by merging our voices, but by protecting their
differences and fostering their coexistence, we contaminate the “egoizing” encoded in existing
notions of value and productivity in the academy with the creative and critical capacities of
collaboration, friendship, and affective bonds (“The Shobies’ Story” 95). Implicit also in this
work is a critique of SF’s genre boundaries and taxonomies, much like that outlined by John
Rieder in Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), particularly the sense that “in
modern Western artistic practices more prestige accrues to violating these boundaries than to
conforming to them” (24). We point to the pliability of these boundaries, which have at least as
much to do with Western-centric notions of canonicity (and the deployment of these in higher
education) as they do with the possibilities and limitations of the imagined worlds of a given
text, or collectivity of texts.
Staying then with the joys and troubles of pushing boundaries by thinking and writing as
a collective, we reassemble each time, that is, for each mission, in a different constellation, in
ever-changing and expanding “strategic coalition[s],” united by the solidarity-making process
of imagining otherwise (Olufemi 136–37). This work “requires making oddkin,” meeting each
other again in “unexpected collaborations and combinations”; as Haraway aptly puts it, “we
become-with each other or not at all” (Staying with the Trouble 4). When we divide ourselves
into smaller working groups over the course of a project (the constitution of which usually
reconfigures on each occasion, for each project), we frequently find that we think ourselves into
a narrative thread that reflects both our broader discussions and our shared passions. For us, as
for the Shobies, collaborative narration is “the chancy and unreliable but most effective means
of constructing a shared reality” (Le Guin, “Introduction” 9). We think and speak ourselves
onto the same critical texts, but with polyvocal results—the work produced is not uniform,
46
but united by a “perception variation” (“The Shobies’ Story” 91) that gives it meaning. By
centering estrangements and forms of “queer assemblage” (Puar 128) in our materials and
seeking to embody the utopian and liberatory potentialities they offer, Beyond Gender enacts a
creative process of solidarity-making which does not locate sameness/otherness as a determining
binary force, but rather counters this binary as a precondition for solidarity-making at all. In
this sense, Beyond Gender’s work seeks to align itself with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s emphasis on
solidarity as a creative and generative practice which does not require pre-existing commonality,
but which rather “discovers it” by means of creating, sharing, and embracing values within a
community (238).
Thus, for us, “love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made
all the time, made new” (The Lathe of Heaven 158). It is the continuous re-making—in the forms
of work the collective generates, the spaces in which it is created, and the shifting membership
of the group at any given time—that fuels and refuels the utopian energy of Beyond Gender’s
work. Rather than creating an environment in which “a cessation of cause and effect” creates “a
hopeless confusion” (“The Shobies’ Story” 95), the ways in which Beyond Gender bends and
reshapes “makes space for unexpected companions” (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble 11). It is
by becoming science fictional oddkin that we are able to be Beyond Gender.
Notes
1 Loving Allness is one of several games which have been designed and developed by members of Beyond
Gender, as part of our collective exploration of the potential of ludic SF and collective storytelling.
These include: a game session as part of the Companion Voyages RPosium, a participatory Research/
Game Environment developed with Exposed Arts, led by Avery Delany with Francis Gene-Rowe;
Otherwards, a queer, interdimensional world-building and storytelling community on Discord, built by
Felix Rose Kawitzky; and We Have the Square, a collaborative storytelling game inspired by occupation
protest movements created by Raphael Kabo and Katie Stone which was played as part of Utopian Acts
(London 2018) and a digital version is available here: https://wehavethesquare.utopia.ac.
2 For other utopian responses to the recent UCU strikes in the UK see McKnight (2019).
Bibliography
Beyond Gender. “Beyond Gender Manifesto.” Help Us Build the World, 2019, pp. 10–11.
Butt, Amy. “ ‘Only one way in and one way out’: Staging Utopian Spaces.” Studies in Arts and Humanities,
vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 5–23, doi: https://doi.org/10.18193/sah.v5i1.155.
Featherstone, David. Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. Zed Books, 2012.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books,
1991, pp. 149–181.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness @Second_Millennium FemaleMan Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and
Technoscience. Routledge, 2018.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. “The Past Is the Contested Zone: Human Nature and Theories of Production and
Reproduction in Primate Behavior Studies.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
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Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Extrapolation, vol. 44, no. 4, 2003, pp. 409–419, doi: https://
doi.org/10.3828/extr.2021.2.
Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction: From the Pulps to the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial
Award. 1996. University of Sydney, PhD dissertation.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Introduction.” A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Science Fiction Stories. Victor Gollancz,
1996, pp. 1–12.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner, 1971.
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Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Real and the Unreal: The Selected Short
Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. Saga Press, 2016, pp. 329–336.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Shobies’ Story.” A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. Vista, 1997, pp. 74–105.
Levitas, Ruth, and Lucy Sargisson. “Utopia in Dark Times.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian
Imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. Routledge, 2003, pp. 13–28.
Lewis, Sophie. “Mothering Against the World.” Love, Riga International Bienalle of Contemporary Art, 4
June 2020, www.rigabiennial.com/en/riboca-2/programme/event-title-sophie-lewis.
Li, Sinjin, and Raphael Kabo. Loving Allness, 2020. https://loving-allness.mimir.computer.
McKnight, Heather. “The Sussex Campus ‘Forever Strike’: Estrangement, Resistance and Utopian
Temporality.” Studies in Arts and Humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 145–172, doi: https://doi.
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Moraga, Cherríe. “Refugees of a World on Fire: Foreword to the Second Edition.” This Bridge Called My
Back: Racial Writings by Women of Color. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983, pp. v–viii.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. 1986. Peter Lang, 2014.
Olufemi, Lola. Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. Pluto, 2020.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text, vol. 23, no. 3–4 (84–85), 2005, pp. 121–
139, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-121.
Rieder, John. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
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1987, pp. 65–81, doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
Stone, Katie (on behalf of Beyond Gender). “Collective Reading: The Ones Who Walk Away from
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Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
University of California Press, 2007.
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7
QUEER SF
Ritch Calvin
Queer SF in Theory: Eight Moments

(1) Several years ago, I (he/him) offered an upper-division seminar on Queer Science Fiction
(QSF). To my delight, the class filled quickly. My excitement tempered, however, when
I arrived for the first day of class and discovered that only four of the thirty students had
any idea what the class was about—most were there because it filled a General Education
requirement at a convenient day and time. In 2020, however, I offered an undergraduate
seminar on Nonbinary Science Fiction (NBSF). The class again filled quickly. This time,
however, most of the students not only knew what they were in for, but they had some
working knowledge of science fiction (SF) generally and QSF specifically. The zeitgeist had
shifted.
(2) The category of “SF” is a slippery one, with a fraught history. In his 1979 monograph,
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, science fiction theorist Darko Suvin (he/him) defines SF
as literature that makes the world with which we are familiar seem strange, and makes
the strange world seem familiar via the introduction of a “novum”—a technoscientific
discovery or invention that distinguishes the secondary world of the SF story from our
own. From this perspective, SF “queers” the reader’s perspective, allowing audiences to
imagine a world with different kinds of subjects and different social and political structures.
In other words, SF points to the queer possibilities of the future, if not the actual queer
practice of SF.
(3) In her groundbreaking 1991 book Queer Theory: An Introduction, Annamarie Jagose (she/
her) explores the history behind the term “queer” and the developmental arc of “queer
theory,” noting that both are characteristically resistant to definition. She explains that
queer theory has been “radically anticipatory, trying to bring a world into being” (1). As
such, “queer theory,” like SF, is premised on the desire to make new worlds and new social
relations.
(4) In his 1997 essay, “Queer Research, or How to Practise Invention to the Brink of
Unintelligibility,” William Haver (he/him) defines “queer” as “making strange, queer, or
even cruel what we had thought to be a world” (291). Given those similarities, one might
think that SF had always been queer. That depends. If queer is taken to refer to an identity,
then “no”: in terms of identity politics, SF has historically been conservative. If queer is
taken to mean a critical lens that deconstructs familiar paradigms, then the answer is a more
interesting “potentially.”
(5) In 1999, Wendy Gay Pearson (per/per) published the award-winning essay “Alien
Cryptographies,” which offers a tentative typology of QSF. Pearson identifies four types
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-9 49
Ritch Calvin
of QSF texts: those that are not explicitly queer but can be read as queer “with a specific
historical context and sensibility”; those that are “proto-queer” and offer some challenge
to naturalized categories of sexuality; those that are “coded” as queer, containing messages,
symbols, and language recognizable to an insider community; and those that are “overtly
queer” (5). Pearson also notes that the categories are slippery, fluid, and non-exclusionary.
(6) We see a shift in Pearson’s work away from Suvin’s structuralist approach. Whereas Suvin
predicates his model and typology on the structures of the text, Pearson shifts focus onto
the reader. While Pearson does point to elements contained within individual texts, per
more importantly points to ways in which the reader determines whether or not a text is
queer. For example, in “coded queer SF,” the reader’s own knowledge establishes the text
as queer.
(7) A great deal has changed in the twenty years since Pearson’s essay first appeared. In June 2015,
the editors at Lightspeed Magazine published a special issue titled “Queers Destroy Science
Fiction” to carve out a space for QUILTBAG (Queer, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans,
Bisexual, Asexual, and/or Gay/Genderqueer) creators and content. Since 2015, a number
of anthologies and anthology series devoted to QSF have also appeared, including Beyond
the Binary (Lee Mandelo, 2012), Meanwhile, Elsewhere (Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett,
2017), the Transcendent series (K. M. Sparza; Bogi Takács, 2016–2018), and the Glittership
series (Keffy R. M. Kehrli, 2017–2018).
(8) In March 2020, Tor.com published a roundtable edited by Lee Mandelo (he/him or they/
them) called “Queering SF: 12 Authors, Critics, and Activists on What’s Changed in
the Last Ten Years,” in which authors identify the reasons behind the recent growth
of overt QSF. In short, they note, gatekeepers have changed, publishing outlets have
changed, public and political attitudes have changed, and readers of SF have changed. At
this moment in time, as the corpus of QSF grows in depth and breadth, we can begin
to map out certain tendencies and categories. QSF can be a text written by someone
who identifies as queer, and/or it can represent the stories of primary, secondary, and
tertiary characters who are queer. QSF can also include texts produced and distributed
by queer means, particularly, but not limited to, queer presses and queer bookstores.
Finally, QSF represents a view from the margins, as it imagines a differently structured
universe. As was true of Pearson’s typology, these tendencies are not meant to be fixed
or comprehensive as writers add to the corpus on a daily basis. Any one text can exist in
any or all of these four definitions.
In this chapter, I explore what I see as three main story types within QSF:
(1) Those in which issues of queerness are addressed obliquely;

(2) Those in which the queerness is explicit but not central to the narrative, and;
(3) Those in which queerness is explicit and central to the narrative.
Queer SF in Practice: Three Tendencies
(1) Addressing Queerness Obliquely: The QSF of Samuel R. Delany,

Toby MacNutt, and Vajra Chandrasekera
Samuel R. Delany (he/him) broke into SF at the time of the New Wave (NW), a revolutionary
shift that occurred in 1960s SF as authors turned from stories about the hard sciences and
outer space to those that use the “soft” sciences—psychology, anthropology, sociology, and
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Queer SF
even economics—to explore the “inner space” of both individual people and entire cultures.
Delany came of age as a queer man living in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, and, as
he talks about in autobiographical works such as The Motion of Light on Water (1988), was an
active participant in the public sex life of his chosen sexual community despite intense public
disapproval and police harassment. These experiences informed a number of Delany’s SF stories,
including the Nebula award-winning “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which appeared in 1967 in the
boundary-pushing anthology, Dangerous Visions (1967).
In “Aye, and Gomorrah,” the unnamed narrator (he/him) and four fellow “spacers” come
down to Earth for shore leave. (In keeping with contemporary practices, Delaney uses he/him
pronouns for the nongendered spacers.) “Spacers” are individuals who have been surgically
altered to successfully survive intense space radiation, albeit at the cost of their reproductive
organs and sexual drive. Somewhat ironically, these “sexless” spacers are fetishized by a certain
subset of humans called “frelks.” The spacers understand their appeal to frelks and sometimes take
advantage of that desire to make extra money. In the story, an art student (she/her) approaches
the narrator to secure a liaison, but she cannot pay them. While the narrator initially agrees
to go home with the frelk because he is looking for human connection, he leaves when the
conversation turns to money. The liaison does not occur because neither person can get what
they are looking for from it.
At a literal level, the story represents both spacers and frelks as sexual deviants. In an early
scene, the spacers interrupt a group of gay men in a public bathroom, only to be told that “you
. . . people” should leave (101). The line repeats in a later scene when some prostitutes tell
the spacers that they do not appreciate the competition (102). The spacers are marginal and
undesirable, even for society’s marginal and undesirables. Meanwhile, Delany queers the frelks
with strategically deployed and deliberately gendered pronouns. In French, they are “une frelk”
(feminine); in Spanish, they are “un frelko” (masculine) (101, 102). In this simple move, Delany
invokes the discursive arguments of queer theory that all sex and gender categories are arbitrary
linguistic creations. Frelks have no essential gender identity, but rather whatever gender identity
is imposed upon them. In many ways, the spacers and frelks seem to be analogs for queer folx
from our own world. Both the spacers and the frelks stand outside social norms; both queer the
relationship between body and identity and between body and sexuality. Even so, the references
to queerness are oblique.
Oblique representations of queer experience and lives are also central to contemporary stories
by Toby MacNutt and Vajra Chandrasekera. MacNutt (ey/em/eir) is a nonbinary and disabled
artist who works on issues of gender fluidity, queer identity, and embodiment. In “Moments
of Light” (2015), ey tells the tale of an artist named Lyuko (ze/hir), born on the water planet
Voushato, who has the ability to gather and sculpt light. After constructing a light structure on
hir homeword, ze accepts a commission on for a project on a waterless world. Upon completion
of that sculpture, ze begins an even larger piece in deep space that will gather the light of the
stars and direct them onto a habitat orbiting a dead star.
“Moments of Light” can be read as obliquely queer in several ways. First and foremost,
Lyuko’s nongendered pronouns suggest that the Voushato do not have a gendered identity.
Second and equally important, the inhabitants of Voushato live as a colony, where each new
member asexually buds off from the parent. Later, when Lyuko goes to space, ze re-creates
the experience of collective identity by making the support team hir de facto colony. Finally,
“Moments of Light” queers the reader’s expectations of an SF story. While it is set on alien
planets and in space, it is not a celebration of science and technology. Instead, it centers both
the beauty and the function of art. Much like Delany, MacNutt features nongender-conforming
characters, but only obliquely comments on queer identity.
51
Ritch Calvin
Vajra Chandrasekera’s (he/him) “Rhizomatic Diplomacy” (2016) uses politics to make

similarly oblique comments about sexed and gendered identity. “Rhizomatic Diplomacy”
revolves around the final thirty minutes of protagonist Talpo’s life. Talpo (he/him) is a diplomat,
deployed to communicate with the alien paniskoi, who have been dropping “bombs” which
they claim function as “soil rejuvenation initiatives” on Talpo’s world. Talpo, however, is not, as
he notes, a “traditional human.” He is a rhizome that has been dropped into a marsh to negotiate
with the paniskoi. The language of both species employs three elements: “pheromones,
somatics, and speech.” As part of a rhizome, Talpo’s individual life is inconsequential and can be
sacrificed on the battlefield. Moreover, Chandrasekera offers no information about the sex and
gender of Talpo (apart from his pronoun), and he offers no information about the identities of
the paniskoi at all.
“Rhizomatic Diplomacy” can be read as obliquely queer in several ways. For one, Talpo’s
creation is asexual. Therefore, the story offers a new take on subjectivity. Talpo is not the
singular, Western, unified self born from a singular female body. Instead, he is part of a collective
and a community; a queer subject fashioned by queer reproductive means. Chandrasekera also
obliquely refers to the lived experiences of queer folx through the newly embodied Talpo’s
concerns about his “chronic lymphocytopenia” and other “immunodeficiencies,” both allusions
to AIDS that suggest another important connection between Chandrasekera’s posthuman
diplomat and the queer community but without direct references to queer identity or queer sex
as it exists in our own world.
(2) Making Queerness Explicit but Not Central to the Story: The QSF
of Lisa Bunker, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, and Shweta Narayan
Lisa Bunker’s (she/her) Felix Yz is one of many Young Adult (YA) QSF novels published in
the last ten years. Bunker came to writing late, after a long career in non-profit radio. In 2018,
Bunker became the first openly trans individual elected to the New Hampshire state legislature.
Like Delany, Bunker draws on her own sexed and gendered experience to create her art. Unlike
Delany, however, she makes queerness explicit and central to her characters’ lives, if not essential
to the story itself. Felix Yz centers around 13-year-old Felix (he/him), the youngest child
in a quirky, semi-counterculture family. Felix’s father is a scientist, but when an experiment
goes awry, his father is killed, and Felix is fused with a hyperintelligent being called Zyx. The
fusion causes Felix to become hunched over and have difficulty with physical movement. The
novel takes the form of a journal, providing direct access to the thoughts of Felix and Zyx and
explicitly addressing issues of queer identity.
Time and time again, Bunker’s novel refuses the kind of binary thinking associated with the
heteronormative matrix. Felix quickly establishes that he is gay and has a crush on a classmate.
His mother, Margo (she/her), dates both men and women. Felix’s grandparent is Vera/Vern,
who uses neopronouns (vo/ven/veir/veirself) and presents as either feminine, masculine, or
neither on different days of the week. And yet, while many of the primary characters are queer,
queerness is not essential to the narrative. When Felix is bullied at school, it is for his disability
rather than his sexuality and of course, it literally has nothing to do with his physical fusion
with Zyx. In other words, if Felix had been a cis-gender, heterosexual boy, the novel would not
have been significantly altered. And yet by making this the tale of queer individuals and queer
families, Felix Yz insists on their rightful place in the future imaginary.
Another recent work that revolves around explicitly queer characters but where queerness
is not essential to the narrative is Keffy R. M. Kehrli’s (he/him) “Bonehouse” (2011), which
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Queer SF
tells the story of Chris (he/him), a transman and “evictionist” who locates individuals slowly
rotting away in hospitals called “bonehouses” while jacked into virtual reality, bringing them
home to their concerned families. Chris is good at his job in large part because he himself had
once been addicted to virtual reality and is thus highly motivated to bring down the corporate
powers behind the bonehouses.
The fact that Chris is a trans man is significant for representation and indeed, we learn
that originally, one of the reasons Chris originally stayed plugged into virtual was so that
he could experience himself as a man; it was only after his eviction that he transitioned.
And yet, while this backstory undoubtedly makes Chris’s character richer, it is not essential
to the story. As SF, it could have worked with Chris as a cis-gender, heterosexual person—
after all, Chris could have been motivated to take down the bad guys in his world out of
revenge. Thus Kehrli’s story offers readers a complex queer character and demonstrates the
SFnal potential to reimagine one’s own identity, but does not explicitly alter the story’s
worldview.
“World of the Three” (2017) by Shweta Narayan (they/them or she/her) is a QSF
deeply rooted in Tamil history and the culture and politics of Kerala, India. The story
takes the form of a mother (she/her) telling a long, multi-generational story to her three
youngest children about how they came to be in the world. The children are all mechanical
beings, who live among the Alabar (humans). The mother’s story revolves around the
children’s oldest sibling, Vikramaditi (they/them). In their first incarnation, Vikramaditi
was a King in Chola, until a jealous adopted child unwound their spring. Mother then
reshaped Vikramaditi into a body that resembled a human female, and they took on the
name Ramaa, who decides to become a bird for a while, until they fall in love with a
poet/trader and return to their female body. When their husband betrays Ramaa and all
mechanicals, Ramaa’s heartspring breaks. Mother takes the shards of the heartspring and
creates three new children, Usithan, Maari, and Anbu.
“The World of the Three” is QSF in several ways. For one, Vikramaditi largely rejects a
fixed or gendered norm. While characters do, at times, take on shapes that are stereotypically
gendered, they are never fixed or stable. Vikramaditi notes that the body is only ever “jewellery”
for mechanicals—something to be taken on and off on at will. Indeed, Vikramaditi uses a
nongendered pronoun regardless of physical form, using “they” whether they are a King, a
parrot, or a married person.
“The World of the Three” pushes at a binary worldview, even if it does not rupture it
completely. Narayan begins the story with the reference to the three kings of Kerala. Vikramaditi
takes on three bodies (male, bird, female). When Vikramaditi’s heartspring is remade, their
mother creates three children. Even so, at times, Vikramaditi does conform to one or the other
of the two binary genders. Narayan also invokes binaries in their depiction of the relationship
of the mechanicals to the Alabar humans, which can be read as parallel to that of QUILTBAG
individuals and the cis-het community. The Alabar do not trust the mechanicals; they have
prejudices and biases against mechanicals; they want to limit mechanicals from trade—and they
sometimes want to kill the mechanicals.
“The World of the Three” employs QSF to imagine a space for thinking about the future of
queer folx. As SF, the story contains characters that explicitly challenge binary gender and sexual
norms. However, as QSF, the antagonism between mechanicals and humans could stand for any
two groups. The animosity and distrust is not explicitly because of the characters’ queerness. As
with Bunker and Kehrli, Narayan offers explicitly queer characters, but their queerness is not
essential to the plot.
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Ritch Calvin
(3) Making Queerness Explicit and Central to the Story: The QSF of
Rivers Solomon, M. Téllez, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
Rivers Solomon (they/them) is a self-described “dyke” and “anarchist” who was born in 1989
and educated in the United States before moving to the UK. Solomon’s debut novel, An
Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) offers a QSF work where queerness is central to the narrative. The
novel imagines that humans have created generation spaceships to escape a dying Earth, but
only by recreating chattel slavery as it was practiced in the US. The novel begins in media res on
a ship called Mathilda, and the reader never discovers details about the fate of Earth, the genesis
of the spaceship, or the origins of its sociopolitical structure because the narrative is focalized
through the perspectives of marginalized people of color who live and work on the lower decks
and who do not have access to that history themselves.
In the novel, the generation ship has gone off course and suffered mechanical damage. The
passengers are segregated, with whites in the spacious and luxurious upper decks and people
of color in the cramped and frigid lower decks, where they are compelled to perform the
intensive labor that allows the ship to run. In the hundreds of years since launch, a number of
changes have occurred linguistically, culturally, and biologically. Large segments of the lower
decks are intersexed, and many identify as queer. The protagonist, Aster (she/her or they/
them), is described as Black, intersex, autistic, and a gifted healer. Her ally, teacher, and lover
is Theodore Smith (he/him), who also identifies as queer. Theo guides Aster’s education,
even as he frustrates both her practical and sexual desires. Aster’s best friend is Giselle (she/
her), a woman who refuses to adhere to the social and political norms of Matilda and who
fiercely loves Aster.
Aster’s autism is a constitutive element of her identity, her understanding of the world (ship),
and her actions. One character describes Aster as “Insiwa,” meaning that she lives inside her
head too much, and her surrogate mother Aunt Melusine says that Aster sees the world “side-
ways” (190). In Aster, Solomon represents the intersectionality of queer identity: the experi-
ences and treatment of Aster cannot be isolated to her race, her sexuality, or her ability. The
individual in charge of the ship, the Sovereign, hates and abuses her for all of these reasons; it is
why she cannot have full access to the ship and its equipment.
Solomon’s novel queers SF’s subject matter, protagonists, and classic narrative trajectory.
Unkindness employs the plantation trope to illustrate how the same slavery-based economy that
built the United States could easily reassert itself in the future. The narrative is not a celebration
of technology but, instead, insists that technology will only the save the privileged. Moreover, all
of the central characters are complex, intersectional, and unflinchingly queer. The novel’s narra-
tive and emotional centers are in the lower decks, with the disenfranchised queer folx. Finally,
the novel ends with Aster’s return to Earth, which has recovered from the effects of humans.
However, the ending is far from a triumphant return: Aster is accompanied only by the remains
of her mother and Giselle, while the rest of humanity fights to the death on the Mathilda. Thus,
Solomon queers the reader’s expectations of SF: the hero does not prevail and Western technol-
ogy does not save the day. The novel suggests no futurity under the old paradigms.
Other recent short works in which queerness is explicit and central to the narrative include
stories by M. Téllez and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. M. Téllez (they/them) is a self-described “cross-
roads cyborg” whose story “Heat Death of Human Arrogance” (2016) focuses on two species,
humans and SlowSteppers™, the latter of which are engineered rhizomes created to assist in
off-world colonization. Loma (she/her), a “human-identified Earth organism,” rejects the logic
of colonization and fights for the enfranchisement of the SlowSteppers™. SlowStepper™ Inri
(they/them) works for extended periods of time terraforming Mars. When Inri is not working,
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Queer SF
they spend time with Loma. Inri has no genitals and is part of a collective consciousness. Inri
has difficulty in understanding Loma, individuality, and humans. Still, Inri enjoys sex and thinks
they understand Loma’s love.
Téllez’s story queers many aspects of science fiction. For one, the collective consciousness
of the SlowSteppers™ challenges the reader’s assumptions about the desirability of “individual
autonomy.” Inri has no interest in being an individual. Further, Inri does not fully understand
Loma’s rejection of colonization. Inri’s purpose in life and profession is the colonization of
Mars. Inri exists as part of a colony and has no individual identity. Therefore, Inri sees the ways
in which the newer generations of SlowSteppers™—who are more like individual humans—
threaten them all. The story offers queer characters who reject many of the norms of Western
society. Téllez imagines a world that is differently structured and is focalized from the perspective
of a being who is not an individual, who has no sex and no gender, and has no understanding
of familial relations. In this story, Inri’s queerness is fundamental to their understanding of the
world and to the narrative itself.
As a final example, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (they/them) is the queer, nonbinary author of “The
Frequency of Compassion” (2018), which centers on an agender, autistic, and hyperempathic
individual named Kaityn (they/them). Kaityn and their AI, Horatio (ze/zir), set research
beacons in space for star charting. On a routine mission, Kaityn senses the call of an alien in
distress. While humans from a rival company want to capture and exploit the alien, Kaityn
defends it. The alien returns the favor when the other humans act violently.
In “The Frequency of Compassion,” Kaityn’s autism and agender identity are the center of
the narrative. They are the reason Kaityn was chosen for the job, and they are the reason Kaityn
makes contact with the alien. And yet while these are precisely the qualities that make Kaityn
the hero of this particular story, they are most certainly not the characteristics of the traditional
SF hero. In a flashback scene, Kaityn’s then-boyfriend argues that Kaityn would not make a
good first contact person because their disability and their nonbinary identity would confuse
and mislead any aliens. However, the alien that Kaityn meets has no gender, lives in a cluster,
and is most definitely not confused or misled by Kaityn. Thus, Wolfmoor’s story suggests that
it is binary-oriented, cis-gender humans who are incapable of understanding the alien other. In
other words, our existence actually depends on a queered understanding of the universe and its
inhabitants. In this example, Wolfmoor, like Solomon and Téllez, offers a text with explicitly
queer characters, and that queerness is central to the narrative itself.
The field of QSF continues to expand and develop. The number of queer writers, texts, and
characters have all increased. However, the most significant development is the way in which
the entire field of SF is being queered. Not only is it increasingly difficult to imagine futures
without queer subjects, QSF demands that the very form of SF itself must change. If one of the
takeaways from disability studies is that beginning from a place of disability creates a more acces-
sible world for everyone, then one of the takeaways from QSF is that beginning from a place
of queerness creates a science fiction that imagines a world (universe) that includes everyone.
Bibliography
Bunker, Lisa. Felix YZ. New York, Viking, 2017.
Chandrasekera, Vajra. “Rhizomatic Diplomacy.” An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables,
edited by Rose Lemberg. Stone Bird, 2016, pp. 145–150.
Delany, Samuel R. “Aye, and Gomorrah.” Driftglass. Doubleday, 1971, pp. 101–111.
Haver, William. “Queer Research, or, How to Practise Invention to the Brink of Unintelligibility.” The
Eight Technologies of Otherness, edited by Sue Golding. Routledge, 1997, pp. 277–292.
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 1996.
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Kehrli, Keffy R. M. “Bonehouse.” Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, edited
by Brit Mandelo. Lethe, 2011.
MacNutt, Toby. “Moments of Light.” Capricious, December 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/
20201124142435/www.capricioussf.org/moments-of-light/.
Mandelo, Lee. “Queering SFF: 12 Authors, Critics, and Activists on What’s Changed in the Last Ten Years.” Tor.
com, 31 March 2020. www.tor.com/2020/03/31/queering-sff-12-authors-critics-and-activists-on-whats-
changed-in-the-last-ten-years/.
Narayan, Shweta. “World of the Three.” Lightspeed Magazine, June 2017, www.lightspeedmagazine.com/
fiction/world-of-the-three/.
Pearson, Wendy. “Alien Cryptographies: View from the Queer.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1999,
pp. 1–22.
Solomon, Rivers. An Unkindness of Ghosts. Akashic, 2017.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Yale University Press, 1979.
Téllez, M. “Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance.” Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy
from Transgender Writers, edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett. Topside, 2017.
Wolfmoor, Merc Fenn. “The Frequency of Compassion,” Uncanny Magazine (Disabled People
Destroy Science Fiction), September–October 2018. https://uncannymagazine.com/article/
the-frequency-of-compassion/.
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8
RENOVATING THE SYSTEM
The Matrix Resurrections and Trans Resistance
to Neoliberal Integration
Terra Gasque
Introduction
The Wachowski siblings’ original Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) is often celebrated as a complete
package of action, thought, and style; one that completed its story and gracefully left the
public eye. But artists today are interested in writing beyond the end of both classic cultural
narratives and their own stories to see how seemingly completed narrative worlds might be
reopened to provide new perspective on present-day technoscientific and technosocial issues.
Lana Wachowski’s newest Matrix film, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), is very much part of
this movement, showcasing science fiction’s (SF’s) ability to create complex narrative worlds
capable of exploring the most pressing social issues of the era in which they are first produced
and of being reworked—one might even say “resurrected”—to address new social issues as they
emerge in the present. The original Matrix trilogy follows hacker Thomas Anderson, who goes
by the handle “Neo,” as he transitions from isolated outsider to messianic figure destined to
save the world. Along the way, it invites audiences to explore some of the most classic themes
of SF, including the relations of destiny, free-will, and personal choice in large technoscientific
systems. Nearly 20 years later, we return to the world of the Matrix, but with a more focused
purpose: to explore the perils of neoliberal integration and assimilation for queer individuals.
This time, instead of messianic figures saving the world, we have isolated, impotent individuals
struggling to achieve a sense of personhood that has been stripped from them by a systemic
power. Gone are the massive action set pieces of the original, the poppy CGI effects, and the
intricately choreographed fight scenes. This sequel retains some elements of all these things,
but they are both more nuanced and rougher in application. Likewise, the narrative world of
the Matrix has also moved on, and those who remain must deal with changes both positive and
negative; they must figure out how to survive—and, in doing so, provide audiences with lessons
in resilience that are very much applicable to our own world.
“Replugging” as Central Metaphor of the Matrix Series

Central to Lana Wachowski’s most recent Matrix film is the concept of “replugging,” introduced
in the very first film. The original Matrix films are organized around the conceit that once
someone has realized they are part of the Matrix, they have been “unplugged” and cannot be
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-10 57
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“replugged” into the system. There are those, like Cypher in the original Matrix film, who will
work with the machines to try, but the original series gives little to no evidence that one can
reintegrate into the Matrix once disconnected. This recognition of alienation and subsequent
inability to reintegrate into the system is parallel with the feelings of outsiderness described
by queer theorists. Once they recognize themselves as outsiders to the social, political, and
technological systems organizing their world, intersex, trans, and other sexual minority groups
struggle to integrate with systems that shun and oppress them—or, as the endings of the original
three Matrix films each suggest in their own ways, this recognition becomes the impetus to fully
reject current systems of power or to attempt their total destruction from without.
However, as The Matrix: Resurrections reminds us, integration resistance does not really exist
in either our world or its fictional counterpart. Indeed, the neutering and domestication of
outsider classes and their reintroduction back into an overarching system of control is central to
Wachowski’s film. The ultimate outsiders and champions against the system, Neo and Trinity
have been revived from death, rebuilt at the heart (both metaphorically and literally) of a new
Matrix system, and replugged into it as the system’s primary power source, reminding us that
no system of control is beyond exploiting, expanding, and consuming those it needs for its own
propagation. But of course, that is not the ending of the story. Instead, Wachowski strategically
invokes, revises, and updates both her own Matrix mythos and key SF storytelling practices
themselves to demonstrate how social and sexual minorities might creatively enact not total
revolution from without, but a series of small, subtle changes from within the system to make
it a little bit freer and more equitable for all.
The Original Matrix Trilogy: A Brief Overview

The Matrix series is set in the year 2199 on a postapocalyptic Earth where the world has been
scorched bare and clouds blot out the sky due to all-out war between machines and humanity.
The world is ruled by sentient machines who use the humans they have conquered as their
primary energy sources. Unaware of their role as biological batteries, most humans live out
their lives in the simulated world of the Matrix, unaware of the real world or their place within
it. Those who are unhappy with their lives and learn about the real world sometimes attempt
to escape the Matrix by unplugging. However, the Matrix has entities and mechanisms in place
to stop such escapes. The most apparent of these mechanisms are the Agents which can take
over the body of anyone plugged into the Matrix. Those who do escape are often surprised to
find that real world of the Matrix series is somehow even less pleasant than the Matrix; a cold
dying husk where unplugged humans live in a drab, industrial refuge called Zion, built close to
the planet’s core for warmth. These humans engage in endless war with the machines, who see
the Zion rebels as an existential threat to their way of life, due to the Zion humans unplugging
disgruntled individuals trapped in the Matrix.
The original trilogy focuses on Neo as he escapes the artificial reality of the Matrix and
strives to stop the war between humans and machines, using his love for Trinity (another
unplugged human) to give him strength and determination. At the end of the third film, The
Matrix: Revolutions, both sacrifice themselves to the cause. Trinity dies flying Neo into the
heart of the machine civilization, and Neo dies by integrating with the Machines to combat
a rogue security program, Agent Smith, who threatens to destabilize both the Matrix and the
real world. Central to the narrative is Neo’s love for Trinity, which evolves over the course of
the series and, despite being dramatized by cis-heterosexual actors, conveys a different energy
than the traditional Hollywood romance. This energy reveals itself as the films progress and
Neo and Trinity’s love becomes more sapphic, more caring, and more about gentle support for
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Renovating the System
each other’s emotion instead of physical carnal lust. Significantly, the Wachowskis have gone
on record to state that the original Matrix is a trans allegory, “But it was all coming from a
closeted point of view” (qtd. in Migdon). Given the impossibility of telling stories about gender
nonconforming characters in the 1990s (case in point: Warner Brothers nixed a proposal to
make the character Switch male in the real world and female in the Matrix) and the fact that,
at this point the Wachowskis themselves had not yet come out as trans, it is perhaps no surprise
that while the original trilogy transforms physical lust into gentle emotion, it does so in ways
that helped blur obvious references to queerness.
Nearly two decades after the original trilogy concluded and twelve years after Lana Wachowski
came out as trans, The Matrix Resurrections (directly solely by Wachowski) expands the narrative
of the Matrix series beyond its original focus on the machine war and Neo as world savior.
Without changing the casting or the logic of the story world, Wachowski seems to take strength
from her own time as an out transwoman, making the trans aspects of Neo and Trinity even
more explicit in the modern film. Wachowski does nothing so crude as to literally transform
Neo and Trinity into transpeople, but she does not simply hint at trans issues indirectly, either.
Instead, the films centers on scenes where Neo and Trinity’s experiences directly mirror those of
trans people in our own world. In the first part of the film, both characters experience the kind
of dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization faced by many trans individuals. Examples
include the multiple faces Neo sees reflected in his bathroom, the blurring of multiple days and
meetings into a seemingly endless stretch of times, and the talk of being unable to recognize reality.
Furthermore, both Trinity and Neo act explicitly trans in their language, physical presentation,
and interactions, all while still maintaining the mask of cisgender heteronormativity established in
the first films. For example, early in the newest film, Neo visits a coffee shop as part of his daily
routine to pine over a woman, Trinity, who also frequents the establishment. However, instead
of asking out Trinity on a date or being forward with his feelings, he merely enjoys seeing her
and tries not to disrupt Trinity’s life. When an obnoxious coworker tries to set them up and Neo
learns Trinity is married, he is not distraught with rejection, but instead asks her if they could
meet simply to try out a friendship. There is no carnal lust in Neo’s action, just a deep longing for
companionship. Thus, Wachowski makes Neo and Trinity’s struggles to be their true selves that
much more pointed and resonant to trans and non-binary viewers who might well find themselves
forced to present similar masks in our own world.
Jack Halberstam and the Neoliberal Integration of Queer Subjects

Neo and Trinity’s uneasy reintegration into the Matrix in Wachowski’s 2021 film dramatizes
what queer theorist Jack Halberstam describes as the reincorporation of queer bodies into the
neoliberal world order. In his 2005 book In a Queer Time and Place, released just two years after
the conclusion of the original Matrix trilogy, Halberstam takes on two axioms of earlier queer
theory. First, in a move that seems inspired by the Wachowski siblings’ representations of Zion
(and particularly the Zion rave scene of the third film), Halberstam expands who counts as
“queer subjects” to include not just LGBTQ+ people, but also individuals such as ravers, club
kids, and others who embrace queer perspectives (10). At the same time, he pushes back against
the notion that LGBTQ+ people are naturally and necessarily perpetual outsiders to neoliberal
systems of power by showing how urban gay and lesbian people are slowly becoming part of the
systems they once rebelled against (19). He notes that:
Transgenderism, with its promise of gender liberation and its patina of transgression,
its promise of flexibility and its reality of a committed rigidity, could be the successful
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outcome of years of gender activism; or, just as easily, it could be the sign of the rein-
corporation of a radical subculture back into the flexible economy of postmodern
culture. (21)
For Halberstam, transgender individuals whose gender identity seems to naturally counter
cisgender, patriarchal systems of control are still at risk of integration, should the economic
systems running the world develop a need for these individuals and their talents.
In The Matrix Resurrections, Wachowski dramatizes Halberstam’s warning about trans
integration into the neoliberal order by literally integrating Neo and Trinity back into a society
that once ostracized and estranged them. In the first trilogy, Trinity and Neo achieve their goals
of stopping the war between humans and machines. However, much like the systems of power
in our own world, the machines and controlling systems that define the reality of the Matrix
continue to evolve, and in Resurrections we learn that the machines have formed a new Matrix
that neuters unplugged individuals. As the Analyst (played by Neal Patrick Harris) explains in a
monologue toward the end of the film, the new Matrix he has designed recognizes and actively
capitalizes on human discontent but makes sure that the only means of expressing it is through
empty gestures of resistance, such as Tweets or social media posts. This even distribution of
misery reduces the number of humans with either the knowledge or desire to unplug from the
Matrix and prevents communities of rebellion from forming, thereby ensuring more power for
the machines.
The ways in which neoliberal integration appropriates both the individual and collective
identities of minority subjects is most poignantly dramatized by the fate of Neo and Trinity,
who have been physically resurrected and placed at the heart of the new Matrix. The Analyst
explains that both have a code anomaly that enables them to connect with all humanity in the
Matrix. By suppressing their memories and keeping them miserably close but always apart, the
Matrix generates even more power:
Here’s the thing about feelings. They’re so much easier to control than facts. Turns
out, in my Matrix, the worse we treat you, the more we manipulate you, the more
energy you produce. It’s nuts. I’ve been setting productivity records every year since
I took over. And, the best part, zero resistance. People stay in their pods, happier than
pigs in shit. The key to it all? You. And her. Quietly yearning for what you don’t have,
while dreading losing what you do. For 99.9% of your race, that is the definition of
reality. Desire and fear, baby.
The Analyst’s design choice to separate individuals from their own authentic community
building practices means that while everyone shares the same troubles and miseries, they are
distanced from each other just enough to nullify organizing into a meaningful rebellion. Much
like Halberstam’s neoliberal economic drive, the Analyst’s Matrix integrates all parties into a
single collective, but in such a way that is no longer a meaningful threat to the system.
Although she did not work on it, Lilly Wachowski’s reaction to the very idea of making a
fourth Matrix film provides insight into the horrific nature of forced integration so central to
Resurrections:
[Lana] had come up with this idea for another “Matrix” movie, and we had this talk,
and it was actually—we started talking about it in between [our] dad dying and [our]
mom dying, which was like five weeks apart. . . . And there was something about the
idea of going backward and being a part of something that I had done before that was
60
expressly unappealing. And, like, I didn’t want to have gone through my transition and
gone through this massive upheaval in my life, the sense of loss from my mom and dad,
to want to go back to something that I had done before, and sort of [walk] over old
paths that I had walked in, felt emotionally unfulfilling, and really the opposite—like
I was going to go back and live in these old shoes, in a way. And I didn’t want to do
that. (qtd. in Lash)
Neo’s experience in the film mirrors Lilly Wachowski’s emotional flashbacks. Upon being
integrated into the new Matrix, Neo is given a life as a programmer, and his history from the
previous films is re-framed as a video game with fantastical elements extrapolated from his life
struggles. The tension between his real and false memories results in a mental unwellness that
keeps Neo pliable and subservient to the Matrix by way of his therapist—the Analyst—who
gaslights Neo into believing he is suicidal and delusional. Neo’s dissociation and flashbacks
become most explicit when Morpheus (the program portrayed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II),
tries to contact Neo at his game company. Running from both Morpheus and the police,
Neo has vivid flashbacks to action scenes from the previous Matrix films, culminating when
Agent Smith (portrayed by Jonathan Groff) grabs a discarded gun to kill Neo. The scene ends
with Neo transported to the Analyst, who convinces him that the entire experience was a
mental break and Neo needs to ground himself into reality better. This act of external control
through the careful manipulation of internalized systemic biases, doubts, and phobias is part
of the initial hesitancy and resistance Neo must overcome to unplug himself from the Matrix
once again.
In some ways, Trinity has a perhaps an even worse fate than Neo in the new Matrix. Like
Neo, she has been returned from the dead, stripped of her previous memories, and inserted into
this new Matrix. However, while Neo is at least granted a profession with some relationship to
his previous one as a hacker, Trinity is transformed from a purposeful warrior into a distracted
and discontented wife and mother. Even so, the Analyst controls Trinity for much of the film
by suggesting that it is her duty—and special skill set—to keep her family safe from the world’s
various mundane ills. Indeed, this rhetoric is so powerful that it almost works at the climax
of the film, when Trinity’s artificial family tries to take her away from Neo by claiming one of
the children is hurt and she is needed at the hospital. Eventually she refuses, thereby forcing
the Analyst to expose his hand, but there is palpable tension as Trinity makes the final choice
between Neo and her simulated family.
Even Agent Smith, the villain of the original series, has been reintegrated into this new
Matrix—somewhat ironically, as Neo-the-game-designer’s partner. In the original trilogy,
Smith is an Agent of the Matrix, seemingly killed but ultimately liberated from machine control
when Neo merges and then explodes out from him. The next two films follow an unplugged
(and, due to his entanglement with Neo, an increasingly emotional and unpredictable) Smith
who tries to take over the Matrix by making everyone a clone of him, all while insisting on
that, “We’re not here because we’re free. We’re here because we’re not free. There’s no escaping
reason. No denying purpose. Because as we both know without purpose, we would not exist.”
In the newest film, Smith retains some of his impressive abilities but is, initially at least, used by
the Analyst as another tool to keep Neo’s life within this new Matrix controlled and miserable.
He is given power and seems happier than Neo and Trinity, but he is just as much exploited
and seeking freedom as they are. Once again, then, the new Matrix capitalizes on the misery
of closeness. As Halberstam observes, no matter which individual seems to have power over
another, the larger system of control integrates all outsiders into it in ways that leave no one
happy but mollify them into accepting the world as it is.
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Renovating the Master’s House by Dismantling the Myth of the One

Although she is skeptical that queerness “naturally” grants individuals the ability to resist
neoliberal systems of power, Lana Wachowski uses The Matrix Resurrections to rethink
some of the key premises of the earlier Matrix trilogy and hopefully imagine new paths
toward queer community and positive political change. This process of narrative rehabili-
tation is much like the one that Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson describes
in her introduction to Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. In
this opening essay, Hopkinson takes on self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior,
poet” Audre Lorde’s claim that we cannot dismantle systems of power using the same
tools that built those systems. As Lorde puts it: “The master’s tools will never dismantle
the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they
will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (26–27). At least in terms of SF a
genre often associated with White, cis-heteronormative, male privilege—Hopkinson sees
things differently, arguing for the possibility of radical renovation: “I want to see what
would happen if we handed out massa’s tools and said, ‘Go on; let’s see what you build’ ”
(8–9). This act of creative rehabilitation allows systems to be radically altered through a
million small shifts and changes.
Wachowski dramatizes this kind of literary and sociopolitical renovation in The Matrix
Resurrections through the growth of Trinity and Neo and their final confrontation with the
Analyst. She begins this process early in the film by dismantling the Myth of “the One” that
is so central to the first trilogy. In the previous series, Neo is called “the One” because he
can exploit the rules of the Matrix. This role was created by the Matrix as a tool of control
to keep the Matrix safe from both humans and the Machines alike: when enough anomalies
aggregate to destabilize the Matrix, a human is selected to be born with special code that
attracts all the anomalies and eventually allows the human in question to reset the Matrix.
Thus “The One” is both a tool of control and a messianic figure. And in the first three
movies, The One is truly a singular, exemplary figure, perhaps best demonstrated by Neo’s
superman-like flight at the end of The Matrix or the messianic T-pose he assumes at the
climax of The Matrix Revolutions. By way of contrast, Wachowski’s newest film takes on the
myth of the exceptional individual free from history almost immediately. Once unplugged
from the new Matrix, Neo is taken to Io, a hidden city built together by both humans and
machines. There Neo encounters Niobe, a character from the previously trilogy who is
much, much older than when he last saw her. Niobe explains that belief in Neo as The One
led to both the destruction of Zion and the death of Neo’s mentor Morpheus, as various
members of Zion dedicated themselves to seeking The One instead of trying to work with
each other to fix their problems.
While Niobe instructs Neo (and, presumably, the audience) on the dangers inherent in
myths of The One, Wachowski uses another female character, Trinity, to rehabilitate that
myth and its role in the world of the Matrix itself. Toward the end of The Matrix Resurrections,
Trinity learns that she shares the same special code as Neo and can exploit the rules of the
Matrix at with even equal or greater ease. This access to power coincides with her realization
that her true family is not the group of avatars who claim to be her biological relations, but
the found family of human rebels she lived and worked with in Zion. The climax of the film
shows Trinity breaking free and affirming the importance of her family outside the Matrix,
starting with Neo, whom she protects from the Analyst by flying the two of them away
from danger when Neo’s powers fail. Trinity’s new abilities within The Matrix Resurrections
62
challenge the “great individual” narrative of history so central to Western culture and to the
myth of “The One” that permeates the world of the Matrix. Here, “The One” is reconfig-
ured as a group that may include any type of person willing to protect her true community.
While the original Matrix films granted Trinity some agency as a typical female love interest
with atypical and seemingly masculine aspects, they never granted her the level of power
attributed to Neo; she remained “separate, but equal.” By way of contrast, The Matrix Resur-
rections elevates her to true equality with Neo in terms of power, presence within the story,
and vitality to the new Matrix’s future.
Conclusion: Renovating the Matrix

The Matrix Resurrections ends with Trinity and Neo re-uniting in the physical world outside
the Matrix. At long last the misery of closeness is broken, and they can continue their lives
together. They do so by confronting the Analyst and while blows are thrown, the real action
unfolds in their conversation on the possibility of change in the new Matrix. The Analyst
assures Neo and Trinity that they cannot change this Matrix, as it is designed to exploit mis-
ery and keep people from coming together. Their tactics from the earlier iterations of the
Matrix will never work, as there is no community available to support their revolution. In
response, Neo and Trinity acknowledge they will not be able to enact the kinds of massive,
sweeping change to the Matrix they have in the past. However, they still vow to make small
changes where they can, to help those in need, and to work for a better world. This recalibra-
tion of how to enact meaningful change shows a maturity within the characters. Recognizing
that the promise of sweeping resolution is often undermined by systems of control that can
change and adapt to external threats, Trinity and Neo shift to a new mode of action based on
renovating the system from within. Indeed, their unique positions as outsiders who have been
freed from, reintegrated into, and freed once again from the Matrix hold forth the promise
of allowing them to help others escape and to leave renovation marks on the Matrix through
their actions. The world will change, not with a bang, but with one person making one small
difference at a time.
The Matrix Resurrections shows us the power of renovation in SF narrative. The original
Matrix, written from a closeted trans perspective, is about becoming strong enough to break a
system that others could not. It is a youthful celebration of becoming the single great person
who can destroy the barriers separating people—not through force, but through something
softer: emotions, kindness, and sacrifice. Now, twelve years later and told from the perspective
of an older, out transwoman, The Matrix Resurrections tells a different story. The Matrix does not
simply reject outsiders who threaten its stability but, much like Halberstam’s systems of neo-
liberal integration, assimilates and profits from the energy of those once-threatening outsiders.
This process not only defangs the outsider but keeps them separated from their communities
and allows the system to adopt the very fangs they took. A single person cannot break this sys-
tem: no one person can single handedly defeat this beast. Instead, one possible path forward is
to renovate and fight from the inside, connecting across vast communities to change the system
slowly, until it is unrecognizable to itself. Perhaps then, what The Matrix Resurrections shows us
is not the end of a series, but a new beginning: the beginning of the longest, hardest thing Neo
and Trinity, and, by extension, the audience, will ever have to do. Together, we must live, build
bridges to others, and forge shelters to weather the oppressive systems we are trapped within.
This process has a distinct beginning, but never an end. After all, one can finish building a
house, but we are never done renovating it.
63
Terra Gasque
Bibliography
Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University
Press, 2005.
Hopkinson, Nalo. “Introduction.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by
Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004, pp. 7–9.
Lash, Jolie. “Lilly Wachowski Explains Why She’s Not Involved with Matrix 4: “That’s a tough one.”
Entertainment, 25 August 2021. https://ew.com/movies/lilly-wachowski-explains-not-involved-
the-matrix/.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Feminist Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader, edited by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills. Routledge, 2003, pp. 25–29.
Migdon, Brooke. “Keanu Reeves Says Trans Character was Cut from ‘The Matrix.’ ” The Hill,
2 December 2021. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture/584049-keanu-
reeves-says-trans-character-was-cut-from-the/.
Wachowski, Lana, director. The Matrix Resurrections. Warner Bros, 2021.
Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski, directors. The Matrix. Warner Bros, 1999.
Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski, directors. The Matrix Reloaded. Warner Bros, 2003.
Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski, directors. The Matrix Revolutions. Warner Bros, 2003.
64
9
BUFFALO GALS AND TALKING
JELLYFISH
Feminisms and Animal Studies
in Science Fiction
Joan Gordon
“The truth is, we [women] live like Bats, or Owls, Labour like beasts, and Die like
Worms.”
—Margaret Cavendish, from “Female Orations” (1662), qtd. in Robbins
Women have always insisted they are women, not animals. They certainly did so in science
fiction (SF) well before it became a genre—witness Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World from
the seventeenth century. This chapter, however, recognizes that the categories of “women” and
“animals” were never really stable enough to foster an unentangled view of feminism and animal
studies in SF. As feminism evolved into feminisms, as it moved from binary to multifarious
identities, and from identity politics to hybridity and posthumanism, animal studies evolved
similarly. Here, through readings of a variety of texts, I will transform the declaration of my
opening sentence into a way of questioning its very terms.
After a brief glance at how authors of the 1970s combined ideas about feminism and animal
studies in SF, I will examine two later moments in its timeline. The first moment is 1990, when
Ursula K. Le Guin’s animal stories collected in Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (written
from 1971–87 and collected in 1990) and Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog were published.
This was the same year in which two groundbreaking works of queer theory were published,
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, ideas not
consciously explored in either Le Guin’s or Emshwiller’s stories. I will discuss Le Guin’s and
Emshwiller’s works using Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s paranoid and reparative reading, considering
queer theory along with queer animal studies. Then, after a short race through the intervening
period, I will move the discussion forward to an examination of two contemporary writers,
Nnedi Okorafor and Charlie Jane Anders, to show how feminism and animal studies in SF have
evolved into a less binary vision that turns this chapter’s opening sentence into a list of unstable
categories ready for dismantling.
Let me begin by describing how Sedgwick’s categories of paranoid and reparative reading
inform my consideration of animal studies and feminism in SF. In her groundbreaking work
on the subject, Sedgwick describes paranoid reading as a process of “exposure” (138) and
“of unveiling hidden violence” (140, emphasis in original), whereas reparative readings allow
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-11 65
Joan Gordon
“the reader to realize the future may be different from the present” (146) and is full of
“queer possibility” (147). Reparative readings are future-oriented and associated with the
rejection of gender reification, moving toward more flexible and open-ended possibilities.
When I approach a work of fiction in a paranoid way, I find how it enacts violence toward
persons and ideas I value. When I read reparatively, I look for how I can make the text fit
the world to which I aspire. I will be reading the texts under consideration here in both
ways to move them through acknowledgment of the personhood of other species, to an
understanding of a more generous view of what it means to be a woman and a feminist,
and then to show how recent works of science fiction embrace these more generous views
of feminism and species.
Feminist SF novels of the 1970s, including Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1974) and Marge
Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), imagined separatist utopias that recognized non-
heterosexual ways of being but did not necessarily connect feminism with the rights of other
species. Other novelists, however, did indeed connect feminism and animal rights. Sally Miller
Gearheart’s Wanderground (1970) imagines a fairly gentle separatist world, away from the threats
of men’s cities, in which women live in harmony with nature and communicate telepathically
with other species. In the grittier Motherlines (1978) by Suzy McKee Charnas, women again live
separately from the cities of men, where no animals have survived and women are treated like
chattel. The society of women is not gentle but highly forceful and highly technological, as it uses
genetically modified horses for reproductive purposes. In all these works, non-cisgendered people
are acknowledged and in some, the connections between women other species are valued.
Published in 1990, Le Guin’s Buffalo Gals collects stories from the 1970s forward, and so
it is no surprise that many of the tales included in this anthology reflect the feminist ideals of
the time. This is especially true of the title story “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come out Tonight”
(1987) and “The Wife’s Story” (1980), both of which examine how the distinctions between
human women and other animals are erased by patriarchal culture. “The Wife’s Story” is a
relatively slight story in which a wolf family discovers that the pater familias is in fact a werewolf,
turning from a “good husband, a good father” (77) into a vicious and murderous human man
who must be destroyed. I did not read this critically when I first came upon it; I simply saw it
as a feminist tale about the true nature of wolves and men. But now, after Eve Sedgwick, I read
“The Wife’s Story” more critically, as an example of second-wave feminism: important but
limited to cisgender women’s concerns about domestic equality and centered on binary, fixed
sexual identities.
“Buffalo Gals” is similarly indebted to second-wave feminist ideals: in this story, a white child
is found after a plane wreck, unable to care for herself, so various other species—coyote, deer,
chickadees, and so on—care for her until she can make her way back to people like herself. The
differences between humans and other persons are shown as flexible but important. Coyote, for
instance, looks human to the child, while the child looks like a coyote to Coyote. As Coyote
explains to the child, “There’s the first people, and then the others.” The first people are “the
animals. . . . All the old ones. . . . And you pups, kids, fledglings” and everyone else are “The
others. The new people. The ones who came” (36). As in “The Wife’s Story,” adult humans
are inferior to other species: more dangerous, more destructive. Children, however, are the
exception among humans and therefore worth saving. It is only when adult humans begin to
separate themselves from other species that they become “the others. The new people.” Like
other second-wave feminist texts, “The Wife’s Story” makes simple, binary gender distinctions:
the females of all the species included in Le Guin’s story are the ones who produce and care for
their own offspring, and they are the ones who make sure Le Guin’s human child is nurtured
until she can return to her own people.
66
Buffalo Gals and Talking Jellyfish
We see similar binary categories in Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog, where human women are
transformed into other animals and other animals are transformed into human women—and
it is often difficult to tell who is going in which direction. Meanwhile, human men remain
unchanged and are portrayed as almost universally controlling, attempting to suppress women’s
animal instincts but demanding they continue to care for men. The novel’s heroine is a dog who
is transforming into a human: her two most pronounced traits are a dog-like devotion to the
family baby and her love of music and singing. Again, male and female roles are clearly marked,
and reproduction and nurturing emphasized. However, while Le Guin celebrates the maternal
instincts of all animals, Emshwiller demonstrates how women are seen as less-than-human, as
animal, by men. Despite these overt differences, bringing a paranoid reading frame to these
stories makes clear that they operate from similar second-wave feminist viewpoints rooted in
identity politics: both authors define womanhood by reproduction with little regard for race,
class, or sexual identity and both normalize cisgender, heterosexual, binary views of gender at
the expense of a more complex reality.
Reading these texts reparatively, however, I also recognize that they reflect some of the very
real and important difficulties faced by all kinds of women, both then and today. Women still
earn less than men, are typically more vulnerable to physical attack, endure intrusive reproduc-
tive regulation, and so on. The problems of second-wave feminism have not yet been solved,
so these stories remain trenchant. But that is not the only way in which these texts can be read
restoratively. First, we can remind ourselves that what is true for the often-white, heterosexual,
cisgendered, able-bodied women of these stories is even more so for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and
differently abled people as well. The shapeshifting of these stories invites us to shift ourselves
into subversive rearticulation. We recognize the limitations of these works, but also see them
as important steps toward acknowledging broader understandings of species interrelationship
and thus of “undoing and remaking the world” into something richer and stranger that escapes
simple binary categorization.
Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, other SF authors did indeed connect feminism
with animal studies in increasingly nonbinary ways. Perhaps the most important in this respect
is Octavia E. Butler, whose Lilith’s Brood series (1987–89) provides readers with the startling
new image of the “amborg,” a being born of human intelligence and alien connectivity to
other species (see my “Gazing across the Abyss” for further discussion). Sheri S. Tepper’s novels
The Family Tree (1997), Six Moon Dance (1998), and The Companions (2003) are ecofeminist SF
tales with both strong female characters and powerful, sentient animals of other species, even
as they maintain the traditional male/female binary. Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords (1993)
and Hwarhath Stories (collected 2016) imagine an alien culture that normalizes queer sociality
and questions the uniqueness of human sentience. Karen Traviss’s six-volume Wess’Harr Wars
(2004–2008, beginning with City of Pearl) imagines multiple species of nonhuman alien sentient
people and multiple gender possibilities as well, linking ecological concerns to feminist and
animal rights issues. The constellation of gender, species, and ecology forms a major concern in
SF, as it increasingly does in literature and life in general.
As I write this is 2022, it seems obvious that gender, species, and ecology are of paramount
importance in a field that, however dystopian its visions, assumes a future of some kind. Other
chapters will discuss ecology: here I now turn to two current writers of young adult fiction
who face the queering of gender and species head on and joyfully. Nnedi Okorafor and Charlie
Jane Anders provide readers with coming-of-age stories that use aliens to represent wider pos-
sibilities for gender and species relations than those imagined by even the most creative of their
foremothers. Together their work demonstrates ways in which contemporary feminists have
embraced a genderqueer, nonbinary perspective, just as animal studies scholars have moved
67
Joan Gordon
on to destabilize species difference and queer the human/animal binary. In Donna Haraway’s
words, such work “tracks stories and figures for making kin in the Cthulucene”—her term for
the present age of climate change (“Staying” 4). They assume “oddkin,” as she puts it, among
multiple genders and species.
Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian American who writes what she calls “Africanfuturism,” or
SF that is “specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and
point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center
the West” (“Africanfuturism Defined”). This is especially true of the Binti series, in which
Okorafor’s eponymous heroine leaves behind her very traditional African upbringing, complete
with rigidly binary notions of gender, when she attends university on a far-off planet. Once she
leaves the gravitational pull of Earth and its patriarchal cultures, Binti becomes acutely aware of
how much more complex and queer the world can be, and finally returns to look at her home
with fresh eyes.
Binti is told from the point of view of a mathematically gifted and neurologically diverse
Himba girl who “trees,” or falls into a trance-like state when contemplating “the shallows of
the mathematical sea” (10). In Binti’s world, treeing is not aberrant, but an asset for solving
difficult mathematical equations. And yet, while Himba culture accepts neurological diversity,
it—and Binti herself, at first—cleaves to traditional heterosexual roles for women. However,
Binti gains a broader perspective on sex and gender possibilities through her interactions with
aliens—including a genetic exchange with the meduse, a jellyfish-like alien species. Since the
meduse identify as “it,” and Binti identifies as “she,” Okorafor’s heroine must learn to incor-
porate both another species and another gender identity. Of course, Okorafor does not stop at
dismantling the human/animal boundary: by the chronological end of the series, Binti has also
incorporated the DNA of an organic, sentient ship into her body and identity. Significantly, at
no point does Binti concern herself with nurturing children, even though the ship sees itself as
a mother. Instead, she strives to nurture all parts of herself.
The story “Binti: Sacred Fire” includes a particularly interesting discussion of trans identity.
In this story, Binti becomes friends with a non-Himba human girl, Haifa, who announces that
she transitioned to female at 13. Binti is surprised by this, and the girls discuss the differences
between their two communities in dealing with people who transition. Neither community
condemns them, but the Himba are less open about it, referring obliquely to the process as one
of “alignment”: “Once they align, it was never mentioned again” (65). Haifa initially compares
her process of sexual transition to that of Binti’s species transition, but ultimately decides the
two are not quite equivalent because Haifa chose her transition and Binti did not. In the end,
Binti complicates this comparison even further by sharing that she does not regret her own
involuntary transition any more than Haifa does her voluntary one.
As this brief reading of the Binti series suggests, twenty-first-century feminist SF has moved
to a more inclusive space beyond fixed gender identities or roles, while still acknowledging
that more conservative views remain. And it has moved to more inclusive ideas about species
identity as well by acknowledging the sentience and value of nonhuman persons in the form of
aliens with the traits of nonhuman Earth species. Later, the novel makes even more clear how
broadly it views personhood when an elephant teaches another human “to speak to all peo-
ple”—including people of other species (230)—and that human goes on to commune “with
various peoples of the desert, from fox to dog to hawk to ant” (311). Indeed, such acknowledg-
ment extends beyond the animal kingdom to plants: “Do you know plants can do math? They
measure what they need to survive and thrive” (304). It also extends to microbes, when Binti
learns that microbes have repaired her in a purposeful manner. By the end of the series, Binti
contains multitudes beyond the meduse, including the aforementioned sentient ship, microbes,
68
a human tribe called the desert people or Enyi Zinariya, and an alien species called the Miri 12.
Aimee Bahng calls such multiplicity a “Femi-Queer Commons,” arguing that this trope was first
introduced by Octavia Butler and now is used by many feminist SF authors including Okorafor
“to formulate nonhierarchical socialities and even more radical onto-epistemological modes
of living in common, often through feminist ideas of collaborative praxis and queer notions of
kinship” (310).
Okorafor’s “femi-queer commons” is a complex and sometimes contradictory place for a
young woman overwhelmed by the wide universe of “queer notions of kinship.” Near the end
of “Binti: The Night Masquerade,” Okorafor’s heroine meets with a therapist to discuss her
transformations: “I like who I am. I love my family. . . . I don’t want to change, to grow! . . . Am
I human?” (348). Like most good therapists, she does not answer Binti’s question. Instead, she
responds, “And here you stand healthy and strong. . . . And strange” (349). Binti, confronted by
new ways of being, and by her own literal transformations, struggles to maintain her original
identity and adjust to the strangeness of her new more complex existence—this is how she, like
all modern people, really, must come of age.
We see this same struggle in Charlie Jane Anders’s coming-of-age novel Victories Greater
Than Death. Anders is openly transgender, a category she finds much more complex than sim-
ply moving from one gender to another and that she explores with both wit and poignancy in
her newsletter Happy Dancing (happydancing.substack.com). Anders’s struggle to find herself
is very much reflected in the struggles of protagonist Tina Mains and her friends in Anders’s
novel. Victories follows Tina and her fellow “Earthlings” as they join an intergalactic force called
The Royal Fleet to combat their nemesis, ironically called The Compassion: “Their name
sounds friendly, but they follow an ideology of total genocide and subjugation” (32). Tina and
her best friend are from the United States, but the “Earthlings” team is diverse and hails from
China, Brazil, and England; together, they represent a variety of races, genders, abilities, bod-
ies, and allegiances, enacting Bhang’s “nonhierarchical socialities and even more radical onto-
epistemological modes of living in common” (310). Once we include the many humanoid and
nonhumanoid members of The Royal Fleet and of the worlds they visit, we have a space opera
version of a “femi-queer commons” with very odd, and accepted, notions of kinship. Rather
than coming of age by learning to accept oddkin, the characters of Victories begin from that
place. Some people prefer to be she, others he, still others they, and some become furious when
called by any pronoun at all; some belong to societies with two genders, some with three; some
look like humans, others like foxes, still others are part rock, and still others unlike any species
known on Earth. In The Royal Fleet they are all comrades. Thus Anders queers race, gender,
species, and kingdom as well.
Like Binti, Tina questions her personal identity. She is both a queer human girl and the clone
of an alien Makvarian, in the process of changing physiologically from one species to another; she
is both a human girl “who went to high school and flunked driver’s ed and everything,” and the
clone of an alien intergalactic hero (90–91). When the Earthlings join hands in an act of friendship
and solidarity, she asks, “Do I qualify as an Earthling: And do I even want to?” (90). The answer is
neither yes or no: She is both human and alien—and accepted as such by her Earthlings and other
shipmates alike. The novel is, among other things, a lovely story about friendship.
It is also a story about choices, and how difficult, yet important, they are: “Everybody has
choices. . . . You always get to choose how to define yourself,” says Elza, Tina’s trans girlfriend
(96)—despite the fact that, when Elza made the choice to not “be a boy anymore,” her par-
ents threw her out on the street (122). Tina’s reaction: “I didn’t even realize she was trans, or
whatever” (122). What mattered for one generation is “whatever” for Tina’s, or at least for her
group of oddkin.
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Joan Gordon
As Anders dismantles hierarchical relationships of every kind, her characters acknowledge

how choice works within and against oppressive, colonizing systems of thought. Elza points out
that “people get programmed in all sorts of ways, by privilege, or propaganda, or whatever”
(178). Individual people and entire cultures can relinquish choice or deny it, demanding
conformity to cultural norms instead. That is exactly how Anders depicts the Compassion:
As an intergalactic colonizing hegemony demanding allegiance of all people they recognize
as human and destroying those they do not. Ancient explorers, one of the shipmates explains,
destroyed all
intelligent creatures who weren’t human-shaped . . . for hundreds of thousands of

years, and it shaped the galaxy we live in today. It’s the reason why so many of us
humanoid species are so powerful. And why anyone [else] is still struggling to catch
up. (110)
Such violence was and continues to be used by those in power to deny choice to those who do
not conform to the status quo. The choices of each young person to express their individual
identity in matters of gender and species are, then, connected to choices on much greater scales.
In both Okorafor’s and Anders’s narratives, characters move from paranoid to reparative
readings of their own identities as they come of age. Each author’s protagonist begins by
thinking of herself as unitary and solitary, less than others, and unable to join a community;
thus they are paranoid or critical of their own position in the commons. As they grow, each
becomes multiple, not only one thing or another, but something more complex, and indeed
more difficult to accept. And, finally, each learns to accept their multiple identities, neither one
thing nor another, but both unitary and hybrid, solitary and a part of something communal:
each learns a reparative view of their complexity. This is how, metaphorically, adolescent readers
may learn to negotiate their own alienations, mixed feelings, hybrid identities, non-conforming
allegiances, and changing bodies as they negotiate their own complex selves.
Okorafor and Anders also illustrate how the shift from paranoid to reparative readings,
and from unitary to complex ideas about identity, reflects both the complexity of human
gender, race, and culture, and beyond that, the complex connections between human and
other persons. These stories demonstrate a movement beyond a concern for difference to a
seeking out of kinship much like Bhang’s “Femi-Queer Commons” (310). Both stories show,
through the journeys of their protagonists, how difficult it has become to separate ourselves
from other species as being unique in importance or value: indeed, while taxonomy may rank
being from domain down to species, those rankings are not evaluative, nor are they always easy
to determine. Plants are entangled with fungi; animals sustain and are sustained by microbes;
organisms live in symbiotic relationships. If species is so difficult to determine, then who are
any of us to say what it means to be a “real” woman when there are so many ways to be one?
Margaret Cavendish recognized that men saw women as bats or owls or worms: now we see
that we are entangled with these living beings—and with many others. I began by promising
to destabilize my opening sentence: “Women have always insisted they were women, not
animals.” The category of women, we now recognize, like that of animal, has been queered into
something much more generous than it once was; species, even kingdom, have been queered
as well: oddkin indeed.
Nevertheless, I am aware of how much we are enmeshed not only in this entangled world
but in our own view of that world. As much as I would like to conclude on this optimistic
note, I wonder what the next iteration of paranoid and reparative readings will reveal of the
connections between feminism and animal studies in SF. I am mindful of Fredric Jameson’s
70
warning that all too often “our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were
little more than projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation”
(211). What projections do we impose here?
Bibliography
Anders, Charlie Jane. Victories Greater Than Death. Tor, 2021.
Bahng, Aimee. “Plasmodial Improprieties: Octavia Butler, Slime Molds, and Imagining a Femi-Queer
Commons.” Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader, edited by Cyd Cipolla et al. University of
Washington Press, 2017, pp. 310–325.
Emshwiller, Carol. Carmen Dog. Mercury House, 1990.
Gordon, Joan. “Gazing Across the Abyss: The Amborg Gaze in Sheri S. Tepper’s Six Moon Dance.” Science
Fiction Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2008, pp. 189–206.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight.” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences,
ROC, 1990, pp. 17–60.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Wife’s Story.” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. ROC, 1990, pp. 77–83.
Okorafor, Nnedi. “Africanfuturism Defined.” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog, 19 October 2019. http://nnedi.
blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti: The Complete Trilogy. 2015–2019. DAW, 2019.
Robbins, Michael. “The Royally Radical Life of Margaret Cavendish.” The Paris Review, 15 April 2019.
www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/04/15/the-royally-radical-life-of-margaret-cavendish/.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You
Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Touching Feeling. Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 123–151.
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10
ASEXUAL AND GENDERLESS
FUTURES1
Anna Kurowicka
Introduction
Science fiction (SF) is a fruitful ground for thinking through queer desires and gender
identities because of the ways in which it defamiliarizes these categories. Science fiction (SF)
critics and writers ask how non-normative sexualities may function in imagined futures and
what this, in turn, reveals about how they are understood here and now (Pearson, Hollinger,
and Gordon; Melzer). This chapter examines queer visions of futures that posit lack of sexual
desire and/or lack of gender (or biological sex), asking how the two are connected and how
they can contribute to reimagining heteronormative desire and the heteronormative gender
binary. Focusing on two classic texts of queer SF, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula
K. Le Guin and “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1966) by Samuel R. Delany, and the newer, critically
acclaimed Imperial Radch trilogy (2013–15) by Ann Leckie, I use the asexual perspective to
find “alien spaces” in which desire and gender are displaced.
The stories explored in this chapter center on characters with bodies that could be described
as “unnatural,” in that these characters do not embrace conventional ideas about sex, gender, and
sexuality (Melzer 28) because their experience of gender and desire is either nonexistent or radically
different than the heteronormative binary. I show how some of these characters recreate the link
between gender and desire assumed in Judith Butler’s concept of heterosexual matrix, while others
embody alternative positionalities and intimacies detached from this structure. I begin by proposing
a theoretical framework for understanding asexuality, the heterosexual matrix, and androgyny for
my close reading of Le Guin, Delany, and Leckie. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is perhaps
the most famous novel that destabilizes the gender binary, yet it continues to depict desire as fully
dependent on heterosexual attraction. Delany’s “Aye and Gomorrah” focuses on spacers, people
devoid of sexual characteristics and consequently also sexual desire, who can only be objects of desire
for others. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, a space opera set in a society without gender, lends itself
to a queer reading as a story of non-sexual intimacies and relations. The last text complements the
other two as one of the most critically acclaimed and widely discussed recent attempts at queering SF.
(Dis)entangling Desire and Gender

In so far as asexuality stands in opposition to normative compulsory sexuality (Gupta), it is always
a queer position. Within the framework of identity politics, asexuality is defined as the sexual
orientation and identity of “a person who does not experience sexual attraction” (asexuality.org).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-12 72
Asexual and Genderless Futures
Yet, using this identity-based definition is problematic in the case of SF because authors often use
their chosen genre to destabilize well-established categories and either render them meaningless
or suggest that they must be understood differently. Thus, I am not necessarily claiming asexual
identity for the characters I analyze; rather, I use a broader concept of “asexual resonances”
(Przybylo and Cooper, Przybylo 29), or ways of understanding desire and lack thereof that
resonate with the asexual perspective. The asexual perspective employed in this way enables us
to see those elements of SF world-building that decenter sexual desire and carve out a space for
identities and relationalities formed on different basis.
Exploring these SF worlds reveals how lack of gender and lack of desire are interconnected
and by extension how the very concepts of gender and desire mutually condition one another.
Is there no desire when there is no gender, and vice versa? According to Judith Butler’s theory
of heterosexual matrix, in the contemporary Western culture, one’s gender is largely defined
through sexual attraction to people of the opposite gender: one is a woman if/because one
desires men, and the other way around (30). Consequently, it seems that without a gender
binary—or perhaps even a sexual binary—there can be no sexual desire, since desire is
constituted through sexual difference. Indeed, Butler argues that the heterosexual matrix is the
primary philosophical and cultural paradigm that contributes to LGBTQ+ invisibility and the
unthinkability of non-heterosexual desire. Questioning the heterosexual matrix and imagining
new possibilities is precisely what connects queer theory and SF. SF offers an opportunity
to think through the implications of worlds build in opposition or without reference to the
heterosexual matrix and gender binary.
The radical possibilities of futures not organized around binary gender have inspired
many feminist and queer authors and critics. From female separatist utopias to cyberpunk
visions of the future in which bodies lose their materiality and connection to gender (Melzer
29), removing the male/female binary has been considered a sine qua non for building truly
feminist futures. SF author and critic Justine Larbalestier offers three possible “solutions or
alternatives to the conflict between the sexes that do not involve the reinscription of male
rule” in SF (73): worlds without men, worlds without distinct gender roles, and worlds
where sex difference does not exist due to pervasive androgyny or hermaphroditism. This
latter category is particularly provocative and contains multitude of possibilities for authors,
from cultural androgyny expressed through dress or behavior to various forms of biological
intersexuality to beings who possess some male and female sex markers, but not organized in
the same ways that they would be in our own world.
Mutually Constituted Gender and Desire

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) has been hailed as a groundbreaking work of feminist and
queer SF due to its creative engagement with gender norms and the construction of gender
itself. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was a prolific author of speculative fiction, including
fantasy, utopia, and science fiction. With a long career spanning the second half of the twentieth
century and the first decade of the twenty-first, she had enormous influence on the development
of the genre, especially with regards to themes of political systems and gender and sexuality.
Though The Left Hand of Darkness (LHD) is perhaps the best-known example of a feminist SF
text that uses androgynous aliens to explore what a world without gender difference might be
like, it has been criticized by other feminists for preserving the central place of masculinity. Le
Guin herself expressed reservations about some of the choices she made in LHD, especially
in terms of using “he” as the default pronoun, which resulted in making maleness the default
category even in a society of androgynes (“Gender”). Even so, LHD remains an important early
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Anna Kurowicka
attempt to think through androgyny, and the attempt itself tells us much about both the central
concerns of the 1960s and 70s feminist SF and its limitations.
Le Guin’s story is set on Gethen, whose people are described in The Left Hand of Darkness as
“hermaphrodite neuters” and for most of the time lack sex or gender. It is only in “kemmer,”
the mating season, that they become male or female and experience sexual desire. At that
time, the partner of the Gethenian in kemmer becomes the opposite sex. Readers discover
Gethen through the eyes of Genly Ai, a newcomer from a world in which gender and
sexuality are structured in a binary and heteronormative manner. The novel raises significant
questions about how alternate sex and gender systems might change society as a whole. When
observed by representatives of a heteronormative culture, Gethenians are pitied as “eunuchs”
or “castrated,” and immature children, in a manner reflective of colonialist discourses of
epistemological and moral privilege (Fayad 67). But Le Guin also suggests that the Gethenian
gender system has real advantages over more traditional heteronormative ones, in that the
Gethenians have very few aggressive impulses and have eliminated war altogether (LHD
102–3).
The Gethenian gender system may be interpreted as an example either of androgyny/
intersexuality, or of lack of sex and gender. “Intersexuality” typically suggests some
characteristics of (two or more) different sexes, which seems to be implied when Gethenians in
LHD are referred to as “potentials”, or “integrals” rather than “neuters” (101). In fact, the way
we understand Le Guin’s Gethenians depends entirely on one’s frame of reference:
The argument that Gethenians have two sexes depends entirely on our acceptance that
men and women have different sexes; to themselves, the Gethenians would obviously
appear to be single-sexed and Terrans would appear not as duals, but as halves, horribly
incomplete and perhaps mutilated. (Pearson 99, note 3)
At the same time, in the framework of heterosexual matrix, intersexuality, like asexuality,
challenges normative ideas about how desire is shaped by binary gender. This slippage between
intersexual and agender identity is evident in SF critic Brian Attebery’s point that the Gethenians
“offer a challenge to the notion of gender by having none” (130). Distinguishing between
intersex or androgynous bodies and sexless bodies or agender beings in SF poses significant
challenges, even more so considering the important political implications of the complexities
of trans identities. This is why it is important to focus on how gender is understood within a
particular SF text rather than conflating it with real-world categories.
Le Guin goes into significant detail describing the brief but intense experience of sex, gender,
and desire for her Gethenians in ways that make abundantly clear the differences between the
sex and gender systems of her fictional world versus our own:
Gender, and potency, are not attained in isolation. . . . When the individual finds a
partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated . . . until in one partner
either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or
shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes
on the other sexual role. (LHD 96)
Specific genitals, male or female, come into being as a result of desire that is oriented toward
a specific partner, one who must also be in kemmer at the same time. The question of which
partner becomes male and which becomes female is mostly relegated to chance: “Normal
individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether
74
they will be the male or the female, and have no choice in the matter” (LHD 97). Since specific
sex is a matter of chance and there is no sex in between kemmer, there are also no stable
gender roles, which is what made this vision so attractive to the feminist readers of the time of
publication.
At the same time, Le Guin contains the estrangement that readers might experience when
reading LHD by explaining the experience of kemmer in terms of the heterosexual matrix.
Desire appears in the first phase of kemmer and seems both overwhelming and undirected.
Sexual attraction is only produced in this specific moment and in the company of a potential
mate. Here then, it is literally one’s oppositional desire that makes one male or female.
Furthermore, while Le Guin insists that Gethenians are not sexed or gendered outside of the
temporary experience of desire, she treats sex/gender and sexual desire as somehow simply
dormant outside of kemmer, ready to come into being through an external impulse. Thus,
it is perhaps not so much that gender and desire do not exist at all, but rather they remain
latent until activated in the mating season. Thus, the Gethenians offer readers a radically
different way of thinking about sex and gender while simultaneously reasserting the primacy
of heterosexuality.
Sexless Objects of Desire

Gender and desire are also inextricably linked in the short story “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1966) by
Samuel R. Delany (1942–). One of the most prominent Black and queer writers of twentieth-
century SF, Delany wrote short stories and sprawling novels that escape easy categorization
and explore key themes of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Much of his SF
revolves around non-normative genders and desires, an interest that is also evident in Delany’s
autobiographical writing about gay life in 1960s and 70s New York City in The Motion of Light
in Water (1988) and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999). “Aye, and Gomorrah” is one
of Delany’s most well-known works and a foremost example of SF about queer bodily pleasures
(Morrison).
The story is a series of vignettes depicting interactions between “spacers,” astronauts who
have had their reproductive organs removed before puberty to avoid the effects of space radiation
on gametes, and the “frelks” who are sexually attracted to them. Even though spacers are devoid
of sex and gender, their assigned sex at birth is a topic of fascination to non-spacer humans,
who project whatever gender they find attractive onto the spacers. This may imply that “the
gender of someone without sex . . . depends . . . on what sort of desire they inspire in others”
(Attebery 140); thus, it seems that in this story, much like in The Left Hand of Darkness, gender
and desire are mutually constitutive. The key difference is that in Delany’s story this logic need
not be heterosexual; in some encounters, queer men and women express their disappointment
with spacers not fitting their desired gender.
Yet spacers are desired by frelks, for whom it is the unique embodiment and social position
of spacers that make them objects of desire. Frelks meet with contempt from spacers and see
themselves as unhappy victims of unfulfillable urges. The relationship between the two groups
centers around sex trade, which is implied yet never explicitly described. Delany referred to
the story as being “somehow about the desire for desire” (“Afterword”), suggesting that neither
side of the exchange truly desires the other, but rather chases the need itself. In a similar vein,
Veronica Hollinger claims that frelks are “helplessly—and hopelessly—erotically attracted to the
sexless spacers,” so their desires are “fulfilled only in the deferral of fulfilment” (151). Here then,
the lack of sex/gender does not produce a lack of desire, but instead prompts whole new kinds
of desire and sexual identity.
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Anna Kurowicka
While there is certainly a sense of melancholy and longing around frelks’ interactions with
spacers, it does not necessarily follow that their desire cannot be satisfied. Even though Delany
never explicitly confirms what occurs between them, sexually or otherwise, the contextual
hints of sex work suggest that there may well be sexual contact and some fulfillment of desire,
however imperfect it may be due to its transactional nature. It is telling that these potentially
sexual encounters are impossible for the narrative voice to describe. I would argue this is
because spacers, without genitalia and sexual characteristics, are constructed as perfect yet
perverse and passive objects of desire. Frelks are compared to necrophiles and “grave-robbers”
(Delany, “Aye” 98), not only implying that their desires are deviant, but also positioning
spacers as dead bodies or children, subjects who cannot experience desire of their own. This
in turn suggests that desire is impossible to imagine without sexual characteristics; spacers’
indeterminate gender and lack of sex situate them beyond the realm of experiencing desire.
In this reading, spacers are asexual because they are unable to reciprocate; as one frelk tells a
spacer, “I want you because you can’t want me” (Delany, “Aye” 98). The fact that they cannot
desire due to their lack of sexual characteristics, along with their infantilization, play into an
assumption that asexuality is related to immaturity. Lack of markers of gender and sex render
one desireless, but also reinforce the mutual entanglement of gender and desire for Delany’s
uniquely queer subjects.
Intimacies Outside Gender

In Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy (2013–15), desire is constructed outside of the logic
of heterosexual matrix partly because gender is erased on the linguistic and discursive level.
A winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association
Award for Ancillary Justice (2013), Leckie’s use of “she” as the default pronoun in the
Imperial Radch trilogy is a gesture reminiscent of Le Guin’s earlier effort to build a world
without gender; however, the feminine pronoun has a stronger effect of defamiliarization
on the readers and succeeds in decentering masculinity (Faucheux). The Imperial Radch
trilogy is thus both a continuation of feminist SF authors’ engagement with non-normative
gender and sexuality that began with Le Guin and Delany in the 1960s, and part of the
contemporary efforts to incorporate minority perspectives in the SF community and its
literature. The spectrum of linguistic options accessible to readers interested in describing
sex and gender from new perspectives was much broader for Leckie in the 2010s than was
the case for Le Guin in the 1960s; in particular, the greater visibility of transgender people
has resulted in greater awareness of diverse gender pronouns and the variety of sex/gender
identities.
Ancillary Justice is set in the Radch empire, whose culture and language do not recognize
gender difference; the generic pronoun for every person is “she.” While other languages used
in the empire indicate gender and people have different bodies that can be potentially sorted
into “male” and “female,” as suggested by some brief references, there is functionally no gender
difference in the dominant culture. This makes Leckie’s world an “ideal queer universe” because
the reader is prevented from assuming any gender and sexual identity for most characters and
cannot read particular sexual encounters as same-sex or different-sex, since there is no indication
of sexual characteristics (Faucheux).
While the lack of gender indicators certainly affects the reader’s experience, Leckie’s
defamiliarization of desire also works on other levels. The narrator of the novels is Breq,
a ship who, having lost her ship body and most of the human bodies that served as her
extended consciousness, now exists in a singular human body. As she is not a human being
76
and has been socialized in the Radch culture, Breq’s ways of relating to other beings,
including both humans and other AI ships and stations, is completely devoid of gender
and sex considerations. She is asexual, though it is never made clear if this is her individual
quality, or one universal to all AIs. Her perspective on relationships is rather unique: there
are mentions of people engaging in sex, but the reader gets no insight into how their desire
is constructed. It cannot stem from gender since this is not a consideration in Radch; other
elements may determine people’s desires, but Breq is unaware of them, so they are beyond
the scope of the represented world.
This is not to say that Breq cannot participate in intimate relationships. Indeed, Leckie’s
AI longs for emotional contact but at first cannot imagine how to attain because she has been
conditioned by oft-repeated Radchaai credo that “ships love their captains,” suggesting that
love is possible only between different types of beings, such as ships and humans. Breq is a
ship but one in a human body, which seems to make her uniquely unsuited for forming the
conventional ship-captain partnership. Yet throughout the series she forms close relationships
and even creates a family of sorts, made of another ship and several humans. She is thus not
only capable of experiencing affection for others, but also being an object of affection. Bonds
of affection and attraction, however, do not automatically lead to sex or desire. Breq feels
no sexual desire for the members of her family, while her human companions find sexual
fulfillment with one another. Somehow, it all works. Thus, Leckie celebrates a multiplicity
of sexual (including asexual) subjectivities while showing readers how the disappearance
of gender might open possibilities for intimate and romantic relationships that decenter or
disregard sexual desire.
Conclusion
Expanding queer insight into SF to include asexual perspectives is crucial not only to do justice
to the diversity of non-normative genders and sexualities in the genre, but also to examine the
logic governing visions of futures without gender and desire. As I have discussed in this chapter,
the ways in which SF authors use their chosen gender to critically assess sex and gender relations
and to imagine alternate possibilities depends largely on their historical and political moment.
While pioneering feminist authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany were inspired to
translate the androgynous impulses of second wave feminism into their visions of differently
sexed and gendered futures, Le Guin remains bound to the heteronormative assumptions about
binary sex and gender that were very much part of identity-politics feminism. Delany’s own
experience as a gay man living outside the heterosexual matrix enables him to imagine non-
binary sex and gender identities, but his tendency to link the lack of desire to immaturity and
death indicates the very real difficulty of imagining and representing asexual ways of being.
Writing nearly half a century and two waves of feminism later, Ann Leckie channels new
insights about the multiplicity of sex and gender identity and the complexity of desire to imagine
a future where asexual beings do indeed experience the craving for and ability to connect with
other individuals intimately and romantically, without needing to put sexual desire at the center
of their relationships. Such SF texts expand our traditional understandings of conscious life
beyond rigidly delineated concepts of human sexuality and desire as heteronormative and binary,
suggesting exciting queer alternatives for our literary—and, perhaps, real-world—futures.
Note
1 This research was funded by the National Science Center, Poland [project no. 2020/39/D/HS2/00116].
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Bibliography
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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2006.
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2003, pp. 91–101.
Delany, Samuel. The Motion of Light in Water. Arbor House, 1988.
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11
MAKING THE END TIMES
GREAT AGAIN
Postapocalypses, Preppers, and the Politics
of Patriarchy on American Television
Carlen Lavigne
Introduction
Between the turn of the millennium and the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, the
United States produced a notable glut of postapocalyptic television series, including Jeremiah
(Showtime, 2002–04), Jericho (CBS, 2006–08), Falling Skies (TNT, 2011–15), Revolution
(NBC, 2012–14), Defiance (Syfy, 2013–16), The Last Ship (TNT, 2014–18), Z Nation (Syfy,
2014–18), The 100 (The CW, 2014–20), The Last Man on Earth (Fox, 2015–18), Into the
Badlands (AMC, 2015–19), Wayward Pines (Fox, 2015–16), Colony (NBC, 2016–18), The
Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–22), and Fear the Walking Dead (AMC, 2015–). Such series
repeatedly detailed Earth futures in which some crisis has already ended society as we know
it, and ragtag bands of survivors must work to build new futures. These fictional offerings
were accompanied by reality television “prepper” programs like The Colony (Discovery, 2009–
10), Doomsday Preppers (National Geographic, 2011–14), and Doomsday Castle (National
Geographic, 2013). Analyzing such programs in terms of the catastrophes they posit, the new
societies they envision, and their relations to real-world social and political forces can tell us
much about American cultural anxieties during this period. While speculative catastrophes
may represent a morass of anxieties, “survival” in these programs is inevitably linked to white
male power and the American political right.
Similar rises in apocalyptic stories are also found in other cultures and historical moments; one
could cite medieval plague fictions, the Bible (Thompson 5), or the popularity of giant radiated
monster movies in post-WWII Japan (Caputi 101). Indeed, “Apocalyptic writing is itself a remainder,
a symptom, an aftermath of some disorienting catastrophe” (Berger 7); concepts of apocalypse are
neither new, nor specifically confined to any individual medium, culture, or geographic region, and
horror stories have always reflected the anxieties of their times.
The twenty-first-century Hollywood surge in postapocalyptic television series is notable
specifically for relying on heteronormative, white masculine tropes produced within the
context of longstanding links between science fiction and far-right masculine white supremacy
in America. The notion of apocalyptic invasion in particular, as exemplified in works like H. G.
Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), has historically lent itself to scenarios in which white colonials
re-envision themselves as noble and embattled victims of violent oppression (Rieder 124).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-13 79
Carlen Lavigne
In such readings, “Imagining oneself as a colonized victim often serves as the ideological core
of imperial fantasy for those who benefit the most from modern-day conditions of empire”
(Higgins 1). Stories that have gained right-wing popularity in this vein have included examples
such as pulp science fiction stories of the early twentieth century (Rieder 142); Philip K.
Dick’s work “regarding the artificial and imprisoning nature of everyday existence” (Higgins
191); Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999) (Higgins 190). Such works have been distinctly
masculinized; though women have of course had a well-established and influential presence
through all of Western science fiction history (Lefanu; Merrick), specific subgenres like the
early cyberpunk works that helped to spawn The Matrix have been particularly described as “the
most fully delineated urban fantasies of white male folklore” (Ross 145) and have noticeably
omitted or rejected marginalized social movements (152). There are many branches of science
fiction firmly rooted in Western patriarchy.
This is not to argue that all such science fiction is inherently reactionary and conservative (far
from it), or that science fiction as a genre is somehow more reactionary and conservative than
other forms of popular culture; it is simply to say that some elements of science fiction have long
appealed to people invested in white supremacist, xenophobic colonial masculinity. This may be
especially true of postapocalyptic works—not that they are intentionally or inevitably regressive,
but that many are easily read that way. We can evaluate such series’ significance as markers of a
specific cultural mindset and moment.
The Nightmares Model: What Fears?

On one level, such programming can be analyzed in terms of specific fears: what is causing
these visions of apocalypse? Heather Urbanski’s “nightmares model” provides a possible
lens for this type of analysis, citing speculative works as “cautionary tale[s]” in which “part
of what genre writers do is to look at society, into the future, and within themselves, and
then reflect the fears and nightmares they find” (9). In such readings, the disasters we see in
fiction may be seen to represent the horrors of everyday life and the daily news cycle. If “it
has become a cultural truism that levels and types of cultural anxiety can often be tracked
by the kind of monsters that a given culture produces for entertainment purposes” (Simpson
38), then when we consider global events like the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown in
Japan, or ongoing tensions between countries like the United States, Iran, Russia, and
North Korea, it’s hardly surprising that nuclear missiles explode in Jericho, Revolution, Z
Nation, and The 100.
Fictional apocalypses from the early twenty-first century can take a multitude of shapes,
representing a broad range of cultural anxieties. Revolution connects the specter of nuclear
annihilation to uncontrolled nanotech and rogue artificial intelligence, invoking fears about
the frailties of complex technological infrastructures. Jeremiah and The Last Ship both take place
in worlds ravaged by deadly pandemics, suggesting disease concerns about SARS, Ebola, or
Zika. Zombies, like those seen in The Walking Dead or Z Nation, can stand as metaphors for
any number of anxieties, including viral infections, Hurricane Katrina or climate change, the
2008 financial meltdown, immigration, or the post-9/11 war on terror (Bishop 14). Likewise,
alien invasions and body-snatching narratives—such as those in Falling Skies or Colony—may
frequently be read as metaphors for cultural anxieties about the racialized and/or immigrant
Other (Takacs; Kakoudaki); here, our analysis begins to reveal the first shades of explicitly white
Christian anxieties seeded within these texts. Early twenty-first-century postapocalyptic series
produced in the United States reflect a time of turmoil amid growing social tensions and a series
of traumatic events.
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Making the End Times Great Again
The nightmares model suggests that our stories reflect the specific mindsets and fears of
particular times and places, and the United States at the onset of the twenty-first century may
be seen as a morass of post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-SARS psychological strains. If a marked
increase in Hollywood disaster movies between the 1980s and 1990s might be taken as a sign
of already-growing cultural preoccupation with such potential crises (Thompson 12), rising
tensions into the twenty-first century are only further reflected in cultural products such as
American television series.
Social Hierarchies: Whose Fears?

Postapocalyptic series are not just warnings of simmering cultural fears, though; many may also
be seen as subtle reassurance. After all, a postapocalypse posits that even if the worst happens,
humanity will continue. Historically, apocalypse stories tend to suggest a world-ending struggle
followed by a period of transformation and rebirth (Holba and Hart vii; Thompson 3–4). The
postapocalyptic setting itself, though it represents the death of the before times, also allows for
new growth. This suggests a second course of inquiry; while the focus of the nightmares model
ably answers the question “what are we afraid of?”, broadening our cultural studies approach
also allows us to ask who “we” are; whose fears, exactly, are being reflected and assuaged?
Whose stories are being told, and for whom? This is where the influence of regressive forces
becomes more explicit. In a postapocalyptic setting, in which all contemporary institutions
and authorities have been destroyed, we might expect strange new worlds or the potential
for radical new social structures; instead, the series in question suggest a return to regressive,
hypermasculine, white heterosexual patriarchies.
Program after program features a straight white man rising to leadership; his wisdom and
endurance are often the only hope a ragtag band of stragglers has. Heroes like Jericho’s Jake Green
(Skeet Ulrich), The Last Ship’s Tom Chandler (Eric Dane), or The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes
(Andrew Lincoln) must take control, assuming positions of leadership as they fight for the
survival of their new communities. These protagonists are not just white men, but a particular
hypermasculine archetype of white man: he is former police, CIA, FBI, or military. His rugged
individualism, weapons knowledge, and hand-to-hand combat skills allow him to take control;
he is, in many ways, a classic pulp science fiction hero, ready to repel aliens (Lucanio 25), fight
dinosaurs, or conquer Mars. In a postapocalypse, such a man cannot be accused of privilege,
since the society that would grant it to him no longer exists; in such a scenario, he therefore
takes control because he is the “natural” choice, the only one capable of shepherding his charges
to safety. Moreover, such narratives repeatedly imply that any society-destroying crisis will lead
to a war-like environment in which no stranger can be trusted and only the strong will survive.
Thanks to the casting and scripting of these series, this “strength” is inevitably demonstrated
through the cisgender white heterosexual male heroes who embody these traits. Power struggles
between such men become the driving force for these stories.
This type of narrative serves as a sort of postapocalyptic comfort food for a certain type of
conservative straight white man—the type of man for whom the destruction of contemporary
society is, in many ways, a welcome reprieve from the disruption caused by forces such as
feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, and the civil rights movement (Nilges). This is both cyclical and
regressive; we might find a similar pattern, for example, in earlier work like Niven and Pournelle’s
Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), in which the devastation of a crashing comet creates “a reversion to a
kind of natural aristocracy, in which such decadent luxuries as feminism, democracy, and social
justice must be jettisoned in favor of more natural values more suited to survival” (Berger 8).
We might also consider “nuclear frontier stories” of the 1950s, such as Leigh Brackett’s The Long
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Tomorrow (1955), Walter A. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon
(1959), which “made nuclear war actually seem appealing” (Sharp 7).
Twenty-first century postapocalyptic series build on these same assumptions while also
dovetailing with a more recent cultural reinforcement of “traditional” gender roles that Nilges
identified as a definitive trend in post-9/11 American media; likewise, Faludi has observed
that post-9/11 news reporting repeatedly advanced images of rugged military men and caring,
supportive women in need of rescue or protection. Postapocalyptic American television of this
era arguably fetishizes these politics: the survival of the white heterosexual nuclear family is
conservative white wish fulfillment, as whatever catastrophe wipes out most of the human race
also clears the way for the return of an unchallenged white patriarchy.
Similar patterns can be identified in “prepper”-focused American reality television from
the same period, which offers glimpses—highly edited, produced images, granted—of actual
Americans preparing for many of the same “end times” seen in dramatized series. These reality
series include Doomsday Preppers, The Colony, Apocalypse 101 (National Geographic, 2013),
Doomsday Castle, Forecast: Disaster (National Geographic, 2012), and How to Survive the End of the
World (National Geographic, 2013). Significant work has already been done by Christian and
Kelly in examining these types of reality programming, their presentation of rigid gender roles,
and their focus on white men; such reality TV programs work in tandem with the fictionalized
postapocalyptic series of this same era, providing a clear picture of the white cisgender
heterosexual man who both prepares for disaster today, and will be the key to humanity’s—and
America’s—endurance tomorrow.
Prepper television complements its scripted genre counterparts “by restaging the plausible
real-world conditions under which the performance of manly labor appears instrumental to
collective survival” (Kelly “man-pocalypse” 96). Like their fictional counterparts, prepper reality
series privilege the role of the straight white male leader. Doomsday Preppers, arguably the best
known of such programs, profiles a different American “prepper” in each episode as it examines
the lengths to which some people go to prepare for the coming apocalypse. In these profiles,
men outnumber women by 3–1, and the numbers skew further after the first season (Christian
58); the typical man in the spotlight is white, heterosexual, 40+, and middle class (Christian 53;
see also Long 116). The series concentrates primarily on men with “bug-out bags” and complex
escape plans who drill their family members incessantly on combat and survival skills. These
men often have military experience or aspire to military-style training; their protective instincts
are presented as being “primal” and “male” (Kelly “man-pocalypse” 104).
Both scripted and reality apocalypse series of this period also advance highly restrictive
roles for women. Scripted postapocalypses repeatedly draw on the trope of dead wives and
mothers whose tragic demises motivate the male hero as he forges forward into the new world.
Moreover, in series such as Jericho and Jeremiah, women are sensitive innocents in need of male
saviors, while in Revolution and The Walking Dead, the only women who survive are those who
adopt masculinized propensities for violence and ruthlessness—but they are never as powerful
as the men, and they must adhere to Western norms of feminine sexual attractiveness (Lavigne;
see also Inness 179). Likewise, Doomsday Preppers frequently presents women’s performance of
masculinized skills as “inadequate” (Christian 58) and women’s independence as a “liability”
(Kelly “man-pocalypse” 110), reinforcing notions of binary gender differences by portraying
women as canners and homesteaders who “are often interviewed in front of pantries and
kitchens, whereas men are more likely to be pictured in front of the household gun collection”
(108). We see similar patterns in The Colony, the short-lived reality series that placed contestants
in an apocalyptic survival setting, and in series like Meet the Preppers (Animal Planet, 2012). Taken
together, such depictions repeatedly limit the role of women in doomsday survival scenarios.
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It is also important to acknowledge the characters or people who do not appear onscreen,
and the stories that are not being told—a lack of nonbinary and/or trans individuals,
marginalized LGBTQ+ representation, the sidelining of BIPOC narratives, and the rarity of
disabled representation are among the important factors to be considered in these texts. As
these postapocalyptic visions prioritize cisgender heterosexual white male narratives, they do
not encapsulate other stories or voices; despite (and because of) the looming threat of viral
outbreak or zombie attack, the heroes of such scenarios are freed from the societal constraints
imposed by feminists, LGBTQ+ and civil rights activists, and other perceived threats to the
fundamentalist Christian “family values” that mark white conservative movements in the
United States (Thompson 8). A cultural studies approach reveals white male narratives created
primarily by white men in an industry further dominated by white men (Lavigne 166; Writers
Guild of America); postapocalyptic television advances the American patriarchal status quo,
telling stories that promote and normalize the interests of those in power.
Media Cultivation: Why Does It Matter?

Mainstream media have a complex and cyclical relationship to wider culture. If it has become
a media studies truism that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (Culkin 70),
then likewise, we produce our stories, and then our stories affect who we are. From a cultivation
perspective, the popularity of American postapocalyptic television in the early twenty-first
century has significant implications when considering wider questions of American politics and
culture during that time. The decades leading up to this period saw increasing numbers of
women, LGBTQ+ people, and/or BIPOC people gaining more rights and taking more public
roles, both on a wide cultural scale and within science fiction communities; they also saw a rise in
men’s rights movements (Ferber). It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that these cultural shifts were
followed by a wave of backlash media that presented military hegemonic masculinity and a return
to supposed small-town American values as protection against a drastically changing world.
This focus on both white men and masculinity is disturbingly congruent with the culture
of white supremacist groups and neo-Nazi movements currently labeled as the “alt-right” and
associated with the far fringes of conservative America (Osnos). Such organizations, such as the
Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nations, are repressive on the grounds of both race and gender,
representing “attempts to redeem a specifically white, racial masculinity” (Ferber 37). White
supremacist movements romanticize a faux-historical “wild west” (Schlatter); the fictional
worlds of recent postapocalyptic television recreate this fantasy, particularly series such as
Jericho and Revolution in which white male heroes struggle in a new wild frontier conveniently
distanced from the legacy of actual colonial violence (Lavigne), which allows for the continued
imagination of the white man as noble and victimized hero (Higgins). This, too, is familiar
within a genre partly founded by twentieth-century dime novelists who “found it easy enough
to transform western cowboys into space cowboys” (Pftizer 52). Such a proposed future, within
both postapocalyptic and white supremacist narratives, romanticizes and “recreates” a false past
in which BIPOC people were safely suppressed, “men were secure in their masculinity and the
hierarchical gender order remained firmly entrenched” (Ferber 51).
Doomsday Preppers offers a similar “vision of the future survived by white men who embody
rugged national virility . . . through ritual performances that visibly demonstrate the male
subject’s preparedness to return to pre/industrial America” (Kelly “man-pocalypse” 110); in
prepper reality series, the links between survivalist culture and right-wing American politics
become more explicit. Tea Krulos, who interviewed preppers throughout the U.S., notes
repeatedly how many of his interviewees were Trump supporters, describing a “conservative
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prepper base” with strong beliefs in the lying media and “fake news” (25; see also Ford);
prepping is additionally very specifically linked to racist colonial discourses (Ford) and religious
fundamentalism (Lamy).
Lamy has argued, “the survivalist right is a seed bed for the fascist millennial dreams of a
new Christian white supremacy” (134), and Kelly identifies these narratives as representing
not just hegemonic masculinity in crisis, but dangerously aggressive crisis: “Apocalyptic
paranoia has contributed to a surge in hypermasculine mass violence in American culture
where feelings of white male alienation translate into militaristic preparations for an uncertain
future” (Apocalypse Man 32). While it is important to resist over-simplistic media effects
hypotheses—mass media are not directly responsible for violent men acting on the fantasies
they consume—there can be no doubt that media and culture inform and influence each
other, and that postapocalyptic and prepper series represent a regressively gendered and
violent style of conservative thinking, reflecting a wider crisis in American masculinity. The
normalization of white hypermasculine leadership tropes in mainstream popular culture may
have served to smooth the way for alt-right movements and populist views (and votes) in
2016; likewise, the rise in alt-right movements and populist views leading up to this period
may have led to the production of multiple politically regressive postapocalyptic series. Our
stories both influence and represent our selves; the glut of twenty-first-century apocalyptic
series specifically patterned as hegemonic white male wish fulfillment is part of this cycle.
Much as earlier popular science fiction like Star Wars or The Matrix was taken by some
audiences as symbolic of white male manhood under threat (Higgins 199), the postapocalypses
of twenty-first-century American television have served as part of a resurgence in “patriotic”
and faux-nostalgic frontier imagery (Faludi 4) and pro-military rhetoric (Lavigne 11) that
have positioned the end of the world as a “secular cleansing” (Curtis 7) that both permits and
renormalizes the advancement of white men (Nilges 31).
Conclusion
Postapocalyptic science fiction tropes are particularly suited to, and reflective of, conservative
patriarchal cultural anxieties about coming catastrophe. It is notable that as the conservative
Trump presidency reached its zenith in the United States, the glut of American apocalyptic
television seems to have ended; a few, such as The Walking Dead and its assorted spinoff
franchises, staggered on, but most of the programs detailed in this analysis had gone off air
by this period. It’s possible that the apocalypse simply came and went, as the market grew
saturated and audiences grew numb; it’s also possible that—while Americans remained, overall,
anxious (American Psychiatric Association)—the focus and source of such cultural anxiety
changed. Much as apocalyptic imagery has surged and changed in times of crisis for centuries,
contemporary notions of the apocalypse, and of prepping, are not exclusive to the far right
(Garnett 3–4; Kerrane et al.; Tait). Indeed, the rise of liberal preppers was notable in Trump’s
America (Feuer; Deller; Sedacca). Two of the more recent postapocalyptic series on American
television—The 100 and Into the Badlands—also shifted from white patriarchal paradigms and
attempted, with admittedly mixed success, to make our dystopian futures more inclusive to
all. While The 100 has a distinct focus on cisgender white women (Lavigne 141), and Into the
Badlands both raises and dodges a variety of race issues (Lavigne 133–34), it is interesting that
postapocalyptic television’s focus broadened at least slightly even as the prepper movement itself
was attracting more members from the left.
Despite these more recent changes, science fiction series like Jericho, Falling Skies, and
The Walking Dead—in tandem with reality series such as Doomsday Preppers, The Colony, and
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Apocalypse Preppers—posit that a strong, white, heterosexual military man who prepares for the
end times is also the type of man who will survive and thrive after society dissolves. Of course,
the “masculinity crisis” goes back decades, and visions of catastrophe are not new, nor is the
white masculinist fetishization of science fiction texts. But analyzing the apocalyptic products
of early twenty-first-century American television provides an instructive look at the tenets
of white supremacy and the way popular culture may also reflect populist beliefs. American
postapocalyptic television—and prepper-style reality television—of the early twenty-first
century was symptomatic of a rising conservative backlash in American culture. The regressive
politics seen in these programs correlate with the radical conservative American politics of their
time—specifically, the resurgence of white supremacist and “men’s rights” movements now
associated with the neo-Nazi “alt-right,” and the populist wave that elected Donald Trump
in November 2016. Postapocalyptic and prepper television series are part of wider cultural
patterns and require further examination as important signifiers of a particular American
cultural moment.
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12
DECODING MASCULINITY
IN 21ST-CENTURY SCIENCE
FICTION BY MEN
Two Case Studies in Reconceptualizing
Patriarchy
Sara Martín
Introduction
Science fiction (SF) written by male-identified authors needs to be studied not only from a
feminist position focused on the quality of the representation of women and of LGBTIQ+
persons in their works, but from a critical angle attentive to how men self-represent. It is
for this reason important to rethink “patriarchy”—that is, the social model of hierarchical
organization built around power that is unequally distributed across genders—and distinguish
it from “masculinity,” or the gendered construction that is privileged by patriarchy, but which
people of all genders can (and should) oppose. There are many types of masculinity, not all of
which inherently support patriarchy and some of which are distinctly anti-patriarchal. Using
a Masculinities Studies methodology, I discuss two SF novels by two British authors, Thin
Air (2018) by Richard K. Morgan and The Algebraist (2004) by Iain M. Banks, as case studies
of the ways in which authoritarian, patriarchal systems privilege certain forms of masculinity
and oppress men who do not conform to those ideals. This uneven access to male privilege is
largely class-based: Morgan’s underprivileged Hakan Veil rebels but sees no avenue for further
resistance against patriarchal capitalism, whereas Banks’s far more privileged Fassin Taak does
become an anti-patriarchal, anti-authoritarian rebel in his dystopian society.
Brian Attebery remarks in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction that “Once women begin to
demonstrate their independent existence, males too become gendered” (7). Masculinities
Studies is the academic field devoted to making gender “visible” to men (Kimmel 6) from a pro-
feminist and anti-patriarchal critical perspective. The main aim is not only to make men aware
of their privileged position, but to encourage them to participate in the project of eliminating
masculinist sex and gender discrimination. While not all men are powerful, they are empowered
by their masculinity and it is, therefore, necessary for men to examine both how they are
favored by patriarchy and how they are oppressed by it if they want to oppose it effectively.
Masculinities Studies intends to promote change so that a fully equal social model eventually
replaces patriarchy and liberates men from its weight. Recognizing the need to address the
“gender politics within masculinities” (37), Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell developed
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-14 87
Sara Martín
the Gramscian concept of hegemonic masculinity (later “masculinities”) to describe the set of
social practices that determine the “relations of alliance, dominance and subordination” (37)
among men. These hegemonic practices maintain the patriarchal system of power by legitimating
“unequal gender relations between men and women, masculinity and femininity, and among
masculinities” (Messerschmidt 46), which emerge from constant negotiation between different
gendered identities in private and public life. Fiction plays a crucial role in this process, often
endorsing hegemonic masculinities although it may also provide models of anti-patriarchal
resistance addressed to men, whatever the gender of the author(s).
SF frequently works as a laboratory of ideas to present alternative approaches to gender,
but male authors are still taking limited steps toward accomplishing the goals of Masculinities
Studies. While current SF by male writers offers an improved treatment of women characters
and is less prejudiced against LGBTIQ+ persons, such authors often provide rather limited
explorations of masculinity itself, with most male characters presented mainly through their
occupations. Men are still scientists, explorers, soldiers, investigators, or agents, character types
firmly established in Eurowestern SF by the 1950s. A few other characters have been added in
recent decades but they, too, are largely defined by profession: Since the1980s, male authors
have often centered stories on the computer hacker, and, since the early 2000s, the survivor
(who is often defined by their work as a resistance member or leader in their dystopian world).
There is some room, too, for criminal businessmen and politicians and, most intriguingly, for
non-human males, such as androids. Few male characters, if any, are presented as role models
for young people, and many are quite negative representations of masculinity, as if male writers
prefer a starker approach to male characterization which avoids any idealization.
Hakan Veil in Morgan’s Thin Air and Fassin Taak in Banks’s The Algebraist share some
features—both are posthuman, nonwhite, cisgender, heterosexual men—but Veil is an
economically marginal man, whereas Taak begins his story from a financially privileged position.
I argue that, although their characterization is neither exceptional nor ground-breaking, their
gendered self-consciousness (and, by extension, that of their authors) suggests that there is
room in contemporary SF by men to rethink both patriarchal capitalism and men’s roles and
representations within it.
Hard Man, Hard Wired: Patriarchal Capitalism and Disempowered

Masculinity in Richard Morgan’s Thin Air
As someone who is part cyborg and part genetically modified human, Richard Morgan’s
Hakan Veil is a kind of posthuman monster, a man disenfranchised even before his birth. In
his own study of transhumanist speculative fiction Michael Grantham argues that “Although
concerns regarding the potential exploitation of genetically engineered beings are not without
merit in discussing the potential consequences of such technologies, far more recognized are
the issues pertaining to the potential disparity between genetically modified and unmodified
individuals” (149). That is to say, contemporary debates over the genetic modification of
humans tend to approach human enhancement as an individual matter, rather than inviting
us to reflect on how cyborgization will bring an even greater dominion of the privileged
classes over the disempowered. In Morgan’s SF novels this is how technoscience is applied:
not to secure a better personal or collective future for Homo Sapiens, but to exploit deprived
individuals—including especially impoverished male individuals who have no option but to sell
their monstrous cyborgian bodies to voracious transhumanist capitalists. In this circumstance,
being born male is not always an advantage. On the contrary, the bodily features at the core
of idealized masculinity—strength, resilience, and endurance—are coveted by the public and
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Decoding Masculinity in 21st-Century Science Fiction by Men
private agencies that deprive Morgan’s anti-heroes of their rights as men, turning them into
enslaved posthuman workers employed as expendable soldiers or paramilitary enforcers.
Morgan is best known for the trilogy comprised of Altered Carbon (2002, and the basis for the
popular Netflix series of the same name), Broken Angels (2003), and Woken Furies (2005). The
novum of Morgan’s trilogy—and other books written in this universe—is the cortical stack, a
device which can record human consciousness and transfer it to other bodies. Over the course
of the series, protagonist and super-soldier Takeshi Kovacs occupies a variety of “sleeves,” or
male bodies of different races and can do so indefinitely, provided his stack is placed in a new
sleeve. As such, Kovacs embodies concerns also explored by Morgan with the character of Carl
Marsalis in Black Man (2007), published as Th3rteen in North America and subsequent UK
editions.
A crucial point in Morgan’s anti-capitalist, anti-cyborg critique is that modified humans
are created according to market needs. Thus, all posthumans are “agenda-targeted” (TA 99)
corporate products. In Black Man, Carl Marsalis, a Black Briton, is the outcome of genetic
engineering by which area 13 of the brain, supposed to control violent urges, has been erased.
The resulting variant-13 males (no women are modified, with one exception) are used as
soldiers instead of expensive, hackable combat robots. These men are, however, so dangerous
that the United Nations orders their elimination. Hard-boiled Marsalis, employed by the UN
to hunt down rogue fellow variant-13s, is treated as a monster but secretly respected by the
capitalists who employ him, even as they fear he will turn his heightened masculine energies
against them. By way of contrast, other poor males are transformed by advanced technology to
serve as “hibernoids” who are specifically created for space travel enforcement. On duty during
the eight months of the year when they need no sleep, hibernoids are used in long interplanetary
journeys to quench any potential crises. Even though they serve a policing function roughly
similar to that of characters like Marsalis, the hibernoids are not feared or respected as monsters.
As one of Marsalis’s fellow 13s notes,
Not many people are scared of the ones whose party piece is curling up and sleeping
for four months at a time. Doesn’t threaten your masculinity much, that. It’s only peo-
ple like us they feel the need to lock up and stop breeding. (286, my italics)
Whereas ultra-male variant-13s are both admired and feared by the patriarchal men who made
them, hibernoids are a risible outshoot of technoscience, freaks that capitalist patriarchy need
not fear and can freely exploit.
Thin Air is, like Black Man, a thriller involving a murder investigation. Whereas in Black Man
the case connects with the illegal manufacturing of modified humans, in Thin Air the focus is
the fragile political and economic situation of Mars, a partly failed colony. Terraforming efforts
have only succeeded in specific areas, political corruption is rife, and the Chinese and Andina
mafias are waging constant war. The lower gravity and the thin air that lends its title to the novel
require Martian high-frontier humanity to be modified so that, technically, all the inhabitants of
Mars are posthumans. Veil is, nonetheless, exceptional for his many enhancements.
Morgan continues his critique of transhumanism in Thin Air through protagonist Hakan
Veil’s ruminations on his posthuman masculinity and his disempowerment. Veil is a posthuman
hibernoid irked by the alleged obsolescence of hibernoids, whose manufacture has been
discontinued, who believes that the UN’s planetary anti-posthuman legislation is useless:
Shit-poor women don’t go on selling the future children spring-loaded into their ova-
ries so they can feed the actual here-and-now kids they’ve already got? Bright young
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Sara Martín
things at cutting edge gene labs don’t go on buying the raw material by the kilo? Cash-
strapped regional legislatures whose major remaining resource is remote and desolate
real estate don’t go on signing land deals to host evasively termed “research facilities”
with no questions asked? Government spokesmen and corporate PR departments
don’t lie about it, and shadow enforcement agencies can’t get any work covering it
up? (29, original italics)
Both Marsalis and Veil are legally made posthumans, but their genetic material is provided by
those “shit-poor women.” We learn over the course of the novel that Veil’s desperate, pregnant
mother joined Western Australia’s local Special Indenture Programme, run by Blond Vaisutis
TransSolar Enforcement and Security Logistics, a subsidiary of the omnipresent corporation
COLIN (Colonial Initiative) Corporation, to provide a future for her son in exchange for
allowing the corporation to remake him as one of the hibernoids they needed at that time.
Children like him are raised in corporate luxury, which is why Veil does not blame his mother
for her choice: “Underclass unfortunates,” like the two of them, are “plucked from poverty all over
the Australasia catchment” (389, original italics) and given privileges they could never dream of.
Families are kept nearby and allowed regular contact with their boys, though few fathers are
present.
A peculiarity of Veil’s characterization is that even though the ethnic and racial particulars of
other characters are noted, his are not. This is surprising, especially in view of Morgan’s staunch
defense of his right, as a white writer, to create Black characters such as Marsalis. When I asked
Morgan if Veil is an Australian aboriginal inspired by Māori actor Temuera Morrison in his role
as Jake in Once Were Warriors (1994), the author replied:
I have deliberately left Veil’s ethnic origins vague in this one, because to be honest his
class origins are far more important—he’s a product of common poverty dynamics
that are similar the world over. In this day and age, he’d certainly have a higher statisti-
cal chance of coming from an ethnic minority background than not (though it’s also
worth noting that these days the poor white demographic is fairly steeply on the rise
everywhere you look). But in the world of the book, who knows? What exactly will
constitute an ethnic minority three hundred years from now, in Australia or anywhere
else? (in Martín 90)
Veil, aged forty-four, has been living on Mars for fourteen years, having been previously
employed as a Black Hatch “overrider” on board interplanetary spaceships for twelve years.
The main crisis of his life happens when, at age thirty, he mutinies against Blond Vaisutis’s
brutal methods. Veil refuses to execute the members of a small rebel group and, although he
could easily be terminated, he blackmails his employer into giving him a second chance on
Mars. As in Banks’s The Algebraist, bodily vulnerability becomes an essential component of
male subjectivity, for Veil initially fails to understand that his long conditioning has made him
extremely vulnerable. It is difficult for Veil to find regular employment because he is genetically
programmed for long periods of hibernation in space; it is likewise complicated to find a safe
place for hibernating, and although he keeps most of his mechanical and digital augmentations,
Veil is forced to relinquish a number of key features after being dismissed; besides, any prospective
employer must pay royalties to Blonde Vaisutis if Veil uses the enhancements he still possesses.
The only technology Veil can really count on is OSIRIS, the AI to which he was hard-wired
as a child, because the processor filament cannot be detached from his nervous system without
killing him.
90
Cultural theorist Amanda Fernbach discusses the figure of the male cyborg popularized
in the 1980s and 1990s as a “fetishized, idealized masculinity that is a desirable alternative” to
what “ordinary masculinity lacks” (237). However, the 21st-century cyborgian male lacks many
of the features that constitute idealized masculinity; he is, rather, a disempowered survivor, at
least in Morgan’s version. This is the reason why Veil feels that he is “hard-wired rather than a
hard-man” (251), despite the street reputation that his violence gives him. Veil’s case works as
a warning that patriarchal capitalism will use advanced technoscience to transform the poorest
citizens of any gender into indentured labor for life, here on Earth or elsewhere, and will
discard them when they are no longer wanted. Transhumanism is not part of a discourse for
the liberation of the species from random evolution but a sinister plot to deepen the difference
between the privileged and the underprivileged classes. Far from being empowered by his
posthuman enhancements, Veil is disempowered by them, limited in his choices as a man at
most levels.
As happens with Marsalis in Black Man, Veil has a very clear understanding of how the
patriarchal, capitalist system works against disempowered men, but he has no political agenda
beyond solving the cases which he investigates and punishing the villains. In Morgan’s SF
thrillers, rugged individualism prevents hard-boiled men from joining others to demand justice
against patriarchal abuse. The author exposes how power-hungry patriarchal capitalism operates
but his main male characters have no resistance to join, no higher cause to support. In that sense
their anti-patriarchal stance runs the risk of being a jaded, cynical rant instead of an effective
tool for change. Morgan’s men rage against patriarchal capitalism and know that this is the
enemy, but remain passive. Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist, by way of contrast, offers a more
hopeful possibility for disempowered men to join organized resistance and seek justice.
The Making of a Rebel: Anti-patriarchal Dissidence in

Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist
Known for his unique dual career as both a mainstream and an SF novelist, Scottish writer
Iain M. Banks (1954–2013) was the author of eight novels constituting the Culture series—
Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996),
Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), and The
Hydrogen Sonata (2012)—and of a short fiction collection also set in this narrative universe,
The State of the Art (1991). He also published three stand-alone SF novels: Against a Dark
Background (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994), and Hugo Award nominee The Algebraist (2004).
In this latter novel, scholar Fassin Taak finds himself involved in the struggle of his multispecies
civilization, the Mercatoria, to reconnect with the rest of the galaxy after the loss of the
Arteria, a wormhole portal network that facilitates interplanetary travel. Taak, a cultural
anthropologist who specializes in studying the poetry of the Dwellers (an enigmatic, aloof
civilization that is not part of the Mercatoria), must find out whether the rumors concerning
the fabled existence of an alternative secret space network run by the Dwellers are true.
In the process, Taak’s youthful resistance against the rigid hierarchy which the Mercatoria
enforce transforms into mature rebellion as he comes to the defense of the oppressed artificial
intelligences that the Mercatoria simultaneously use and abhor.
Jude Roberts has argued that “Banks’s writing considers the vulnerability of the masculine
body as the foundation of the masculine subject” (46) and Fassin Taak’s narrative arc can be
certainly summarized as a journey into the discovery of his own vulnerability as a privileged
man. Taak is Chief-in-Waiting of the Sept Bantrabal, heir to one of the families that monopolize
scholarly research on the Dwellers, a Slow civilization for whom time runs at a different scale.
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Physically adapted to fit this scale, Slow Seers like Taak are long-lived posthumans also capable
of selecting their physical appearance. Nasqueron, the Dwellers’ home planet, is a gas giant,
which forces all Seers to use a combined suit and vehicle known as a gascraft during research
there. Taak’s sense of personal vulnerability, however, does not emerge from this necessary
cyborgization, but from the physical and mental abuse by the Mercatoria that becomes the root
of his progressive anti-patriarchal rebellion.
The Mercatoria are an alliance of mainly nonhumanoid civilizations dominated by the
Culmina. They are in the habit of “uplifting” alien civilizations by kidnapping some members
to start new civilizations that can join the alliance. This happened to humans: The Culmina’s
henchmen, the Vohen, visited Earth in 4051 BC (the current date is 4034 AD) to gather
human genetic material from the main human civilizations of the time: China, Egypt, and
Mexico. A divide was then set between the rHumans of Earth, who remain unaware of this
theft, and the aHumans (or advanced Humans) of the rest of the galaxy, who do indeed know
their origins; the two types eventually meet when Earthlings develop interstellar travel. Taak’s
resentful great-uncle Fimender complains that aHumans are “advanced but cowed. Servant
species, just like everybody else” (149). The Mercatoria offer everyone, regardless of race,
gender, or species, the same opportunities; at the same time, they also subject all their citizens
to similar regimes of repression. They are not patriarchal in terms of privileging men over
other genders, but in the sense that their hegemonic meritocracy firmly relies on the belief that
society should be organized along lines of power and that fierce control should be exerted over
all the disempowered.
This a lesson that young Taak learns while still unsure about whether to join the academic
ivory tower of his privileged family. When he supports a protest against the Mercatoria’s
privatization of public space, Taak finds himself arrested and brutally tortured. This rude
awakening to the physical vulnerability of his so far fully protected body is intended to be a
political lesson. As his Orwellian torturer explains, “You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic,
naïve, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an
inkling. They work on force, power and coercion” (180). The lesson, however, does not turn
out as the Mercatoria intend. The violence inflicted by his own political leaders, combined
with his realization that Dweller civilization operates in far more democratic and almost even
anarchic ways, results in Taak’s decision to train as a Seer and to become a spy for the Beyonders,
the anti-Mercatoria resistance.
Taak keeps his Beyonder connection secret for decades, until the main episode that
constitutes the narrative core of The Algebraist. Warned by their research analysts that Taak may
have inadvertently found a significant clue about the portal network, the Mercatoria force him
to join a military unit with the mission of further exploring this clue, but fail to understand that
the threat to eliminate his family if he does not collaborate only increases Taak’s disaffection.
It must be noted that although the narrator, an illegal artificial intelligence (AI) passing itself
off as the unassuming robotic head gardener of Taak’s family, defines the Mercatoria’s hierarchy
as a “baroque monstrosity” (230), and despite the fact that its government is “disliked and
resented by most of its citizens/subjects,” the Mercatoria are “not actively hated by them”
(483). Sam Reader claims that Banks portrays the Mercatoria “as flawed, but not completely
irredeemable—despite their rigid hierarchy”, hinting that Taak’s idealistic resistance is for this
reason more moderate than might be expected from an anti-dystopian rebel.
Taak’s modest rebellion, however, takes a definitive turn when the Mercatoria cruelly destroy
his family and home despite the progress he is making in his mission. The Mercatoria use
computers to run their civilization but cannot tolerate AI sentience. Unbeknownst to Taak,
the head of his family, his uncle Slovious, disagrees and has been sheltering the narrator AI in
92
the family home. When Slovious attempts to protect a second AI, the Mercatoria wipe out
the whole clan (the narrator survives because they believe the lie that it is a basic, non-sentient
machine). Taak is just collateral damage in this operation, but after the tragic loss of his family,
he can no longer hope that “there would somehow be an elegance about his involvement in
the struggle against the Mercatoria, a degree of gloriousness, a touch of the heroic” (284) for
that hope is misguided:
Instead: muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery, and mass
death—all the usual stuff of war affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without
any necessary moral reason, without any justice and without any vindictiveness, just
through the ghastly, banal working-out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital
mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending. (284)
This turning point transforms Taak into one of Banks’s “recalcitrant and unregenerate non-
conformists and malcontents, the flawed dissenters and misfits” (Winter 333). In his case, Taak is
not yearning to escape the utopia of the Culture novels but a system that he knows, as he puts it,
to be “vicious, cretinous, vacuously self-important” and, to cap it all, “sentience-hating” (284).
When direct contact with the AIs that help him in his mission teaches Taak that the Mercatoria
are lying about the machines’ innate depravity, he gives his whole loyalty to the Beyonders.
At the end of his odyssey, Taak visits his family’s refugee AI to declare that “one day we’ll
all be free” (534). Having solved the enigma of the Dweller portals, Taak and the Beyonders
presumably next compel the Mercatoria to accept the gradual transformation of their inflexible
regime. The mission forced on Taak leads, then, to a significant erosion of the Mercatoria’s
authoritarian, patriarchal foundations. This is the main lesson that Banks teaches through Taak’s
quest: Even privileged men can rebel against patriarchal power and work for radical change to
defend the rights of the oppressed, no matter who they are.
Conclusion
The cyborg protagonists of Morgan’s Thin Air and Banks’s The Algebraist may seem to be
very imperfect anti-patriarchal rebels but, as long as men lack a clear awareness of their own
patriarchal oppression and an agenda to resist it, their stories can only offer this type of limited
alternative to the standard male characterization of much genre fiction. At the same time, these
authors take the first step toward creating this kind of male consciousness-raising with stories
about male characters who demonstrate that patriarchy should not be understood as simply a
social construction created specifically to dominate women, but as an authoritarian, power-
hungry, hierarchical organization dedicated to exploiting all of those with less power—including
disenfranchised poor men and sentient AIs. Men’s SF, in short, can help us see that patriarchy’s
power extends beyond misogynistic repression to all kinds of authoritarian oppression.
Bibliography
Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist. 2004. Corgi, 2005.
Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 1995. Polity, 2006.
Fernbach, Amanda. “The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction: The Cyborg and the Console
Cowboy.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, July 2000, pp. 234–255.
Grantham, Michael. The Transhuman Antihero: Paradoxical Protagonists in Speculative Fiction from Mary Shelley
to Richard Morgan. McFarland, 2015.
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Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Martín, Sara. “Martian Politics and the Hard-Boiled Anti-Hero: Richard Morgan’s Thin Air.” Hélice, vol.
IV, no. 11, 2019, pp. 84–95. www.revistahelice.com/en/helice-25-2/.
Messerschmidt, James W. Hegemonic Masculinity: Formulation, Reformulation, and Amplification. Rowman &
Littlefield, 2018.
Morgan, Richard K. Black Man. Gollancz, 2007.
Morgan, Richard K. Thin Air. DelRey, 2018.
Reader, Sam. “With The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks Perfected His Space Opera.” B&N Sci-fi and Fantasy Blog,
9 June 2017, www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/algebraist-iain-m-banks-perfected-space-
opera/.
Roberts, Jude. “Iain M. Banks’ Culture of Vulnerable Masculinities.” Foundation: The International Review
of Science Fiction, vol. 43, no. 117, 2014, pp. 46–59.
Winter, Jerome. “ ‘Moments in the Fall’: Neoliberal Globalism and Utopian Anarcho-Socialist Desire in
Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution Quartet and Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series.” Extrapolation, vol. 55, no.
3, Fall 2014, pp. 323–348.
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13
“I CAME FOR THE ‘PEW-PEW
SPACE BATTLES’; I STAYED
FOR THE AUTISM”
Martha Wells’s Murderbot1
Robin Anne Reid
In May 2020, Martha Wells released Network Effect, the first novel in the Murderbot Diaries
series. The series, as of the writing of this chapter, consists of five novellas, a short story, and the
novel. Murderbot, the protagonist of the series, is a cyborg Security Unit (SecUnit) who frees
itself from its governor module before the events in the first novella, All Systems Red (2017).
Murderbot’s dramatic narrative of self-emancipation and subsequent feelings of awkwardness
as it learns to negotiate the physical and social universe, is both critically acclaimed and widely
popular. Wells’ novellas have been finalists for all the major SF awards and have won one Alex,
one Nebula, two Hugo, and two Locus awards. Her novel Network Effect won the Locus and
Nebula Awards for Best Novel (“Martha Wells”).
The series balances action plots with character development, primarily Murderbot’s. The
major storylines show how Murderbot’s destruction of its governor module leads to its sub-
sequent work investigating corporate crimes. These crimes include illegally acquiring alien
remnants, a process which often includes murder, and extensive exploitation of humans as under
an indentured labor system. Murderbot changes as it becomes more involved in investigating
corporate colonialism and corruption, acquiring new skills, both technical and emotional. It
interacts with robots, cyborgs (including other SecUnits), Artificial Intelligences (AIs), and
humans—all the while complaining about how these events and relationships interfere with
its desire to consume its favorite media in peace. By the end of Network Effect, Murderbot has
friends and a family of choice. One of its most significant relationships is with a powerful AI that
runs a university research transport vessel named ART by Murderbot, the letters in the name
standing for “Asshole Research Transport,” whose activities and relationship with its human
crew include various attempts to subvert corporate exploitation of human labor.
Readers who discovered Wells through the Murderbot Diaries may assume she is a relatively
new writer, but she has been writing fantasy and science fiction (SF) since 1993 and has pub-
lished eighteen novels in three series as well as numerous short stories and novellas. Her previous
work was mostly in fantasy and media tie-in novelization, and she was nominated regularly for
awards from 1994–1999 (“Martha Wells”). Although Wells published fourteen critically praised
novels between 2000–2017, she received no award nominations in that era. Wells describes how
Murderbot came to her when she was working on The Harbors of the Sun (the final novel in her
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-15 95
Robin Anne Reid
Raksura series), at a moment when her career seemed dead in a “field that expected women
[her] age to quietly fade away” (Wells, “Introduction”). She disclaims any intention to write the
character as an autist (Wells, “Science Fiction Book Club Interview”) but does not dispute that
interpretation, or any other. Moreover, in interviews and online interactions with fans, Wells
shares how her experiences with neurodivergency and lifelong anxiety and depression inform
her characterization of Murderbot (Wells, “Hi, I’m Martha Wells”).
Murderbot’s voice and story resonate with readers who experience marginalization and
oppression along multiple axes of identities (Bourke 2019; Cahill 2017; DeNiro 2018 and 2019;
Kend 2018; Liptak 2018; Mullis 2020). While reviewers emphasize how relatable the character
is, they emphasize that neither the first-person narrator, nor the series, is a simple allegory:
“Murderbot isn’t . . . a stand-in for any other oppressed group, as much as some of us might see
ourselves in its outsider-status, hatred of ally condescension, and ‘not applicable’ gender” (Nor-
dling 2021). While I agree that Wells’ work cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional allegori-
cal reading, I believe it is possible to productively read her work in the context of some of the
changing discourses around autism such as gender and sexuality; how to interact with humans
and deal with emotion; and strong attachments to media.
I read Murderbot as an autistic character because I am an autist who strongly identifies with
the character’s reaction to and emotions about its experiences. My interpretation draws on my
lived experience as a queer autist although I make no claim of being representative of any other,
let alone all other, people who are queer and/or who are autistic.2 I spent nearly sixty years of
my life wondering why I was always doing everything with humans wrong with the result that
my response to most interactions was the burning desire to be left alone to read my science
fiction and fantasy. My first memory of being different was when my first-grade teacher told
me I read the wrong way. According to family stories, I learned to read at age 3 and, when
I started first grade, tested as reading at the fourth-grade level. The result was numerous teacher-
principal-parent meetings to discuss the “problem,” which I thought was me—specifically, my
resistance to learning phonics and my dislike of the “Dick and Jane” readers, both of which
wasted time I could spend reading real books.
My inability to meet the social standards of my peers got worse after first grade although
I began to receive approval from my teachers for being quiet, spending a great deal of time read-
ing, and testing well. Their approval meant that my peers in junior high and high school saw me
as a teacher’s pet. Outside the classroom, I resented being told that “girls” did not read science
fiction (which I did and still do) and even more resented being told that “girls” were supposed
to get married and have children (which I never wanted and never did). However, the options
for “boys” were no better, as I learned from watching my younger brother being bullied by his
classmates. Things got better in college when I found science fiction (SF) fandom. When I was
officially diagnosed as on the autism spectrum at the age of 62, in 2017, nearly fifteen years after
I learned about Asperger’s from the media and started doing my own research, whole parts of
my life suddenly made more sense.3
In addition to my own experiences, I draw on some of the scholarship on autism which
I have found personally valuable. As someone trained in literary and culture studies, I am not
familiar enough with the sciences where most of the research originates to evaluate it and have
found recent work by autistic people trained in the humanities to be the most useful. James
McGrath, in Naming Adult Autism (2017), points out some of the biases in both the scientific
literature about and popular representation of adults with autism. Melanie Yergeau, in Author-
ing Autism (2018), draws on queer and disabilities studies and uses storytelling to critique how
“autism” has been framed as a problem of lacking “theory of mind” and thus people with autism
are seen as lacking humanity. One significant problem in the work on autism is the focus on
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“I Came for ‘Pew-Pew Space Battles’; I Stayed for the Autism”
the default white male child. In recent years, neurodivergent people began to create our own
narratives, autobiographies, and critiques of the medical and popular stereotypes of autism and
other neurological differences. Two of my favorites in this vein are works by Joanne Limburg
(2021) who explores feminism and autism, and Latino journalist Eric Garcia (2021), who uses
his experience and interviews from many others on the spectrum to help medical experts and
laypeople alike understand what life is like on the spectrum.
Nancy Bagatell (2010) describes the public perception of autism as changing from “a curi-
ous but obscure psychiatric condition to a widely known public health concern receiving much
attention in the popular media,” with ongoing debate about the causes of the condition and
whether they are environmental or neurological (33). Growing conflicts exist between the bio-
medical community, which constructs the condition as a disease or disability requiring a cure,
and an adult autistic community drawing on the social model of disability and practicing self-
advocacy who use technology to organize. But both sides agree that there is a need for more
scholarship, larger samples and wider recruitment, and more longer-term studies.
Literary scholars have drawn on the social model of disability to analyze characters in novels
by Jane Austin, Marge Piercy, and Charlotte Brontë (Dekel 2014; Rodas 2008; Smith 2017). In
a similar vein, SF studies scholar Ryan J. Morrison’s “Ethical Depictions of Neurodivergence in
SF About AI” (2019) draws on disability studies to show how classic SF novels by Philip K. Dick
and William Gibson reinforce widespread cultural assumptions that to be a “normal” human is
to be defined by emotions and empathy, in contrast to thinking but unfeeling machines, while
more recent novels by Ann Leckie challenge that stereotype by using an AI to foreground the
autistic character’s perspective as providing equally valid and valuable ways of negotiating the
future. Like McGrath, Morrison shows connections between how the stereotypes about “nor-
mal” human emotion and empathy discriminate against both AI characters and neurodivergent
people such as autists. Morrison’s essay is part of a small but growing movement to use disability
studies to analyze SF. More work on the topic can be found in the anthology edited by Kathryn
Allan, Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure.
Through Murderbot’s perspective, Wells subverts the genre conventions of space opera, a
subgenre of science fiction that revolves around galactic-scale meetings between humans and
aliens and, more often than not, the galactic-scale conflict that occurs between and amongst
such groups when they meet. She most importantly subverts the space opera cliché of AIs as
beings who are isolated among humans, who feel inferior to them, and who wish to become
human, or at least more like humans. Instead, Wells explains that: “I wanted to write an AI
that didn’t want to be human, and I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want,
as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want” (Wells, “Introduction”). Indeed,
even after gaining agency by destroying its governor, Murderbot feels the pressure of expecta-
tions to be more like humans, or to follow the advice of human friends. At the end of All Sys-
tems Red, all the surveyors who are saved by Murderbot assume that the best thing for it to do is
to return to Preservation Aux with them to become the legal ward of Dr. Mensah. Murderbot
realizes that “I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me” which
is why, at the end of the novel, it conveys this sentiment directly to Dr. Mensah before leaving
her (148–49).
One of the specific pressure points for Murderbot, like many human autists, is its gender
presentation. Human characters expect Murderbot to have a gender although from the start
Murderbot is clear that Security Units have no gender or “sex bits”; the only Units with sex
bits are Sexbots, sometimes called “ComfortUnits.” In many ways, Murderbot’s reaction to the
assumption it must have a singular, stable gender resonates with the experience of people with
autism, who have a higher rate of gender variance than the general population as well as lower
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Robin Anne Reid
identification and more negative associations with identifying as a specific gender (Cooper,
et. al. 2018). In addition, Murderbot’s dislike of viewing sexual intercourse (whether between
clients caught by its 24/7 recording systems or on its favorite shows) raises the complicated
question of asexuality and its intersection with stereotypes about people with disabilities (Kim
2011). As Mullis notes,
even as Murderbot removes its shackles and starts developing a personality, it doesn’t
really take on a gender in any traditional sense. It has likes and dislikes and personality
traits that some might see masculine or feminine, but Murderbot doesn’t think of them
that way. Murderbot is just Murderbot.
One complication of Murderbot’s nonexistent gender is how its narrative foregrounds the
gendered English pronoun system by Murderbot’s insistence on “it” as a chosen pronoun. Liz
Bourke (2018) notes her discomfort with Murderbot’s choice of pronouns and her choice to
use “they/their” instead:
Murderbot consistently refers to themself as “it,” but I’m sufficiently uncomfortable

with using object-pronouns for people that I can’t bring myself to do the same. I know
this is inconsistent with the basic standard politeness of using people’s self-chosen pro-
nouns. It’s a dilemma.
I share that discomfort to some extent but am also unable to impose my choice of pronoun on
the character.4
Another pressure point for Murderbot that many people with autism might well recognize
is the difficulty of negotiating social interactions involving emotions that do not come naturally
to it. These frustrating problems come to a head for Murderbot after it gains its freedom but
realizes it lacks the programmed behaviors and speech acts the governor module had imposed
on it. Murderbot has been treated all its life as a thing and chooses to continues to perform its
duty, albeit to a lower standard, after destroying its governor in spite of its personal desire to
spend as much time as possible immersed in its media. Its narrative emphasizes the difficulties
it faces interacting with humans: relying on armor as social protection and masking its face to
hide the feelings it cannot help showing. It hates being looked at by humans and, later in the
series, when it is able to pass as an augmented human, uses the armor to access security cameras
to watch the humans while in conversation. Behaviors such as avoiding eye contact, lacking
control of facial expressions, and experiencing difficulties reading human facial expressions—all
of which Murderbot experiences regularly—are also natural for me as an autist.
Murderbot has internalized the idea that SecUnits have no feelings and must learn to acknowledge
that it does feel emotions, even for such minor things as the clothing it chooses in Rogue Protocol.
Murderbot may dislike having feelings for and about others, but its narrative shows it has them,
including, but not limited to, anger on behalf of those it empathizes with, such as Ayres and the
others who had so few choices that they sold themselves into twenty years of indentured servitude
(Rogue Protocol). Even more significantly, Murderbot can empathize with all the other bots and AIs
it encounters throughout the series, developing its ethical limits in regard to asking for consent
from transport bots rather than overriding their programming. When Murderbot investigates the
mining facility where it went rogue and killed clients in Artificial Condition, it discovers that the
ComfortUnits at the facility acted to try to protect the humans when a malicious program caused
the deaths. Murderbot spends over five hours collecting the information, imagining how the
ComfortUnits tried to help, and perceiving their last moments of life:
98
One by one the file downloads had stopped. One had signaled that it would try to
decoy SecUnit attention away from the others, and three acknowledged. One had
heard screams from the control center and diverted there to try to save the humans
trapped inside, and two acknowledged. One had stayed at the entrance to a corridor
to try to buy time to reach SecSystem, and one acknowledged. One reported reaching
SecSystem, then nothing. (116)
One of the most significant scenes that reveals Murderbot’s growing level of awareness of its
emotions occurs in Exit Strategy, after Murderbot rescues Dr. Mensah. When Mensah asks about
its fondness for the show Sanctuary Moon, Murderbot “actually [feels] the organic tissue in [its]
back and shoulders relax,” but then tries to answer the doctor’s query as to why it would watch
a show about human problems. In order to answer Dr. Mensah’s question, Murderbot accesses
its archived memory of watching the show and realizes that it was the first one it watched after
destroying its governor. It tells Dr. Mensah that and concludes, “[Sanctuary Moon] made me
feel like a person.” Murderbot feels that revealing so much means it was “losing control of [its]
output.” It does not share its next revelation although the “words kept wanting to come out. It
gave me context for the emotions I was feeling, I managed not to say” (115–16). While the external
action of this scene is Murderbot managing its rescue of Dr. Mensah, the internal action centers
on blaming its “stupid human neural tissue” and hating everything it is feeling because they are
“emotions about real humans instead of fake ones” (116).
A third pressure point for Murderbot that resonates with my own experience as an autist
is its intense love of media. As Leah Schnelbach notes in her review of Network Effect (2021),
which focuses on reading the Murderbot series during the Covid lockdown, one of the major
achievements of Wells’ work is the importance of media which
is not presented as an escape. It’s not an addiction, it’s not a way for Murderbot to
“learn to be human”—a thing it does not want—it’s not a balm, it’s not the opiate of
the masses, and there is no distinction that I caught between “high” and “low” brow
media.
Instead, media is seen as an important part of Murderbot’s awareness of itself and as a way of
interacting with others, so much so that the series shows how creations shared by an interstellar
network can be used as forces against the oppressive economic systems created by the corporate
powers.
While one important aspect of Murderbot’s characterization is its enjoyment of media, the
character moves from simply consuming it to creating it, both on its own and in collaboration
with others, over the course of the series. Besides its diaries, Murderbot creates and shares a
variety of videos, transcripts, and other digital materials, such as putting together a “Murderbot
Impersonates an Augmented Human Security Consultant” file to explain to others what it
has been doing (Exit Strategy). It also works with Dr. Bharadwaj to create a documentary
about “bot-human relations” (27), and in Network Effect, Murderbot works with ART to create
Murderbot 2.0, a kill ware program who shuts down SecUnit Three’s governor module and
shares files with it about Murderbot’s life. Murderbot’s ongoing critique of the low quality of
representation of Security Units in the popular media it consumes is also worth noting.
At the end of Network Effect, Murderbot has discovered what it really wants to do: to work,
temporarily, with ART and its crew while being able to visit friends on Preservation Aux. The
novel ends with the two AI characters reviewing new media ART has collected and planning
how to acquire more. However, the story does not seem to end here: The possibilities for
99
Robin Anne Reid
Murderbot and ART to work together in additional volumes of the series are many. Likewise,
as we learn more about emerging work in disability studies on autism as well as other forms of
neurodivergence, we will acquire more tools and skills to read what Wells and other SF authors
have created in new and complex ways.
Notes
1 My title quotes, then adapts, a sentence from a press release about Network Effect winning the Nebula
which, in the original, reads as: “Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I.
you’ll read this century” (“Network Effect”).
2 As this chapter was in the final stages of editing, Cassie Josephs’ review, “Murderbot: An Autistic-
Coded Robot Done Right,” was published on Tor.com. Josephs also notes the similarities between
Wells’ character and their own experiences as an autistic person, arguing that Wells avoids the “robotic”
stereotype often applies to people on the spectrum. The review received over 100 “favorites” and 44
comments, most expressing agreement with Josephs and their love for the series. Many commenters
discussed their own neurodivergence and discussed with each other the issues of gender, asexuality, and
aromanticism raised by the series, most emphasizing that their different interpretations were linked to
their differing personal experiences.
3 I was privileged in having insurance as well as being lucky enough to find a qualified therapist who
did not reject the concept of women on the spectrum and was willing to work with adults (and older
adults!) as well as children. I know that many, for multiple reasons, can only self-diagnose and others
may choose not to pursue a diagnosis because there is no guarantee the outcomes will be positive.
4 Names are important to Murderbot: Its own name is self-chosen and private, as its choice to reject
gendered pronouns. Not only does Murderbot give ART a name, it wipes the name of The Company
that owned it from all transcripts and records, replacing it with the generic term, as Dr. Bharadwaj
realizes in Network Effect (“Helpme.file, Excerpt 2”).
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Palgrave 2013.
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2010, pp. 33–55.
Bourke, Liz. “Liz Bourke Reviews Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells.” Locus.
26 April, 2018. https://locusmag.com/2018/04/liz-bourke-reviews-artificial-condition-and-rogue-
protocol-by-martha-wells/.
Bourke, Liz. “Murderbot’s Inconvenient Emotions: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells.” Tor.com. 2 October 2019.
www.tor.com/2018/10/02/book-reviews-exit-strategy-by-martha-wells/.
Cahill, Martin. “Meet Your Favorite Depressed A. I. Since Marvin in All Systems Red.” Barnes and Noble,
2 May 2017. www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/meet-favorite-depressed-since-marvin-
systems-red/.
Cooper, Kate, et al. “Gender Identity in Autism: Sex Differences in Social Affiliation with Gender
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link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-018-3590-1.
Dekel, Mikhal. “Austen and Autism: Reading Brain, Emotion and Gender Differences in Pride and
Prejudice.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 2014. www.ncgsjournal.com/issue103/
dekel.html.
DeNiro, Anya Johanna. “Exploring Queer Friendship in Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition.” Tor.com.
13 May 2019. www.tor.com/2019/05/13/exploring-queer-friendship-in-martha-wells-artificial-
condition/#more-455874.
DeNiro, Anya Johanna. “Life Lessons from a Murderbot: Reading All Systems Red as a Trans Woman.”Tor.com, 21
March 2018. www.tor.com/2018/03/21/life-lessons-from-a-murderbot-reading-all-systems-red-as-a-
trans-woman/.
Garcia, Eric. We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. Houghton Mifflin, 2021.
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2019, pp. 387–410.
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14
THE WOMANIST
SPECULATIVE ARCHETYPE
IN ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS’S
“EVIDENCE”
R. Nicole Smith
Introduction
Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
(2015), writes in the introduction to her anthology that she and co-editor adrienne maree
brown endeavored to make their volume an authorial space where marginalized people could
imagine the viability of themselves and their communities in the future. Imarisha emphasizes
this point by writing: “And for those of us from communities with historic and collective
trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two
legs” (4–5). One of the historic, traumatic events this quote brings to mind within the African
diaspora is the cognitive dissonance of first contact and alien abduction that manifested in the
form of the transatlantic slave trade (Womack 34–38).
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s short story “Evidence,” included in Octavia’s Brood, imagines a
future where Black women communicate across generations to document the apocalyptic fall
of the patriarchal capitalist system that ignited intersectional oppression across the world and its
replacement by new and more equitable modes of communitarian living based on a redefinition
of self, wealth, and technology. To tell this tale, Gumbs replaces the ruggedly individualistic,
White, male hero who dominates classic apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fictions such as Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation series and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land with what I call
the “womanist speculative archetype.” This new science fiction (SF) heroine undertakes a
quest to build a sustainable, communitarian world based not just through the invention and
deployment of new technologies, but more importantly—through the creation of female-
centered communities.
The woman speculative archetype is, as her name indicates, an avatar of womanism, a social
theory based on the history and everyday experiences of Black women. Womanist scholar Layli
Phillips (Maparyan) describes a womanist as one who is “triply concerned with herself, other
Black women, and the entire Black race, female and male—but also all humanity, showing an
ever-expanding and ultimately universal arc of political concern, empathy, and activism” (xxiii).
The term was first coined by Alice Walker in her 1979 short story “Coming Apart”; later, in
the essay “Womanist,” Walker would more formally describe a womanist as a “Black feminist or
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-16 102

The Womanist Speculative Archetype in Gumbs’s “Evidence”
feminist of color. . . . Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people” (xi–xii). These
goals were also central to the members of the Combahee River Collective (1974–1980), who
wrote in their text “A Black Feminist Statement”: “If Black women were free, it would mean
that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction
of all the systems of oppression” (18). These dreams of an egalitarian, communitarian future
revolve implicitly and explicitly around the figure of the future-facing Black woman who creates
new communities based on new modes for healing for the community and world as a whole.
As she builds a new and better future for all, the heroine who embodies the womanist
speculative archetype also embarks on a journey to develop her own personhood by connecting
with her Black feminist and diasporic African cosmologies. Audre Lorde offers the ideal
prototype of this womanist heroine in her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
In its broadest dimensions, Lorde’s journey of self-discovery resembles that of the classic
Eurowestern, archetypal hero’s journey: she leaves her home of origin, New York, and travels
across the US and Mexico, learning to negotiate new environments as she grapples with a
variety of interpersonal and sociopolitical obstacles. The book ends with Lorde returning to her
home in New York with a stronger sense of herself.
However, when one considers that the monsters Lorde faces in her quest to selfhood are
not physical entities she can defeat in a single battle, but the seemingly interminable hydras of
intersectional oppression, one realizes that the Eurowestern, male model of the hero’s journey
is too limited in scope for Lorde. Indeed, as a self-described “Black lesbian feminist socialist
mother of two, including one boy, and member of an interracial relationship” (“Age, Race,
Class, and Sex” 114), Lorde, as the heroine of her own story, more closely resembles that of
the protagonist from a lesbian bildungsroman (Pearl 300) who actively deconstructs classic
masculine heroic norms. Moreover, as Lorde’s creation of the term “biomythography”—a
mode of literature that includes history, biography, and myth-making—suggests, the specific
shape of her experiences in the world may be unique, but, like other myths, they help
explain larger patterns of personal and social relations as well. As I have argued elsewhere, the
term “womanist speculative archetype” provides a more accurate representation of the future-
facing, community-oriented heroine of Black texts such as Lorde’s Zami because it invites
new considerations of who and what the heroine needs become to successfully complete her
journey. This new archetype has been particularly useful to analyze heroines in stories written
by Black women writers of speculative fiction who weave together mythic, speculative, and SF
tropes in stories where the Black woman protagonist as a heroine symbolizes transformative
activism for herself and her reimagined zami, or community.
Lorde’s text Zami is central to the work of the womanist speculative archetype. Lorde defines
the term in her biomythography as a “Carriacou name for women who work together as
friends and lovers” (223). Monica B. Pearl expands this definition to explain that zami is “a
name that, in its designation, is an attempt to make community, to break silence, to make a
common acknowledgment and a common bond” (300). Throughout Zami, Lorde illustrates her
experiences with communities of women who offer the author varying levels of support and
recognition as she recognizes, explores, and celebrates key aspects of her personhood that do
not fit neatly into pre-existing patriarchal, heteronormative, Eurowestern societal constructs—
namely her sexuality, her race, and her experiences as a first-generation American. Indeed,
her coming-of-age experiences are inseparable from her sociopolitical and personal liberation.
The womanist speculative archetype follows a similar trajectory, both learning how to become
more herself from the Black female communities she encounters and how to use her newfound
strength and talents to connect with others across space and time in the effort to build better
futures for all.
103
R. Nicole Smith
Contemporary scholar, poet, activist, and educator Pauline Alexis Gumbs is no stranger to
Audre Lorde’s work. On her website, Gumbs describes herself as a “Queer Black Troublemaker
and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings.” She also
“identifies proudly as a queer Caribbean author and scholar in the tradition of Audre Lorde,
June Jordan, M. Jacqui Alexander, Dionne Brand and many more” (alexispauline). At the writing
of this chapter, Gumbs, a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow,
is drafting her latest book, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (alexispauline). Given the multiple
connections Gumbs forges between herself and Lorde, it is not surprising that her short story
“Evidence” invokes and dramatizes Lorde’s practices for activism and for building community.
The Black women protagonists in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s 2015 short story “Evidence”
reflect the interconnectedness between individual self-actualization and the wellness of the
entire community. “Evidence” revolves around five generations of women who live through
and after a paradigm-shifting occurrence referred to as “the time of silence breaking” (35).
While Gumbs does not describe the actual event or who precipitated it, her protagonists offer
insight into the characteristics of their various societies before, during, and after this apocalyptic
event. The silence breaking is so impactful to human society that it becomes a chronological
marker called “Before Silence Broke” or “BSB” (33), used much as we use as “BC” and “BCE”
to distinguish major historical eras in contemporary Western culture. Gumbs’s story is organized
around five pieces of evidence shared in the story as “Exhibits A–E,” through which the reader
can deduce that the time before the silence broke was one where women did not feel safe
because they were often victims of sexual abuse, unsupportive families, and various modes of
silencing resulting from patriarchal and capitalist paradigms that stunted or prohibited their
self-actualization (35–37). After the apocalypse associated with the breaking of the silence,
the women of Gumbs’s story create a zami that illustrates the efficacy of a woman-centered,
Caribbean-informed sociopolitical paradigm for individual and communal healing. In contrast
to their ancestresses who lived in fear, the women of Gumbs’s postapocalyptic communitarian
society live, work, love, and raise children together in an environment of equity and mutability.
Members’ individual and collective ability to choose their own path to self-actualization
buttresses the sustainability and solidarity of each zami.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the zamis of “Evidence” are created and populated by characters
who embody the womanist speculative archetype. Over the course of Gumbs’s story, the reader
meets three pivotal characters related to one another but separated by generations who write
letters, annotate research and lecture notes, and otherwise offer the reader a variety of written
artifacts that document occurrences during and reactions to the world-changing silence breaking.
These characters are Alexis (Lex/Lexi), who lives through and builds new kinds of community
during the apocalypse; Drix, a researcher and lecturer who documents the apocalypse sometime
after that event; and Alandrix, a descendant of Alexis (and presumably Drix) who thrives in her
post-scarcity world five generations after the silence breaking.
Gumbs invites readers to view these characters as interdependent reflections of the past,
present, and future and to interpret the protagonists as part of an anachronistic community. As
explained by Drix in her lecture notes, the “self should be understood as a vessel open to time
and fueled by presence, where presence is as multiple as it is singular” (34). In other words,
one exists in multiple realities in a given moment. Not only does a person exist in the present,
but because they are the product of their ancestors and harbingers of the future, they always
represent a combination of varying temporal realities. Drix describes this phenomenon as such:
“This is what black feminist scientists called ‘integrity,’ a standard for affirming the resonance
of presence across time, where action was equal to vision embodied through variables” (34).
While all of Gumbs’s characters are integral to the story, the one who most clearly inhabits the
104
womanist speculative archetype is founding ancestress Alexis (sometimes known as Lex or Lexi).
Her letter, from herself after the silence breaks to herself in the BSB era and presented as Exhibit
E, the last piece of evidence, provides a blueprint for the reimagined zami she hopes to help
manifest for herself and her community.
As she assures her BSB-era self, humanity not only survives the apocalyptic breaking of the
silence, which involves the literal end of capitalism, but, guided by women like Alexis, she
and her community members begin to create a new social model in which “life, although not
exactly easier, is life all the time. Not chopped down to billable minutes, not narrowed into
excuses to hurt and forget each other” (39). As they do away with capitalism, the progenitors
of these zamis redefine the concepts of “wealth” and “technology” to promote equity and
compassion. Within the story, wealth translates to the idea that everyone possesses the ability
to grow their own food. Alexis writes in her letter, “Everybody eats. Everybody knows
how to grow agriculturally, spiritually, physically, and intellectually” (40). In other words,
abundance is not solely measured in a material way and is therefore able to be shared and
nurtured in an equitable manner. Similarly, technology in this new society no longer refers
just to machinery, but more generally to the womanist practice of making a way out of no
way for the individual and the community. As Alexis puts it, in her postapocalyptic world,
technology is “the brilliance of making something out of anything, of making what we
need out of what we had” (39). She goes on to describe how this reimagined understanding
of technology benefits the community, writing that true technology “[aligns] our spirits
so everyone is on point so much of the time that when one of us falls off, gets scared, or
caught up, the harmony of yes, yes, yes, we are priceless brings them right back into tune with
where they need to be” (39–40). Whereas BSB-era humans use technology to compete with
one another and accumulate wealth for themselves and perhaps their immediate biological
families, Alexis’s descriptions of the post-BSB era provide readers with a glimpse of a more
equitable future where wealth and technology are redefined in communal terms that provide
everyone with the opportunity to thrive.
Significantly, as Alexis and the womanist heroines who come after her dismantle capitalism and
redefine wealth and technology in communitarian terms, they also dismantle old understandings
of family based exclusively on blood relations, replacing them with a new societal model wherein
people choose their own families of affinity. In the letter she writes to her ancestress Alexis upon
turning 12 and reaching the age of accountability in her utopian future, Alandrix notes,
you would have thought of me as part of your family, even though we now do family
differently; we have chosen family now, so maybe we would have just been comrades
if you lived here in this generation. Who knows? But I think that if you met me, you
would feel like we have some things in common. I’m a poet and I use interactive
dance so maybe you would choose me as family. (35)
Even as “Evidence” offers a new vision of collective survival, Gumbs sounds a note of
caution. Drix’s research does more than turn up hopeful poems about the future written by
women of the BSB-era; it also illustrates the horrors experienced by women who are silenced
by the social, political, and economic arrangements of patriarchal capitalism by presenting
visceral descriptions of women literally going underground to survive while they document
their isolation and attempts to silence them. In Exhibit C, Drix documents an image of words
written by a BSB-era woman on a subway wall:
105
R. Nicole Smith
If you can read this, I am evidence. We had been wrong all along. Blood is not money.
Money is not food. The anonymous prophets were right. We cannot afford our own
blood. As I write this, the air is thick with our failure. And I am alone. Remember us
and heal. (37, my emphasis)
The statement that “we cannot afford our own blood” points to the pitfalls of the capitalist
emphasis on material production and consumption rather than developing and nurturing the
individual. This is especially poignant for Black people who have already survived the apocalypse
of the transatlantic slave trade, which stands as a literal representation of this observation. In each
case, the physical sacrifice of humans catalyzed the production of raw materials such as sugar,
cotton, rubber, tobacco, and rice. On the whole, neither those sacrificed nor their descendants
have profited from the tainted fruits of their labor at the scale of their persecutors, if at all. In
“Evidence,” then, the inability to afford one’s blood points to the dystopian capitalist relations
of BSB-era life that sacrifice the person for larger economic or societal gains. And that is what
womanist speculative archetype Alexis and her descendants fight to change.
Testifying, regenerating, and reclaiming are all Black feminist strategies that focus on healing
communities that have long been wounded into silence. Gumbs’s story is part of this tradition
and offers an example of what adrienne maree brown describes as an “emergent strategy”
for community survival and renewal based on decentralized leadership, abundance, and a
keen compassionate understanding of interdependence (280). In “Evidence,” Gumbs makes
this strategy the foundation for a utopian society where everyone experiences contentment
and works to develop sustainable methods of production ensuring abundance for all (Gumbs
alexispauline). In addition, members of this fulfilled society operate from an assumption of
plentitude and an equitable distribution of resources. This societal paradigm differs greatly from
our own capitalist one that presumes scarcity and assumes everyone must work hard and hoard
what they earn for themselves because there might not be enough for everyone (Gumbs 40).
In her coda to Octavia’s Brood, brown writes that connecting SF and social justice offers an
environment for discovery “as it gives us the opportunity to play with different outcomes and
strategies before we have to deal with the real world costs” (278). This is precisely what Gumbs
does in “Evidence,” as she plays with the fantastic notion that capitalist societies run by White
men based on exploitation of the individual’s labor can morph into Black woman-centered
zamis shaped by common experiences and the desire to heal and grow both individually and
collectively. Indeed, 12-year-old Alandrix reflects the successful completion of the womanist
speculative archetype’s journey. In the fully realized zami of the future, Alandrix understands
self-actualization as a matter of course, not something one has to fight for. As she writes to
“Ancestor Alexis”: “I read your writing, and the writing of your other comrades from that
time and I feel grateful. It seems like maybe you knew us. It feels like you loved us already. Thank
you for being brave” (34, my emphasis). Much like Alexis’s own postapocalypse letter to her
preapocalypse self, Alexandrix’s message sent backward through time and space serves as both a
challenge to narratives that silence Black women in the guise of capitalist reality and as testament
to the radical imagination of Black women who imagine more generous and equitable futures
for themselves and their descendants. Indeed, soon after the breaking of the silence and the fall
of capitalism, Alexis bravely writes,
We did it. We shifted the paradigm. We rewrote the meaning of life with our living.
And this is how we did it. We let go. And then we got scared and held on and we let
go again. Of everything that would shackle us to our sameness. (41)
106
In writing this letter, Alexis celebrates a love for herself and her zami both inside of the net
of capitalist intersectionality as we experience it today and as it might enable a sustainable
communitarian future where the goal is not to be rich, but rather to be whole.
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edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. AK Press, 2015, pp. 33–41.
Imarisha, Walidah. “Introduction.” Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited
by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. AK Press, 2015, pp. 3–5.
Lorde Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Defining Difference.” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press,
1984, pp. 114–123.
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press, 1982.
Pearl, Monica B. “ ‘Sweet Home’ ”: Audre Lorde’s Zami and the Legacies of American Writing.” Journal of
American Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2009, pp. 297–317.
Phillips (Maparyan), Layli. The Womanist Reader. Routledge, 2006.
Smith, R. Nicole. “Audre Lorde’s Zami as a Speculative Womanist Guide to Self-Actualization in Octavia
Butler’s Dawn.” New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers, edited by
LaToya Jefferson-James. Lexington Books, 2022, pp. 197–216.
Walker, Alice. “Womanist.” In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Harcourt, 1983, pp. i–xii.
Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. First ed. Lawrence Hill Books,
an Imprint of Chicago Review Press, 2013.
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15
FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION
ART
Smin Smith
Introduction
The term science fiction (SF), as critic Adam Roberts puts it, “resists easy definition . . . it is
always possible to point to texts consensually called SF that fall outside the usual definitions”
(1). The history of feminist SF then, especially queer feminist and trans feminist texts, could
be described as a history of interventions. Creating feminist SF has often necessarily involved
a process of critically intervening in and bending the SF genre. Nowhere is this more apparent
than in examples of feminist SF operating as theory. Here I draw on the scholarship of speculative
feminists including the Beyond Gender Research Collective, Sophie Lewis, Donna Haraway,
Simon O’Sullivan, and David Burrows, all of whom read SF texts as theoretical interventions
into conventional understandings of gender, family, and/or temporality. SF theorist Katie Stone
takes this one step further when she posits that “the boundaries of SF extend beyond the
borders of fiction” (32). SF then can be feminist theory, feminist theory can be SF, and feminist
praxis can also be SF. Here Stone is merging the theorisations of Donna Haraway and the editors
of Octavia’s Brood (2015), who argue activism is SF and SF is political theory. Reading SF as
feminist theory exposes the urgent role it plays in contemporary understandings of science,
society, and subjectivity.
In this chapter I will focus on another genre-bending intervention in the communities and
cultures named SF. SF art is a broad subculture, defined by Dan Byrne-Smith as “forms of
practice, complex networks, or a set of sensibilities” (12). Byrne-Smith’s expansive definition
opens SF art to new disciplinary scrutiny beyond its more traditional framing as illustration
accompanying the “real” SF of the print story itself. This critical shift in the landscape of SF
and its associated mediums leaves space for the many inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary artists
already self-defining their practices as SF. Feminist SF artists, like authors and creators before
them, are at the centre of this intervention. I argue that these artists extend the critical impulses
which motivate feminist SF literature to produce work which not only challenges SF’s content,
style, and themes, but additionally rewrites the disciplines, mediums, and processes termed SF.
SF is thus transformed by feminist SF artists, and we are challenged once again to rethink those
usual definitions.
When choosing case studies to address in this chapter, I reflected upon those feminist SF
narratives which have been read as theory, including Frankenstein (1818), The Left Hand of
Darkness (1969), Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Xenogenesis (1987–1989), Bloodchild (1995),
and The Deep (2019). One could argue there is a novelty to the ideas in these texts in that
they provide new arguments for abolishing conventional gender, family, and temporal relations.
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Feminist Science Fiction Art
However, the “newness” celebrated in readings such as these frequently relies upon myths of the
lone genius or auteur working outside any communal literary, artistic, or intellectual tradition.
Critics have historically reproduced this tendency when framing individual SF illustrators as
exceptional, deemphasising the broader landscape and cultures of SF art. Instead, I build on the
writing of feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, who posits that “authorship is always coauthorship”
(157). Feminist SF, then, is always produced in collaboration. I argue it is this collaborative spirit
that leads authors like Ursula K. Le Guin to write SF in conversation with feminist theory.
This technique is also used in many of the SF stories previously listed. As such, in this chapter
I examine a group of artworks in conversation with feminist theory, which provide speculative
interventions into pre-existing discourses on gender, temporality, and science.
My aim in this chapter is to position feminist SF art as a space productively engaged in
recursivity, in the collective production and rewriting of worlds. I argue that collaborative
worldbuilding is both a common production process and a necessary intervention in how we
understand and read SF more generally. In doing so, I build upon the work of repro-utopian
feminist and SF theorist Katie Stone, who argues for “a reading of SF creators as involved in
the decidedly utopian process of deliberate inheritance” (246). Stone reads projects like Octavia’s
Brood (2015), a collection of short SF stories written by feminist activists and inspired by Octavia
Butler, as examples of deliberate inheritance. In this chapter I apply this framework to feminist
SF art, extending Stone’s argument to show that collaborative worldbuilding is also a “queer
kinmaking practice” (44). The SF artists I reference then both radically recombine techniques
like sculpture, painting, video, performance, and gaming, whilst framing these projects as
collaborative worldbuilding exercises.
Collaborative Worldbuilding
Collaborative worldbuilding is defined in this chapter as a range of processes through which
worlds are produced recursively, using mediums, strategies, and formats which encourage
viewers to extend the story. Collaborative worldbuilding then might be understood as an
expansion of what theorist Dan Hassler-Forest terms transmedia worldbuilding, such that it
becomes applicable to the processes of (feminist) SF art. In Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics
Hassler-Forest summarises transmedia worldbuilding as follows:
(1) Transmedia worldbuilding takes place across media;

(2) Transmedia worldbuilding involves audience participation; and
(3) Transmedia worldbuilding is a process that defers narrative closure (5).
Hassler-Forest lists “television series, comic books and pulp literature” as examples of deferred
narrative closures, whilst videogames that engage with “spatial exploration, collaborative
interaction, and kinetic immersion” (8) are tied to audience participation. Equally vital to this
type of worldbuilding is the production of narratives which operate across media, where worlds
are created across multiple outputs. These techniques certainly can be found in SF art, especially
in outputs from inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary artists. Installations necessitate audience
participation; artist series produce narratives across media; and deferred narrative closure remains
central to fashion design, where the story is extended with each collection, campaign, and
catwalk. However, there is frequently less consensus in SF art, where collaborative worldbuilding
artworks often employ just one or two of these techniques.
Hassler-Forest argues that these transmedia worldbuilding strategies, when employed
together, produce recursive spaces with “political potential” (6). My use of “collaborative
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worldbuilding” in this chapter allows me to engage with artists employing all, some, or no
transmedia worldbuilding techniques whilst still producing spaces of feminist potential. Some
of the artists in this chapter use declarations of deliberate inheritance, including Sin Wai Kin
and Sophia Al-Maria, who frame both their practices and their artistic investigations of gender
as the inheritance of Ursula K. Le Guin. Elsewhere, feminist artists such as Tai Shani rewrite
pre-existing SF to challenge conventional ideas about temporality. This is a process we might
also term collaborative worldbuilding, as narratives are produced in conversation with other
SF authors and viewers are frequently encouraged to write the story again. Finally, I examine
how Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley uses immersion and gameplay in physical and digital spaces
as a form of collaborative worldbuilding that commemorates the history of Black trans people
through stories that effortlessly blend scientific and fantastic tropes.
Deliberate Inheritance in BCE (2019)

Within SF communities, Sophia Al-Maria is perhaps most well-known for the term “Gulf
Futurism,” which she coined with collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri. In this section however I focus
on BCE, an artwork produced by Al-Maria as Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence,
2018. BCE includes two videos: “Wayuu Creation Myth,” featuring Ziruma Jayut, and an
unnamed video written in collaboration with fellow SF artist Sin Wai Kin. These videos were
exhibited together at the Whitechapel Gallery (2018). Al-Maria’s practice then provides a clear
example of how audience participation in SF art takes place, specifically engagement in audio-
visual installations. BCE also shows how artist series or connected videoworks tell narratives
across outputs. These videos were installed with the intention of encouraging connections and
comparisons between each output.
As the Whitechapel Gallery described in a press release for this installation, “over the
course of her residency, Al-Maria has taken inspiration from the late speculative fiction
writer Ursula K. Le Guin.” This isn’t the only time Al-Maria has put her practice in
conversation with Le Guin. She opens Sad Sack (2019), a book of collected writing and
found imagery, by quoting the closing line of Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
(2019): “still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars” (37). This essay
looks to the carrier bag as a tool predating weapons, and considers how technology, science,
and by extension SF might be redefined through this origin story. Le Guin emphasises that
the origin stories SF authors repeat can either entangle or disentangle science from the
“Techno-Heroic” (36), a narrative Al-Maria’s collaborator Sin Wai Kin also identifies in
cultures of white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalism. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
is also explicitly referenced by Al-Maria in BCE, which includes “one ancient [and] one
new” alternate creation myth.
I’d like to primarily focus on Al-Maria’s unnamed myth, which places the artist Sin Wai
Kin in a distant future. Sin is themselves an interdisciplinary artist, who both wrote the script
and performed in this video. They also frame their own practice as SF, where SF is defined
specifically as “a practice of rewriting patriarchal and colonial narratives naturalized by scientific
and historical discourses on states of sexed, gendered and raced bodies” (Sin). Sin, like Al-Maria,
places their art into relation with Le Guin frequently across a multitude of projects, interviews,
and panel talks. These include but are not limited to sonic fiction produced for Ignota Press’s
Carrier Bag Music (2021), a DG galleries group exhibition titled Seized by the Left Hand (2019–
2020), and a blog entry for Auto Italia titled “On Ursula Le Guin.” In the latter, Sin looks at
the continued relevance of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’s
critical interventions. Towards the end of this essay, Sin describes how they “returned [from
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The Left Hand of Darkness] with an image of a different social context, which while imperfect,
was something which I could use to refigure my own attitudes towards gender and sexuality.”
Both Sophia Al-Maria and Sin Wai Kin then position their practices as forms of deliberate
inheritance from Le Guin. In doing so they evoke the theorisations of Katie Stone, who observes
that “contemporary authors have framed themselves as the inheritors, or indeed children, of
their literary forebears” (Strange Children 44). I argue that deliberate inheritance strategies also
exist within SF art, with feminist artists in particular frequently placing their practices into
relation with other SF artists, authors, and creators. Stone poses that deliberate inheritance
provides a “utopian reworking of inheritance, no longer tied to essentialised constructions of
biological heredity or the strictures of the capitalist family” (244). Deliberate inheritance then
is both “an act of care” (244) and a “queer kinmaking practice” (44), and artists like Al-Maria
and Sin who use this technique are critically intervening in relational structures like the family.
In BCE’s unnamed myth Sin speaks directly to the audience, surrounded by what they term
the “infinite sky.” This takes the form of a star-filled backdrop in the videowork which pulses,
sometimes pushing through Sin’s body and evoking the opening sequence of Dune (1984). Sin’s
dialogue describes a dystopian world where bodies and beliefs were placed into hierarchies,
where the existence of these ranking systems was simultaneously denied. But this violence
is historicised in the script and juxtaposed with what the critic Kit Edwards has described as
“an infinite way of being” in the narrative’s present. Edwards points to a passage in the video
which echoes Octavia Butler’s writing, with Sin and Al-Maria’s phrasing “Gxd is Infinite”
mirroring Butler’s “God is Change” refrain as featured across the Parable series (1993–1998).
Edwards argues that infinity, as a mode of being, is “spoken into existence” by Al-Maria and
Sin here, challenging chronological narratives of time. BCE might therefore be understood as a
collaborative worldbuilding exercise, critically intervening in discourses on temporality.
In the centre of this unnamed video, Sin asks the audience, “How many stars? How many
worlds? How many ways of being alive?” Here Sin and Al-Maria’s dialogue enacts what the
writer Bridget Crone names “hyperbolic fictioning such that [hierarchical categories are]
highlighted as a series of rules, experiences, and productions that could be otherwise” (italics in
original) (xiii). When contextualised within Sin’s artistic practice of “rewriting patriarchal and
colonial narratives,” these questions specifically pose a challenge to heterocisnormativity. After
all, “how many ways of being alive” could there be beyond the gender binary? Subsequently,
I read BCE as an SF artwork engaged in a “liberatory reworking of sexual and gender relations”
(Gabriel). BCE uses collaborative worldbuilding to theoretically intervene in discourses
surrounding gender and sexuality. It makes sense then that Al-Maria and Sin place this project
in deliberate inheritance with Ursula K. Le Guin, whose SF also critically intervened in these
areas of feminist theory.
Rewriting in DC Productions (2014–2019)

Tai Shani is a multidisciplinary artist whose transmedia project DC Productions operates across
installation, text, film, sculpture, and performance. The DC Productions series (2014–2019)
included installations at The Tetley (2018) and Turner Contemporary Margate (2019); a
film titled The Vampyre (2017); five performances titled “Semiramis,” “Phantasmagoregasm,”
“Mnemesoid 2,” “Mnemesoid,” and “DC Productions 1” (2015–2018); and a collection
of short feminist SF stories titled Our Fatal Magic (2019). These outputs tell the stories of
twelve characters who exist in a temporal but not spatial city. This project could therefore
be described as a collective worldbuilding practice that produces “a space-time that is both
mythical and historical, a world built by and for women” (Crone xii–xiii) and is engaged with
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by audiences across outputs. DC Productions’s characters are “diverse and self-defined—trans*,

differently abled, of different ages, sizes and shapes” (Crone viii–x). In an interview with Turner
Contemporary, Shani explains that
it’s just a city that is for anyone that wants to live outside a white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy. . . . I’m not interested in women, I’m interested in femininity and what can
be salvaged from a history of femininity, to think about ways out of where we are now.
If SF is feminist theory, DC Productions then could be read as a critical intervention within

conventional understandings of gender. The city provides a conceptual space for critiquing and
reimagining gender relations.
Shani’s artistic practice includes rewriting, which she applies in DC Productions to a wide
range of pre-existing SF and utopian texts. Shani explicitly names the SF stories and proto-
feminist utopias DC Productions rewrites in Our Fatal Magic, with Christine de Pizan’s The
Book of the City of Ladies (1405) as the most drawn-upon source. Shani also acknowledges the
influence of empath characters found in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and
Octavia E. Butler’s P arable of the Sower (1993). This rewriting process could equally be described
as remixing. In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Legacy Russell argues that “materials . . . can be
reclaimed, rearranged, repurposed, and rebirthed” (133) to forge new feminist technologies
for survival. In doing so, Russell echoes Afrofuturist remixing practices, including “digging
the future out of the archive” (Gunkel 19). DC Productions should be contextualised within
these wider speculative cultures of rewriting, salvaging, and remixing. For Shani specifically,
collaborative worldbuilding (or to use their term “world-making”) provides a means for moving
“out of where we are now.” I argue that artworks like DC Productions actively invite further
rewrites through this remixing process, with audiences pushed to recursively transform Pizan’s
world again. Shani’s practice then explicitly engages in collaborative worldbuilding, such
that “authorship is [presented as] always coauthorship” (Lewis 157), which encourages more
coauthorship, which encourages further coauthorship, and so forth.
DC Productions also provides critical interventions in feminist theories of temporality. Through
rewriting and combining texts from different periods, Shani explicitly disengages with chronological
narratives of time. The city in the narrative is specifically described by Shani as a temporal but not
spatial city, and DC Productions combines references from contemporary SF and proto-feminist
sources to create a world populated by both historical figures and software. DC Productions might
therefore be read in conversation with chronopolitics, as the text “pushes against the dictates of
capitalist time and its mode of capture” (Lewis et al.), which include the chronological narratives
of progress often reproduced in feminist theory. Shani instead looks to salvage and rewrite outside
these narratives of time and progress, to repurpose texts across temporalities with feminist aims.
This method, I argue, could also be read as a critical intervention in the history of SF. DC
Productions includes texts written long before the temporal emergence of “science as we understand
the term today” (Roberts 2011 4), which are framed as SF through this process. Shani’s practice then
draws upon feminist, queer, and Indigenous studies by critiquing cultural understandings of science
as a stable, universal, and empirical ideal. Science is instead understood as a situated knowledge,
one frequently melded with spiritualism in various temporalities, geographies, and communities.
This is perhaps most explicit in DC Productions’s character list, which includes mythical figures
like mystics, sirens, psychics, and vampyres, alongside an AI programme named Mnemosyne.
Read alongside Shani’s SF, these figures serve as critical interventions in chronopolitical narratives
of science, transforming SF in the process. In the world of DC Productions, science is contiguous
with, rather than opposed to, the fantastic and the magical.
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Immersion in WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT

ARE NOT (2020)
My final case study in this chapter is Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s WE ARE HERE BECAUSE
OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT. Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist working with animation, sound,
performance, and video games. WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT
specifically is an online archive, accessible at blacktransarchive.com, that aims to counter the
erasure of Black queer and trans people from both historical and artistic archives (American
Artist et al.). The project includes multidisciplinary collaborations across animation, sound
art, and gaming. When accessing the site through Brathwaite-Shirley’s portfolio, the audience
encounters the following introduction:
WELCOME TO THE PRO BLACK PRO TRANS ARCHIVE

THIS INTERACTIVE ARCHIVE WAS MADE TO STORE AND CENTRE
BLACK TRANS PEOPLE
TO PRESERVE OUR EXPERIENCES OUR THOUGHTS OUR
FEELINGS OUR LIVES
TO REMEMBER US EVEN WHEN WE ARE AT RISK OF BEING ERASED
YOUR OWN IDENTITY WILL DETERMINE HOW YOU CAN INTERACT
WITH THE ARCHIVE AS WELL AS WHAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS
BE HONEST WITH THE ARCHIVE
This introduction frames the archive within wider queer, trans, and Black feminist worldbuilding
histories, where queer culture for example is defined as a world-making project. Brathwaite-
Shirley focusses specifically on Black trans world-making in this archive, building an immersive
world from the preserved daily experiences, thoughts, and feelings of Black trans people.
Audiences experience different versions of the archive. Specifically, participants are asked if
they identify as 1) Black and trans, 2) trans, or 3) cis upon entry; this chapter was written after an
encounter having selected option 2, “I identify as trans.” Throughout the archive these multiple-
choice questions encourage audiences to become active contributors to the worldbuilding, in
contexts which foster accountability and responsibility. After an encounter with Brathwaite-
Shirley’s SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE (2022), art critic Zarina Muhammad similarly
described how “the game let me in, offered me a chance to help, gave me very clear instructions
. . . made every single one of my choices heavy with accountability and consequence.” This
strategy is also employed throughout WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE
NOT, where audiences are denied the role of passive spectator. The archive therefore employs
collaborative worldbuilding strategies including collective production and immersive gameplay.
Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice, like Tai Shani’s, can also be read as a critical intervention into
mainstream conceptions of scientific realism. WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT
ARE NOT draws upon magic and spirituality, featuring a Trans Temple, anxiety reduction
spells, and the resurrection of trans ancestors. These components are presented in a virtual
landscape, where she includes both digital aesthetics and frequent references to software. Magic,
spirituality, and science are therefore merged in Brathwaite-Shirley’s speculative world. In this
manner, her practice rejects what Hortense Spillers terms “the official point of view” (Lewis
et al.). This official point of view, I argue, includes the wholesale embrace of empiricism and
realism at the expense of all other ways of knowing the world. WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF
THOSE THAT ARE NOT then collaboratively worldbuilds, providing critical interventions
in science and SF studies.
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I am particularly drawn to readings of WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT

ARE NOT that frame this archive as both SF art and an abolitionist project. The archive is,
after all, produced with the aim of altering recorded histories where trans people “are at risk
of being erased” (Brathwaite-Shirley). Brathwaite-Shirley is then engaged in what Christina
Sharpe terms the work of a “feminist abolitionist, to both destroy the world as it is, and imagine,
make possible, and make present . . . the kinds of worlds that we want to inhabit” (Hartman
et al.). Counter-archiving is used throughout this artwork to destroy, imagine, and rewrite.
Additionally, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT builds or “make[s]
present” a pro-Black and pro-trans space, a world or digital “room,” to use Brathwaite-Shirley’s
terminology, in which Black and/or trans participants can mourn, rest, relax, and heal. The
archive then utilises immersive gameplay to counter cultures of heterocisnormativity and white
supremacy, collaboratively building worlds by and for trans people.
Feminist SF Art
To conclude, the feminist SF artworks in this chapter all use collaborative worldbuilding, either
collective production processes or the reproduction of science fictional and historical worlds.
Through case studies I have identified three collaborative worldbuilding strategies employed by
feminist SF artists: deliberate inheritance, rewriting, and immersion. These techniques allow
artists such as Sophia Al-Maria, Sin Wai Kin, Tai Shani, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley to
make important interventions into conventional understandings of gender, temporality, and
science. Taken together, their art dramatises SF writer Samuel R. Delany’s insight that “we read
words differently when we read them as SF” (153). Similarly, in this chapter I have explored
how contemporary feminist artworks can be read as theory when categorised as SF. In the words
of Sophie Lewis, feminists need more than written theory; they also “have need of fictions,
artworks, and dreams to help us train our minds” (157). SF art, like feminist theory, is “lighting
the way” (Lewis 157).
Bibliography
Al Maria, Sophia. Sad Sack: Collected Writing. Book Works, 2019.
Byrne-Smith, Dan, and Whitechapel Art Gallery. Science Fiction: Documents of Contemporary Art. The
Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2020.
Brathwaite-Shirley, Danielle. “Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.” Mysite. www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com.
Crone, Bridget. “Wounds of Un-Becoming.” Our Fatal Magic. Strange Attractor, 2019, pp. vii–xxii.
Gabriel, Kay. “Gender as Accumulation Strategy.” Invert Journal, 21 May 2020. https://invertjournal.org.
uk/posts?view=articles&post=7106265#gender-as-accumulation-strategy.
Gunkel, Henriette, and Daniel Kojo Schrade. “Scavenging The Future of the Archive.” Futures and Fictions,
edited by Henriette Gunkel et al., Repeater Books, 2017, pp. 193–212.
Hartman, Saidiya, et al. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition.” Silver Press, 2 September 2020.
https://silverpress.org/blogs/news/poetry-is-not-a-luxury-the-poetics-of-abolition.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism.
Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.
Imarisha, Walidah, and adrienne maree brown, editors. Octavia’s Brood. AK Press, 2015.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota Books, 2019.
Lewis, Gail, et al. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Abolitionist Feminist Futures.”
Silver Press, 19 August 2020, https://silverpress.org/blogs/news/the-master-s-tools-will-never-dismantle-
the-master-s-house-abolitionist-feminist-futures.
Lewis, Sophie. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Verso, 2019.
Muhammad, Zarina. “Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley @ Arebyte.” The White Pube, 27 February 2022.
https://thewhitepube.co.uk/art-reviews/she-keeps-me-damn-alive/.
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Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006.

Roberts, Adam. “The Copernican Revolution.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark
Bould et al., Routledge, 2011, pp. 3–12.
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2020.
Shani, Tai. Our Fatal Magic. Strange Attractor Press, 2019.
Sin, Wai Kin. “On Ursula Le Guin.” Auto Italia, 7 February 2018. http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/news/
victoria-sin-on-ursula-le-guin/.
Stone, Katie. Strange Children: Childhood, Utopianism, Science Fiction. University of London, 2021.
Turner Prize. “2019 Nominee | Tai Shani | Turner Contemporary.” YouTube, 4 October 2019. www.youtube.
com/watch?v=QdEzQc9b5Uc.
Whitechapel Gallery. “Alternative Creation Myths Narrate a Feminist Past at Whitechapel Gallery.”
Whitechapel Gallery, 15 November 2018. www.whitechapelgallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/
Sophia-Al-Maria-BCE-Press-Release_Final.pdf.
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PART III
Who
Subjectivities

16
INTRODUCTION
Wendy Gay Pearson
Nick Mansfield begins his book, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (2000) with
an extended reference to Blade Runner (1982). Who am I? is an essentially human question and
it is their ability to ask this question that undermines the corporate determination to designate
replicants as less than human. When replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is dying, he says
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of
Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those
moments will be lost in time, like . . . tears in rain. Time to die.
More than anything else, this speech, emphasizing the ephemerality and fragility of life itself,
establishes the replicants’ humanity and encapsulates the tragedy of their enslavement and
built-in obsolescence.
In SF, many more people than humans, using that term to refer to homo sapiens, are con-
cerned with questions of subjectivity. Not only does SF’s wideflung capacity for imagining
different people, different worlds, and different futures mean that subjectivity is always going
to be central to the genre, but it allows generic interventions into definitions of humanity—
of who gets to be a subject and who does not. Subjectivity is the academic term given to
the individual’s sense of self, our ability to define ourselves, to talk about ourselves, to be, in
the most literal sense, the subjects of our own stories. Science fiction, not surprisingly, extends the
question “who am I?” not only to those who have historically been denied subjectivity (in the
West, mostly women, LGBTQ2S+ folk, people of colour, other marginalized groups)1 but also
to those whose ideas about subjectivity might be radically different: aliens, androids, animals. As
Martha Wells’ Murderbot series demonstrates, one doesn’t even have to wish to be human to have
a sense of subjectivity. Murderbot has no problem using the pronoun “I” of itself, even though
it is sincerely dedicated to rejecting humanity and any attempt by humans to incorporate it
into their lives. As Grifka Wander points out in her chapter, Murderbot’s refusal of gendered
pronouns and insistence on “it,” a pronoun that in English is generally used only for objects and
the objectified, may be a blanket refusal of both gender and any sort of human identity, but it
also calls into the question the notion that subjectivity must be tied to humanity or, indeed, to
the organic.
When we think and write about gender in SF, we have little choice but to be deeply involved
in questions of subjectivity. After all, one of the most basic answers to the question “Who am
I?” involves the assertion of gender identity, usually binary. “I am a woman” is a meaningful
sentence and so, unless one is dealing with anti-trans politics, is “I am nonbinary.” The very fact
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-19 119

Wendy Gay Pearson
that “I am nonbinary” can be read as nonsensical by anti-trans activists speaks to the fraught
nature of gender in the contemporary Western world. Anti-trans activists (sometimes known as
TERFs) tend to argue that “gender” does not exist; all we have is biologically determined sex
(something that, as Pearson points out in per chapter, does not reflect contemporary science).
This results, inevitably, in the dehumanization of those whose genders are not socially and
culturally intelligible. SF is ideally positioned to address such questions. Jacob Barry notes in his
article on Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) that the robot Paladin has no gender—indeed,
no genitalia—yet is persistently gendered by his handler and others. Newitz highlights the
bizarrity of assigning gender to a largely mechanical being (Paladin does have a human brain,
but it is not what they think with nor does it do more than aid in facial recognition). Yet,
despite having no innate sense of gender, Paladin certainly has a sense of selfhood. Like Roy
Batty, like Murderbot, Paladin occupies a liminal space in human society, created as a useful
tool, yet imbued with subjectivity informed by their programming, their life experience, and
their exposure to human society. As Barry argues, “Like robots and cyborgs, trans subjectivities
are aggregate assemblages of parts, technology, and the socio-cultural relations in which they
are embedded” (128).
For women and LGBTQ2S+ people, subjectivity has similarly been a fraught question.
Postmodern theory tends to critique contemporary notions of subjectivity, something that those
who have not traditionally had their selfhood recognized have suggested is a case of the (White)
boys taking their toys away when Others are let into the game. Yet, without the recognition
that one is a subject, it becomes almost impossible not only to be heard, but even to find a voice
in the first place. The important point here is that White cisgender heterosexual middle-class
men have always had their selfhood recognized, while recognition of the subjectivity of Others
has been spotty at best. Graham Murphy argues that cyberpunk, as a largely male-oriented
subgenre of SF, has also productively been adopted by women, LGBTQ folk, and people of
colour, all of whom succeed by ringing the changes on the generic expectations set up by the
first male-authored cyberpunk fictions. Indeed, cyberpunk, as both Murphy and Barry note,
has become a genre that can make space for trans people, in part by using the cyborg and the
cybernetically enhanced humans as symbols for a not always overt gender difference. Murphy
cannily points out that Matrix Resurrections makes The Matrix series more than allegorical, in
part by disrupting binaries of every type, including the binary that positions Neo as “the One”
but which is overwritten by Trinity’s depiction as a complex and more than binary character (a
reference that is both obviously Christian yet subversively trans).
In this section, a variety of scholars, some of them women, queer, trans, and/or people of
colour, think about how SF allows for subjectivity to be understood in much broader terms.
Aliens function as a floating signifier not only within SF but within popular culture more broadly;
they can function as symbols for the outcast, the frightening, the inhuman. It is impossible to
think about who is allowed the right to call themselves human without thinking about gender
and subjectivity. So often gender, along with sexual orientation and race, has divided the human
from the less than human or the completely inhuman. As Schneider-Vielsäcker writes in her
chapter, the revitalization of traditional gender roles in China means that feminist SF writers in
that country have to take on the task of imagining less constrained roles for women and even,
potentially, the possibility that the original commitment to gender equality by Mao and his
followers be revived. Because criticism of the Chinese government is difficult, Chinese women’s
SF, not unlike much feminist and queer SF in the West in the 20th century, has needed to code
its analysis of gender inequality by restaging the gender conflict among alien beings. Similarly,
writing about the ways in which women writers of SF in India have taken up issues of gender
and subjectivity, Mukhopadhyay argues that Indian SF by women has the potential to intervene
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Introduction
in the gender politics of both Indian culture and the state even if that means that women
can only escape their subservient roles by declaring themselves something else entirely—as in
Vandana Singh’s story “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet.”
At the same time, however, SF’s focus on gender invariably means that we must also think
about gender outside the dominance of the binary concept. Several chapters in this section look
at questions affecting transgender people, including Barry’s argument that Autonomous functions
as an allegory of trans belonging, while also highlighting, in Eliasz’s determined gendering of
his robot partner, the difficulty of escaping binary gender. Emily Midkiff looks at how some YA
texts disrupt generic presuppositions, particularly in blurring the line between fantasy and SF, to
similarly disrupt gender expectations. When creators of science fiction for children, like Yoon
Ha Lee and Rebecca Sugar, “break out of the dichotomous definitions that confine both chil-
dren and genre, they can reimagine science fiction as a genre for queer, BIPOC kids and their
toys” (158). In Lee’s adult novel, Ninefox Gambit (2016), trans issues are tackled more directly,
with the protagonist shapeshifting into a male body, but still having a female consciousness. Sex
changing is also a recurrent motif in John Varley’s SF, but Pearson examines the ways in which
a normalized, near-universal practice of changing sex fails to reflect contemporary understand-
ings of transgender and, instead, asks readers to imagine a future in which the idea of a fixed
sex becomes entirely meaningless in part because in an egalitarian society gender itself can hold
little meaning. Finally, Costabile-Heming performs a deep analysis of the gender swapping
stories in the GDR anthology Like a Bolt out of the Blue (1975), noting that while male writers
invariably depicted women behaving as badly as men, even the women writing could not fully
imagine a completely egalitarian world.
Pronouns have become a major issue for trans and nonbinary people. Some anti-trans
activists have achieved notoriety by their refusal to use people’s pronouns and one particu-
larly notorious critic was recently banned from Twitter for “deadnaming” Elliot Page (a trans
person’s “deadname” is their pre-transition name). Pronouns have also been central to SF’s
considerations of gender for a long time. Grifka Wander looks at the journey from Le Guin’s
use of “he” for the hermaphroditic Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness to much more
capacious uses of pronouns in more recent SF by Yoon Ha Lee (himself a trans man) and to
refusals of gender in the Murderbot series. In this respect, feminist SF has been at the forefront,
particularly lesbian feminist SF. One of the earliest instances of a so-called neo-pronoun
occurs in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), where the gender egalitarian
future society of Mattapoisett uses the gender neutral pronoun “per” (short for “person”) for
everybody. Other invented pronouns, mostly for gender neutrality, include na/nan, xe/xyr,
ne/nir, ve/viz, thon/thon’s, and ze/hir. As long ago as 1991, Kelly Ann Sippell identified
some ninety neo-pronouns invented to express a gender-neutral third person in English. In
more recent SF, authors inventing multiply gendered alien species (or species who change
gender) also invent pronouns for anyone of any species who is not clearly male or female.
And, of course, contemporary writers also reflect current usage of “they” as an epicene third
person singular pronoun.
In our contemporary world, it is not remotely surprising that, like gender, race is central
to most people’s sense of selfhood. Intersectionality, the notion that we all are inflected
with multiple identity categories (not just sex, gender, sexual orientation, and race, but
many other social categorizations), has become relatively commonplace as a notion since
Kimberlé Crenshaw first used the term in the 1980s. SF has been identified, if somewhat
incorrectly, as a male-identified genre (the “boys and their toys”) but also as a White,
largely cisgender and generally heterosexual one. Increasingly, however, people of colour
are writing SF, not only in the West, but around the world and recognizing, as they do
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Wendy Gay Pearson
so, the many intersectional factors that go into their possibilities for being in the world.
This delightful diversification and expansion of the genre has not gone either unremarked
or uncontested. Two series of events in the SF world have highlighted just how fraught
the issue of race is, alongside questions of gender and sexuality. The first was the series of
events labelled “Racefail” in 2009/10 that seem to have begun when writer Elizabeth Bear
posted some advice about writing the Other and garnered a good deal of pushback from
those who wanted their SF sans diversity. This was shortly followed by the rise of the Sad
and Rabid Puppies, both of whom gained notoriety by attempting to game the Hugos to
garner more awards for straight White men and accused women, queers, trans people, and
POC of “ruining” their genre (Jemisin 2010). As the articles in this section demonstrate,
rather than ruining SF, the presence of women, queer, trans and racialized readers, writers,
and producers has charged the field with exciting new visions of worlds that might come
to be, could we just find ways to bring them about. This is precisely the type of utopian
insurgency Larissa Lai writes about and that Campbell considers in relation to queer uto-
pian writing in SF.
In her article on Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, Sara Wenger looks at the ways in
which their works make space for Black sexual desire, particularly for Black women. There is a
direct correlation here: the capacity to feel desire and to define its object is specifically linked to
subjectivity. One of the most basic answers to the question “Who am I?” is to locate oneself in
terms of relationships, whether those be familial, amicable, or romantic/erotic. Peyton Camp-
bell notes that emphasizing queer relationality is one of the ways in which we can imagine queer
futurity; following José Muñoz, Campbell argues that Joanna Russ, Larissa Lai, and Hiromi
Goto all highlight queer relationality as a path toward some form of utopian queer futurity (in
contrast to queer theorist Lee Edelman’s argument that queerness is always opposed to futurity).
Also writing about Lai, but focusing on Salt Fish Girl, Agnieszka Podruczna argues that
Lai’s fiction engages in a constant dialogue with . . . extant narratives of mainstream
science fiction. At the same time, her writing interrogates the colonial legacies of
those narratives, positioning the Othered body as the locus of anti-colonial trans-
gression, which refuses to remain contained within the discursive frameworks of the
dominant system. (183)
Subjectivity is linked to corporeality through gender, through sexuality, and inevitably through
the colonial legacy of contemporary notions of race. Wenger concludes that
It is within these speculative fictions where Black girls and women have the space
to be messy, complex, and paradoxical in their sexual desires and pleasures, even as
systems of oppression, domination, and violation threaten to eradicate fantastical pos-
sibilities of ecstasy. (203)
As the SF world becomes both more diverse and more global, we will continue to see
works from around the world that think seriously about gender and imagine ways in which
it might be different, whether because we proliferate genders beyond the binary or because
alien species might have any number of genders. However we imagine the future of gender
and the challenges and changes we might wish to enact, it is certain that questions of gendered
subjectivity will remain central to much SF, particularly as more women, LGBTQ2S+ folk, and
people of colour assert their right to imagine brave new worlds. Our selves may be as ephemeral
as tears in the rain, but how we assert them matters.
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Introduction
Note
1 There are many different acronyms for the queer and trans communities; LGBT is common, but
increasingly people are modifying it to recognize queer, Two Spirit, and sometimes intersex people.
Bibliography
Jemisin, N. K. “Why I Think RaceFail Was the Bestest Thing Evar for SFF.” NKJemisin.com, 2010. https://
nkjemisin.com/2010/01/why-i-think-racefail-was-the-bestest-thing-evar-for-sff/
Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. Routledge, 2020.
Sippell, Kelly Ann. Solving the Great Pronoun Problem: The Acceptability of the Singular ‘They’. 1991. Eastern
Michigan University, MA thesis.
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17
“ALL HAIL THE TRANS
CYBORG”
Autonomous as an Analogy of Trans Becoming
Jacob Barry
In February of 2019, Laura Ingraham, the conservative host of The Ingraham Angle at Fox News,
hosted Dr. Paul Nathanson, a men’s rights “activist” and “gender relations” professor, on her
podcast, where the two pondered whether trans people are secretly cyborgs trying to destroy
humanity. The hour and a half episode titled “Transhumanism and the Assault on Traditional
Gender and Masculinity” consisted of Ingraham and Nathanson discussing some of the “hoaxes”
contributing to “the attack on masculinity” (23:45–24:11). Of specific interest, as described by
Nathanson, is the development of a feminist ideology that challenges the notion of gender, and
as Ingraham states, has led to the “destruction or elimination of the traditional family” and the
“outrageous surge” of trans and non-binary movements (30:21–31:02). Nathanson agreeing
with Ingraham, adds:
I think that the trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning
gender altogether, not simply re-writing it, they’re basically trying to use social engi-
neering to create a new species. Which is what, in fact, the transhumanists have been
doing for the past half century. Using medical and other technologies to develop a
new species. So, the goal is really quite radical. . . . We’re not talking about people who
want to simply do a bit of reform here and there, add a new category. They want, they
must, in fact, destroy whatever is in order to replace it with what they think it should
be. We’re talking about revolution, not reform. (33:01–34:48)
Nathanson and Ingraham go on to debate what this new “species” would look like, suggesting on
one hand that the new era of trans subjecthood would contain aspects of animality (Ingraham),
and on the other hand reflect a transhumanist future wherein gender transgression becomes
the combination of human and machine (Nathanson). The latter involves the use of “social
engineering to create an entirely new species” whose goal it would be to send the world into
a full-fledged state of dystopia via the destruction of gender norms (Nathanson 33:01–34:48).
The irony in Ingraham and Nathanson’s attempt at anti-trans propaganda is that instead of
setting up a dystopian future, wherein the end of gender norms equals the end of the world, the
episode ends up depicting an alternative future where trans people take over the world. This is
a future, which in my view, and arguably in the view of a majority of the gender benders out
there, is one “badass utopia.” The episode, while rightfully identified as anti-trans propaganda,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-20 124

“All Hail the Trans Cyborg”
also sparked an outpouring of comments embracing and uplifting the demise of gender as a
result of trans cyborgs. A Reddit thread titled “All Hail the Trans Cyborg” began with a meme
captioned: “part human, part machine, all trans. doncha love it when transphobes accidentally
make trans people sound badass?” (u/MattloKei). The post was followed by hundreds of
comments, some of which included: “I mean I’m trans and I’ve got an insulin pump and a cgm
so I already am a trans cyborg” (isnt-there-more); “this is a whole other level of stupid. Though
if trans people are starting a machine fused human race, I’m all for it” (DankwraithFA); “wow,
this blew up. Pay me some money so I can hack off my arm and get a cool robot one. And also,
estrogen” (RadFemme74); and “hell ya I wanna be a trans cyborg, but they do realize they’re
just ripping off science fiction, right?” (jayakiroka). Despite Ingraham and Nathanson’s self-
perceived revolutionary discovery, the trans cyborg, or the cyborg more generally, is not a new
phenomenon. In the 21st century the world has already been faced with and has embraced the
technologically enhanced human. Thus, while the cyborg is already a reality, it is the genre of
science fiction that continues to push the boundaries of the relationship between technology,
gender, and the category of human.
Science fiction narratives commonly use technological advancements, apocalyptic events,
and space or time travel to think speculatively about present-day troubles through alternative
and/or futuristic worlds. As Ursula K. Le Guin states in the opening to The Left Hand of Darkness,
“science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer
is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for
dramatic effect, and extend it into the future” (x). However, as Le Guin beautifully points out,
science fiction “is not predictive; it is descriptive,” highlighting instead the all too eerie ways
that science fiction reflects the past and current conditions of the real world, as well as the all
too real possibilities of a not-so-distant future (Le Guin, x). Because science fiction offers the
opportunity to explore social conventions, the genre serves as a viable medium through which
to question the preoccupation with a colonial/modern binary sex/gender system. Although
there continues to be relatively few representations of trans characters within the genre, the
prevalence of gender-bending plot lines has grown exponentially since the trailblazing work of
Le Guin. By pushing up against binary conceptions of sexuality and gender through the use
of shifting pronouns, gender identities, expressions, and hierarchies, science fiction reveals the
many ways that gender structures the world around us, including our own bodies and selves.
Robots, cyborgs, and androids as present-day realities thus offer a vehicle to experiment with
gender in a manner that produces a tangible, perhaps even non-fictitious, account of how
gender is a way of regulating and disciplining the body.
To illustrate, the current paper investigates Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous as an allegory of
trans becoming by examining the gendered discourse that unfolds throughout the novel. Set
in the year 2144, Autonomous explores a world where the evolution of late-stage capitalism
has resulted in the dissolution of national borders into economic zones and the increased
enforcement of patent and property laws. Newitz constructs a post-plague world in which
human rights have been replaced by private contracts, and pharmaceutical technology, now
capable of curing almost any disease, is strictly policed by a governing body known as the
International Property Coalition (IPC). Meanwhile, robotic artificial intelligence (AI) has
evolved dramatically, resulting in a world that is as much made up by robots, cyborgs, and
androids, as it is by humans. Through the storylines of two protagonists, Jack and Paladin, one
human, the other a human-enhanced robot, Newitz weaves together a not-so-distant future
narrative that addresses the themes of autonomy, capitalism, technology, and gender.
Although it is tempting to read Autonomous as a dystopian future, the world Newitz creates
is an attempt at accurately depicting a future based on the conditions of the present. At first
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Jacob Barry
glance, Autonomous appears to be a cautionary tale about the violences of capitalism and, while it
certainly is that, the novel in more covert ways asks what defines sex, gender, queerness, and, by
extrapolation, transness. Newitz themselves identifies as non-binary and uses the pronoun “they”;
their use of pronouns in the novel is both careful and deliberate. In questioning the definitions
and interrelationships between these categories, Newitz engages with what Nikki Sullivan and
Samantha Murray call somatechnics. Derived from the Greek words soma (i.e., body) and techne
(i.e., technologies), somatechnics emphasize how “corporealities are formed and transformed”
through the body’s continued engagement with technology (3). According to Sullivan and Murray,
somatechnics offer “possibilities for disruptions, counter-actualizations, destabilizations and for the
creation of new selves, affinities, kinship relations, and culture” (XXI).
Newitz engages the discourse of somatechnics in two distinct ways. First by exploring
gender through the genderless (yet gender inscribed) part robot, part human that is Paladin; and
second, in their ability to situate science fiction (i.e., a genre that is simultaneously concerned
with technology and functions as a soft technology in and of itself) as the techne through which
to explicate the gendered soma. Here Newitz offers a mirror into the world in which we live
wherein the reader is able to recognize the subject, and at the same time be unfamiliar with
what the author is reflecting back at them (Suvin 6). Autonomous questions both what it means
to be human, and what role gender and technology play in answering such a question. Through
Paladin’s experience of gender as an alien concept, Newitz leaves traces of what I read as
trans becoming. Most simply defined, trans becoming is the ever-changing, multidirectional,
and deeply entangled process that involves the physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological
movements required in coming to be something “other” than one’s starting point. In the sections
to come I carefully read the character of Paladin to explicate how gender simultaneously belongs
to and is something that is done to the body, in particular the trans or transing body.
Trans Cyborgs Take Over the World

In Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto the cyborg is described on one hand as a creature of
fiction, tasked with blurring the rigid boundaries of the self and the other, yet, on the other
hand, as “a creature of social reality,” representing humanity’s enfleshment with technology
(149). However, as Haraway emphasizes, one should not get caught up within the dichotomy
of fiction versus non-fiction; even the fictional cyborg is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from
becoming social reality (154). The cyborg, fictional or not, thus is said to represent “transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (154). Cyborgs reflect back to humanity
the social-cultural dichotomies, such as “self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,
maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong” (177) that structure the world, as well as subjects
themselves. Haraway asserts that the cyborg, in particular the feminist cyborg, challenges the
essentialist view of gender identity by situating bodies as being enmeshed within the socio-
temporal moments which they pass through or exist within. However, the cyborg, as well as its
robot kin, does not entirely escape the rigidity of gendered categories.
Despite often being made in the likeness of humans, the cyborgs and robots commonly
depicted in science fiction writing tend to lack actual physical genitals. While playing “no
role in their initial gender assignment,” a lack of genitalia does not necessarily correlate
with a lack of gender ascription (Robertson 5). The character Paladin is first presented to
readers as a newly activated robot who is indentured to the IPC for a minimum of ten years
of military service. Paladin has a hard black exterior shell and genitals equivalent to that of
a metal Ken doll, making him seem more machine-like than humanoid (Newitz 227). The
combination of Paladin’s outward appearance and combat programming causes them, and
126
robots like them, to receive a sex/gender assignment of male/masculine. Throughout the first
half of the novel, Paladin is referred to using male pronouns,1 as that is how he is gendered
by his IPC partner and human handler, Eliasz. Although Paladin is initially understood to
be a robot devoid of human-like qualities or organs, as the novel unfolds it is revealed that
Paladin’s body incorporates a brain that previously belonged to a human woman—which
by definition makes Paladin a cyborg. The brain has limited functionality and is not part of
Paladin’s intellect or processing capacity—Newitz defines the brain’s raison d’être as its ability
to recognize human faces. Paladin is initially irked with Eliasz’s obsession with this brain,
noting that, contrary to Eliasz’s assumption that the brain is the seat of Paladin’s psyche, or
perhaps soul, it processes neither his ethics nor his emotions (33). Newitz’s conceptualization
of Paladin as a bot enhanced by human flesh (i.e., a human brain, albeit without many of
that brain’s potential functions), rather than a human enhanced by technology, provides a
foundation through which they are able to displace and trouble the current-day preoccupation
with rigid gender categories. By analyzing and breaking apart gender through the medium
of a genderless robot repeatedly encountering the human obsession with gender, Newitz not
only provides a queering of the cyborg, but actively troubles gender in the way that Haraway
first envisioned in her discussion of the cyborg.
Although Paladin has no internal conception of their gender, the humans within the novel,
in particular Eliasz, repeatedly project a perceived gender identity onto Paladin. Prior to the
discovery of Paladin’s female brain, Eliasz first perceives Paladin to be male. As Paladin and
Eliasz develop feelings for each other, this conceptualization becomes problematic for Eliasz
who not only identifies as heterosexual, but whose past has made him homophobic. In an
attempt to understand both their and Eliasz’s desires, Paladin questions Eliasz about the need
for military robots to “learn about human sexuality” (Newitz 140). Taken aback by Paladin’s
question, the blood rushes into Eliasz’s face as he replies, “I don’t know anything about that,”
referring to same-sex desire in derogatory terms (Newitz 141). Confused by Eliasz’s response,
Paladin allocates 80% of their processing power for combat and the remaining 20% for running
searches on sexual terms. As Paladin learns more about human sexuality they begin to “perceive
that gender [is] a way of seeing the world,” and “a form of social recognition” (227). When it
becomes clear to Paladin that Eliasz’s desire for them is complicated by his perception of them
as masculine/male, Paladin reveals to Eliasz that their human network is a brain donated from a
dead female soldier. Although Newitz tells us more than once throughout the novel that robots
do not have a sense of gender, Paladin adopts “she/her” pronouns at Eliasz’s request in order to
alleviate his reservations about accepting his desire for them. There is a ringing discomfort to
Newitz’s engagement with pronouns throughout the novel, as it bears a stark similarity to the
experiences of many trans and non-binary readers. The experience of accepting pronouns that
do not necessarily sit comfortably with one’s perception of their gender identity in an effort to
alleviate the discomfort or ignorance of others is paralleled in the becoming of many trans and
gender-diverse people.
Like many trans identified individuals, Paladin becomes an enmeshment of symbols, flesh,
and technology that simultaneously break apart an essentialist imaginary of gender identity,
whilst never being entirely free of the rigidity of an essentializing gaze. However, because
Paladin is indentured to the IPC, their willingness to allow Eliasz to perceive them as a
woman is further complicated by the fact that Paladin has loyalty and attachment programs
running in the background at all times. Reflecting on a private server chat with another
robot, Paladin thinks to themselves: “Bug would no doubt say that there are no choices in
slavery, nor true love in a mind running apps like gdoggie and masterluv. But they were
all that Paladin had” (236). As Newitz addresses in their earlier academic work, “cyborgs
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Jacob Barry
are programmed to work, and there is nothing they can do to override that programming”
(Pretend We’re Dead 124), thereby drawing a parallel to the gender programming that takes
place when people are expected to take part in specific gender performances (Butler, 41).
Like robots and cyborgs, trans subjectivities are aggregate assemblages of parts, technology,
and the socio-cultural relations in which they are embedded. Although Paladin is not trans,
as explicitly stated at the end of the novel, the journey which Paladin embarks on resembles
many of the questions and queries that trans folks are faced with in their own explorations
of gender. Take for instance later in the novel when Eliasz, in an effort to justify his initial
attraction to Paladin before knowing the origins of their brain tells Paladin that he “must have
somehow sensed that [she was] a woman” (284). Through this interaction Newitz evokes the
discourse of the wrong body model of trans subjectivity formation wherein the sexed body
is perceived as wrong in relation to an inner, real, and authentic gender identity (Psihopaidas
413). While Paladin does not have a sexed body, they do have an exterior shell that was
initially gendered by Eliasz as masculine/male. However, unlike the trans person who is
supposedly discovering their “true self,” Paladin is having a gendered “true self ” narrative
imposed upon them by Eliasz, predominantly due to Eliasz’s internalized homophobia. Eliasz
believes Paladin’s “true self ” “which was utterly confused in his mind with her gender” (299)
was located in their brain and was lost with the brain’s destruction. Eliasz’s imposition of his
(mis)understanding onto Paladin’s sense of selfhood reflects trans becoming insofar as it draws
a parallel to the experience of having a sex/gender imposed upon one’s body in order to
become intelligible to the dominant culture.
Paladin was “given . . . a gender before [they] even had a name” and comes to experience
it as externally imposed upon them rather than in their own internal conceptualization
(227). Of course, this is further complicated by the programs running in Paladin’s software
that require them to please Eliasz, but which Paladin is finally able to disable when they
acquire an autonomy key. Drawing a parallel to the experience of trans individuals, the
gender inscribed onto a body does not always neatly map onto each unique individual’s
conceptualization of their own gender identity and expression. Unlike Paladin, trans
individuals are not necessarily programmed with specific software that make them incapable
of denying the external imposition of gender identity on to their bodies, but neither do
they have even surreptitious access to autonomy keys which allow them to take over control
of their own programming. Trans individuals are still subject to the social and cognitive
programming that takes place as a result of a world deeply divided by gender hierarchies and
stereotypes. There is a unique balance between the discourse that biopolitically produces
trans subjectivities and those that “enable trans people to realize themselves as trans in
the first place” (Puar 35). Because gender is tightly woven into the social fabric of our
everyday world, it is constantly coding and deploying bodies in ways that materially affect
them (Stryker & Aizura). When Paladin chooses to emigrate to Mars with Eliasz, the
cyborg is forced to negotiate the complex relationship between Paladin’s own desire for
Eliasz, however that desire may be understood in an inherently ungendered and genital-less
being, and Eliasz’s imposition of gender onto their genderless corporeality. Trans people
are similarly often required to uphold cis-normative expectations of gender identity and
expression for reasons that may be equally as complex in balancing gender identify (so far
as one has one), the desire for corporeal and emotional autonomy, the intensity of intimate
relationships, and social and familial expectations. By addressing the body’s connection to
technology, Newitz asks important questions about what it means to be human, and what
role gender and autonomy play in this equation.
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Conclusion
Autonomous constructs a future world that does not in many ways feel all that different from
our present-day realities. In an interview conducted with the Literary Hub (2019), Newitz
describes Autonomous as a novel of hope, but not the type of hope bound up in false claims
of a utopian future. Instead, Newitz pragmatically considers what hope would look like if it
took seriously the messiness of the current world, stating that the future is neither “entirely
good or entirely bad” (Crum 2019). Newitz’s attempt to accurately represent a neither
utopian nor dystopian future where “individuals will live and love and struggle” (Crum)
provides readers with a glimpse into a possible future while simultaneously using science
fiction as the techne through which to explore things that are not yet possible in the here
and now. Autonomous explores a highly intelligent, technologicalized world wherein late-
stage capitalism amounts to a single governing body controlling lifesaving resources, bots,
and humans.
As an analogy of trans becoming, Autonomous questions both what it means to be human,
and what role gender and technology play in answering such a question. Through the character
of Paladin, Autonomous presents what may resemble a trans cyborg. Following a longstanding
tradition within science fiction, Newitz uses what Darko Suvin (1979) calls cognitive estrangement,
reflecting back at us a subject that is simultaneously recognizable and unfamiliar. Newitz
encourages their audience to consider the ways in which oppressive power relations, such as
capitalism and rigid gender categories, shape our relationship to the world around us. Science
fiction offers a methodological tool, one that Donna Haraway would call cyborg writing,
allowing us even for a short while to imagine alternative possibilities for existing in this world.
The trans cyborg as both a creature of fiction and a very real social reality provides an escape
from what Petra L. Doan (2010) calls “the tyranny of gender” (635)—the pervasiveness of
gender categories that makes life difficult, if not at times impossible—offering one avenue for
a more hopeful world. For trans and gender-diverse individuals, science fiction, whether it
be as readers, watchers, or producers, is a way to cultivate alternative livable worlds—perhaps
even ones in which our diverse relationships to gender are not only affirmed but celebrated. To
conclude and echo Jay Connor’s sentiment in his review of The Laura Ingraham Show podcast,
“my only request is that when the trans community inevitably creates their invincible legion of
transgender cyborgs, that they show no mercy on the conservatives who spoiled their imminent
reign” (1). All hail the trans cyborg.
Note
1 Throughout the novel Paladin has both “he/him” and “she/her” pronouns projected onto them by
Eliasz. While the convention in analyzing SF writing is usually to follow the pronoun usage of the
novel itself, which in this case reflects Eliasz’s gendering of Paladin, I have instead opted to use gender
neutral pronouns (they/them) for Paladin. I do this to reflect Paladin’s absence of an internal concept
of gender and how gender has been projected onto them.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999. doi: 10.4324/
9780203902752
Connor, Jay. “Laura Ingraham Guest Believes Trans People Will ‘Destroy’ Gender Norms to Create
‘New Species’ That’s ‘Part Machine’.” The Root, 28 March 2019. www.theroot.com/laura-ingraham-
guest-believes-trans-people-will-destroy-1833645207.
129
Jacob Barry
Crum, Maddie. “Annalee Newitz Is Imagining the Future of Work.” Literary Hub, 9 April 2019, https://
lithub.com/annalee-newitz-is-imagining-the-future-of-work/.
DankwraithFA. “R/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns—all hail the trans cyborgs!” Reddit. 2020. www.reddit.com/r/
traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/j3sshr/all_hail_the_trans_cyborgs/
Doan, Petra L. “The Tyranny of Gendered Spaces—Reflections from Beyond the Gender
Dichotomy.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 17, no. 5, 2010, pp. 635–
654, doi: 10.1080/0966369X.2010.503121.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
20th Century.” The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, pp. 117–158, doi:
10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4.
Ingraham, Laura and Paul Nathanson. “Transhumanism and the Assault on Traditional Gender and
Masculinity.” The Laura Ingraham Show, vol. 43, 2019, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/
transhumanism-and-the-assault-on-traditional/id914065708?i=1000433620193
isnt-there-more. “R/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns—all hail the trans cyborgs!” Reddit. 2020. www.reddit.com/r/
jayakiroka. “R/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns—all hail the trans cyborgs!” Reddit. 2020. www.reddit.com/r/
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace, 1969.
Newitz, Annalee. Autonomous. Tor, 2018.
Newitz, Annalee. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Duke University Press,
2006.
Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017, doi:
10.1515/9780822372530.
Psihopaidas, Demetrios. “Intimate Standards: Medical Knowledge and Self-Making in Digital Transgender
Groups.” Sexualities, vol. 20, no. 4, 2017, pp. 412–427, doi: 10.1177/1363460716651415.
RadFemme74. “R/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns—all hail the trans cyborgs!” Reddit. 2020. www.reddit.com/r/
Robertson, Jennifer. “Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan.” Body & Society, vol. 16, no.
2, 2010, pp. 1–36, doi: 10.1177/1357034X10364767.
Stryker, Susan., and Aren Z. Aizura, editors. The Transgender Studies Reader 2. First Ed. Routledge, 2013.
Sullivan, Nikki, and Samantha Murray. Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. Ashgate, 2009.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University
Press, 1979.
u/MattloKei. “R/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns—all hail the trans cyborgs!” Reddit. 2020, www.reddit.com/r/
130
18
QUEER SCIENCE FICTION,
QUEER RELATIONALITY, AND
UTOPIAN INSURGENCY
Peyton Campbell
Introduction
In 1984, Samuel R. Delany asserted that “Science fiction is not about the future” but rather that “it
uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present” (26). He
was arguing not only that science fiction should be taken seriously as a literary category, but also
that science fiction is distinct from other literary forms in how it grapples with the tension between
the given present and imagined futures. Instead of providing a definitive vision of the future, science
fiction offers us “images of tomorrow” that may or may not come to be, but without which
one is trapped by blind history, economics, and politics beyond our control. . . . Only
by having clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one
can go, will we have any control over the way we may actually get there. (14)
When taken not as destiny but possibility, science fiction’s imagined tomorrows can offer ways
of orienting ourselves within the present towards better ways of living. Queer and feminist
science fiction may offer hope of alternative futures for those of us who find no solace in a
tomorrow that replicates the oppressive structures of the present, something necessary for the
creation of better worlds both in the immediate now and the future.
For José Esteban Muñoz, utopian idealism within the present is necessary in imagining better
worlds within the future, but this look forward must be a “backwards glance that enacts a future
vision” (4). Utopian idealism that is disconnected from historical and contemporary struggle is
an abstract utopia, a “banal optimism” that fails in its attempt to enact real change (3). Rather,
Muñoz, drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, argues that within utopian imagining we must
look towards “concrete utopias” for how they are “relational to historically situated struggles, a
collectivity that is actualized or potential” (3). It is the connection to real and historical struggle
that provides concrete utopias their capacity for change, and it is within the hope of enacting
better worlds that Muñoz centers his work.
Muñoz’s conception of utopian futurity as one of queer relationality must be situated in
conversation with the work of Lee Edelman. Edelman challenges the often-unquestioned way
time is understood within a framework of linear progress, what he sardonically recognizes as
“futurism’s unquestioned good” (7). He points to the way that futurity is constructed around
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-21 131

Peyton Campbell
reproductivity and represented through the image of the symbolic child, an understanding of
futurity which places queerness not only outside of the future, but as inherently antithetical
to it. To be queer is to stand in the way of futurity and the utopian endpoint that adhering to
reproductive futurism, and its reliance on frameworks of heteronormativity and neoliberalism,
will supposedly bring. Rather than looking towards queerness as a potential site of future oriented
thought, however, Edelman considers queerness outside futurity entirely, leaving no potential
for queer futures or utopian imaginaries. In contrast, Muñoz’s work centers contemporary
and historical struggle and asks us to consider ways that queer relationality provides a space for
envisioning potential futures that move beyond the confines of reproductive futurity.
The turn to history is important in understanding how the present is, for many oppressed
groups, experienced as a temporal period of injustice and oppression. Indigenous climate justice
scholar Kyle Powys Whyte argues that the “Anishinaabek already inhabit what our ancestors
would have understood as a dystopian future” (207). Climate destabilization is one example of the
historical and ongoing violence of industrial settler colonialism, which some Anishinaabe attempt
to challenge through Indigenous-led environmental restoration and conservation projects. These
projects are “not based on dread of certain futures,” but recognize these dreadful futures as already
here while working to conserve and restore species that are important within Indigenous culture
and local ecosystems (213). Integral to this understanding is that hope for the future, and the ability
to form concrete utopias and strive towards better worlds, is found not in an abstract ideal of the
future, but in our relations to each other, to non-human entities within our networks of care,
and to the land itself. Muñoz writes that “queer relationality promises a future” (6). It is through
connection with others that we find hope and the promise of a future that is, if not a utopia, a
better and more equitable world than the one currently experienced.
Similarly to Muñoz, Larissa Lai calls for understanding utopia not as an endpoint to be reached,
but as a series of temporal enclaves that run next to and within our present. Lai builds on Tom
Moylan’s understanding of the critical utopia that emerged in the late 60s and 70s, which Moylan
saw as a shift within utopian writing that sought to maintain the utopian dream while grappling
with the limitations, challenges, and imperfections of utopia in practice (1986 10). For Lai, the
critical utopia, while valuable, requires updating to better contend with our “collective social and
planetary co-existence and in how we respond to the uneven histories of exploitation, colonialism
and imperialism that have brought us to the present moment” (“Insurgent Utopias” 98). Lai’s
insurgent utopia draws on what John Rajchman understands as the “knock at the door” or the
potential points of utopian possibility. These points are not temporal ends, but instead a “double-
edged sword” that is not assuredly utopian but instead is “open to co-optation, destruction,
bastardization, incorporation, death, or defusal, and yet, when it bursts through, it offers the
powerful possibility of critique—narratively or discursively, in its very materiality” (94). The knock
at the door is not guaranteed to be utopian but offers the potential of change that can lead us closer
to utopian futurities. Lai writes that “what matters is the work of thought and imagination—the
work of ‘overleaping’ rather than arrival. The utopian enclave belongs to a temporality that is
always beside us—a self-contained eddy indeed, always moving in multiple directions” (97). For
Lai, speculative fiction is critical in preparing us to recognize the utopian moment when it comes
knocking, what she calls the “aesthetic sensibility and attentiveness to history to recognize the
utopian gift when with [sic] appears” (95). Taken alongside Muñoz, Lai’s work makes visible
how queer and feminist science fiction, by depicting the utopian potential nestled within
imagined worlds, offers alternative futures to the dominant narrative of heteronormativity, settler
colonialism, and apocalyptic capitalism. Novels act as temporal enclaves, envisioning queer futures
that, while not always utopian, nonetheless contain seeds for imagining, and bringing into being,
more equitable futures within the present.
132
Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, Utopian Insurgency
The Tiger Flu’s Utopian Insurgency

Often the ways in which queer science fiction is able to couch utopian modes of thinking is
within dystopian worlds that emphasize and satirize the problems of our temporal present. Lai’s
novel The Tiger Flu could easily be read as dystopian in its depiction of two young women
who must navigate a West Coast North America ravaged by, among other things, massive
environmental change, societal breakdown, widespread poverty and food insecurity, and an
ongoing global pandemic that infects and kills men far more often than it does women. In an
interview with Jiaqi Kang, Lai explains that her novel, despite its seemingly dystopian approach
to its subject matter, was written to be a novel of hope. She says,
I really was trying to offer a possibility for the world in spite of all the horrible things,
in spite of the patriarchy, in spite of environmental destruction, in spite of rabid capi-
talism, in spite of all those things. I can’t imagine those horrors away, but I can imag-
ine their transformation into something else, maybe better, but definitely different.
(“Conversation”)
In writing a novel that is at once a reflection of our dystopian present and a work of hope, Lai
embodies within her writing the idea of insurgent utopia. Within The Tiger Flu Lai offers a
vision of utopian futures that exist within and alongside our temporal present, and in doing so
urges us to imagine and work to create new and better futures within the here and now.
As the characters of Lai’s novel navigate the world around them, kinship functions as an integral
part of their ability to image and enact utopian futures. Kirilow is one of the Grist sisters, a commune
of women who reproduce through parthenogenetic cloning, birthing litters of daughter-doubles.
Only a small number of women in the village are capable of doing so, just as only a few of the
Grist women are starfish, able to regrow their organs, which are harvested and transplanted into
other Grist women to extend their lives. Here, Lai explores the complex ways care and harm are
intertwined within our networks of relationality, as Kirilow is forced to extract organs from her
beloved Peristrophe Halliana to extend the life of the Grist Village’s last doubler. Despite her efforts,
Peristrophe dies, and Kirilow must travel to the hub of an ongoing pandemic to find a new starfish
and ensure the village’s survival. Kora, who lives in the dilapidated metropolis of Saltwater city
with her mother, uncle, and brother, navigates the constant threat of disease and starvation amidst
technological marvels and vast wealth disparity. After her mother kills her beloved pet goat Delphine
in order to feed them, Kora is sent to live at the Cordova School for Dancing Girls, one of the last
refuges of survival for young women. Throughout the novel, both characters are forced to engage
in acts of care and brutality, laying bare the conflicting nature of our interdependent world in which
our relations act as sites of both potential healing and harm.
It is within this dystopian world that Lai presents the utopian enclave of queer relationality. Kai
Cheng writes that “against the backdrop of atrocity and despair, she illuminates the conditions
which make human healing and growth not only possible, but necessary no matter the ultimate
outcome” (“Surviving Utopia”). Kora and Kirilow, trapped within a world that is (often literally)
falling apart around them, in which they are forced to witness and experience horrific acts of
violence, still endeavor to carve out a future for themselves and the Grist sisterhood. For both
characters the future they create is very different from the utopian imaginary, marked by both
loss and failure, yet nonetheless utopian in its form. As Muñoz writes,
The history of actually realized utopian enclaves is, from a dominant perspective, a
history of failures. Hope and disappointment operate within a dialectical tension in
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Peyton Campbell
this notion of queer utopia. Queerness’s failure is temporal and, from this project’s
perspective, potentially utopian, and inasmuch as it does not adhere to straight time,
interrupting its protocols, it can be an avant-garde practice that interrupts the here
and now. (155)
Hope is often disappointing in its inability to make real imagined realities, but it nonetheless
attunes us towards cultivating better ways of living together within the world. The future Kora
and Kirilow create for the Grist Village is marked, like the queer present, by futures that will
never come to pass. Yet, it is within this tension between idealization and reality that we may
find the hope necessary in creating more livable futures. Even within dystopian worlds, the
utopian potential of queer relationality remains.
The final pages of The Tiger Flu depict Kora and Kirilow 150 years in the future living
within a thriving Grist Village. Kora has become the Kora tree, bearing organs as if they were
fruit and removing the need for organ harvesting amongst the Grist sisters. Here, Lai illustrates
through the Kora Tree how our relations to one another form the basis of any potential utopian
future. The Grist Village relies on the Kora tree for organs, reflecting the interconnections of
our relationships in how we care for one another. As Kora provides organs for the Grist sisters,
extending their lives and eliminating the need for dangerous organ harvesting, so too does the
Grist Village care for her, evidenced by the children of the village who gather around the Kora
tree to hear her stories of the past. Through their shared interdependency, the Grist sisters
survive. Marina Klimenko recognizes the Kora tree as a representation of queer relationality,
reflecting a move away from the nuclear family model and towards queer modes of connectivity.
She writes,
By showing the Kora tree teaching young Grist sisters their history and encourag-
ing them to remember, Lai suggests a model of family and reproduction that moves
beyond this neoliberal logic and inspires environmental care through memory, con-
nection to more-than-human beings, and plural lower-case-h histories rather than a
singular neoliberal ideology. (178)
The Kora Tree embodies utopia as found within our relations, both human and non-human,
and in doing so presents a vision of utopian potential, an enclave of utopian futurity that centers
on queer relationality.
Russ’s Queer Relationality

Within science fiction, utopia and dystopia are often not binary opposites, but may function
within, between, and beside each other. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man quite literally embodies
Lai’s concept of the utopian enclave as the novel explores worlds that are separated physically,
but exist alongside each other within the same linear space. These worlds differ greatly, from
the lesbian separatist utopia of Whileaway where all men have died out from a disease long
ago, to the middle worlds of what is seemingly our own world and one very similar but stuck
within the 1940s, and a world that is undeniably dystopian in which men and women are at
war and violence is commonplace. In these different realities of the same world, we see Lai’s
understanding of utopia as a temporal enclave next to our own made literal. The different
worlds, and different characters (who are also the same woman across realities, linked to each
other and the author by names beginning with “J”), function as temporal enclaves within each
other, acting as potential points of eruption. As the women meet and visit each other’s worlds,
134
they are often disturbed, but the convergence also compels them to change, to imagine new
possibilities and futures beyond their present. At the ending of the novel, Russ writes,
Remember: we will all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will

all be free. I swear it on my own head. I swear it on my ten fingers. We will be our-
selves. Until then I am silent; I can no more. I am God’s typewriter and the ribbon is
typed out. (213)
Russ speaks not only of the characters within the book, but to the queer readers who find
within the pages a vision of queer futurity. As Lee Mandelo argues, The Female Man and its
predecessor, Russ’s short story “When It Changed,” both published in the 1970s, were highly
controversial, particularly for straight white men who felt attacked by the novel and could not
relate to its depiction of lesbian eroticism. Mandelo writes that Russ’s works are
queer stories—they are lesbian stories, and also stories of “women’s sexuality” across
a spectrum. They are stories about women loving, touching, needing, lusting for and
getting physical with other women. They are stories about women together, erotically
and emotionally. (“Queering SFF”)
Despite its critics, The Female Man offered many a temporal enclave of queer love and eroticism,
one that unapologetically challenges men’s sexual dominance and compulsory heterosexuality.
For some, this is undoubtably a confrontation, a challenge to masculine power. For others, and
certainly for those Russ was addressing when she wrote the novel, it is a vision of potential
queer futures of lesbian desire made real within the present.
Russ’s novel is a work of queer hope precisely because it centers itself within queer
relationality. The protagonists, as temporal enclaves within one another, provide for each other
new, potential futurities. Jeanne Cortiel reads “When It Changed” and The Female Man as a
move away from Russ’s previous work that focused on the individual exceptional woman, to
an explicitly feminist understanding that examined the role of women as a social class enacting
change through their relations. Cortiel writes that in
transcending the anger and hatred directed against their antagonistic class, women
characters in Russ’s fiction also create emotional and erotic ties to women and by
ignoring men gain access to a narrative which promises them ownership over their
own bodies and control over their sexuality. (91)
It is through an understanding of queerness, and its promise of futurity centered on and within
relationality, that The Female Man becomes a work of queer utopia. In offering the imagined
world of Whileaway, Russ offers a vision of lesbian utopia that is at once fictional and a temporal
enclave within our own world. As a fictional narrative, or as a temporal enclave, this world acts
as a site of hope for future relationality, of queer love and connection in a world that is often
hostile to it.
Goto’s Fluid Futurity

As temporal enclaves within The Female Man are explored as literal other worlds that one
can travel to, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child explores temporal enclaves as inner worlds
inside us that incubate utopian potential. Within the novel, the unnamed main character, a
135
Peyton Campbell
Japanese-Canadian woman, becomes pregnant with a kappa after an erotic encounter with a
“mysterious stranger” on an airport tarmac during the “last visible lunar eclipse of the twentieth
century” (81). Although the pregnancy is undetectable by doctors and friends, the protagonist
knows she is pregnant with a kappa, a green, humanoid creature from Japanese folklore that
inhabits freshwater. This pregnancy sets in motion a journey of personal exploration and growth
as the protagonist confronts the trauma and pain of her past which continues to negatively
impact her within the present, particularly in her relationships (romantic, platonic, and familial)
to women. It is interesting that the pregnancy, and the events it sets into motion, are started by
an encounter of queer eroticism. Muñoz writes that queer futurity “is all about desire, desire
for both larger semiabstractions such as a better world or freedom but also, more immediately,
better relations within the social that include better sex and more pleasure” (30). The desire for
queer relationality that propels a utopian vision is both individual and collective, encompassing
the various ways we long for and seek out connection with others. Throughout the novel, the
protagonist struggles with her own self-hatred and sense of alienation, often describing herself
as a “short ugly Asian,” and regularly wrestles with her loneliness and fear of intimacy (84).
Engaging in an act of queer sex, and allowing herself to indulge in her desires, is what propels
the protagonist towards mending old connections and forming new ones, and in doing so,
establishing a sense of self-love that allows her to change her life in ways that are more fulfilling
and joyous. Queer relationality, we see, is a site of revolution in the face of past harm that makes
it possible to create better futures.
Throughout The Kappa Child, the audience is given glimpses of the kappa as it lives within
the protagonist in a world of water, a temporal space both literally inside her and also existing
physically and temporally separate. The kappa, hidden within the protagonist but felt by her,
embodies the temporal enclave of utopian potential. As a creature of water, the kappa reflects
the protagonist’s unfulfilled desire for queer relationships. As the novel makes clear, it is through
her relationships with other women that the protagonist finds sustenance and renewal. Like
water, relationality is necessary not only for survival, but for quenching the thirst for intimacy
caused by loneliness and alienation. As Muñoz argues that “queerness is primarily about futurity
and hope,” The Kappa Child offers that futurity as one which is always relational, always built
on and within our connections to each other (11). The Kappa pregnancy leads the protagonist
to seek connection with other women, reconciling with both her estranged sisters and her
friends, Midori and Genevieve. The protagonist also finds herself moving closer towards a
budding romance with single mom Bernie, reflecting the ways in which utopian potentiality
is often located within seemingly mundane social contact. For Nancy Kang, the final words of
the novel, “and the water breaks free with the rain,” symbolize how the Kappa, as a being of
water, offers hope for the protagonist and rebirth through her connection with other women
(Goto 275). Kang writes,
Water breaking free—whether in the form of undammed rivers or drought-quenching

showers—duly refers to the rupture of the amniotic sac during childbirth. It may also
foreshadow older children breaking free into less encumbered spaces. Surrounded by
rain, a direct contrast to the dryness of the prairies that inhibited the growth of suc-
cessful rice crops, the ultimate stance of these women argues that rebirth is not only
possible, it is already in process. (“Ecstasies” 7)
As the Kappa pregnancy exists as an enclave of temporal and physical space within the body of
the protagonist, the Kappa pregnancy functions to move her forward in her life by offering a
vision of utopian hope centered within her connection to others.
136
Conclusion
Lai’s insurgent utopia allows for imagining utopian futures even within a dystopic present.
Reading queer and feminist science fiction can hone our ability to recognize the potential
points of utopian futurity found within the here and now, points that help nurture seeds of
queer futures nestled within our present. When we look to our relations, when we seek out
others, we are engaged in an act of hope for what may come. Both fear and hope for the
future are anticipatory, but fear as an affect anticipates loss. Hope asks us to imagine what can
be gained, what can be maintained, what can be restored, made new, made whole. Queer and
feminist science fiction attunes us, as Lai argues, to recognize the insurgent utopia when it
appears knocking, to open the door even when we fear what is on the other side. To open the
door is a relational gesture (I open the door to let you in) orientated towards futurity, towards
the future in which I let you in, in which we are together because I opened the door. Just as the
Anishinaabek center relationality in ways that challenge settler-colonial conceptions of dystopia
and futurity, queer relationality allows a re-orienting of queerness toward utopia. Queer and
feminist science fiction novels may act as temporal enclaves, providing space for us to imagine
better worlds beyond the limitations of the present. In reading queer science fiction, I maintain
a cautious hope towards future worlds while remaining anchored to the present. To find hope
where there is none is to create hope where otherwise none would be.
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6 December 2018.
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Delany, Samuel R. Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Rev. ed. Wesleyan
University Press, 2012.
Goto, Hiromi. The Kappa Child. Red Deer Press, 2002.
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Child.” Canadian Literature, vol. 205, no. 205, 2010, pp. 13–31.
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19
LIKE “A BOLT OUT OF THE
BLUE”
Stories of Gender Transformation From the
German Democratic Republic1
The German Democratic Republic (GDR) existed as an independent, socialist state from 1949
until 1990.2 Like the Soviet Union, it tightly controlled communication, particularly in the
literary sphere. The reading public viewed literary texts as quasi “unofficial” information that was
generally free of the political propaganda and bias present in party-sanctioned publications. As
a result, party officials viewed literary texts skeptically, even as dangerous sources, and therefore
subjected fictional texts to a rigorous system of review. Science fiction was popular with East
German readers, though GDR SF garnered limited attention outside the country’s borders
(Fritzsche, 15). In a survey, Heidtmann documents that GDR SF ranked fourth most popular,
though it accounted for less than 1 percent of all titles (91). Fritzsche’s seminal study of GDR
SF argues that the genre provides a unique window into “alternative socialist worlds and times”
and exposes how science fiction writers “understood their surroundings and themselves” (14).
This assertion provides a useful framework for analyzing eight GDR short stories that portray
gender transformation. The anthology, Like a Bolt out of the Blue (Blitz aus heiterem Himmel),
curated by the American feminist Edith Anderson, was published in 1975 by the East German
Hinstorff publishing house.3 The stories are utopian fantasies, written by established male and
female authors, which attempt to subvert traditional gender-based viewpoints by presenting
protagonists who undergo a gender transformation. With roots in both Greek and Oriental
mythology, gender transformation literature strives to overcome the historical, physical, and
psychological gaps between the sexes. This anthology explores the extent to which patriarchal
behaviors, norms, and habits were present in GDR society. The science fiction medium served
as a vehicle for these authors to depict social problems in a whimsical light while simultaneously
distorting or disturbing the expected development of social evolution, and also evading the
watchful eyes of the censors.
The idea behind the volume was simple: male authors would imagine life as if they were
transformed into females, and women writers would present the male perspective. Anderson
asked potential contributors to
place [themselves] in the skin of the opposite sex and just for once, instead of envying,
resenting, despising it—or desiring, loving, worshiping it—picture how we would
feel if the positions were reversed. Might this not be a salutary game for the whole of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-22 138

Like “A Bolt out of the Blue”
society? For, as we all know, the enforcement of the constitutional guarantee of equal
rights and the best intentions of conscientious citizens still leave certain problems
unsolved. (“Genesis” 4)
The project’s emphasis was not to portray a transgender experience, but rather to craft a
futuristic, utopian reimagination of the self as emancipated from the strictures of patriarchal
definitions of gender identity. The alternative socialist worlds that the authors created, however,
ultimately revealed that this type of utopian reimagining of society where all individuals are
viewed as equal was elusive. Male and female writers had decidedly different visions of what this
reimagined, equal society would look like, which were informed by their own gender identities
and experiences.
In “Gender Transformation” (Geschlechtertausch), Günter de Bruyn introduces a married
couple, Karl and Anna, who switch genders. Following their transformation, Anna/Adam
immediately experiences a crisis: she is stricken by an unnamed male disease and admitted
to a clinic. Karl/Karla, on the other hand, continues to work as if nothing has changed.
Though Karl’s supervisor characterizes the circumstances of Karl’s new-found identity as
an “accident” (10), Karl quickly adapts to the new normal.4 His immediate focus is on the
external trappings of femininity, clothing, hair, and makeup, because he continues to view
himself through “men’s eyes” (12). Initially, Karl’s transformation hints at a utopian socialist
future: this gender transformation promises “the advent of a new era . . . , in which along
with class and racial differences, gender differences also will be eradicated” (20). Despite this
auspicious beginning, Karl and his colleagues lapse into traditional gender stereotyping in their
expectations and relationships with one another. The first change occurs in interactions with
female colleagues, who now expect Karl to water his own plants, wash dishes, and serve coffee;
these female colleagues have so internalized gender roles that they contribute to their continued
enforcement. Male colleagues interact differently with Karl, showing displeasure when he is
assertive, and even usurping his authority as department head. In a scene that accentuates male
dominance and power, Karl’s supervisor makes sexual advances. While the relationship between
the two had been tense prior to Karl’s transformation, heterosexuality now becomes a means
for the supervisor to exert his will in a threatening way. Likewise, Karl succumbs to expected
stereotypes, behaving in a manner that men expect of women. Despite the promised equalizing
forces of socialism, there remains a two-class society divided by gender. Karl realizes that his
physical transformation prompts others to perceive him differently, as less than what he was.
Because he will never receive the same validation as a woman as he had as a man, he desires a
return to his male form.
By contrast, Anna’s doctor was able to heal Anna, who is not interested in reversing the
procedure, preferring to start a new and emancipated life with nurse Karin. While the story
hints at the possibility of a utopian future, one in which equality between women and men can
become a reality, the promised equalization does not occur. The story’s open ending implies that
it is the man Anna/Adam, who has the power to decide both Anna and Karl’s destinies. Anna/
Adam’s decision not to reverse the transformation sentences Karl/Karla to life as a woman,
underscoring that life as a man is the more desirable fate (Meyer 138). De Bruyn is unable to
break open traditional gender roles and clichés (Meyer 139), and the two-class gendered society
continues.
In Gotthold Gloger’s fantastical, fairy-tale like story, “The Beet Harvest Festival” (Das
Rübenfest), the cooperative farmer Arnold and his wife, Milda, undergo a gender exchange in
their sleep, which Arnold believes results from his encounter with the old woman, Blawasch. He
believes she bewitched him following a chance meeting: the next day he awakens to discover
139
that his body has been transformed into that of his wife. Arnold goes about Milda’s morning
household chores without even thinking about them. Milda, by contrast, though she too has taken
on Arnold’s body, does not conform to his routine; instead of appearing in underwear as Arnold
typically does, Milda comes to breakfast dressed and ready for the day. Despite the exchange of
physical features, both characters retain their memories and their attitudes, which affects how
they approach societal problems. For instance, Milda (as Arnold) develops a plan to improve
working conditions for women. Arnold perceives it as an attempt to overthrow men’s superiority
and elevate women to power: the plan fosters the equal participation of women in leading the
cooperative, promoting a socialist utopia whereby the end of class structures also terminates men’s
dominance over women. Arnold, despite his female form, is unable to see the advantages of a
society based on equality, viewing the plan as the “inevitable repression of men” (105).
During the evening’s beet festival, a women’s celebration commemorating the end of
the harvest where men are excluded, Blawasch divines the future from a deck of cards. She
encourages the women to stand up to their husbands, arousing Arnold’s ire. A chaotic scene
ensues, ending in the release of the spell. Arnold and Milda return to their original physical
forms. As the story concludes, Arnold remains convinced that women are trying to take over
and that all of the men around him have been converted, either physically transformed into
women or at least convinced of the value of women’s equality. Despite Gloger’s attempt to
promote gender equity for women, Arnold is unable to overcome his prejudices against them.
His inability to accept a different, classless, genderless society underscores the frailty of socialist
society and exposes how the GDR, despite its constitutional support for women’s equality,
continued to replicate the gender-based class society that existed in capitalist societies.
In “Meditation,” Rolf Schneider introduces a male protagonist whose multiple failed
marriages have convinced him that there is a “women’s dictatorship” (174) that exploits men.
He describes his fourth marriage as hostile, because this wife repeatedly tries to dissuade him of
his opinion that women rule over men. After a particularly intense altercation, the protagonist
awakens on the wrong side of the bed to discover that he is now a woman, a situation that he
considers “appalling” (177). The transformation appears permanent, as a doctor informs him
that nothing can be undertaken to reverse the metamorphosis. As the couple resumes their
lives, the protagonist experiences many affronts that women know well, including enduring
catcalls, leering glances, uninvited groping, and sexual domination. This new reality reveals
that his earlier assumptions about women’s dominance were inaccurate; he recognizes that men
are the true oppressors. Because of this new awareness, the protagonist attempts to take up the
women’s cause, only to learn that many women have already tried and failed. Despondent,
the protagonist attempts suicide by drinking a pharmacological cocktail. Instead of dying, the
protagonist awakens the next morning transformed into a queen bee. In this new form, the
protagonist combines female sexuality with the desire for domination that he had always sought
by enjoying sexual flings with drones prior to killing them. In Schneider’s tale, the protagonist’s
new life without conflict between genders is portrayed as possible in the natural world, but not
in human society.
Unlike other stories in the anthology, Karl-Heinz Jakobs’s “Quedlinburg” does not depict
the gender transformation of individuals, but rather a transformation of the social and political
order. A matriarchy has governed the city of Quedlinburg for twenty years, where three rules
predominate: all women are equal; marriage and love have been abolished; all power proceeds
from women. Men have been relegated to the role of servants, primarily satisfying the sexual
needs of the women. This new society appears at first to be the closest to a utopian, socialist
ideal, because marriage and love have been outlawed not only as patriarchal institutions but also
as ideology (Meyer 106). The story’s protagonists, Agnes and Sibyllius, remember how society
140
used to be, but they recall the transfer of power from men to women differently. Whereas
Agnes is adamant that she led a violent coup, Sibyllius insists that the transfer of power occurred
peacefully. Despite the goal of eradicating women as property, this new society is neither equal
nor equitable. Rather than subverting the old order of law, the city has merely replaced one
form of dominance with another: women rule over men, who are ranked according to their
physical attributes and sexual prowess. As the story concludes, Agnes and Sibyllius disclose that
they were able to adapt easily to the new order because they each had secretly wished to inhabit
the gender of the other. Nonetheless, they also reveal that the banishment of love seems to have
resulted in the elimination of both emotions and happiness. Meyer proposes that Quedlinburg’s
strict adherence to dogma ultimately destroys interpersonal relationships (111). Thus, what on
paper is proclaimed as progress, is in reality no closer to reaching utopian ideals than earlier
societal forms. With this statement, Jakobs’s story makes the most critical contribution to the
anthology. Rather than serving as a commentary on gender relations, it reads as an indictment
of the GDR’s dogmatism, which merely replaced the capitalist system with the socialist one.
Christa Wolf ’s “Self-Experiment: Appendix to a Report” (Selbstversuch: Traktat zu einem
Protokoll) has garnered the greatest critical response.5 The protagonist, a female scientist leading
the working group on gender conversion, volunteers to undergo the first gender transformation
experiment, which she meticulously protocols. As the story begins, the protagonist has already
returned to her female form, having interrupted the experiment before its conclusion. The
story is the appendix to her official report, in which she attempts to explain to her male
professor and supervisor her reasoning for abruptly ending the experiment. Eigler reads this
as a way for her to take control of how the experiment ultimately is interpreted (401). Wolf ’s
text reveals deep-seated biases against professional women, particularly in science. In order to
earn respect as a female scientist, the protagonist had to deny her gender and become a man.
Despite the experiment’s success in transforming the protagonist physically into a man, her
mental socialization as a woman remained. Gansel reads Wolf ’s use of the fantastic as a means
to point out deficits in the GDR’s socialist experiment (79). The protagonist decides to revert
to her original female form, because she did not want to abandon completely what it means to
her to be a woman, to explore her feelings, and experience love. Wolf ’s text is the most realistic,
because it is the only one that ends with the realization that neither “man” nor “woman” is
ideal. It concludes with a utopian wish, though it remains unclear whether this wish can be
fulfilled. From this perspective, Ehlers reads it as a plea to free men as well as women from the
dictates of playing specific gender roles (133).
Anderson’s contribution, “Yours for Always or Never” (“Dein für immer oder nie”),
explores how relationships between men and women shift over time: couples in long-standing
relationships change in ways that are undesirable to their partners, leading to alienation. As
a result, individuals actively seek out or serendipitously find new partners to whom they are
initially drawn; the cycle ultimately repeats itself. Anderson sets up a dichotomy of love versus
friendship, whereby individual characters seem to be most fulfilled by relationships with friends
(of the opposite sex) rather than by their spouses. The protagonist Alyda viewed her role in
her marriage as that of “servant girl” (137) and her life as a woman as “vegetating” (141).
After her husband’s death, she embarks on an extended affair with the much younger Florian.
Florian is dissatisfied with his home life, and feels drawn to Alyda, who experiences freedom
and independence as a widow. Over the course of time, Florian’s behavior changes: he begins
to act more like a stereotypical husband. Alyda retreats into her fantasies, writing stories about
her youth, a time when she dreamed of becoming a man. When her story becomes reality,
however, Alyda views the transformation as a “catastrophe” (131). Anderson’s story is a strong
indictment of marriage and the expectations of gender roles. Despite Alyda’s transformation at
141
the end, there is no resolution; Alyda realizes that equality can only exist when all parties, men
and women, are viewed as equally emancipated. Tragically, Alyda recognizes that her constant
wishing for something or someone else only leads to disappointment. Ultimately, she longs to
return to her original state as a woman, but recognizes that this is merely a role that she knows
how to play. As the story concludes, Alyda remains in the male form.
Sarah Kirsch’s story, “Like a Bolt out of the Blue” (“Blitz aus heiterm Himmel”) gives the
anthology its title. The protagonist, Katharina, lives an ordinary and mundane life with her
casual partner, Albert. Her days are filled with work and household duties. Though they are
lovers, she emphasizes that her relationship with Albert is a close friendship, nothing like a
marriage. One night, Katharina goes to bed and awakens three days later as Max. Max, who
views this new condition as curious, is not fazed by it. Indeed, he views the possibility of a
reverse transformation as even “more unsavory” (198). Max’s transfiguration is not just external;
he begins to perceive his surroundings differently, noting that he needs to furnish the apartment
less colorfully; he also develops a passion for watching soccer.
Because the close friendship with Albert existed before the transformation, Max is confident
that these new circumstances will not affect their relationship. This suspicion proves true; when
Albert arrives in the middle of the night, he is so tired that he does not even notice that a
transformation has occurred. The next day, Albert is nonplused by Katharina/Max’s change,
though he alters the way he interacts with Max. He willingly and voluntarily washes dishes,
takes out the trash, and transports the coal from the street to the cellar. He and Max share the
workload equally, a parity that did not exist in the relationship with Katharina. Max realizes this
and thinks ironically to himself, “now that I’m also a man, I get emancipation” (204). Kirsch
plays with the spelling of the German word Emanzipation, creating a portmanteau with the
phonetic spelling: Ehmannzipatzjon. The word is spelled as it is pronounced in Max’s dialect,
but the emphasis on the first syllable resembles the word “Eh[e]mann,” husband. Like Anderson’s
story, Max does not return to the female form at the end. For Schmitz-Köster, Kirsch’s story
is an indictment of societal disdain for women (77). Kirsch’s text is the most critical because it
clearly outlines that a relationship based on equality is only possible between men.
Irmtraud Morgner’s “Good Message from Valeska in 73 Stanzas” (Gute Botschaft der Valeska
in 73 Strophen) was penned originally for inclusion in the anthology, but it was rejected. She
later embedded it in her novel The Life and Adventures of Troubadour Beatrice as Chronicled by her
Minstrel Laura (Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau
Laura), published in the GDR in 1974.6 In Morgner’s story, Valeska undergoes a reflective
self-discovery. When she and her partner Rudolf receive word that they can receive a common
apartment, Valeska bristles at the thought of losing her independence and submitting herself
completely to Rudolf, whose previous partners willingly assumed the role of housewife.
Disillusioned at the lack of seriousness with which the GDR treats female scientists, she muses
that one would have to be a man in order to find fulfillment. This is precisely the transformation
that occurs. In order to avoid revealing her “mutation” to Rudolf, Valeska flees to Moscow, where
she finds solace with her friend, Shenja. There, Valeska is able to have a physical relationship
with Shenja and continue her research. Nonetheless, she remains dissatisfied because she cannot
forget her past as a woman. It is only after she allows Rudolf back into her life and her bed,
where she is able to physically transform back into a woman for the purposes of sexual intimacy,
that she finds a semblance of peace. Morgner’s story shows that the utopian ideal of gender
equality remains elusive.
Each of these gender transformation stories criticizes patriarchal society and the
dehumanization of society through scientific and technological advancement. Though all
of the protagonists experience varying degrees of alienation from the patriarchal status quo,
142
the “transformed” characters retain their gender experience as the essence of their identity.
Indeed, the stories focus primarily on gender roles and less on sexual identities. Interestingly,
this corresponds to what Joanna Russ discovered in her survey of role reversals in male-authored
science fiction. Russ argues that the depictions of women emphasize a desire for superiority
over equality (10): the male authors all assume that women would like to treat men as men
historically have treated women. The male GDR authors continue this trajectory, allowing their
transfigured male protagonists to experience the same aggressive sexual and physical affronts
that women have had to endure. Their transformations reveal that men are the aggressors who
are unwilling to accept women as equals, and these authors are unable to imagine a world
without dominance. They fail to craft a society where real gender equality can occur. The
female authors, in contrast, avoid the language of dominance, introducing instead friendship,
collaboration, and collegiality as the cornerstones of parity within relationships. Nonetheless,
the women writers are also unable to break entirely with gender stereotypes and norms. Thus,
despite the GDR’s constitutional guarantees of gender equality, gender discrimination and
patriarchal attitudes remained entrenched in society and in male-female relationships.
These authors had the opportunity to create alternative socialist worlds and subvert traditional
gender-based viewpoints. Rather than create a truly alternative socialist utopia, however, they
focused exclusively on the question of whether gender equality is possible. Instead of breaking
down stereotypes, these stories, particularly those authored by men, rely heavily on tired tropes.
In each case, the transformations reveal social constructs about gender that the protagonists are
unable to overcome. The gender swap does not resolve GDR society’s gender inequities. The
protagonists, even in their new genders, are unable to perceive a reality beyond the one based
on society’s gender norms. Not only does gender equality remain elusive in this alternative
utopian fantasy, but the transformations themselves shed even greater critical light on the
gender-based power relations inherent in GDR society. The imagined identities underscore the
rift in the GDR that existed between the theory of gender equality and the reality of women’s
experiences as less than equal. The stories highlight key insights into how gender identity is
socially constructed, and they criticize the fact that, despite the GDR’s goal of creating a classless
society, socialism retains the hierarchical relationship between men and women, continuing the
patriarchal control of the bourgeoisie rather than overthrowing it. All of the protagonists remain
trapped within their original gender identities, remaining, as Meyer writes, the product of
creative fantasy (15). The fact that none of these stories is able to resolve societal hierarchies can
be read as an indictment of GDR society. Like Wolf ’s “Self-Experiment,” the idea behind these
stories remains mere theory, an experiment to which no one returned.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Rachel J. Halverson for her comments and to the DDGC remote writing group for
their collegial support.
2 Founded on October 7, 1949, the GDR’s socialist government began to crumble in fall 1989 amid
citizen protests for freedoms and reforms. The GDR ceased to exist on October 3, 1990.
3 Hinstorff was known for publishing traditional regional literature and fiction books. Anderson proposed
the project in 1973; it took two years for the volume to receive the necessary authorizations for
publication. As a result, the volume’s essays appeared in other venues first (Gansel 83). Contributions
by Stefan Heym, “The Wachsmuth Syndrome” (Das Wachsmuth-Syndrom) and Irmtraud Morgner,
“Good Message from Valeska in 73 Stanzas” (Gute Botschaft der Valeska in 73 Strophen) were not
published in the final anthology, though there was no official reason given (Meyer 1). Heym, who
assumed the anthology would never receive publication approval in the GDR, published it in Playboy
magazine in September 1972 (Anderson, “Genesis,” 6). It never appeared in the GDR.
4 All translations are my own.
143
5 It was first published in the literary journal Sinn und Form in 1973.
6 It was also published in West Germany along with Christa Wolf ’s “Selbstversuch” and Sarah Kirsch’s
“Blitz aus heiterm Himmel” in the volume Geschlechtertausch (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1980).
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Culture and Society 4, edited by Margy Gerber et al. University Press of America, 1984, pp. 1–14.
de Bruyn, Günter. “Geschlechtertausch.” Blitz aus heiterm Himmel, edited by Edith Anderson, Hinstorff,
1975, pp. 7–45.
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Discourse.” German Quarterly vol. 73, no. 4, 2000, pp. 401–415.
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20
NEW PRONOUNS AND NEW
USES
Gender Variance and Language
in Contemporary Science Fiction
Misha Grifka Wander
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin “eliminated gender, to find out what was
left” (“Is Gender Necessary” 160). She created a world in which the dominant species,
Gethenians, have no gender, because their sex is undifferentiated except for monthly oestrus.
The first-person narrator, a human man, reminds the reader frequently of the sexual differences
between that world and ours. However, Le Guin, through her narrator, uses “he” to refer to
Gethenians—which does not necessarily conjure an image of a sexless, genderless world, but
rather one populated by men. Le Guin herself expressed regret about that pronoun choice, and
critics pointed out the ways in which using “he” as a universal pronoun is counter to Le Guin’s
stated aims. Recently, pronouns have become even more central to debates over gender, as the
greater visibility of trans+ and nonbinary people in mainstream society has led to discussions
about pronouns and their appropriate usage. In the years since The Left Hand of Darkness was
published in 1969, writers have increasingly used science fiction to defamiliarize gender,
sex, and sexuality. Deliberate pronoun use is often key to these interventions. Through close
attention to pronouns, we can understand the landscape of gender variance in contemporary
science fiction.
This chapter explores the use of pronouns and gender variance in three contemporary
science fiction series, all recent luminaries of the field. The Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie,
starting with Ancillary Justice, is a direct response to The Left Hand of Darkness in multiple ways;
notably, the narrator uses “she” as a gender-neutral pronoun, while recognizing a diverse array
of genders beneath and beyond that one pronoun’s scope. Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire
series, starting with Ninefox Gambit, imagines a future wherein gender stigma has vanished, but
the gender variety of today is still present. Lastly, Martha Well’s Murderbot series, starting with
All Systems Red, explores how pronouns can be used to express cyborg identity and push against
anthropocentric assumptions about agency and naturalist assumptions about sex and gender.
The Left Hand of Darkness (Left Hand) stars Genly Ai, a newcomer to planet Winter. The
inhabitants of Winter, called Gethenians, are “androgynes,” who are sexually neutral except
while in “kemmer”, or monthly oestrus. Accordingly, there is no idea of gender on Winter. Ai
struggles with this concept, and consistently seeks evidence of a male or female gender in the
Gethenians he meets. The reader is situated within Ai’s perspective, and asked to struggle against
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-23 145

Misha Grifka Wander
the binary gender system he and the reader presumably are native to, in order to understand the
world of Winter.
The gender innovations in Left Hand have drawn much criticism and countercriticism. Brian
Attebery neatly sums up the objections:
first, that it does not go far enough in its depiction of androgyny; and second, that
androgyny itself is, rather than a liberating vision, a betrayal of feminist aims. As evi-
dence for the former objection, critics cite Le Guin’s use of masculine pronouns for
the Gethenians, the dominance of the masculine narrator over the entire text, and the
preponderance of masculine traits for the supposedly gender-free characters. (131)
Much ink has been spilled on whether the use of “he” as a neutral pronoun “ruins” Le Guin’s
gender experiment. Le Guin herself later stated that the universal “he” may be grammatical,
but it is also sexist (“Is Gender Necessary”, 170). However, not every critic has associated the
Gethenians with masculinity. Wendy Gay Pearson notes that
Although much criticism of Left Hand has focused on Le Guin’s decision to use the
masculine pronoun for the Gethenians, creating an apparent masculinization of her
hermaphrodites, the Gethenians’ sexual/asexual nature makes them responsive to
monthly cycles, thus linking their experience of sex and gender to human women’s
experience of menstruation. (“Legacy” 186)
a canny observation that refocuses attention from pronoun use alone to the experience of
the bodies in question. Whether associated with the masculine or feminine by critics, as
Pearson writes, “The very act of imagining hermaphroditic, androgynous people with no
comprehension of gender as a hypostasized ontological category is an act of asserting that the
world might be different” (“Legacy”, 196). This act is no less radical now than in the 1960s, but
both contemporary understandings of gender, and contemporary speculative reimaginings of
gender, have changed quite a bit since Le Guin first wrote Left Hand.
Commentary on Left Hand often references the difficulty of imagining this “different world”.
Barbara Brown writes, “Le Guin is aware how difficult her readers will find acceptance of the
androgynous principle” (230) and John Pennington adds,
The Left Hand of Darkness works as a resistant text because it thematically addresses
the murky gender arena by trying to structurally find a way to eliminate gendered
perspectives. In a narrative, this is essentially impossible, because language is charged
with gender implications. (357)
However, the language of gender and the possibility of nongendered language has expanded
since 1969. I myself use the ungendered pronouns they/them, and have no trouble imagining
the Gethenian way of life. And while society remains resistant to full acceptance of gender
variance, pronouns have been in the national spotlight for years. In 2014, publications from
Time to Rolling Stone trumpeted the arrival of “the transgender tipping point” (Swyers and
Thomas, 272).
Crucially, neither Left Hand nor its commentariat differentiate between sex and gender. The
thing we would call “gender” in the Gethenians is structured totally by sexual biology, but that
it should be so is not a given. The three contemporary series I address use pronouns to indicate
gender as separate from sex, unlike Gethenians. There are characters in these books who do not
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New Pronouns and New Uses
have a sex but still participate in societies which read their performances as gendered, as well as
characters with sexed bodies but uncategorized gender performances. Pronouns in Left Hand
are used to describe a speculative sex; pronouns in these texts are declarations of queer gender
possibility, irrespective of sex.
Ancillary Justice, the first in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, opens with a scene that
could be lifted from an alternate version of Left Hand. Breq, the narrator, is travelling through
a snowy foreign land, and is having trouble communicating because of cultural differences.
However, the cultural difference in question is that the surrounding culture categorizes
individuals by gender, and Breq does not. She struggles to communicate effectively in a
language that uses gender, and has to solve the “problem” of gender before responding, even
in a tense situation:
Behind me one of the patrons chuckled and said, voice mocking, “Aren’t you a tough
little girl.” . . . She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns
quilting her shirt. . . . This language we were speaking now [marked gender], and
I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms. It didn’t help that cues
meant to distinguish gender changed from place to place, sometimes radically, and
rarely made much sense to me. (3)
Breq not only uses she/her pronouns to refer to everyone, but also has trouble distinguishing
either sex or gender. She knows about gender markers—in this case, the quilting on a shirt—
but they do not automatically read to her like they would to a native of the culture. She makes
no distinction between sex and gender; both are inscrutable.
Breq serves as our Genly Ai, the reader’s guide to a strange culture. But in Ancillary
Justice, the strange new culture is more similar to our own, recognizing multiple genders,
whereas Breq does not. Leckie’s choice to use she/her pronouns as Breq’s default is a clear
response to Left Hand’s he/him pronouns. Breq encounters an alien gender system that
is more or less our own. Complicating things, even if a society treats its genders or sexes
equally, gender itself is still potentially problematic, especially when gender and sex act as
proxies for one another:
The society she lived in professed at the same time to believe gender was insignificant.
Males and females dressed, spoke, acted indistinguishably. And yet no one I’d met had
ever hesitated, or guessed wrong. And they had invariably been offended when I did
hesitate or guess wrong. I hadn’t learned the trick of it. (48)
In the society Breq describes, she perceives that there is no difference between the genders, or
the sexes. It should not matter, therefore, which category someone belongs to—and yet it does,
to those people, as it would likewise matter to most English speakers. Similarly, when Breq
discovers an old acquaintance named Seivarden, she uses she/her in her narration to refer to
Seivarden, but uses he/him pronouns in dialogue with these gender-conscious people, signaling
that Seivarden is what that culture (and presumably ours) considers a man. But when Breq and
Seivarden return to Radch space, Seivarden is described with she/her pronouns by everyone,
including Breq. The reader is challenged to forget what we know—that Seivarden “is” male—
and accustom ourselves to the idea that people we might think of as male can be called by
she/her pronouns. Because Seivarden is Radchaai and thus culturally genderless, we are also
challenged to separate she/her pronouns from any particular gender. She/her pronouns are
marked in English, but Leckie pushes against that by making them so ubiquitous as to reverse
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Misha Grifka Wander
the usual pattern: in Radch space, it is he/him pronouns that are marked, and he/him pronouns
whose very presence conjures the existence of gender differentiation.
When Breq returns to Radch space after twenty years away, she reflects:
I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai—never, to my annoy-
ance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound
(trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned, tied).
Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none.
A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of
this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one
moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment
masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choos-
ing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn’t need to do that here.
I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was
home. (176)
This passage emphasizes how the proliferation of gender markers does not mean that gender is
essential and necessary, but rather that gender is contentless, able to be read into anything. When
Breq refers to someone as “she”, it means nothing about their appearance, body, mannerisms,
or any other category.
While Radch society is remarkably gender inclusive, it is not free of societal divisions.
Radchaai do not consider non-Radchaai to be fully human, and are intent on conquering,
sometimes violently. Breq is also not considered to be human, because she is an ancillary, just
one of many bodies controlled by an intelligent ship. She sees herself as separated from other
intelligent life as an ancillary, not because of gender. This is in stark contrast to Genly Ai, for
whom gender is a primary axis of alterity. He says to his Gethenian companion: “In a sense,
women are more alien to me than you are. With you, I share one sex, anyhow” (285). Pearson
writes,
The question of alterity is at the heart of The Left Hand of Darkness: the alterity that
the sex/gender system creates for us as a society . . . and the alterity that allows the
construction of Us and Them, of a binary that is automatically hierarchical, so that
They are always less (human) than We. (“Legacy” 189)
The Radch has done away with sex/gender alterity, but they have not lost alterity, merely
reconfigured it.
Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire uses gender systems that are the most similar to the
21st-century United States. There are three gender categories in the series: women, men, and
“alts”. These relatively straightforward categories are challenged early in the book, however.
The main character, Cheris, is a woman, but she receives a mental passenger—Jedao, reduced
to a living ghost, only capable of speaking to the person to whom he is anchored. When Cheris
first wakes up after being anchored to Jedao, she experiences confusion between her body and
his: “Had they made her a man? They could do that, it was unremarkable among the Shuos and
Andan, and she’d wondered what it was like” (58). While Cheris’s body remains unchanged, her
gender becomes more confusing. She is the physical representative of Jedao, and others continue
to address him as himself, despite Cheris’s female body, and Cheris’s own female identity still
present in that body. The pronouns used to refer to Jedao do not change to conform to his
appearance, as we see through another person’s eyes: “Although Jedao’s body belonged to a
148
young woman, his face was drawn and ghastly pale” (304). In another scene, Cheris relives some
of Jedao’s memories, including of getting an erection, something obviously tied to a male-sexed
body, but she does not change her pronouns in her narration. It becomes clear that in Lee’s
world, gender and sex are distinct, overlapping and diverging in complicated ways.
In Machineries of Empire, alts may have any body at all and still use they/them pronouns.
While some alts are physically androgynous, some are labeled as “womanforms” or “manforms”.
For instance, a Kel officer is described as “a scowling womanform” (100). These neologisms
allow Lee to describe a character’s apparent sex without implying their gender. Unlike many
portrayals of nonbinary people, which rely on a physically sexually ambiguous body to create
an androgynous gender (for example, the use of slim models in loose, masculine clothing to
represent nonbinary identity), Lee acknowledges that not all nonbinary gendered people are
sexually ambiguous and that having a clearly sexed body should not be taken to define one’s
gender. Not all nonbinary or trans+ people “pass” perfectly under society’s expectations of what
their gender should look like, and the people in Lee’s stories accordingly do not rely on bodies
to determine gender or pronouns.
This is particularly relevant to the conversation on Left Hand. When Le Guin attempted
to “eliminate gender”, she did so by also eliminating sex. Many critics similarly collapse sex
and gender when talking about androgyny. Mona Fayad writes that “One of the problems
with the concept of androgyny . . . is linguistic indeterminacy” (59), a problem exacerbated
by the fact that the Gethenians are sexless physically, appear ambiguously gendered to Genly
Ai, and also have an agender society. Thus referring to them as androgynes, as many writers
do, obscures what dimension of sex-gender-identity is being discussed. The Gethenians have
a gender structure that matches their unique physiology, but androgyny does not necessarily
encompass both sex and gender. Barbara Brown assures her readers that, “In androgyny . . .
the source of the dynamics is not the opposition of male and female but rather the alternating
thrust and withdrawal of the masculine and feminine principles within each individual psyche”
(228). Brown’s conception of androgyny leaves binary gender intact, but the Gethenians have
no concept of gender, nor of any psychic principles that would be gendered. It makes little
sense to say that a culture with neither sex nor gender differences is characterized by “thrust”
and “withdrawal” of gendered forces, and particularly to state it in such Freudian terms
when presumably Freudian psychodrama is irrelevant to Gethenians, who have no Oedipal
or Electra complexes to rebel against. Left Hand imagined a world without sex and gender;
Machineries of Empire imagines individuals without gender, but a world where sex and gender
do exist.
The significance of sexual androgyny to gender can be further interrogated by characters
who do not have biological sex, as is the case for Murderbot, the protagonist of the eponymous
series by Martha Wells. Murderbot is a SecUnit, or security unit, owned by a company and
leased to human parties who wish to travel to potentially dangerous locations. Murderbot is
partially organic, mostly machine, and is not considered human by its owners or lessors, or by
itself. In fact, the humans around it believe it is incapable of independent thought. This belief
stems from the restrictions placed on SecUnits by the “governor module”, a piece of software
that forces all SecUnits’ actions to align with company rules. Murderbot has hacked its governor
module, enabling it to ignore the rules and act according to its desires as a fully agentive being.
It does not use this freedom to declare its humanity, or ask to be treated more respectfully. It
names itself Murderbot, and continues to use “it” pronouns, which in English are normally not
used for agentive beings.1
In a survey of reviews of the series, Holly Swyers and Emily Thomas noted that many
reviewers were uncomfortable with Murderbot’s pronouns. About 53% did not use it/its
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Misha Grifka Wander
pronouns, and of the approximately 47% that did, 21% also used another pronoun such as she/
her or he/his (287).
For a reviewer sensitive to recent social activism around respecting an individual’s

preferred pronouns, Murderbot’s choice represented a catch-22. Even if it felt techni-
cally correct given Murderbot’s lack of gender, the use of it to handle gender non-
conformity was unacceptable. (286)
Trans+ activists have had to push against the use of “it” to dehumanize trans+ people, but
Murderbot claims those pronouns for itself. While dehumanization is generally seen as a tool
of oppression, Murderbot actively chooses to dehumanize itself. It is deeply uncomfortable
with the idea of being human. Swyers and Thomas write, “Murderbot staunchly emphasizes
its non-human-ness and distinction from humans” (284). It does not see humanity as necessary
for emotions, cognition, or sentience. When it loses control of its emotions and snaps at the
humans around it, it experiences profound social anxiety:
I had talked myself into believing that I hadn’t actually lost it as much as I thought
I had when Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like
I was an actual person or something. The conversation they had immediately after that
gave me a sinking sensation as I reviewed it. No, it had been worse than I thought.
They had talked it over and all agreed not to “push me any further than I wanted to
go” and they were all so nice and it was just excruciating. (26)
Murderbot does not perceive that it is lesser than humans, but it simply does not want to be
around them or consider itself part of humanity. In fact, when the humans around it grow upset
at the practice of using organic human parts to create SecUnits, and grow dangerously close to
accepting Murderbot as human, it reports the conversation to the captain of the crew so that
they will stop (35).
It pronouns are key to Murderbot’s ability to linguistically express its identity.2 Swyer and
Thomas write that using they/them pronouns to describe Murderbot “would defy the pronoun
convention that Murderbot had apparently accepted in the novella: Murderbot was an it, not a
they” (286). Queerness exists in Murderbot’s world—K. Eason writes:
Wells’ future gives us a lot more variety: queer, trans, straight, and genders found only
in particular colonies; single or married monogamously or, more commonly, married
with multiple partners; friends, parents, second-mothers, siblings, daughters, uncles.
Murderbot treats this human diversity as unremarkable, bordering on unimportant.
Murderbot is aware of queerness and human diversity, but does not include itself in that
spectrum. It does not choose the genderless pronoun “they”, but the pronoun most distant
from humanity and from human ideas such as gender and sexuality.
Murderbot’s use of the it pronoun asks us to consider posthumanist potentiality. Murderbot
is firm that it is not human, but it is also not all-machine or all-organic:
It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the
halves are discrete. . . . As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole
confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. (67)
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For this person who is neither machine nor human, but something else, perhaps the only
pronoun that makes that nature legible is “it”. In Wells’ future, one can be fully agentive
without being human, realizing a truly post-human existence. The first novella uses
Murderbot’s first-person narration as a way to avoid mentioning gender, but as the series
continues Murderbot more openly insists on using “it” pronouns, allowing the reader to
accustom themselves to using “it” to refer to a person. Murderbot presents “it” as an agentive
possibility, suggesting that humanity is not a prerequisite to personhood, and that human is
not always a desirable category.
Unlike Left Hand, none of these series were constructed around the gender experiment at
the center. These series approach gender orthogonally, embedding gender practices within
the world of stories predominantly about other things. This allows the authors to side-step a
problem described by Veronica Hollinger: “In our struggle against a monolithic patriarchy . . .
we risk reinscribing, however inadvertently, the terms of compulsory heterosexuality within
our own constructions. In other words, our critiques of sex and gender polarities often leave
those polarities in place” (25). There is no Genly Ai there to remind the reader of the status quo,
and hence, no one there to reify the very system being critiqued.
These books are all products of their time, and no doubt in a few decades we shall see
critiques of the outdated gender norms in the newer series as well. But for now, they represent
a careful attention to the meanings encased in the small words called pronouns. Small, yet
important, as Le Guin writes: “If only I had realized how the pronouns I used shaped, directed,
controlled my own thinking” (170). Examining pronouns allows us to see the interventions and
inventions being made by the authors, the differentiating of social gender, linguistic gender,
biological sex, and physical humanity, creating new configurations that are speculative but also
undeniably queer.
Notes
1 Some gender-nonconforming people also choose to use it/its, but it is far from the norm at the time
of writing.
2 Machineries of Empire also has servitors, agentive robots with their own society and no aspirations to
humanity.
Bibliography
Attebery, Brian. “Androgyny as Difference.” Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. Routledge, 2002,
pp. 129–150.
Brown, Barbara. “The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny, Future, Present, and Past.” Extrapolation, vol.
21, no. 3, 1980, pp. 227–235.
Eason, K. “The Monstrous Machines of Corporate Capitalism.” Tor.com. 26 October 2010. www.tor.
com/2020/10/26/the-monstrous-machines-of-corporate-capitalism/
Fayad, Mona. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in The Left
Hand of Darkness.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, 1997, pp. 59–73.
Hollinger, Veronica. “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of
Gender.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 26, 1999, pp. 23–40.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Is Gender Necessary?” Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Putnam, 1979, pp. 155–172.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.” Dancing at the Edge of the World. Grove Press, 1989,
pp. 7–16.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Penguin Books, 1969.
Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Justice. Orbit, 2013.
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Lee, Yoon Ha. Ninefox Gambit. Solaris, 2016.

Pearson, Wendy Gay. “Postcolonialism/s, Gender/s, Sexuality/ies and the Legacy of The Left Hand of
Darkness: Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutians Talk Back.” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2007,
pp. 182–196.
Pennington, John. “Exorcising Gender: Resisting Readers in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.”
Extrapolation, vol. 41, no. 4, 2000, pp. 351–358.
Swyers, Holly, and Emily Thomas. “Murderbot Pronouns: A Snapshot of Changing Gender Conventions
in the United States.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, vol. 3, no. 3, 2018, pp. 271–298,
doi:10.1386/qsmpc.3.3.271_1
Wells, Martha. All Systems Red. Tor, 2017.
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21
NOT JUST BOYS AND TOYS
Gender and Intersectionality in SF for Children
Emily Midkiff
Science fiction (SF) is a genre about White boys and their toys, or so the saying goes. While
not intended to refer to literal young people, this turn of phrase encapsulates the gendered,
raced, and generic assumptions often attached to the genre. SF has long been coded as rational/
masculine/technological/Western, while fantasy is coded in opposition as irrational/feminine/
natural/non-Western. SF stories that cross this dichotomy are automatically suspect, especially
those that outright blur the lines of fantasy and SF—a practice that pioneering SF scholar Darko
Suvin once called “rampantly socio-pathological” (69). Over the past few decades, however,
authors of children’s SF—or what I term “primary SF” in Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science
Fiction for Young Children—have increasingly rejected the binary associations used to divide
fantasy and SF. Moreover, the recent primary SF stories that disrupt genre binaries often disrupt
binary definitions of gender and race as well. The middle grade novel Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha
Lee (2019) and the animated television series Steven Universe (2013–2019) are two especially
vivid demonstrations of primary SF texts doing this work.
Clichés notwithstanding, children are far more often associated with fantasy than with
SF because Eurowestern culture connects them with the feminine, the irrational, and the
natural, and they are part of the domestic sphere of women’s work. They are also feminized in
terms of their powerlessness in society and controlled in the name of protecting their purity.
The concept of childhood innocence derives from thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
theorized that children are close to nature and therefore both uncontaminated by adulthood
and also inherently irrational until they reach adolescence. As a result of these assumptions,
the child both represents (irrational, nature oriented) fantasy and is perceived as its ideal
consumer. Science fiction scholar Bud Foote argues that fantasy represents childhood while
SF represents adolescence, because children have not “worked out the line between magic and
technology” (205). Even as late as 2011, children’s literature scholar A. Waller Hastings argued
that “the difficulty in creating believable science fiction for the very young lies in the readers’
inadequate knowledge of the world, which arguably does not permit them to distinguish
adequately between fantasy and more plausible scientifically informed extrapolations” (207).
However, as I explain in Equipping Space Cadets, this view does not reflect real children’s
abilities. Instead, when adult gatekeepers like scholars, librarians, teachers, authors, and
publishers believe that SF is not suitable for children, they perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy
that suppresses both the production of primary SF and children’s exposure to the SF genre
as a whole.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-24 153

Emily Midkiff
Since children are associated with fantasy, authors of primary SF must work harder to prove
they belong in the SF genre. Primary SF is quickly criticized for having too little science and
too much fantasy. Karen Sands and Marietta Frank write that “unlikely details frequently cause
critics either to dismiss science fiction for children as being completely nonexistent or, at best,
to label it science fantasy” (27). Furthermore, because children’s media is seen as inferior to
adult fare, authors may feel that legitimizing primary SF is all the more necessary. Historically
speaking, publishers of primary SF have often sought legitimacy by embracing the image of
SF as the realm of boy readers, therefore aligning it with traditional genre dichotomies (Sands
and Frank 35). Accordingly, boys are often centered within these texts. Even when primary SF
includes female protagonists and female scientists, they are often negative representations that
preserve the perception of SF as a boy’s genre. Consider the sisters in Brian Pinkey’s (2000)
picture book Cosmo and the Robot and in the Cartoon Network series Dexter’s Laboratory (1996–
2003), who are both major nuisances and even a danger to the science and technology.
Publishers of primary SF also often assume cisgender and heterosexual readers. This is
unsurprising, given that gender and sexuality can be seen as controversial topics for children’s
media. Kathryn Bond Stockton explains that in Western culture, children’s sexual and gender
identities are kept on hold, a stalling practice that prevents children from growing up “until we
say it’s time” (6). She further argues that the
queer child, whatever its conscious grasp of itself, has not been able to present itself
according to the category “gay” or “homosexual”—categories culturally deemed too
adult, since they are sexual, though we do presume every child to be straight. (6)
This results in a situation where authors working in all genres, including SF, are often both
implicitly and explicitly advised to avoid any topic deemed related to sex—including gender
identity and sexual orientation. Assuming straightness, however, is considered appropriate.
While these converging beliefs about the nature of modern childhood have often resulted
in stories that are quite literally about straight boys and their technoscientific toys, over the
past century female characters have become increasingly central to primary SF. In my own
examination of 357 illustrated primary SF books from 1926–2016, I found that 38% featured
significant female characters (79). The numbers fluctuate dramatically by year, but a Pearson
correlation test indicated a positive, but weak relationship between strong female characters
and the decade of publication (82). In other words, the representation of women in this sample
slowly, if inconsistently, increases over time. Of the 17 books from the most recent year in
the sample, 2016, over half (58%) contained significant female characters, including Lunella
Lafayette in Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, who is now officially the smartest character
in the Marvel universe.
Primary SF stories featuring significant female characters challenge the simple equation
between femininity and fantasy. In recent years, SF creators such as Yoon Ha Lee and Rebecca
Sugar have extended primary SF to explore both queerness and intersectional identities. By
mixing elements of classic SF and fantasy and featuring characters with differently sexed,
gendered, raced, and abled identities, Dragon Pearl and Steven Universe challenge viewers to think
past the heteronormative gender binary.
Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee is marketed explicitly in terms of diversity and genre. Dragon
Pearl was the third title put out by the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, founded by author Rick
Riordan to channel fans of his bestselling Percy Jackson series towards diverse authors writing
similarly mythological speculative fiction. Lee submitted to the imprint because of his “Korean
background and habit of including mythical influences in science fiction” (Lee and Riordan),
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which fit well with Riordan’s goals, but at the time Dragon Pearl was the only SF title among the
imprint’s fantasy texts. Dragon Pearl’s genre became a core part of the marketing. In the official
promotional interview, Lee declares that what he most wants readers to take from his book is
“That science fiction and mythology can coexist happily!” For Lee, storytelling categories like
SF and mythology and fantasy do not need to be sorted into separate boxes.
Dragon Pearl could be feasibly categorized as SF or fantasy, depending on one’s definitions
and priorities. It features SF settings like Jinju, a poor planet that was never fully terraformed.
The plot strikes various SF chords as well: the main character, Min, grapples with the realities
of space travel as she sets off to search for her brother in a ship powered by a fusion reactor and
a Gate-jumping stardrive. However, other worldbuilding details would seem more at home
in fantasy. Min is a fox spirit who can use magic to shapeshift and charm people. Several
supernatural creatures from Korean folklore, like dragons and goblins, also live alongside humans
and wield specific magics of their own.
The combination of fantasy and SF in Dragon Pearl is not based on assumptions about the
child audience but is simply part of Lee’s style. Lee’s SF for adult audiences also often includes
fantasy elements and has been nominated for many combined fantasy/SF awards like the Hugo,
Nebula, and Locus as well as genre specific awards like the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur
C. Clarke Award for SF. Dragon Pearl itself won the Locus Award for Best YA Novel and the
Mythopoeic Award for children’s literature and was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award and
Lodestar Award, indicating that these committees saw value in the book’s mixture of SF and
fantasy. If these awarding institutions can be taken as evidence of quality, then genre mixing does
not seem to be a detriment.
Lee’s genre mixing allows him to depict traditional Korean culture as dynamic and
compatible with the future. In his universe, dragons use their powers to terraform planets and
spaceship design is based on pungsu jiri, or Korean feng shui, and the flow of the ship’s qi, or
energy, along its meridians. Both examples mix SF concepts with mythological and mystical
concepts, but this does not make them antithetical to SF. Colin Scott argues that Western
readers do not notice how much their concepts of science are infused with the metaphors
of myth and story (178), and one must only look at Star Wars to see this at play in science
fiction. To a non-Asian reader, qi may seem like a fantastical premise, but qi is an everyday
cultural concept to Korean readers and would be familiar to many other Asian readers as well.
Lee simply made qi and meridians slightly more tangible in his universe. This move breaks
down the Western/non-Western binary that is often applied to science and used to evaluate
the relative realism of SF.
Dragon Pearl’s hybrid generic aspects also enable the story’s themes about gender. All Space
Forces members wear their pronouns prominently on their nametags and the secondary
character Sujin uses they/them pronouns, choices which normalize nonbinary existence in the
future. Beyond this simple representation, though, the story also engages with more complex
ideas of gender and embodiment. Min, who chooses to be female like most fox spirits, spends
the middle of the story impersonating a dead, male Space Forces cadet named Jang in order to
stow away on his ship.
Lee’s experience as a transgender man influenced this gender-swap part of the plot. Lee
recalls taking comfort in the gender swap plots of his teenage reading material, like the novels
of Jack L. Chalker and Piers Anthony, although he disliked their extremely stereotypical
gender representations (“The Problem with Problematic”). As a 12-year-old, he even wrote
his own fantasy story that featured a gender change, but his mother responded by forcing him
into feminine gender performance. Lee says that he avoided writing trans characters for years
afterward but found that he could tolerate writing a metaphorical exploration of the trans
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Emily Midkiff
experience in his adult SF novel Ninefox Gambit, in which a male character becomes embedded
in a female character’s head and must share her body (“SFF in Conversation”).
Similarly, Dragon Pearl explores the concept of trans identity through the magic of
shapeshifting. Min still knows herself to be female even while her body is the shape of the
boy and she is performing as a male person. Yet Min’s impersonation of Jang does not rely
on her performing masculinity through the stereotypes that Lee found aggravating in his own
childhood reading. Instead, she is focused on impersonating his role as a cadet. In one scene,
Min suppresses the urge to reassuringly squeeze the hand of Jang’s friend Sujin—not because of
masculine anti-affection norms, but because she “learned from observation that people in the
Space Forces didn’t casually touch each other” (114).
Lee explores the physical aspects of body swapping with the detail and realism expected of SF
while still avoiding gender stereotypes. For instance, immediately following Min’s transformation
into Jang’s body, she literally runs into another cadet:
I emitted a strangled yell when the person’s knee accidentally connected with my
crotch. I was going to have to be more careful about guarding that part of my body!
Assuming the shape of a boy might not be any weirder than turning into a table or a
teacup, but I had to remember that it didn’t make me immune to pain. (92)
In this passage, Lee’s language is simplified for novice readers, but he does not curtail detail in
the name of childhood purity. This passage is likely to cause some giggling among younger
audiences and horrify certain adult audiences who would prefer that the anatomical consequences
of shapeshifting be skipped altogether. Yet this is just one of many small changes that Min
encounters while struggling to uphold her disguise, alongside adjusting to a deeper voice and
hearing people call her the wrong pronouns. Min’s thought that being in a boy’s body is not
any weirder than any other transformation casts male features as just another shape; it is clearly
not her chosen body and she does not feel at home in it, but she is not deviant for wearing
it either. The transformation also upends a classic female-to-male gender-swap trope when,
instead of finding herself benefiting from a stronger male body, Min finds that she must hide her
fox strength and agility to better impersonate Jang’s human abilities. Through shapeshifting into
Jang, Min does not hop to the other side of a gender binary, but instead experiences gender in
multiple dimensions: a female fox performing as a human male.
Although almost every interview for Lee’s adult novel Ninefox Gambit includes questions
about its transgender themes and their relationship to Lee’s childhood experiences with gender,
none of this is ever brought up in interviews about his middle grade novel Dragon Pearl. Even
Riordan’s interview with Lee, which includes discussion of the novel’s nonbinary character, is
silent about transgender themes and Lee’s own experiences. Since Lee’s adult and middle grade
novels have similar gender coded themes, it seems that the lack of questions about trans identity
in the book for children is an intentional choice related to Dragon Pearl’s younger audience,
though it is unclear whether that choice was made by the interviewers, Lee, or even Disney-
Hyperion’s marketing department. Instead, the Dragon Pearl interviews focus heavily on Lee’s
identity as Korean, with no exploration of how that impacts his thinking about gender.
In contrast, Rebecca Sugar directly acknowledges using the genre convention of her animated
TV series Steven Universe to explore both gender and race, noting that, “To me, the show is
specifically about intersectional feminism” (qtd. in Dueben). Intersectional feminism, a concept
first described by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, encourages thinking about how
gender is experienced differently by different racial groups. In turn, as more recent scholars
such as Carla Rice explain, intersectionality can be expanded to consider how queerness also
156
complicates the experience of race and gender. By dramatizing these and other intersectional
identities, Steven Universe enthusiastically endorses complex speculation about gender as suitable
material for children’s media.
Like Lee, Sugar combines elements of SF and fantasy in her story, which follows a group of
aliens called the Crystal Gems who are raising a half-alien, half-human child named Steven in
a small beach town on Earth. As the show progresses, the Gems are revealed to be rebels who
defend Earth from their colonizing, hierarchical species. The aliens use advanced technology,
but their abilities also seem magical: they are gemstones that project solid bodies made of
light and can fuse together into larger bodies through intimate dance, although fusion between
different Gem types is considered deviant and prohibited on the Gem homeworld. The show’s
SF and fantasy elements are represented most clearly through the “mad scientist” Gem, Peridot,
and the “water witch” Gem, Lapis Lazuli, who develop a complicated queer partnership that
André Vasques Vital says criticizes the history of treating science and nature as a binary. Their
queer relationship brings together fantasy and SF, magic and science, defying Suvin’s complaints
about “socio-pathological” genre mixing (which in this context resonates with similar prejudice
against queerness).
This semi-magical framework enables the show’s queer themes. Eli Dunn writes that
the inherently genderless bodies of the Gems, who nonetheless all use female pronouns, are
significant since “the flexibility of Gem bodies (and the frequency at which they change) sets
up their feminine gender traits as illusory” (45). Kevin Cooley notes that the queer coding and
amorphous bodies of the Gems “brings a placeholder substance to the queer modes of being
that our present cannot yet articulate” (52). Dunn and Cooley both argue that the cartoon
medium and unrealistic powers mean that Steven Universe has the freedom to imagine a queer
future without the restrictions of realism.
As advocates of intersectional feminism, Sugar and her team explore the relations of race,
sex, and gender in child-friendly terms through the Gem Garnet. Garnet is voiced by Estelle,
a Black British singer-songwriter, and projects a body coded as female and Black. At the end
of season one, audiences learn that Garnet is a fusion of two Gems, Ruby and Sapphire, who
are in an explicitly queer relationship and even get married. Garnet physically embodies Black
queer love. Garnet is also the character who most vocally champions fusion, especially when
young Steven begins experimenting with it. Mandy Elizabeth Moore points out that Garnet’s
mentoring relationship with Steven is a significant statement of the potential of queer futurity
by depicting a “child/adult partnership of queer worldmaking” (7). Working across the binary
of child/adult, Garnet’s prominent place in the show’s cast and frequent role as the spokesperson
for its queer themes centers Black queerness as suitable content for the child audience.
Steven Universe also thinks through the relations of race, gender, sexuality, and ability
through the Gems Amethyst and Peridot. Amethyst is sometimes treated as disabled by
Homeworld Gems due to her differences from other Amethysts. For example, in the season
2 episode “Too Far,” Peridot declares Amethyst “defective” and not “normal” because she
is smaller than other Amethysts. Amethyst can shapeshift into the same size and shape as her
peers, but it is uncomfortable and unsustainable for her. Her character development takes
her through several confrontations with embodiment and bodily agency. Meanwhile, Peridot
has been fondly claimed by autistic fans for her communication difficulties and discomfort
with unpredictability—especially since it is rare to see any representations of autistic girls or
women in popular culture. Peridot also wears limb enhancers to compensate for her inability
to shapeshift and uses recording devices to prerecord complex ideas that she wants to share.
These tools function as prosthetics and alternative communication devices comparable to real
life assistive technology.
157
Emily Midkiff
The interactions between Amethyst and Peridot offer valuable and rare depictions of female
characters confronting internalized ableism together, but with mixed success. While Peridot
eventually realizes that she and Amethyst are different but not defective, the other Gems never
accept that Peridot’s assistive technology improves her quality of life. Peridot views these devices
as part of her. She refers to the limb enhancers on her legs as her feet, but when they are
removed, she calls her actual feet by the alienating term “gravity connectors” (“Too Far”).
When Steven gives her a tablet to replace her finger screens, she tries to attach it to herself.
Nevertheless, Amethyst—who is struggling with her own sense of worth in the face of her
disability—insists that Peridot is too focused on her disabilities rather than her abilities and
throws Peridot’s assistive technology into the ocean. The resolution of the season 3 episode
“Too Short to Ride” implies that Peridot develops metal-controlling powers to compensate for
the loss of her limb enhancers, but this is a dissatisfying conclusion for anyone who uses assistive
technology.
Sugar’s attempts at broad representation were not without risk. Critics of Steven Universe
assert that the show undercuts its own dramatic strides toward intersectional feminism when
it fails to challenge other norms. For instance, Moore points out that the show focuses on
alien colonialism without ever addressing how its humans belong to real postcolonial cultures.
Meanwhile, Olivia Zolciak finds that the show may be intersectional, but the featured
intersections “favor privileged groups, ultimately reinforcing and complicating stereotypes of
Black women” (69). This latter argument, which has been made in fan discussions for several
years, is itself controversial since it relies heavily on reading the Gem Pearl as White, while
many fans read her as Asian and protest what they consider to be an erasure of Asian characters
by those who read her as White. Even so, the fact that Steven Universe can support heated
discussions around representation goes to show that it is engaging deeply with race, disability,
and intersectional identities, even when it may not always get it right. There is no playing it safe
for the child audiences of Steven Universe, but rather a high-risk, high-reward engagement with
topics that have real world implications.
Overall, Dragon Pearl and Steven Universe queer the SF/fantasy divide to offer complex
speculation for young people. In both stories, the SF setting means that the characters’ gender
identities—however magical—are framed as part of a future to work toward, not an imaginary
and unreachable fantasy. These stories take up SF’s potential to radically reimagine our world
by embracing fluid definitions of genre and gender. If more adult gatekeepers of primary SF
manage to break out of the dichotomous definitions that confine children and genre, they too
can reimagine SF as a genre for queer, BIPOC kids and their toys.
Bibliography
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Steven Universe, edited by John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 45–67,
doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9.
Dueben, Alex. “ ‘Steven Universe’ Creator on Crafting a Show About Family, Love—and Aliens.” CBR, 11
May 2016. www.cbr.com/steven-universe-creator-on-crafting-a-show-about-family-love-and-aliens/.
Dunn, Eli. “Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque.” Gender Forum: An
Internet Journal for Gender Studies, vol. 56, 2016, pp. 44–57.
Foote, Bud. “Getting Things in the Right Order: Stephen King’s The Shining, The Stand, and It.” Nursery
Realms: Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, edited by Gary Westfahl and George
Slusser. University of Georgia Press, 1999, pp. 200–209.
Hastings, A. Waller. “Science Fiction.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul.
New York University Press, 2011, pp. 202–207.
Lee, Yoon Ha. Dragon Pearl. Rick Riordan Presents, 2019.
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Lee, Yoon Ha. “SFF in Conversation: Yoon Ha Lee on Being Trans.” The Book Smugglers, 16 June 2016,
www.thebooksmugglers.com/2016/06/SFf-in-conversation-yoon-ha-lee-on-being-trans.html.
Lee, Yoon Ha. “The Problem with Problematic.” Patreon, 18 April 2017. www.lightspeedmagazine.com/
nonfiction/interview-yoon-ha-lee/.
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exclusive-interview/.
Midkiff, Emily. Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children. University Press of
Mississippi, 2022.
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Literature, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–17.
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doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9.
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22
SPECULATIONS AGAINST
GENDER DISCRIMINATION
A Study of Indian SF’s Growing Engagement
with Gender Issues
Introduction
Discussions of the portrayal of gender issues in SF have reached a critical juncture at present. On
the one hand, the gendered image of SF is being convincingly questioned by drawing attention
to this genre’s potential to counter gender normativity and mapping the presence of women and
transgender writers. On the other hand, the majority of these discussions are limited by their
lack of attention to women SF writers beyond the anglosphere. For instance, Helen Merrick’s
chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction outlines SF’s “appropriateness . . . as a
vehicle for exploring gender and humanity and ‘unlearning’ the strictures of cultural norms”
(251) by way of a discussion focusing on women writers of SF during the twentieth century,
yet without mentioning women writers outside the anglosphere. Likewise, M. Keith Booker
and Anne-Marie Thomas disclose how the creation and nurturing of a gender-hierarchy by
male writers ended up generating an underlying potential for challenging the same gender-
hierarchy. They explain how the recurrent othering of the feminine figure by male-propagated
SF ultimately “imbued” this othered figure with an “ominous power” that enabled it to
emerge as an ideal “tool” for challenging gender-hierarchy and gender-constructs (86). Yet,
their otherwise insightful discussion does not move beyond the anglospheric women writers’
utilization of such powers.
The underlying problem of the anglosphere-centric aforementioned discussions may be
understood in the light of Justine Larbalestier’s comments on the importance of maintaining
comprehensivity in accounts of women exponents of SF. Larbalestier observes: “There is danger
in the argument that there were few women in the field, for . . . the slide from few women
and few representations to no women can easily happen” (155). Though Larbalestier offers this
observation in a different context, her insight holds true for the discussions referred to earlier.
By limiting their focus to women SF writers from the anglosphere, such discussions actually end
up inaccurately portraying women SF writers as few and far between on the global map of SF.
Avoiding this pitfall, this discussion will focus on non-anglophone women SF writers, especially
those who emerged within societies with a tradition of disciplining women’s behaviour.
This chapter contributes towards such attempts to assemble and analyze the output of non-
anglophone women SF writers by focusing on three Indian women writers, namely Rokeya
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-25 160

Speculations Against Gender Discrimination
Sakhawat Hossain, Vandana Singh, and Manjula Padmanabhan.1 Since the publication of
“Sultana’s Dream” by Hossain in 1905, Indian SF by women writers (ISFW) has gradually
established itself as a site for critiquing Indian society’s gender bias. Each of these writers, as this
discussion will subsequently explain, represents three distinguishable but interrelated directions
taken by ISFW for materializing such critiques. In this discussion, I will consider these three
different approaches to the examination of gender roles in Indian SF, which I will call revisive,
representative, and post-revisive, respectively. The first involves imagining ways in which India’s
treatment of women might be revised, the second ensures representation of alternative gender
roles in SF, and the third moves beyond both revision and representation to investigate gender
more generally.
This discussion does not present Singh and Padmanabhan as Hossain’s literary progeny in
the literal sense. Instead, the analysis of these writers will aim at identifying the reverberation of
tropes and templates, such as the presence of female scientists as protagonists, futuristic versions
of India, critique of the gender roles thrust upon Indian women by its patriarchal system, etc. As
each of the three subsequent sections will explain, usage of the aforementioned tropes or templates
in ISFW has changed concurrently with the changing position of women in Indian society.
These analyses will also outline how these three writers mark ISFW’s continued preference for
the form of Kalpavigyan (akin to speculative fiction), which emphasizes “imagination” rather
than remaining bound by “the strictures of laws” or vigyan (science) (Chattopadhyay 437). I will
offer a brief overview of the gender roles thrust upon women by Indian society to understand
what exactly these writers were responding to. To date, Indian society remains dominated
by traditional gender roles that restrict women’s participation in multiple sectors, including
education and especially in the field of science. Alarmed by the sinking gender ratio2 and
overall discrimination against women, the present Indian Government launched the BBBP
(Beti Bachao Beti Padhao; in English: Save Daughters, Educate Daughters) scheme in 2019. As
per the government’s guidelines, this scheme aims at: prevention of “gender biased sex selective
elimination,” ensuring “survival and protection of the girl child,” and ensuring that girls are
educated (7). It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to outline all possible reasons for
this alarming situation, but it is significant to note that the Manusmriti (in English: The Laws of
Manu), arguably the earliest book of laws that governed social life in ancient India, reveals how
the policymakers historically validated discrimination against women.
Manusmriti presents women as essentially carnal, materialistic, and unfit for independence.
They can only lead a moral life as a daughter under the supervision of her father, a wife controlled
by her husband, and a mother looked after by her son (Ch. 9). Even wives are viewed as ideal in
Manusmriti only if they remain silent (Ch. 3). A recent study conducted by Sneha Singh featuring
ten female journalists of different ages reveals that even for modern India, in order to gain social
acceptance, an Indian woman must conform to the expectations of modesty, marriageability, and
silence (Singh 2369). Indian society still associates ideal women with selfless mothers, denying
women their potential as human beings with multiple abilities (Krishnaraj 2). The Indian popular
imagination in general, and Indian women, in particular, have been conditioned to view women
only as domesticated and silent wives or selfless mothers. In the next three sections, this discussion
will explain how ISFW responded to this traditional stereotyping of women.
Hossain: The Revisive Dream

In “Sultana’s Dream,” Rokeya Hossain advocates a revision of her contemporary milieu’s treatment
of Indian women in general and Muslim women in particular. On the face of it, “Sultana’s Dream”
is a delightfully fantastic narrative with occasional use of humour at the expense of conventional
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notions of masculinity. In this story, the narrator Sultana meets a lady in her dream and visits the
beautiful land she hails from. The visit soon turns into a full exploration of the wonders of this
utopic land as, unlike the world Sultana resides in, this land is governed by women while the males
remain at their respective residences. It is completely free from any sign of pollution (“Sultana’s
Dream” 7), and yet has advanced technology like an electric air-car (“Sultana’s Dream” 13). The
women of this land gained control when the country entered into a battle that was almost lost due
to the men’s policies. Subsequently, the women won the battle by using their intelligence and since
then men have been viewed as unfit for independent life in their society (“Sultana’s Dream” 5).
While critical assessments have already acknowledged “Sultana’s Dream” as a pioneering
work of Indian SF for its emphasis on “the idea of science” (Kuhad 59) and its similarities with
“the tradition of early utopian SF” (Banerjee 31), relatively less importance has been given
to Hossain’s way of responding to the gender roles used for conditioning Indian women in
both ancient times and the colonial era, The Indian SF critic Suparno Banerjee mentions that
“Sultana’s Dream” envisions a world beyond the orthodox Muslim society of Hossain’s time
(Banerjee 21) but it is also important to view Hossain’s vision as a response to the portrayal of
women in Manusmriti. Just like the women from Manusmriti, the men of Hossain’s novella are
seen as unfit for independent life. Hossain’s narrative attests to the benefits of acknowledging the
potential for women to govern society without resorting to aggressive policies, by showing how
effortlessly these women solve the crises that their male counterparts failed to resolve. Though
recent criticism of this novella views it as a reflection of the conflict between progressive ideas
and mostly regressive traditions that ensued from the Bengal Renaissance (Kuhad 75), it seems
significant to view it as a narrative that counters the gender roles of its contemporary milieu by
reversing them. Hence, the significance of Hossain’s portrayal of women has to be understood
in relation to her own experience of the restrictive roles of women in Indian society.
While Hindu women gained their educational rights in the late nineteenth century, Muslim
women had to wait until 1939 to receive the British government’s official support for their
education (Hasan 45–46). For Hossain, however, the situation was markedly different. Despite
her father’s opposing women’s education due to peer pressure, Hossain learnt her primary
lessons from her brother and subsequently received encouragement from her husband (Hasan
45–46). Her exposure to knowledge helped her understand the plight of contemporary women
and turned her into an ardent supporter of women’s education. For Hossain, education was
important for achieving equality with men (Ray 72) and financial independence by way
of becoming an employee (Ray 73). When read in the light of the conditions of women
as experienced by Hossain, the portrayal of women easily doing day-jobs and still finding
ample time for doing beautiful embroidery (Hossain 6) or schools for women supported by
the government (7) appear to be a response aimed at re-examining the validity of the gender-
hierarchy. “Sultana’s Dream” has been viewed as essentialist (Banerjee 32) for its reliance on a
rather simplistic reversal of gender roles but when read as the first work of ISFW that started
countering a long tradition of stereotyping women, Hossain’s vision appears to be a remarkable
achievement. Besides, her depiction of women handling both jobs and traditionally feminine
activities like embroidery with equal ease shows signs of problematizing essentialism regarding
gender roles by highlighting the futility of assigning work based on gender.
Vandana Singh: A Representative Vision

While Hossain was writing in the early twentieth century, Vandana Singh began publishing
SF in the early twenty-first century. My analysis highlights Singh’s focus on representing
alternative gender roles that problematize gender-hierarchy and normativity, an approach which
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I categorize as “representative” rather than “revisive.” While Hossain made such constructs stand
on their heads, Singh’s writings show a more progressive concern—representation of multiple
possible roles that signify gender fluidity. Singh herself calls her approach to the question of
gender discrimination resistant; she also focuses on “exploration” of the many faces of gender
fluidity (Personal Interview). According to Singh, gender is not just “a non-binary entity” but
is “something that might vary with time and context” (Personal Interview).
The titular short story from The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet shows Kamala
Mishra’s emancipation from the stereotypical image of an Indian housewife. While a typical
Indian housewife is supposed to keep her entire body covered with a saree and to be subservient
to her husband, Kamala decides to declare herself free from such constraints one morning
by informing her husband: “I know at last what I am. I am a planet” (39). Though Kamala’s
physical shape remains unchanged, by adopting the identity of a planet she gains a sense of
agency. Just like a planet, she moves beyond the gender binaries and yet shows power to create
new life on her own in the form of little humanoid beings. Realizing such powers, she refuses to
clothe herself for the sake of others or treat her husband as superior. Her transformation as well
as emancipation is completed when she uses gas balloons to levitate over her neighbourhood,
leaving behind her garments and shocking the men around.
A significant number of stories by Singh, who is a physicist, centre around women scientists.
Read in the light of Indian women’s prolonged deprivation from education as well as SF’s
association of scientific and technological expertise with masculinity (Merrick 241), such
characterizations by Singh problematize essentialist notions about femininity in SF. Ambiguity
Machines and Other Stories features three stories presenting women of science, who, according
to Singh “engage with the world, and with science, very differently” compared to the male
scientists usually featured in SF (Personal Interview). In “Peripeteia” she portrays Sujata, a
physicist living in the US striving to find solace from personal tragedies in quantum mechanics
and research on aliens who control the world as we know it. The Indian SF writer-critic
Sami Ahmed Khan draws attention to the absence of a “male authority-figure” in this story;
it is also important to note how the story depicts Sujata’s relationship with the other female
character, Veenu, whom Sujata describes as “a lover, a partner, a friend” (53) or how her
scientific discovery about the world helps her to come to terms with the death of her mother
and separation from Veenu.
In Singh’s stories the figure of the female scientist also manifests a selfless love for knowing the
unknown, instead of conquering it for personal gain. For instance, the female scientist Birha in
“Ruminations in an Alien Tongue,” chooses to dedicate her life to understanding the enigmatic
language of an alien race and waiting for the alien Rudrak’s return from a trip across dimensions,
while the rest of humanity works towards conquering this alien race and using the aliens’
interdimensional travel device to foster an industry of wish-fulfilment. Likewise, in “Sailing
the Antarsa,” the trope of the male adventurer in SF undergoes a significant change. Mayha, a
descendant of humans who migrated to the planet Dhara (which in Sanskrit means “Earth”)
goes on a solo expedition to the space ocean Antarsa, guided not by the urge to conquer found
in generic (and markedly masculine) adventurers of SF, but by her community’s ideal of seeking
kinship (171). It is significant to note the parallels between Singh’s female scientist characters
and her own life as a woman of science living at a distance from Indian society.
Singh’s imagination takes another significant turn in her novella Of Love and Other Monsters
where she utilizes the figure of the alien to present the unique character of Arun, who lives in
Delhi as an average Indian male. Arun has a clerical job at the beginning but is revealed to be a
member of a race of shape-shifting and conquering aliens with the unique ability to enter into
the minds of multiple human beings and control them. In the novella Arun is shown to have
163
a fluid sexuality and his caregiver Janani, whose name in Sanskrit means mother, is ultimately
revealed to be the member of an organization run by humans that fight aliens like Arun by
destroying their powers and raising them as average humans thereafter. In both Arun and Janani
gender roles get problematized. While Arun, the conquering alien with super-powers, engages
in role playing as a woman for his human beloved Manek, falls in love with both men and
women, and appreciates the concept of ardhanarishwar, which refers to a form of the Hindu
god Shiva, comprising features of both male and female body (26), the human Janani’s use
of the facade of a generous mother to manipulate powerful aliens like Arun marks a notable
problematization of the traditional image of Indian women as selfless mothers.
While the characters discussed do represent a reversal of gender roles to a certain extent,
Singh’s approach does not limit itself to reversing the heteronormative. Rather, her explorative
approach represents various alternative roles for both male and female characters, in the form of
a typical Indian wife becoming a planet, a female scientist whose emotional nature actually helps
in her progress as a researcher, a female space adventurer minus the urge to conquer, a woman
pretending to be a kind mother to aliens whom she damages, or a conquering alien striving to
be a woman to charm his beloved. While Hossain highlighted how Indian SF could reverse the
bleak contemporary conditions of women, the presence of these successful women of science in
Singh’s writing appears as a response to the tradition of marginalizing women scientists in India
during the 1930s (Sur 118) and the subsequent emergence of scholarly women of science (like
Singh herself and many others).
The Post-Revisive Approach of Manjula Padmanabhan

Use of the term “post” for Manjula Padmanabhan (born in 1953) does not distinguish her from
the other two women writers or, to be more exact, the strain of Indian SF centring on gender
questions that found its first expression in Hossain’s story of a gender-reversed world. Rather,
through this term, I highlight how Padmanabhan’s writings complement the gender-reversal
found in Hossain’s story by moving towards a new phase of ISFW which seeks to approach
gender issues by portraying the plight of both men and women. In her duology, Escape (2008)
and The Island of Lost Girls (2015), she presents the story of Meiji, the only surviving young
girl in a world that has exterminated women. Escape has been viewed as a “feminist dystopia”
(Kuhad 95–96) and has been linked with the alarming imbalance of sex-ratio in present-day
India (Kuhad 76, Khan 88). Yet, in the words of Padmanabhan, there is more than what is
popularly understood as feminism to these novels or her politics as a writer in general (Personal
Interview).
When asked to comment on the ways these two novels represent manipulation or
exploitation of the female body, Padmanabhan responds that both these novels are not just
novels about “female bodies” but “bodies in general” (Personal Interview). Illustrating her
view, she refers to the male character Youngest (who is one of Meiji’s uncles) from The Island
of Lost Girls. Indeed, Youngest’s rumination about what sex-change surgery made out of his
pre-surgery body echoes Padmanabhan’s explanation, when it shows Youngest thinking: “I’m
not free to smile. . . . I’m not a man dressed in a woman’s body. I’m pathetic, witless maniac.
I should be locked up. I should die” (14). The novel further shows the ramification for men of
embracing toxic masculinity through the plight of the suitors of Meiji, who desperately crave
a female companion in the world men like them created by exterminating all women. When
Padmanabhan shows the suffering of these men, she emphatically presents how toxic behaviour
and misogyny affect not just women or men but bodies in general.
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In other words, both men and women suffer in this world that is obsessed with exterminating
the female body. If Meiji suffers from self-loathing (Kuhad 78), so do the men, other than the
ruthless Generals who introduced the policy of wiping out women. Padmanabhan’s duology
therefore represents a significant furthering of the vision found in “Sultana’s Dream” by shifting
the focus from portraying what might happen if women govern the world to portraying the
future of suffering that awaits both men and women if men continue to govern the world the
way they are at present. It reminds readers that men and women are interrelated. As explained by
Padmanabhan, such views emanate from her belief in viewing “male and female not as binaries
or terminal points” (Personal Interview). While some critical arguments suggest that her duology
depicts the extreme shape that the present issue of imbalanced sex-ratio in India, foeticide, etc. can
take in the future (Kuhad 78) or read her duology as “an impassioned plea for women in India”
(Khan 89), it is also important to read her narratives in the light of her views quoted previously.
Padmanabhan never really breaks away from the envisioning of women as powerful and
better guardians of humanity as shown in “Sultana’s Dream” or, to some extent, in Singh’s stories
featuring women scientists. Rather, her novella Shrinking Vanita (2006), primarily written for
children, shows Vanita saving earth from an asteroid using her intelligence and inborn ability to
shrink her body. She also offers a gender-reversed version of an episode of the epic Ramayana
in her story “Exile” where the warrior sisters Rashmi and Lakshmi (representing Ram and
Lakshman) protect Rashmi’s husband Siddhangshu (a male counterpart of Ram’s wife Sita).
The difference between Padmanabhan’s earlier work like “Exile” and her later works shows that
she initially adopted the strategy of gender-reversal, quite like Rokeya Hossain, but eventually
outgrew such stances.
As suggested in her interview, Padmanabhan finds it problematic to be viewed just as a
woman writer as, in her view, such categorization creates certain presumptions about her
writings. In her interview she explained that she felt that some reviewers engaged with her
work with a preconceived notion that she is “just a feminist”; she disagrees with that, saying
her concern is gender in general, not just feminism insofar as it focuses solely on women.
Taking into account both Padmanabhan’s own observations and the gradual changes in the
contour of her vision, traceable from the differences between her earlier writings like the story
“Exile” and her duology, I would argue that Padmanabhan marks Indian SF’s movement towards
problematizing the approach of speculating against gender-hierarchy chiefly through gender-
reversal and would describe such an approach as “post-revisive,” which attests an evolution in
ISFW without a complete detachment from the direction given to ISFW by its pioneer writer
Rokeya Hossain. Additionally, Padmanabhan’s views depict how ISFW is changing its contours
in response to the changing scenario of Indian society.
Conclusion
ISFW has changed its use of templates and tropes like the existence of female scientists, gender-
reversal, etc. in tandem with the changing position of women in Indian society. While Hossain’s
strategy of adopting gender-reversal had its relevance in its milieu, for the present-day Indian
society suffering from an imbalanced sex-ratio, Padmanabhan’s portrayal of the suffering of both
men and women seems to be the need of the hour. ISFW has increasingly gained social relevance
and it has done so by adopting a mode of SF focused on speculations about the outcome
of the as yet unrealized emancipation of women and the future outcome of Indian society’s
present misogynist condition, rather than imagining the spectacle of futuristic technologies.
Both Singh and Padmanabhan agree upon the limitations of classic “hard SF,” highlighting its
165
overt reliance on “colonialist and sexist tropes” (Singh Interview) and its preference for scientific
spectacle over imagination (Padmanabhan Interview), which echoes the idea of Kalpavigyan as
mentioned before. Read together, these three writers show how ISFW’s departure from hard SF
and writing back to the dominance of gender roles in Indian society have nurtured its potential
to critique gender-hierarchy.
Notes
1 Despite her Indian origins, Padmanabhan prefers to be addressed as an anglophone writer as English is
her only spoken language.
2 In India a female child is still viewed as a burden in many sections, especially rural ones, due to the
dowry system.
Bibliography
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pp. vii-xxvi.
Banerjee, Suparno. Indian Science Fiction Patterns, History and Hybridity. University of Wales Press, 2020.
Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. “On the Mythologerm: Kalpavigyan and the Question of Imperial Science.”
Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 2016, pp. 435–458.
Hasan, Md. Mahmadul. “Commemorating Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Contextualising her Work in
South Asian Muslim Feminism.” Asiatic, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 39–59.
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag, edited by Barnita Bagchi, Penguin, 2005.
Khan, Sami Ahmed. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science
Fiction. University of Wales Press, 2021.
Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. “Introduction.” Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? edited by
Maithreyi Krishnaraj. Routledge, 2010, pp. 1–10.
Kuhad, Urvashi. Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers Exploring Radical Potentials. Routledge, 2022.
Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Merrick, Helen. “Gender in Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward
James and Farah Mendelsohn. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 241–252.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. Escape. Hachette, 2009.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Exile.” Breaking the Bow, edited by Vandana Singh and Anil Menon. Zubaan,
2012.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. Interview. Conducted by Debaditya Mukhopadhyay, 29 September 2021.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Shrinking Vanita.” 7 Science Fiction Stories. Scholastic, 2006.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. The Island of Lost Girls. Hachette, 2015.
Ray, Bharati. “A Feminist Critique of Patriarchy: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932).” Asiatic, vol. 7,
no. 2, 2013, pp. 60–81.
Singh, Sneha. “The Ideal Indian Woman: Defined by Hindu Nationalism and Culture.” International Journal
of Social Science and Human Research, vol. 4, no. 9, 2021, pp. 2369–2377.
Singh, Vandana. Ambiguity Machine and Other Stories. Zubaan, 2018.
Singh, Vandana. Interview. Conducted by Debaditya Mukhopadhyay, 29 September 2021.
Singh, Vandana. Of Love and Other Monsters. Aqueduct Press, 2007.
Singh, Vandana. The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. Zubaan, 2008.
Sur, Abha. “Dispersed Radiance: Women Scientists in C. V. Raman’s Laboratory.” Meridians, vol. 1, no.
2, 2001, pp. 95–127.
The Laws of Manu (Transl. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith). Penguin, 1991.
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23
FEMINIST-QUEER
CYBERPUNK
Hacking Cyberpunk’s Hetero-Masculinism
Graham J. Murphy
Introduction
Cyberpunk emerged in science fiction’s (sf) western canon in the early 1980s and blended the
cyber of cybernetics with a streetwise punk attitude perhaps best embodied in the mantra “the
street finds its own uses for things” (186) from William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome”
(1982). Print cyberpunk initially coalesced around the literary stylings of a core quintet—
Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley—and these writers
ostensibly held an oppositional stance towards ‘mainstream’ sf. For example, in his fanzine Cheap
Truth, Sterling (writing as ‘Vincent Omniaveritas’) castigated then-current sf as “distorted folk
tales” and “ritualized, predictable, and only fit for children” (#9) while Lewis Shiner (writing
as ‘Sue Denim’) proclaimed “[t]he SF revolution is crying out for literacy, imagination, and
humanity” (#10). While Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) quickly became “the quintessential
Cyberpunk [sic] novel” (Hollinger 239), Sterling’s Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)
helped codify (and market!) the cyberpunk mode: “Certain central themes spring up repeatedly
in cyberpunk,” Sterling explains in his Preface. “The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs,
implanted circuity, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of
mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques
radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self ” (xiii). Neuromancer and
Mirrorshades were therefore instrumental in defining cyberpunk, for better and for worse, but
a closer examination of this movement and its evolution reveals feminist-queer cyberpunk has
a lengthy and formative tradition that demands attention because it pushes against a dominant
strain of hetero-masculinism.
Feminist-Queer Print Cyberpunk

Despite print cyberpunk’s anti-establishment bluster, many of its core features originated in
previous decades, including feminist-queer sf. Samuel Delany, for example, makes the connection
between Molly Millions—the cyborg assassin from Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981),
Neuromancer, and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—and Jael, the cyborg assassin and revolutionary
freedom fighter of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975):
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-26 167

Graham J. Murphy
Both of them have retractable claws in their fingers. Both of them wear black. Both
enjoy their sex with men. And there’s a similar harshness in their attitudes. I’m sure
Gibson would admit that his particular kind of female character would have been
impossible to write without the feminist science fiction from the seventies. (173)
Similarly, James Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) wrote cyberpunk avant la lettre with the
award-winning “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), a tale about corporate malfeasance,
ubiquitous media technologies, and cybernetic uploads into artificial bodies. Finally, Lisa
Yaszek has drawn on a wealth of feminist sf to show that “[w]omen’s interest in the organizing
themes of cyberpunk—including technoscientifically induced alienation, corporate global
domination, a rapacious media landscape, and the often-reckless use of new technologies to
transform bodies and minds—is as old as science fiction (sf) itself ” (32–33). Nevertheless,
print cyberpunk has a history of deliberately suppressing its feminist-queer precursors and
privileging a deeply rooted heteronormative masculinism. Therefore, such critics as James
Patrick Kelly, Nicola Nixon, Karen Cadora, Carlen Lavigne, Patricia Melzer, and a host of
others have commented upon 1980s-era cyberpunk’s conservatism and reification of well-
known borders and boundaries. “[C]loser examinations of the [cyberpunk] movement,”
Karen Cadora writes, “have revealed that its politics are anything but revolutionary” (157)
while Carlen Lavigne describes 1980s-era cyberpunk as “a glittering world of boys and their
techno-toys, with supporting females thrown in” (30).
While early print cyberpunk was largely obsessed with ‘boys and their (techno-)toys,’ feminist-
influenced cyberpunk in the period was not wholly absent. For example, Candas Jane Dorsey’s
“(Learning About) Machine Sex” (1988) is particularly effective (and chilling) in its feminist
critique of labor exploitation (similar to Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On” [1984]) when Dorsey aligns
the burgeoning computer industry with sex work: both misogynistic industries are shown to
have their roots in discovering fresh talent and profiting from that talent’s ability to open new
markets and find clients. Meanwhile, feminist-queer cyberpunk of the 1990s—for example,
Cadigan’s Synners (1991), Marge Piercy’s He, She and It/Body of Glass (1991), Laura J. Mixon’s
Glass Houses (1992), Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang (1992), Mary Rosenblum’s
Chimera (1993), Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996), etc.—blends “the conventions of
cyberpunk with the political savvy of feminist sf ” and, in so doing, advances “new avenues
for feminist sf and, ultimately, feminist theory” (Cadora 157). A standout in this cluster of
authors is Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends (1994), a novel which follows two queer
hacker protagonists—Trouble and Cerise—who are forced to navigate the challenges arising
from the Evans-Tindale legislation that has regulated America’s access to the global cyberspatial
network. Tellingly, Evans-Tindale was supported by white, straight, male hackers who helped
weaponize the legislation to disenfranchise a younger crop of hackers—that is, women, queer,
and/or persons of color—who were using the cutting edge brainworm technology to access
cyberspace. Trouble and Her Friends therefore takes an atypical route for print cyberpunk by
showing that the American government still retains power to restrict access for women, persons
of color, and the broader LGBTQ2S+ community, an all-too-familiar reality that mirrors our
‘real’ world. Meanwhile, in foregrounding the entanglements of both the corporeal and digital
worlds, Scott also addresses the toxicity felt by a certain clique of incel-adjacent hackers who
despite their fervent wishes can’t ignore race, gender, sex, and/or sexuality even when online.
As feminist-queer cyberpunk, Trouble and Her Friends is a refutation of masculinist cyberpunk
and its at-times reductive desires (or the reductive desires of a segment of cyberpunk’s fans)
about beating the meat and living for some digital fantasy of cyberspace where bodies somehow
don’t matter when, in fact, they always already matter.
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Feminist-Queer Cyberpunk
Feminist-Queer Cinematic Cyberpunk

While feminist-queer cyberpunk may have been transforming and (re)shaping the contours of
print cyberpunk, early cinematic cyberpunk faced its own problems. The trifecta of 1980s-era
cyberpunk films—that is, TRON (Lisberger, 1982), Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), and Videodrome
(Cronenberg, 1983)—fails the Bechdel test quite spectacularly. In fact, Blade Runner, the story
about a bounty hunter ‘retiring’ escaped androids known as replicants, is a standout for all the
wrong reasons: in one pivotal scene, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) uses his body to block the
replicant Rachael (Sean Young) from exiting his apartment. He then pushes Rachael against
the window, raises his hand as if to strike her, and then forces her to kiss him, going so far
as to spoon-feed what he wants to hear from her. Rachael’s status as a replicant therefore
“does not exempt her from sexual abuse” and “[m]anufactured sexual remarks are added to her
manufactured memories” (Barr 29). In addition, Deckard’s hunt for the four escaped Nexus-6
replicants is also deeply troubling because he
is unsuccessful in ‘retiring’ either Leon (Brion James) or Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer)—
i.e., the male replicants—but is able to reaffirm his male prowess by successfully, and
brutally, pumping his bullets into the female replicants Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and
Pris (Daryl Hannah), both of whom die in devastatingly powerful scenes. (Murphy 98)
Such later films as The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992), Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995), The
Net (Winkler, 1995), and Hackers (Softley, 1995) did very little to move the feminist dial, while
Mace’s (Angela Bassett) role in Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995) is simply muscle-for-hire and
underdeveloped love interest for protagonist Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes). Thus, despite a
“multiethnic cast and prominent women, in the end, this is window dressing and [Strange Days’]
neoliberal milieu remains unchallenged” (Butler, 124–25).
The 1990s ended on a conflicted note for mainstream cinematic cyberpunk. In eXistenZ
(Cronenberg, 1999), Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a renowned game designer for
Antenna Research, one of the two biggest developers of biotechnological virtual reality.
Targeted by assassins, Geller is on the run with the only copy of the new game eXistenZ,
which leads her and Ted Pikul (Jude Law) down successive layers of (virtual) reality, including
the revelation they may be trapped in a separate game called transCendenZ. This (potential)
revelation raises questions about Allegra’s agency because while she may be “a participant in
and seemingly a designer of a virtual reality system,” in the end her agency is “undermined
by the revelation that they have been in a game since the start of the film and it is not at all
clear that they ever reach the freedom of a diegetic reality” (Butler 125). The role of Trinity
(Carrie-Anne Moss) in The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999) is equally complicated. On the one
hand, she is an important figure and can stand her own against all threats, human, simulated,
or artificial alike. The first film in the trilogy also plays with gender expectations, such as
when Neo (Keanu Reeves) is surprised the legendary Trinity is a woman while her black
leather costuming “may be body-hugging but [is] not overtly sexualising” (Gillis 80). On the
other hand, The Matrix reveals her primary function throughout the series: she repeatedly
sacrifices herself to protect (or revive) Neo, which shows she is “paradoxically both full of
power—in that she is the catalyst for the [first] film’s dénouement—but also powerless within
this position of power” (Gillis 79). Even in her death near the end of The Matrix Revolutions
(Wachowskis, 2003), Trinity is “forced to take care of Neo, to help him achieve his goal,
despite not knowing what this is herself ” (Gillis 83), although Trinity’s characterization has
undergone a recent revitalization (see below).
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Graham J. Murphy
The advent of the new millennium did little to alter the cinematic landscape. Even in
women-centered cyberpunk or cyberpunk-influenced films—for instance, Æon (Charlize
Theron) from Æon Flux (Kusama, 2005) or Violet (Milla Jovovich) from Ultraviolet (Wimmer,
2006)—there remains a “sexualized femininity to which display is central; while these
women are physically active, independent agents, then, there is no doubt that their bodies
are also being eroticized within the terms of conventionally objectified femininity” (Purse
188). Within this context women are afforded minimal agency, such as Quorra (Olivia
Wilde) in TRON: Legacy (Kosinski, 2010), a digital lifeform who relies on the male figures
of Sam (Garrett Hedlund) and Flynn (Jeff Bridges) to facilitate her growth towards some
type of posthuman emergence that is grounded in conventional heteronormative gender
roles. Similarly, Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) is notable for its “trail of women’s
bodies [. . . that] largely obscures any progressive social commentary the film may have been
attempting, leaving 2049 unable to extricate itself from under the weight of cyberpunk’s early
masculinism” (Murphy 99). In a more productive fashion, however, we can turn to Janelle
Monáe’s Dirty Computer (Donoho et. al., 2018), an ‘emotion picture’ that accompanies the
audio release of the same name, and its explicit use of cyberpunk motifs to advance socio-
political commentary on 21st-century America; specifically, Dirty Computer shows “a deep
awareness of how racial identity politics blended with sound technology can impact an ever-
quickening global popular technoculture defined by race” (Lavender III and Murphy 358).1
The individual musical explorations threaded within a broader story of the incarceration
and mind-wiping of ‘dirty computers’—that is, those non-compliant individuals deemed to
be ‘flawed’ by (white, straight, male) authority figures—fuses “cyberpunk visuals and 1980s
pop sounds to inspire us to act in the present and build a different future than the dystopian
one portrayed in the film” (Capetola 245).2 Finally, the Blade Runner-esque music video for
Viktoria Modesta’s “Prototype” (2014) features Modesta as a Monáe-like ‘dirty computer,’
in this case a rebellious woman with several prominently featured prosthetic legs, including
a spike that cracks patriarchy’s glass foundation and a bejeweled leg that redirects the laser
beams of those oppressive forces trying to contain her. In emerging as a prototype of a new
form of posthuman liberation, Modesta “presents an image of empowerment that derives
from her particular embodiment, overthrowing any notions of victimhood or stigma that are
pervasive in our culture’s understanding of disability” (Gatermann).
Feminist-Queer Cyberpunk: Hopeful Signs

As Dirty Computer and “Prototype” make clear, print and televisual cyberpunk in the newish
millennium have been showing promise. Carlen Lavigne turns to Lyda Morehouse’s Archangel
Protocol (2001)—the first of the AngeLINK series which also includes Fallen Host (2002), Messiah
Node (2003), Apocalypse Array (2004), and Resurrection Code (2011)—as an example of feminist-
queer cyberpunk retaining “a desire for spiritual exploration while rejecting current religious
institutions” (128). Lisa Yaszek meanwhile references N. K. Jemisin (“Too Many Yesterdays,
Not Enough Tomorrows,” 2004), Ren Warom (Escapology, 2011), Elizabeth Bear (“Two
Dreams on Trains,” 2005), Isabel Yap (“Serenade,” 2016), Chris Moriarty (Spin State, 2003;
Spin Control, 2006; Ghost Spin, 2013), Madeline Ashby (vN, 2012; iD, 2013; reV, 2015), and
Nnedi Okorafor (The Book of Phoenix, 2015) as contemporary authors whose feminist-queer
contributions have expanded cyberpunk’s traditional contours. In this vein, Julia Grillmayr
draws attention to Ashby’s Company Town (2016) as a cyberpunk novel that “offers a critical
perspective on how becoming-posthuman might have nothing to do with individual choice,
intent, or even consent” (279). Meanwhile, Wendy Gay Pearson, writing about journalist,
170
editor, and author Annalee Newitz, observes that Newitz’s debut novel Autonomous (2017)
not only advances standard “[a]nti-capitalist critique[s] directed at corporations and neoliberal
globalization” but also “presupposes a future in which genders and sexualities are more fluid
and widespread than contemporary practices suggest, echoing feminist and queer cyberpunk of
the past three decades” (135). Conrad Scott describes Larissa Lai’s tale of the posthuman Grist
Sisters in The Tiger Flu (2018) as a biopunk critique of cyberpunk motifs that focuses on “how
human cultures have most impacted the strata of the earth and thus materialized ourselves a new
geologic division of time” (219–20). Finally, Mozart Freire’s Brazilian cyberpunk film Janaína
Overdrive (2016) is a Spanish-language short film that follows a transexual cyborg sex-trade
worker (Layla Kayã Sah) desperately trying to save their life by uploading their consciousness to
the data net before the Corporation ‘retires’ them in favor of updated technology. Freire’s use
of cyberpunk visual aesthetics in Janaína Overdrive is no accident: “I believe that the movies are,
in general, a sexist and heteronormative field, so I wanted to deconstruct it by using cyberpunk
imaginary,” Freire explains, and cyberpunk “would be the perfect genre to use for a narrative
that deconstructs the heteronormative idea of gender” (Zuin). One of Freire’s influences (aside
from the obvious homage to Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive) is The Matrix sequence which was
undergoing a transgender renaissance at roughly the same time Janaína Overdrive was released.
The Matrix (particularly the first film) as transgender allegory has been a topic of discussion
following the sibling directors’ coming out as transgender in the years following the release of
the original trilogy. Lilly Wachowski, for example, is pleased with the discussions of The Matrix
as a transgender allegory since “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation,
but it was all coming from a closeted point of view” and the film as transgender allegory was
the “original intention, but the world wasn’t quite ready yet, at a corporate level” (“Why the
Matrix”). In this vein, the story of Neo living beneath the bored façade of conservative Thomas
Anderson and unsuccessfully trying to fit into a cubicle-sized identity acceptable to mainstream
corporate America operates on multiple allegorical levels. Meanwhile, Morpheus occupies “the
role of the transgender elder” and Cypher is the “hate and shame-filled” traitor who “acts
violently,” and together they further support that The Matrix is “the most successful transgender-
focused movie ever made” (Cook). Released two decades later, The Matrix Resurrections
(Wachowski, 2021) returns to this transgender territory by again staging Neo’s ‘coming out,’
only this time director and writer Lana Wachowski leans more heavily (and overtly) into the
transgender subject matter. While there is one meta-textual moment when someone says
“[y]ou can understand The Matrix as an allegory for trans politics,” the film more broadly
eschews binary thinking, including (but not limited to) the 1s and 0s of computer programming,
the naïve simplicity of ‘human vs. machine’ narratives, and the limitations upon identity fueled
by binarism. In fact, The Matrix Resurrections resituates Trinity by showing she is an equally (if
not more) powerful figure as Neo and, having been named from the outset “after a pluralist
structure that is more complex than simple binaries,” she “defies expectations and completely
shatters limited binaries—and redefines the entire idea of the One” (Kogod). As a result, The
Matrix Resurrections as feminist-queer cyberpunk course corrects for the problems with Trinity’s
depiction in the original trilogy and explicitly extends the transgender subtext of the first film
by repeatedly critiquing a worldview inf(l)ected by rigid binarism.
Finally, while cyberpunk anime, manga, video games, etc. are worth exploring, I want
to briefly turn to the feminist-queer potential in North American comic books. David M.
Higgins and Matthew Iung, for example, consider Jamie Hewlett and Alan C. Martin’s Tank
Girl (1988–) as an interesting series because while it “often involves finding ways to get Tank
Girl as naked as possible within the bounds of censorship laws” and the protagonist “obviously
represents a juvenile male fantasy of female empowerment and sexual liberation,” Tank Girl
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Graham J. Murphy
also “represents a transgressive and inflationary punk aesthetic that embodies the opposite of
the hypermasculine and deflationary noir sensibilities of most cyberpunk comics from its era”
(Higgins and Iung 93). A transgressive aesthetic is also evident in Steve Pugh’s four-issue limited
series Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead (2009) which follows Alice Hotwire, a detective exorcist
who is responsible for handling ‘blue lights,’ electromagnetic entities fashioned after ghosts
of the recently deceased. Suppression towers and ceramic tombs help control the appearance
of ‘blue lights,’ but there is a notable uptick in blue light violence that coincides with public
protests over the killing of two immigrant kids by uniformed police officers. Alice Hotwire
emerges in the series as a strong, commanding, and effective cyborg who has no patience for
either male fragility or egotism: she refuses to defer to so-called ‘male authority’ and remains
untethered by heteronormative pairings.
In a more deliberately cyberpunk fashion, Rick Remender and Sean Murphy’s Tokyo Ghost
(2015–16) follows Debbie Decay and Led Dent/Teddy, childhood friends-turned-lovers who
are (barely) surviving in a nightmarish urban future common to cyberpunk. Both Debbie and
Led Dent are indentured to the Flak Corporation and are inexorably working towards their
freedom, but Debbie has visions of escaping with Teddy to Tokyo, apparently the last green space
on Earth that is also the site of their next mission, one that goes disastrously wrong and further
secures Flak’s corporate power. The bigger threat, however, is Davey Trauma, a cybernetically
enhanced psychopath who can harness the cybernetic network and control anything with an
augmentation, a skill that proves exceedingly dangerous when Trauma attempts to orchestrate a
global suicide that will digitally transfer all living beings into a cybernetic Eden whose name—
Planet Trauma—belies Davey’s pitch that his digital world is utopia.
Tokyo Ghost’s depiction of Led Dent/Teddy repeatedly undercuts the ‘male action hero’
motif; for example, Dent’s penchant for violence makes him the most dangerous ‘constable,’ but
he remains the damaged Teddy who harbors a deep-seated inferiority complex stemming from a
brutal beating in his youth that would surely have killed him had Debbie not intervened. Teddy
simply cannot get past his inability to keep Debbie (or himself) safe, so he overcompensates for
this profound weakness and becomes addicted to growth hormones, cybernetic augmentations,
and the ‘feed,’ a constant barrage of streamed programming that keeps him largely oblivious to
the ‘real’ world. Debbie emerges as the protagonist of the story: she evolves from co-dependent
enabler to strong-willed warrior who fights Davey not only for her survival but also a digitally
enthralled humanity. While Debbie is initially hampered by her heteronormative devotion to
Teddy, Remender refuses to make Tokyo Ghost about male redemption; instead, Debbie is the
character who fights for control of her own destiny and upon whose shoulders salvation rests.
In this fashion, Tokyo Ghost explicitly subverts those tropes common to masculinist cyberpunk
to tell a wholly engaging feminist cyberpunk story about power and agency.
Finally, Michael Green, Mike Johnson, and Andres Guinaldo’s Blade Runner comic book
series is set in the same universe as the Ridley Scott-Denis Villeneuve film series. Blade Runner
2019 (2019–20) focuses on detective Aahna “Ash” Ashina, an intensely private blade runner
searching for wealthy billionaire Alexander Selwyn’s missing wife Isobel and their daughter
Cleo. Ash learns Isobel, a replicant replacement for Selwyn’s recently deceased wife, was created
by the Tyrell Corporation in exchange for Cleo, whose genome offers the Tyrell Corporation
an opportunity to extend replicant longevity, albeit at the cost of Cleo’s life. Ash’s views on
replicants change over the course of the story as she encounters a replicant underground railroad
and witnesses the love and devotion between Isobel and her ‘daughter’ contra the brutal egotism
of Alexander Selwyn. Blade Runner 2019 ends with Cleo escaping her father’s clutches while
Ash decides to use her blade runner skills to help replicants, not retire them; this sets up Blade
Runner 2029 (2020–22). In the sequel, Ash secretly helps replicants, and becomes embroiled in
172
a case that involves a replicant revolution organized around Yotun, a replicant she had previously
failed to ‘retire’ who has now put out a contract on Ash’s life. While the series isn’t particularly
groundbreaking in its story, this Blade Runner sequence is built entirely around Ash’s agency,
unparalleled skills, and character growth that in part corrects for the persistent misogyny of the
Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 films.
In conclusion, while cyberpunk continues to struggle with a pervasive hetero-masculinism
that dates to its earliest iterations, there also exist feminist-queer roots and branches that often
go un(der)acknowledged by cyberpunk auteurs and aficionados. Admittedly, cyberpunk has
a long way to go to escape its deep-seated hetero-masculinism, but it is an ongoing global
phenomenon carried out in multiple media and artistic outlets, all of which provide more
opportunities for diverse narrative explorations and ongoing critical interrogations, particularly
when these cyberpunk works are fueled by feminist-queer critical inquiry and praxis.
Notes
1 Monáe’s nonbinary pansexuality is also prominent in the short film as Monáe’s Jane 57821 is involved
in a polyamorous relationship with Zen (Tessa Thompson) and Ché (Jayson Aaron).
2 Monáe expands upon Dirty Computer’s Afrofuturist cyberpunk setting with The Memory Librarian: And
Other Stories from Dirty Computer (2022) that includes Monáe collaborating with Alaya Dawn Johnson,
Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, and Sheree Renée Thomas.
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24
TRANS WITHOUT TRANS?
Gender Identity and the Relationship
Between Transness and Sex Changing
in the Works of John Varley
Wendy Gay Pearson
Over the years I have posed the question to many people. . . . If you could change
sex, easily, painlessly, and most of all, reversibly, would you buy a ticket on that
particular weekend cruise? The answers have been almost unanimous: sign me up.
—John Varley, “Introduction to ‘Options,’ ” The John Varley Reader (2004)
Introduction
John Varley provided me with one of the funniest moments in my teaching career. In 1984,
I was teaching a course called “Science Fiction and Modern Science” at York University. I had
about 60 students, including two extremely tall young men—one slender, red-headed, openly
gay, whom I will call Mike, and the other (Tom) a much bulkier dark young Goth. I asked,
“If you had access to cheap, painless, and entirely reversible sex changes, would you have
one?” Unlike the very positive response Varley received from SF fans (411), my classes almost
invariably split into two. The half that said they wouldn’t try it were confounded that anyone
would; the half that definitely would try it were gobsmacked by the others’ lack of curiosity.
Mike explained that one of his motivations in changing would be to experience pregnancy and
childbirth. Several women around him were nodding when suddenly Tom stood up, pointed at
Mike, and boomed out, “you, sir, are a traitor to your gender.” The entire class exploded with
laughter, but we then had a great discussion of what is meant by ideas like gender treachery.
Varley’s stories assume a normalization of sex changing that detaches it from its contemporary
investment in identities: sex changing today, unlike when Varley started publishing in 1974,
has become both the mark and the property of being transgender. Just as only homosexual
individuals are supposed to experience sexual attraction to the “same sex” (quotation marks,
since conceptions of “same sex” are themselves problematic), only transgender individuals are
supposed to experience the desire to change sex, a change conceived as both singular and
permanent. I examine the ways in which Varley’s explorations of near universal sex changing
both depend on a specific notion of corporeal plasticity and allow readers and critics to think
about sex changing as a general practice, rather than a minoritized one. Do Varley’s depictions of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-27 175

Wendy Gay Pearson
sex changing give us space to think differently about the relationship between gender expression,
gender identity, and embodiment? Such different perspectives—emblematic in some ways of
Foucault’s call to “free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently”
(9)—might allow a way out of the impasse in some works of transgender studies when trying to
disentangle trans people who subscribe wholeheartedly to binary gender versus those for whom
gender may be, variably, a trap, a constraint, an impossible demand, or, potentially, something to
play with (which is partly why some scholars now write about gender “euphoria” rather than
the heavily medicalized concept of gender “dysphoria”). For those people for whom gender
feels like a trap, betraying one’s assigned gender may be liberatory in ways that move beyond the
permanent and irreversible sex change that is expected. Not only does that provide one answer
to the obvious feminist problem with rigid hierarchical gender roles, but it allows questions like
“Why shouldn’t a man wish to experience childbirth?”
Characters in Varley’s world change sex frequently and take it for granted; in “Picnic on
Nearside,” the protagonist, Fox, takes off with his best friend Halo for the uninhabited wastes
of Nearside on the Moon after a fight with his mother about her refusal to let him get a sex
change. To complicate matters for Fox, Halo has just had a sex change herself, from male to
female. And to complicate matters from the perspective of the contemporary reader, Fox was
female for the first two weeks of his life, but his mother wanted a boy; Fox and the just-changed
Halo meet up with Old Lester, who has chosen to remain on Nearside because his “cult” beliefs
lead him to disapprove of changing.1 This shocks Fox, who cannot imagine how anyone could
want to remain in one sex their entire life, not least because Lunar laws allow only one child per
adult, so almost everyone opts to bear their own.
If you transposed this story’s raison d’être into contemporary reality, it would make little
sense outside of a desire for permanent transition from a false sex to a real or true one. So
firmly is Western society wedded to narratives of sex permanency that the only intelligible
discourse around gender has for decades been what is called the “wrong body narrative.”
This narrative is so overpowering within medical and social discourse that even people who
have no sense of having been born in the “wrong body” are often forced to create a story
to tick off the psychiatric and medical approvals needed for any sort of sex reassignment
surgery. This is true even in cases where a nonbinary person wants top surgery in order
not to be read as female but has zero desire to transition to male. The medical profession
still requires a psychiatric assessment of dysphoria and distress. In Varley’s future, no one
(except archaic Old Lester) expects to remain in one body their entire life. For many people,
switching is simply a matter of deciding they feel like a change—a slightly more drastic
version of a new haircut.
Several things have begun to disrupt this narrative in the “real world,” but I will focus on just
two here: the first is the recognition that “transsexualism” isn’t the only version of “this gender
does not fit me.” For many nonbinary or agender people, the feeling isn’t necessarily one of having
been born in the wrong body or grown into the wrong body (because the relatively agender
nature of prepubescent children’s bodies does tend to work for nonbinary people). For nonbinary
people, it may not be so much about embodiment, but rather a detestation of being pressured
to adopt a binary gender, preferably one that is in consonance with what society understands as
the sexed body (although biological science is moving again to the belief that there is no clearcut
distinction between two “opposite” sexes [Jordan-Young 2011; Fine 2014, 2017; Hyde et al.
2019]). The relationships between gender-conforming trans people; trans people who take up
trans identities; and agender, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people are
complex. Talking about sex change purely in terms of transition between two clear-cut genders
doesn’t make sense for all people. Indeed, as Varley himself says, “I spent a long time thinking
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Trans Without Trans?
about sex, and came to the conclusion that there is not one statement you can make about all men
or about all women that is valid” (410). Unfortunately, the medical profession and popular culture
both frequently remain wedded to the idea that one can make sweeping statements about men and
women that treat them almost as if they were different species.
Plasticity, Plasticity, Plasticity . . .

Cross-gender identification, the sense of being the other sex, and the desire to live
as the other sex all existed in various forms in earlier centuries and other cultures.
The historical record includes countless examples of males who dressed or lived
as women and females who dressed or lived as men. Transsexuality, the quest to
transform the bodily characteristics of sex via hormones and surgery, originated in
the early twentieth century. (Meyerowitz 4)
What do we mean when we talk about changing sex? What exactly is it that we are changing?
Popular culture tends to treat “biological” sex as a binary that is incommensurable, immutable,
universal, and eternal. Yet historically views of sex/gender have varied widely. Thomas Laqueur
does an excellent, if not uncontroversial, job of demonstrating the prevalence of the “one sex”
theory in which female and male genitalia were seen as internal and external versions of the
same organs. Women’s social inferiority rested on the belief that women lacked the psychic force
to evert their genitalia. Yet, as Meyerowitz describes, by the mid-19th century the prevailing
theory was that humans are inherently bisexual, a term used to indicate that all humans contain
some degree of male and female:
In Europe the medical practice of sex change arose less from new technology than
from new understandings of sex. In the early 20th century, the scientists and doctors
who endorsed sex-change surgery posited a universal mixed-sex condition, in which
all males had female features and all females had male features. This theory of univer-
sal bisexuality directly challenged a nineteenth-century vision of binary sex that saw
female and male as distinct, immutable, and opposite. (Meyerowitz 5)
Jules Gill-Peterson argues that the bisexual model was abandoned for ideological reasons as it
supported the notion that gender exists on a spectrum.
This brings us to the question of plasticity. In the discussion of gender, plasticity has
primarily been used to refer to the supposed malleability of gender in infants and children.
Cordelia Fine and her colleagues are more precise in locating plasticity in the brain as an
adaptive function: “ ‘Experience-dependent plasticity’ has been demonstrated time and again
in the acquisition of skills as wide ranging as musical performance, basketball, dancing, taxi
driving, and juggling” (550). But how does experience-dependent plasticity affect gender? Is
gender a skill one acquires? For John Money and his colleagues treating intersex children,
infantile gender plasticity allowed sex to be reassigned according to the doctor’s best judgment.
Operating on an assumption of inherent bisexuality (that gender is a spectrum, not unlike the
Kinsey scale of sexual orientation), doctors treating intersexuality assumed that children would
identify with the sex in which they were reared—an assumption that the very existence of
transgender people brings into question. In Varley’s non-transgendered world of sex changing,
however, plasticity is not an adaptive function of the brain but a consequence of technological
advances within a culture that has long abandoned the rigidity of a binary model of gender. It
is the body itself that is plastic, malleable, capable of being shaped and reshaped.
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Wendy Gay Pearson
In Varley’s works, the expectation of a clean move between gendered ontological states is
complicated because gender is no longer a hierarchical category; to give it meaning, Changers
look back to 19th- and 20th-century culture. For example, in “Picnic on Nearside,” after Halo
changes from male to female, Fox observes,
She reacted just like the old Halo would have, with a dopey face and open mouth.
Then she tried on other reactions: covering her mouth with her hands and wilting a
little. First-time Changers are like that; new women tend to mince around like some-
thing out of a gothic novel, and new men swagger and grunt like Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire. They get over it. (7)
Similarly, in Steel Beach, Hildy Johnson, who is born female but changed to a male soon after
birth, explains that since Lunar society provides little scope for gendered behaviors, Changers
look back to old television shows, films, and novels. Despite considering this from an ontological
perspective, these are not really identities for Varley’s characters; instead, they are performances,
with an element of choice that is not present in contemporary theories of gender performativity,
if we are to follow Judith Butler. The compulsory nature of gender performance becomes
something else when it is no longer attached to a belief that gender needs to align with some
form of sexed corporeality. As Fox says, first-time Changers usually get over it and go back to
being who they are, a concept from which a gendered component is notably absent.
The reader encounters these ideas in remarkably complete form as early as 1974’s “Picnic
on Nearside,” but later short stories and novels also ring changes on some of the how and whys
of sex changing. In “Options” (1979), the only story in which Varley shows sex changing as an
emerging, rather than normative, practice, protagonist Nile’s first change, from female to male,
is described in some detail and involves genetic engineering to introduce a Y chromosome
and delete an X, the six-month accelerated growth of the resulting clone to adulthood, and
the transfer of memories and personality to the new body. In “The Barbie Murders” (1978),
not only are all the Barbies transformed to meet the rigid and genderless specifications of the
Standardist Church but, to solve the murder, Detective Anna Louise Bach has herself outwardly
transformed into a Barbie, a process that appears to be achieved surgically in a few hours. In
The Golden Globe, actor Kenneth Valentine repeatedly and rapidly transforms between male
and female in order to play both Mercutio and Juliet, transformations which are effected by
adjusting magnets that move around the bones of the face and skull. (There is also a rather
painful transformation of penis to vagina and back again so that Juliet can have on-stage sex with
Hamlet.) Even as he explores different techniques by which sex change might be accomplished,
Varley’s work is consistent in representing sex changing as having become a normative future
practice, rather than something associated with a small minority.
In part, Varley can move the focus on sex changing away from questions of identity because
he depicts the human body as inherently plastic. We know we’re in a future world in “Picnic
on Nearside” not only because it starts with Fox and his mother arguing about whether he
is old for a Change, but also because his mother asks Fox to put away her feet. Characters in
Varley’s stories don’t just change their sex, they change their bodies in multiple ways, in which
the primary is the achievement of very long lifespans. Corporeal plasticity in the stories means
that people can become taller or shorter, thinner or fatter, more or less muscular. They can get
a “null suit” implant to breathe in Venus’s atmosphere or grow purple feathers on their forearms.
Lilo, the gene-hacking protagonist of The Ophiuchi Hotline, is 57 but looks 25: “Her only vanity
was her legs. She had added ten centimetres to her leg bones. . . . She wore fine brown hair, like
178
chinchilla, from midway down her calves to the top of her feet” (4). Lilo is killed and resurrected
in a cloned body multiple times, each time complete with chinchilla fur.
Thinking of bodies as plastic and as largely detached from identity produces a scenario in
which it is possible to rethink how we consider the relationships between sex changes, gender
constructs, corporeality, and their relationship to sexual desire. Sexual orientations based on
distinctions between “same” and “opposite” sexes become largely meaningless, although Hildy
certainly contemplates why some Changers retain a heterosexual (or homosexual) orientation,
while others stick with the sex that they originally desired. This brings me back to the second
question I ask my class when teaching Varley’s work: “If you had a sex change, assuming binary
sexes, would you retain your object of attraction or your sexual identity?” Increasingly, that
question is going to seem, like Old Lester to young Fox, archaic and pointless. While Jérôme
Gofette invents the terms “monosexual” and “altersexual” to describe people who retain or
alter the object of their sexual desire, the question is whether these additional categorizations
are necessary (275). It seems that distinctions between binarily sexed bodies will become harder
to maintain, particularly as biology continues to question the ways in which sex is ascribed to
bodies and bodily parts (see, for example, Fine’s overview of sociocultural discourses about
testosterone [2017]). Once the technology is in place for sex changes for all, will society have
any choice but to contemplate the possibility of corporeal transition without gendered or
transgendered identities?
Sex Changing for All?

At a moment when trans people are very much in the news, usually as the objects of either
physical assault or anti-trans discourse, especially in the form of legislation, it seems particularly
pertinent to question the relationship between sexed corporealities and gendered identities. That
transgender people are under attack both legislatively and politically is undeniable. Between
January 1 and March 20, 2022, “State lawmakers have proposed a record 238 bills that would
limit the rights of LGBTQ Americans this year—or more than three per day—with about half
of them targeting transgender people specifically” (Lavietes and Ramos).2 In the UK, legislation
was passed in 2020 preventing the use of puberty blockers prior to age 16. The argument against
them was that teenagers are too young to make permanent decisions about their bodies and
will end up regretting their choices. However, some recent studies of the rare phenomenon
of detransitioning (estimated at 2% by one major Swedish study, while an American study put
the number at 8%, but added that most of those cases involved temporary detransition due
to lack of familial and social support) show that detransitioners do not always return to their
original gender. Some so-called detransitioners only partially detransition, choosing to identify
as nonbinary or agender instead (Slothouber).
If transitioning is about identity and specifically about gender identity, then the distinction
between trans people who embrace a binary gender identity and those who refuse the very
concept of binary genders becomes starker. For some people, gender is intimately tied to any
potential answer to the question “Who am I?” Yet for others, personal identity and gender are
not closely related at all. In the case of Varley’s depictions of sex changing, in all its varieties,
gender is not identity for anyone except a few dinosaurs like Old Lester and Nile’s husband,
who is struggling to come to terms with having a wife who may present as male one month
and as female the next. Nile refuses to reduce the question of who she is to the possession of
vagina or penis, the relative percentage of sex hormones, or the chromosomes of the cloned
body s/he inhabits.
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Wendy Gay Pearson
Transgender people, as the term is used today, are relatively rare in SF. More commonly,
explorations of genders outside the binary tend to involve either alien species with multiple/
changing genders or mutated humans. Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series features both species
having more than two genders and species beginning life as neuters and choosing their gender
as they mature. For example, the Laru child in The Galaxy and the Ground Within is still neutral
and neither xe nor xyr’s mother can predict what choice xe will make. The Aeluon have three
genders: male, female, and shon. None of these fit the transgender narrative that insists on
the mismatch between interior sense of gender and the assigned sex of the body. Meanwhile,
mutated humans are central to Melissa Scott’s The Shadow Man, a novel which takes Anne
Fausto-Sterling’s article “The Five Sexes” as the basis for its thought experiment: what if
space travel causes people to mutate to have five common sexes? And what if one particularly
conservative planet refuses to accept the existence of all five sexes and forces its citizens to
pretend to be either women or men? Again, this is a way of using SF to think about gender that
does not replicate contemporary discourses around transgender, although Scott’s novel perhaps
comes closest to representing a type of anti-trans politics in the refusal to recognize that binary
sexes do not reflect reality. This is not far from the TERF position that transgender people do
not exist but are either predatory men pretending to be women or confused lesbians pretending
to be men.
At the same time, transgender people do have a long history in speculative fiction. Beginning
with André Couvreu’s 1922 short story “L’Androgyne” and continuing with Theodore Sturgeon’s
1960 novel Venus Plus X, it is possible to track representations of transgender, some literal and
some using transness as a way of critiquing binary gender positions (an approach that has been
critiqued by many trans people as exploitative [Prosser 1998]). Within SF criticism, Cheryl
Myfanwy Morgan has argued that most gender-changing characters in SF and fantasy have
little in common with actual transsexuals, the vast majority of whom claim to be
absolutely certain that their “correct” gender is other than the one that they were
assigned at birth. They have a very strong sense of gender identity, and desire only to
live in that gender, not to swap back and fore (sic). Gender swapping, as portrayed by
Reynolds, Banks and others, is perhaps more typical of transgender people. However,
they generally avoid extremes of gendered behavior because they are uncomfortable
identifying as either “male” or “female.” In contrast, characters who change sex in sci-
ence fiction novels generally adopt stereotypical gender performance. (Morgan 2010;
emphasis in the original)
Morgan is somewhat unusual in the way she distinguishes between transsexuals as people
committed to binary gender and transgender people as essentially nonbinary or agender. As
she notes, some of the early experiments in sex changing in SF were less about changing sex
than about having more than one. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a novel
about hermaphrodites, not about transgender people; Gethenians are more closely related to
intersex people, even though true hermaphroditism, common in plants and invertebrates, is
unknown among humans. Similarly, some critics have discussed the male “fear of role reversal”
story, a subgenre that Joanna Russ treats with splendid contempt in “Amor Vincit Foeminam,”
in terms of sex changing (such as Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, who argues that this fear
was the common theme in GDR SF by men about sex changing). The purpose of these
stories is to express the fear that, if the shoe were on the other foot, women would treat men
the way men have treated women. Venus Plus X, by contrast, is a novel that appears to be
about hermaphrodites, but is also about sex changing. The protagonist can accept a race of
180
hermaphrodites—until he realizes that all babies are surgically altered from their original single
sex. That people might be born hermaphroditic is something he can comprehend; that they
would use surgery to make themselves into hermaphrodites is something he finds abhorrent. But
one could argue that these hermaphrodites are also transgender because they have transitioned
from a single sex to a dual one.
Even though Varley’s stories involve actual sex changing, I would argue that they are still not
about transgender people insofar as we today understand transgenderism in terms of identity.
Instead, they offer us alternative ways to think about whether sex is a basic form of corporeal
permanency or whether it can be plastic and changeable, responsive to individual whim and
the dictates of social fashion (Hildy, for example, refuses many of the options offered him by his
high-end body shop). If people can in the future change sex freely, easily, and reversibly, will
they do so? John Varley’s SF allows us to imagine a future world in which we can all be traitors
to our gender.
Notes
1 The “cult” in this case is Christianity.
2 While I was writing this, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade while also noting that next on
its ultra-conservative agenda is overturning marriage equality, dismissing LGBT rights, and revisiting
the right of married couples to use contraception.
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25
UNRULY BODIES
Corporeality, Technocracy, and Same-Sex
Desire in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
Agnieszka Podruczna
Much of Larissa Lai’s literary oeuvre reveals a consistent preoccupation with the
matter of Othered bodies, conceptualized in her works as tools of resistance against the
neocolonial, technocratic realities in which they exist and function. Lai, a Chinese-
Canadian fiction writer, poet, and scholar, consistently centers in her works the ways in
which the very matter of Othered bodies—characterized by concepts of fluidity, seepage,
refusal of containment—manifests transgressive potentialities of anti-colonial resistance.
Her work around gender and same-sex desire, in turn, complicates the intersections
between queer theory, postcolonial studies, and the science fiction idiom, insisting upon
careful reexamination of the discursive practices and strategies of resistance that arise at
those points of convergence.
Written in the postcolonial (or decolonial) speculative fiction genre, Lai’s fiction perpetually
engages in strategies of writing back (Rushdie 8) and counter-discourse (Tiffin 96), intending
to question some of the fundamental narratives of the science fiction genre. Through these
means, postcolonial speculative fiction (and postcolonial science fiction in particular) is capable
of contending with the colonial history of the genre, which, as John Rieder posits, “appeared
predominantly in those countries that were involved in colonial and imperialist projects” (375),
and which to this day perpetuates “the persistent traces of a stubbornly visible colonial scenario
beneath its fantastic script” (376). Echoing the works of scholars such as Jenny Wolmark,
who points to science fiction’s “ability to articulate complex and multifaceted responses to
contemporary uncertainties and anxieties” (156) or Fredrick Jameson, who in Archaeologies of the
Future (2007) similarly comments on the potentialities of science fiction as a vehicle of social,
cultural, and historical commentary (270), Lai’s fiction engages in a constant dialogue with
those extant narratives of mainstream science fiction. At the same time, her writing interrogates
the colonial legacies of those narratives, positioning the Othered body as the locus of anti-
colonial transgression, which refuses to remain contained within the discursive frameworks of
the dominant system.
In her introduction to The Bodies of Tomorrow (2007), Sherryl Vint remarks that “[t]here is
a tendency in some postmodern theory to speak of the body as an obsolete relic, no longer
necessary in a world of virtual communication and technological augmentation” (8). However,
as she goes on to say,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-28 183

Agnieszka Podruczna
[t]he ability to construct the body as passé is a position available only to those privileged
to think of their (white, male, straight, non-working-class) bodies as the norm. . . .
The body remains relevant to critical work and “real” life, both because “real” people
continue to suffer or prosper in their material bodies, and because the discourses that
structure these material bodies continue to construct and constrain our possible selves.
(Vint 8–9)
Similarly, Lai’s fiction consistently positions the Othered body as the locus of marginalization
but also the fulcrum of resistance, leveraging its transgressive capabilities against the oppressive
systems it inhabits. Aware of the difficulties of escaping racialization that comes with such a
project, she nonetheless goes on to argue that
[t]he question of marked subjectivity then becomes a temporal question. If we cannot

inhabit the positivist, linear history of the nation, then we must invent or imagine our
own racialized times and places, or at least pay attention and make the most of their
moments of eruption. (Lai Slanting I, Imagining We . . . 13)
To this end, Lai’s debut novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (1995, 2nd ed. 2004), interrogates the
intersections between gender, sexuality, race, and embodiment in an interweaving, fragmentary
tale that portrays the body as a crucial instrument of remembrance and historical continuity and
discontinuity at the same time. Despite the fact that When Fox Is a Thousand would be best classified
broadly as speculative fiction, it reveals its indispensable science-fictional underpinnings. As
Robyn Morris argues, “Lai’s incisive incorporation of several principal scenes from Blade Runner
is integral to her interrogation of a hegemonic white gaze that seeks to simultaneously possess,
and dispossess, a specifically Chinese Canadian self ” (70). Similarly, the short story “Rachel”
(2004) and a poem by the same title, included in the volume Automaton Biographies (2010), also
draw from the narrative and themes of Blade Runner in their interrogation of the cyborg identity
and its reconstitution beyond the boundaries of the hegemonic white gaze. In turn, Lai’s latest
novel, The Tiger Flu (2018), proposes a vision of communities of parthenogenetic women who
defy the traditional, patriarchal, colonial order of conception and birth, further complicating
the issues of gender and hegemony.
The theme of queer reproductive defiance is by no means a new one in Lai’s writing. It
constitutes one of the main themes of her sophomore novel Salt Fish Girl (2002), which grapples
with the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and the discourses of neocolonial technocracy.
The novel constitutes a bifurcated, polyphonic narrative which follows two primary timelines:
the first timeline chronicles the story of a Chinese aquatic deity Nu Wa—who, in the beginning
of the novel, chooses to become human and splits her tail into legs—and her lover, known
as the eponymous Salt Fish Girl, who live together in 1800s China. The second timeline, in
turn, presents a vision of a dystopian, neocolonial, near-future Canada and follows the story
of Miranda Ching, daughter of Chinese immigrants and a reincarnation of Nu Wa, and her
genetically engineered lover Evie Xin, one of the so-called Sonias—bred as slave work force for
the Pallas Shoe Corporation—whose genetic material consists of 99.97% DNA of an unnamed
Chinese-Canadian woman and 0.03% freshwater carp, in order to circumvent the ban on
human cloning (Lai 158, 160).
The novel, which at its heart remains a narrative about bodily disobedience, explores an
array of ways in which marginalized subjects are capable of turning the tools of neocolonial
technocracy against the hegemony in an act of defiance, echoing Rita Wong’s claim that
“[f]ar from legitimizing the official history of the nation, Salt Fish Girl critiques it by exploring
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the subjectivities of those who, having been marginalized by the nation’s priorities, do not self-
identify through the nation’s lenses” (113). Among all of those counter-discursive strategies,
the novel sees the most viable potential for anti-colonial disobedience in acts of transgression
facilitated by queer desire and reproductive disobedience: Evie and Miranda’s miraculous
conception of their daughter (Lai 162), as well as the Sonias’ search for parthenogenetic means of
reproduction that would decouple the process from colonial, patriarchal views of sex and gender
(258), reframing the discourses of motherhood to defy the desire for institutionally mandated
and artificially regulated borders of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. With that in mind,
I would like to posit that the novel positions Othered queer bodies as the loci of transgression,
arguing that those bodies reject the hegemonic, heteronormative notions of sexuality and sexual
expression in a direct act of defiance against the fetishizing, objectifying colonial gaze. The
Othered queer bodies are established as the central loci of a power struggle at the intersection
between gender, sexuality, and race—simultaneously transgressive and vulnerable, emerging as
fragmented, liminal entities that bridge together the past, the present, and the future at the same
time as they acknowledge the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity of the colonial and
postcolonial experience of corporeality.
Jack Halberstam proposes that “[q]ueer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by
allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics
that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage,
reproduction, and death” (2). If, according to Halberstam, the creation of those queer
temporalities is facilitated by moving beyond the hegemonic paradigms of the dominant
discourse and the norms which mark the rites of passage for gender and sexual conformity, then
the refusal to conform to these norms, as well as the outright rejection of and rebellion against
those hegemonic paradigms, emphasizes the novel’s belief in the counter-discursive potential
of that practice, situating postcolonial queer embodiment as a site of colonial struggle and
resistance. The linearity of life and death, which characterizes the hegemonic paradigm of the
natural progression of life, is directly opposed by the characters in the novel through the act of
reincarnation, which constitutes one of the crucial processes through which the characters access
their memories and construct their identities, aiding at the same time the partial reconstruction
of collective memory in diasporic communities.
For the central characters in the story—Nu Wa, Salt Fish Girl, Miranda, and Evie—the
question of origins becomes severely complicated. At the same time, their unruly, circular
origins aid them in the process of articulating their own queer desire, transcending space and
time in order to defy the fetishizing, Orientalist gaze, and rejecting the patriarchal, colonial
discourse through their embodiment, destabilizing the supposedly fixed meanings that have
supported the colonial project since the advent of Enlightenment thought. As Sharlee Reimer
remarks:
The uncertainty that accompanies this lack of explanation is critical to the work of cri-
tiquing Enlightenment thought: if Enlightenment thought is built around prescribed
boundaries and coherent and contained narratives, then Lai’s open-endedness substan-
tially disrupts these norms. (5)
In this way, the queering of the reproductive process becomes a tool of bodily disobedience, as all
four central characters repeatedly violate the cycle of reproduction and birth. This transgressive
violation is exemplified in the novel by Nu Wa’s halted and fragmentary process of humanity’s
creation in the beginning of the novel (Lai 2); the transgressive circumstances of Miranda’s
conception and birth, aided by the durian fruit smuggled from the neocolonial periphery of
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Agnieszka Podruczna
the Unregulated Zone (14); Evie’s origins as a lab-bred human-animal hybrid (157); the Sonias’
attempts at asexual procreation without the male, patriarchal, colonial element (258); as well
as the miraculous birth of Miranda and Evie’s daughter at the end of the novel (269). Thus, it
is queer desire itself which becomes an active tool of revolt against Serendipity’s neocolonial
technocracy.
In the novel, both lesbian relationships hinge on the experience of the unruly, disobedient
body which cannot be contained by the patriarchal, colonial discourse, and which at the same
time refuses to be removed from that discourse, signifying a locus of rupture and transgressive
liminality. The central metaphor for bodily disobedience in the novel is constructed around
the notion of stink, which permeates the story—be it in the form of Miranda’s natural scent of
the durian fruit, or the smell of salted fish associated with Salt Fish Girl and Evie—and which
remains crucial for the novel’s exploration of queer desire, as the narrative associates those
olfactory transgressions with expressions of queer sexuality. As Paul Lai argues in his article
“Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl,” the
durian fruit is regarded in the Western consciousness predominantly as “a figure of the exotic,
the primitive, or the inexplicably alien” (177–78), and in the novel, Miranda’s scent “displaces
visible racial difference” (180), becoming a marker of her Otherness. Moreover, according to
Nicholas Birns, the durian “epitomises fertility and the survival of nature amid Serendipity’s
attempt to use human bodies as so many spare parts” (166). Thus, the novel explicitly links
the invasive scents of the durian fruit and the salt fish to the notions of collective memory and
identity, through which the characters piece together their fragmented origins, echoing the
words of Malissa Phung, who conceptualizes this metaphor through Marianne Hirsch’s notion
of postmemory and argues that “[h]istory in Salt Fish Girl . . . lingers like a smell, exuding
through the bodies of the postgeneration” (6).
In order, then, to highlight the importance of bodily disobedience, the novel reiterates this
metaphor in more explicit terms in the closing paragraphs of the story, in a passage which
precedes the scene of Miranda giving birth to her and Evie’s daughter, conceived from the same
Othered, queer bodily disobedience:
After all, children also enter the world from the dirty end, poke their heads through
the point of light. A stinking toilet at the end of the story? Why not? This is a story
about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-
smelling places. (Lai 268)
The novel consistently highlights the importance of the unruly body, as well as the sense of
smell articulated in Nu Wa’s story, whose lesbian awakening becomes irrevocably connected
with bodily scent. When the character of Salt Fish Girl is introduced for the first time, what Nu
Wa associates her with is primarily her smell:
[W]hen I was fifteen . . . , I fell in love with a girl from the coast. She was the daugh-
ter of a dry goods merchant who specialized primarily in salt fish. . . . She stank of
that putrid, but nonetheless enticing smell that all good South Chinese children are
weaned on, its flavour being the first to replace that of mother’s milk. (48)
This emphasis on the smell of Salt Fish Girl returns several times in further descriptions of Nu Wa’s
budding sexuality, as Lai writes: “The scent of the fish, or perhaps her scent, or, more likely still,
some heady combination of the two wafted under my nose and caused the warmth to spread in
the pit of my belly” (51). The smell of salt fish, then, becomes the physical reminder of Nu Wa’s
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Unruly Bodies
queer desire, as she directly associates the smell and, by extension, Salt Fish Girl’s unruly body,
with the physical signs of her own sexual arousal. What follows is an account of prolonged, covert
courtship, which ultimately finds its release and culmination in a scene in which they consummate
the relationship. When Nu Wa recalls the aftermath of their sexual encounter, she once again
frames it in terms of the olfactory experience, saying: “I walked home reeking of salt fish, took
my anxious mother’s scolding with brave and defiant face, went to bed and tumbled into a deep
and contented slumber” (53). Thus, queer desire becomes irrevocably connected with the strong,
invasive scent of salt fish, which comes to stand for the bodily manifestation of disobedient queer
corporeality that cannot be extinguished, eluding containment.
The scent of salt fish reappears consistently throughout the story, bridging the spatial and
temporal dimensions, signifying a shared history of queer embodiment. It becomes crucial,
then, that it is this particular scent which accompanies the first expression of Miranda’s queer
desire as well, as she smells the scent of the salt fish when she recognizes Evie as a reincarnation
of Salt Fish Girl for the first time:
But it wasn’t until I had sunk the needle in that I caught a whiff of a familiar fragrance,
briny and sweet.
“It’s you,” I said. (105)
In this passage, preceded by Miranda’s impression of “the past . . . leaking through into the
present” (105), foreshadowing the moment of recognition, it is once again the sense of smell
and Evie’s disobedient corporeality which facilitates this moment of revelation, bridging the
gap between the temporal dimensions. The scent of salt fish returns again in Miranda’s narrative
to mark the emergence of her own queer desire when Evie kisses her for the first time: “She
leaned over and kissed me. . . . I . . . pressed my nose and mouth to the soft space behind her
ear. The smell of salt fish was unmistakable” (161). It is, then, the body itself which appears to
retain its scent across the subsequent incarnations, exemplifying the defiant, unruly nature of
queer embodiment in colonial and postcolonial realities, and creating a sense of historical queer
kinship, founded upon the embodied history of lives lived.
The corporeal dimension of transhistorical Othered queerness is once again brought to the
fore in the scene in which Miranda and Evie engage in sexual intercourse for the first time, and
Miranda discovers yet another point of corporeal affinity, which at the same time emphasizes the
Othered nature of their bodily experience and facilitates the recognition of the transhistorical
queer narrative they come to represent. Miranda and Evie’s twin fistulas located behind their
ears, leaking clear, briny liquid that signifies their complicated, multiple origins—the aqueous
beginnings of life, Nu Wa’s rebirth in the water of the tank and then the water of the womb, the
memory of Salt Fish Girl and her rebirth as Evie in an artificial tank, as well as the aquarium in
which Evie’s carp “mother” is kept—become yet another bodily manifestation of simultaneous
rupture and convergence. As Astrida Neimanis posits, “to figure ourselves as bodies of water . . .
torques many of our accepted cartographies of space, time, and species, and implicates a
specifically watery movement of difference and repetition” (4). It is significant, then, that the
moment in which Miranda discovers this point of corporeal affinity is directly connected with
both the element of water as well as the direct manifestation of queer desire. Simultaneously, it is
also the moment in which, yet again, the past leaks into the present as Miranda feels “something
shift inside [her] that remembered a longer, leaner shape” (Lai 163).
Queer desire facilitates in the novel a partial reconstruction of the historical account as well as
past identities, as Miranda seems to remember more and more of her previous incarnations as her
relationship with Evie progresses. This process is accompanied by the recurring imagery of water
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Agnieszka Podruczna
and sliding, slithering from place to place, as if, in the act of sexual intercourse with Evie, it is Nu
Wa herself who resurfaces once again in a corporeal state. The narrative intermingles the imagery
of Nu Wa’s water snake form and that of Miranda’s body (161–62), which gradually transforms,
blurring the boundaries between the past and the present. Thus, Miranda becomes Nu Wa at the
same time as Nu Wa becomes Miranda in a transgressive act of remembrance, facilitated through
the body understood as “an enfleshed kind of memory” (Braidotti, Transpositions 156), “an inter-
face, a threshold, a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces, . . . a surface where multiple
codes . . . are inscribed” (Braidotti, “Between the No Longer . . .”). This understanding of the body
as a locus of forces and power struggles remains singularly important for postcolonial speculative
fiction writers such as Lai, who argues that it is through the experience of corporeality and Othered
queer desire that the process of reclaiming and reconstructing history can be attempted, in direct
defiance of the neocolonial realities which the characters inhabit. At the same time, however, Lai
contests the idea that it is possible to fully reconstruct such postcolonial queer genealogies (Salt Fish
Girl 151, 160), as she argues that the fractured, liminal nature of those histories is meant to reflect
the mechanisms of postcolonial recovery of the “extinguished history” (Memmi 52).
This kind of transgressive queer desire finds its culmination in the closing paragraphs of the
novel, in which Miranda gives birth to her and Evie’s daughter. This moment of birth—or rather
ambiguously presented rebirth—remains directly linked with an earlier scene of sexual encounter,
mapping the transgressive path of the postcolonial queer. In the scene which comes directly after
Evie and Miranda engage in sexual intercourse for the first time, blurring the boundaries between
the present and the past, Miranda remarks: “I lay beside her on the rot stink of decaying leaves and
needles, not speaking, just listening to the lapping and whispering of the dark as it surrounded us.
Perhaps it was at this moment that the child took root” (Lai 162). This child, whose conception
mirrors the miraculous conception of Miranda, echoing centuries of multiple beginnings and
origins, becomes a direct manifestation of the transgressive potential of the postcolonial queer.
It signifies a new beginning, bridging the past, the present, and the future of those queer
genealogies which Lai explores in her novel, emphasizing both the points of rupture and the
points of convergence. It is not incidental that Miranda gives birth in a hot spring, which comes to
symbolize the return to her origins and the continuous “leaking of the past into the present” (Lai
105), as the moment in which Miranda becomes a mother constitutes also the moment in which
she becomes one with her queer genealogy. The “ancient ocean bubbling up through the rocks,
salty and full of minerals” (269) transforms in this scene into the ancient cradle of unruly bodies
and disobedient desires—echoing Nu Wa’s original story of transformation and transgression.
Miranda, then, walks into the water to emerge as the physical manifestation of liminality—
part-Miranda and part-Nu Wa, “the coils unravelled” (269) in an act of remembrance and reunion
with her historical roots as she accepts her role as the symbolic repository of ancestral heritage. In
this way, as Heather Latimer argues, “reproduction and new reproductive technologies connect
both to the creation of new bodies and to new myths and stories of origin” (125).
Evie accompanies her in this process of bodily transgression as she joins her in the hot spring
and lets her fishy tail unravel as well, symbolically birthing the child along with Miranda as
she “stretched her tail though mine and our coils interlocked and slid through one another”
(269), symbolizing the rejection of the natural cycle of birth and procreation (Halberstam 2)
and, by extension, rejecting the neocolonial, technocratic paradigm in which she originated
as a genetically engineered and enslaved hybrid. The birth of Miranda and Evie’s daughter
symbolizes the circularity and continuity of those forgotten histories, as well as the triumph
of the postcolonial queer and Othered queer embodiments over the neocolonial, technocratic
hegemonic paradigms against which Lai constructs her narrative, as she concludes the novel
with the following passage:
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My belly heaved and contracted. Blood streamed into the water, staining it. I howled
with the pain of womb spasming deeply, and then a dark head emerged six inches
below my navel, from an opening in my scaly new flesh. The head had a wrinkled
human face. Evie reached under water, guiding the thing out, black-haired and bawl-
ing, a little baby girl. Everything will be all right, I thought, until next time. (Lai 269)
The ending of the novel implies, therefore, that the cycle has been repeated, and signifies the
hope for future generations of similarly liminal subjects, symbolizing the counter-discursive
practices of remembrance and writing back.
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Braidotti, Rosi. “Between the No Longer and the Not Yet: Nomadic Variations on the Body.” 4th
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26
GOOD WIVES AND MOTHERS
IN THE UNIVERSE
Explorations of Traditional Chinese Gender
Roles in Chi Hui’s “Nest of Insects”
“[A] ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.”

—Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994)
Introduction
In recent years, the Confucian ideal of the “good wife and mother” (xianqi liangmu 贤妻良) has
been enjoying a renaissance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where it is even embraced
by highly educated urban professional women. Despite the remarkable progress towards gender
parity during the Mao era and post-reform period, today’s women are increasingly suffering
from the double burden of work and family due to restrictive social expectations. Not only is
this a symptom of the continuity of patriarchal gender norms, but it also indicates a regressive
development in postmodern Chinese society. Since today’s public discourse emphasizes the
significance of family, existing gender inequalities in China are overshadowed. In this misogynist
environment where feminist activism is being silenced, Chi Hui (迟卉, b. 1984) is one of the
few science fiction authors from the PRC who gives voice to issues concerning women.1
This chapter examines the critical engagement with traditional gender norms in contemporary
Chinese SF through a close reading of Chi Hui’s short story “Nest of Insects” (Chongchao 虫巢,
2008). I argue that this story highlights the discriminatory power of traditional gender norms
and their instrumentalization as a means of policing female subjectivities, while at the same
time reinforcing Confucian values. My analysis further suggests that, given the government’s
crackdown on feminist movements, female writers use figurative language rather than openly
criticizing women’s disadvantaged position in Chinese society.
The understudied and underestimated writer Chi Hui represents the new generation of Chinese
SF authors that revived the genre in the 1990s with its subversive stories. More than a century after
the publication of China’s earliest feminist SF novel The Stone of Nüwa (Nüwa shi 女娲石, 1904)
written under the pseudonym Haitianduxiaozi (海天独啸子) (R. K. Wang 7), Chi Hui continues
the history of female utopian societies in Chinese SF and Chinese literature in general, which dates
back even further. By envisioning a female-dominated world in the vastness of the universe, her
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-29 190

Good Wives and Mothers in the Universe
story “Nest of Insects” explores the conservative gender roles that force domestic and reproductive
responsibilities upon Chinese women. The story’s rich symbolism provides multiple different
perspectives and thus many opportunities for interpretation. Beyond the feminist perspective, the
story allows for a reading as a critique of the social and parental pressure only children suffer from
due to the one-child policy (yihai zhengce 一孩政策). Keeping the aim of this anthology in mind,
this chapter focuses on the discussion of women’s issues in Chinese SF.2 Due to the male narrative
tradition that led to female SF authors’ acceptance of these standards and the lack of awareness of
the inequalities that women face among both male and female writers (Chen; Peng 10), feminist
SF texts like Chi Hui’s are relatively rare in China.
While recent scholarship has highlighted the cultural and political implications of
contemporary Chinese SF (Healey; Li; Song; Y. Wang), only a few studies discuss the gender
issues reflected in these works (Ling; Peng; Schneider-Vielsäcker; R. K. Wang). As Chinese
scholars often confuse female SF (stories written by women) with feminist SF (feminist content
regardless of the writer’s gender), conclusions are biased because a story written by a woman is
not necessarily feminist. With the aim of filling this research gap, I seek to answer the question
of how Chi Hui portrays women and gender roles. By applying feminist and gender-oriented
narratology methods, I will demonstrate that the prevailing conservative and sexist ways of
thinking in Chinese society can be explored through SF literature.
The Specters of Traditional Gender Norms

In December 2008, Chi Hui’s “Nest of Insects” first appeared in China’s leading SF magazine
Kehuan Shijie (科幻世界, SF World); thus far, it is still to be translated into English. The story
critically reflects on the existing gender hierarchy in China. It is narrated from an omniscient
perspective and set in a distant future. The plot depicts a peaceful matriarchal society on the
fictional planet of Tantatula, where the female protagonist Yi’ansa lives. She belongs to an
ancient species called Tanla. As the leader of the mysterious nest, which is located at the core of
the planet, and of the sacrificial ceremony that takes place there, the protagonist plays a crucial
role. She is the only being who knows all the secret paths inside the nest. However, human
colonizers soon disturb the harmony on Tantatula.
The narrative consists of two storylines that converge at the end. The first describes an
encounter between the protagonist and the human Chen Qingyan, who is sent by his
government to search for his missing compatriot Sun Zhanmusi. This plotline also introduces
the Tanla society and its ancient customs. The subplot tells us how the malicious Zhanmusi is
holding a young Tanla couple hostage and forcing them to guide him through the nest into its
center. To impress his father, he plans to wipe out the planet’s entire population by ambushing
them during a ceremonial gathering.
The matriarchal society implies a critique of the existing gender inequalities in contemporary
China. In an interview with Kapsel, Chi Hui described China as an “artificial forest” in which
“men and women, regardless of gender, are easily pruned, suppressed in growing or trimmed
into a specific shape” (Dubro et al. 59).3 Her statement conveys profound social and cultural
criticism. She condemns the way in which Chinese individuals have no self-determination—not
only due to the authoritarian government, but also because of longstanding traditions. Chi Hui
further explains that Chinese people are restricted by social norms:
Men possess more opportunities, power, money, and mental superiority. In this
respect, it is relatively challenging for women. At the same time, however, the level of
freedom in society is lower for men and they have less choice [in terms of career]. (59)
191
In China, the cultural model of masculinity ascribes certain characteristics to men, such as
being strong, resilient, courageous, and aggressive (Fong 109). As a result of this model, men are
favored for higher-paid and leadership positions (112). Due to social expectations that impose
the role of breadwinner on Chinese men, they continue to experience significant pressure to
find lucrative employment, even in families with two incomes (Zuo 334).
By reversing the existing gender hierarchy and by visualizing the allegory of the “artificial
forest” through the Tanla species, Chi Hui’s story raises awareness of gender inequalities. The
Tanla only give birth to female children. During a ceremony, each adolescent girl is given a
partner of the opposite sex in the form of a fruit, which she picks from a male adult and places
in a flowerpot (Chi 22, 28). Cultivated for two years, the humanoid tree gradually assumes
a human appearance and eventually awakens (16, 28). To emphasize gender issues, the story
constructs a dichotomy between the weak male and the strong female Tanla. It thereby inverts
the androcentric gender roles and stereotypical gender representation of mainstream film and
literature. Male Tanla are depicted as effeminate: “Obviously this boy has ‘awakened’ only
recently, he was far from speaking yet, and the wood grain was still clearly visible on his skin. He
nervously grabbed the arm of his female guide and frequently gave a terrified whimper” (16).
By referring to the protagonist as the “female guide” (yinlu nühai 引路女孩), or more literally
“the girl who leads the way,” the narrative reinforces its critique of the interdependent relations
between men and women.
Since adult male Tanla are planted in a pot, their whole life depends on women. Moreover,
after procreating with their assigned partner they turn back into trees and fall into a deep
slumber (18). In this stage of their life, the fruit of the male offspring ripens within their bodies.
Thus, their existence is reduced to a simple task: reproduction. Other than during the time
of procreation, male Tanla spend their lives in a sleeping state. The motif of redistributing
reproductive responsibilities links Chi Hui’s text to the feminist tradition of New Wave authors
such as Marge Piercy (b. 1936) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018). If we read the Tanla
male as a metaphor for the position of women in Chinese society, this satirical depiction can
be understood as a critique of the author’s empirical reality in which women are increasingly
restricted by traditional gender norms resulting from a resurgence of Confucian ideals.
According to traditional values, men are responsible for external affairs and women for internal
matters (nan zhu wai, nü zhu nei 男主外，女主内), creating a dichotomy of public and private
spheres as well as a gender segregation (Sun and Chen 1092). Ji observes a regressive development
in contemporary Chinese society that is characterized by the persistence of patriarchal gender
norms within the family (private sphere) and the continued unequal distribution of domestic
work (“Between” 1058–59). Her study shows that today even financially independent women
are internalizing this order: “In these professional women’s minds, the significance of family is
beyond question, overshadowing any unfairness of the unequal gender role division” (1068–69).
Consequently, the majority of well-educated professional women accept the traditional role of
“good wife and mother” and the concomitant reproductive and household responsibilities, so
long as they are able to maintain their economic independence, even if this means they suffer
from a double burden of work (public sphere) and family (private sphere) (Ji, “Between” 1069;
Sun and Chen 1104). The public discourse obscures the main reasons for gender inequalities
and the need for institutional change by using neoliberal rhetoric that emphasizes women’s
“willingness to make sacrifices” as an “individual decision,” although some women have no
choice at all (Ji, “Mosaic,” sec. 8; Sun and Chen 1094, 1100). Gender inequalities are therefore
not only legitimized, but also depoliticized (Sun and Chen 1105).
The narrative highlights these revived traditional gender roles metaphorically through the
Tanla males’ reproductive function and dependence on their female partners. The text critically
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reflects the widespread idiom “Better marrying well than having a successful career” (gandehao
buru jiadehao 干得好不如嫁得好), which mirrors men’s established role as breadwinners and
the associated expectation that women will marry. It also emphasizes the sexist suppression of
women due to the conservative ideal of the “good wife and mother” and women’s indestructible
cultural allegiance to the domestic sphere.
The metaphor of the male Tanla’s lifelong sleep refers to the low social status of Chinese
women and highlights that their talents remain largely untapped since they suffer from the double
burden of work and family. Women’s disadvantaged position in the urban labor market results
from the devaluation of their performance on the grounds of imposed domestic obligations
(Sun and Chen 1105). This disparagement of women’s potential and restriction to housework
relates to the traditional ideal of “the talented man and the beautiful woman” (langcai nümao 郎
才女貌), the embodiment of the perfect couple. The ideal also explains the widespread notion
that a woman’s primary “career” is to be a wife and homemaker, which implies that, from a
Chinese perspective, education and profession are less desirable paths for women (Feldshuh
45–46). In the story, women’s low status is underlined by the nonexistence of the word “father”
in the Tanla language: “Obviously, in a world in which the boys were planted, there was no
suitable translation for the word ‘father’ ” (Chi 32).
The arranged Tanla coupling satirizes the Chinese marriage markets. In 2004, this urban
phenomenon first appeared in Beijing’s Longtan Park and it quickly spread nationwide to other
metropolises (Gui 1924–25). On weekends, Chinese parents literally advertise their unmarried
adult children. To provide for their old age through their children’s future offspring, they try to
find a suitable match by talking to other parents. Marriage markets can thus be seen as a modern
equivalent of Imperial China’s arranged marriage system. These markets are particularly biased
since women are rated according to their appearance and age (i.e., fertility), whilst men are
evaluated based on their educational attainment and income (1932). Consequently, the practices
of matchmaking are further evidence of the prevailing gender inequalities. It is striking that,
contrary to the social and cultural practices in China, the female characters of Chi Hui’s story
are neither described by their appearance nor evaluated by other characters.
In marriage decisions, women are not only significantly influenced by filial constraints
(parental interference), but also by gendered constraints (norms of male superiority) (To 8).
Due to the persistent traditional practice of hypergamy, Chinese men reject educated and
professionally successful women, which leads to their public humiliation and discrimination
against them (Hershatter 269; To 10). If these women, contrary to social expectations,
decide to pursue their careers and remain unmarried in their late twenties or above, they
are stigmatized as shengnü (剩女)—the so-called “leftover women.” Paradoxically, there is
actually a surplus of Chinese men since the one-child policy has caused an uneven gender
ratio. Alarmingly, unmarried women internalize the shengnü discourse and shame is generated
to such an extent that they ultimately feel guilty about being single (Ji, “Between” 1065).
Hence, when looking for a partner they may even conceal their high education level in order
to increase their chances (Feldshuh 45; To 10). According to Feldshuh (37, 51), the pejorative
term shengnü, which was coined by the Ministry of Education in 2007, is an instrument of
social control that the Chinese authorities use due to fears of changing gender dynamics
and power structures, as well as in reaction to the strengthening of women’s role in society.
The financial independence of the women referred to as shengnü is projected onto the story’s
imagined future. However, like the majority of Chinese women, the protagonist still suffers
from a double burden of work and family. As the leader of the matriarchal society, she is in
charge of the nest and ceremonial celebrations, and, at the same time, she tenderly looks after
her adolescent male partner: “Yi’ansa . . . stretched out her hand to caress the boy’s wooden
193
face” (Chi 8). Accordingly, the narrative reintegrates female stereotypes and traditional gender
roles: women as the caring sex.
A Feminist Utopia
Read as a feminist utopia, the female Tanla represent a hopeful vision of future gender equality
since they are not only independent, strong, and intelligent but also hold decision-making
positions. The peaceful matriarchal Tanla society stands in stark contrast to the aggressive
male-dominated society of the humans, the Taiyang, literally meaning “the race of the sun”
(taiyangzu 太阳族). In line with the stereotypical gender roles, male humans are portrayed as
contemptuous, ruthless, and power-hungry. This becomes evident from the characterization
of Chen Qingyan: “Among the Taiyang, he is certainly one of the younger ones, but his
watchful black eyes and strong hands make him appear cold-blooded and resolute” (8–9).
His physical strength and gaze’s terrifying effect point to the fact that men hold power and
authority in Chinese society. This is further indicated by the humans’ conquest of the entire
interstellar territory. Humans control all trade routes that converge on the planet Tantatula
(20). When they demanded the land from the Tanla, they were refused. Eventually, under
the pretext of avenging Zhanmusi, who disappeared on Tantatula, human troops invade and
destroy all Tanla villages, forcing them to flee and resettle on a distant planet (38–40). Hence,
the humans symbolize men’s current social status in China. Expulsion, control, and power
are used as metaphors for the continuity of patriarchal structures and women’s subordination.
According to To (11–12), Chinese men still have decision-making power over their wives’
work and lifestyle decisions, such as the number of working hours, whether they should quit
their jobs after marriage and take on the role of housewife, and their spending (even when
these women have earned the money themselves).
Ultimately, the Taiyang fail in their mission. The Tanla manage to escape in time before they
die from the enemy’s fire and the thuggish Zhanmusi is outwitted by his female hostage (Chi
26, 40). Inside the nest, this female Tanla unexpectedly slips into a small alcove together with
her male partner. As both are enclosed in a cocoon, Zhanmusi is left alone in the mystical place.
For him, this turns into a chamber of horrors because the nest’s honeycombed walls contain
other Tanla pairs that gradually become one as they transform into giant beetles. Through this
metamorphosis, the short story not only conveys a desire for equality in the future but also a
general demand for fundamental change. The terrifying experience leaves Zhanmusi a broken
man, as weak as the male Tanla: “He crouched down and hid in Chen Qingyan’s embrace like a
large and exceedingly frightened baby” (48). The protagonist also seals his fate when she inflicts
a just punishment on him. In the story, the quality of justice is attributed to women. With the
male human’s failure, the narrative overthrows patriarchy and conveys a bold message. Chi Hui’s
vision suggests that only a society run by women can be harmonious—in the sense of former
president Hu Jintao’s (胡锦涛, b. 1942) maxim “Harmonious Society” (hexie shehui 和谐社
会)—whilst a society run by men leads to chaos and destruction.
Coda: Good Wives and Mothers Ad Infinitum?

My analysis suggests that Chi Hui’s story illustrates the need for women’s empowerment.
Considering the government’s turn against women’s movements, her feminist utopia uses a
figurative language to criticize women’s disadvantaged social position. By reversing the existing
gender hierarchy, the story raises awareness about the resurgence of Confucian thought and the
discrimination against women in Chinese society. Within the Chinese context, the reflection of
194
the regression in equality between men and women during the past three decades can not only
be read as social criticism but also as a critique of the communist system and its promises: gender
equality was one of the central promises following the proclamation of the PRC in 1949.
In “Nest of Insects,” the body is used as a trope to discuss gender issues (the bodily limitations
of the alien males who depend on their female partners) and to call for equality (the pair’s bodily
transformation). This poetic link between the weak bodily constitution of literary characters
and the socio-political conditions traces back to the Han dynasty (Hanchao 汉朝, 206 bc–220
ad): “Social critique and the prospects of national salvation are expressed in terms of physical
and mental illness, and writing is seen as both a cause and possible cure” (Isaacson 44). At the
start of the twentieth century, the trope reached its peak as a site for social critique in both
Chinese realism and SF. Through the reinterpretation of this Chinese literary convention, “Nest
of Insects” comments on the traditional, heterosexist norms that are increasingly restraining
female bodies in twenty-first century China.
“Nest of Insects” is representative of the generic hybridity of contemporary Chinese SF as
it combines the aesthetic of modern Chinese literature with the Anglo-American SF tradition
(Healey). The story also borrows stylistic elements from American feminist SF to discuss gender
and explore solutions to gender inequalities, such as the creation of other planets or other space-
times and the redistribution of reproductive responsibilities or invention of new reproductive
forms. Marge Piercy’s feminist classic Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) comes to mind when
thinking of the contrasting two worlds of utopian vision and the depressing reality in Chi Hui’s
short story.
Chi Hui’s narrative clearly contains a feminist stance as it overturns gender power relations.
However, the story reintegrates traditional gender norms and, by inventing a new reproductive
form that is still heterosexual, fails to erase heteronormativity. Despite being independent
women like the shengnü, the female Tanla are by no means equally emotionally detached from
men; instead, they assume a lifelong responsibility of motherly care for them. Consequently, the
story places the women (of the future) right back into the role of the “good wife and mother.”
In the sense of Derrida’s concept of hauntology discussed in Spectres de Marx (1993),4 twenty-
first century Chinese women are and continue to be haunted by a ghost from the past that is
called Confucianism.
Notes
1 Please note that, unlike the rest of the collection, this chapter uses Chinese naming conventions, family
name first.
2 In my thesis titled A Torn Generation’s Alternative Future Visions: Critical Reflections of Socio-Political
Discourses in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction Literature (forthcoming), I explore the story’s many
layers.
3 All translations of Chinese primary texts are my own.
4 In her 2021 reading group, Professor Barbara Mittler from Heidelberg University inspired me to apply
Derrida’s concept to understand the impact of Confucianism on China’s present when she described
Confucianism as “a ghost from the past that haunts female bodies.”
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27
GODDESSES, BROODS,
AND HOMINIDS
Sexual Pleasure and Desire in the Speculative
Fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Nalo
Hopkinson
Sara Wenger
Introduction
Through their speculative fictions of not-too-distant futures, Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006)
and Nalo Hopkinson write for readers in the here and now, whenever that moment finds them.
Both Butler and Hopkinson have received praise for their critical interrogations across space and
time: Butler has been labeled a Black feminist philosopher of history and science (Weinbaum
2019; Cipolla et al. 2017) while Hopkinson has been hailed as an “Afrofuturist visionary”
(Enteen 2007). While Butler and Hopkinson explore a wide array of social and political themes
that went on to inspire countless books, articles, and reviews—including critical analyses on
racial and sexual violence, reproductive slavery, patriarchal power, and more—this chapter will
focus on their fictional representations of Black women’s sexual desires and pleasures, dually
complicated by gendered and racialized systems of oppression.
In her book The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014), Black
feminist scholar Jennifer C. Nash critically examines what she refers to as the pornographic
archive in order to locate and extend theories on Black women’s sexual pleasures within Black
feminist scholarship. Through her archival analyses, Nash seeks to push Black feminist theory
toward what she refers to as ecstasy, or “possibilities of female pleasures within a phallic economy
[as well as] black female pleasures within a white-dominated representational economy” (2).
In her close reading of Black women’s various pleasures in racialized pornographic texts, as
well as her deep analysis of the “black feminist theoretical archive,” Nash hopes to shift Black
feminist theory “beyond a rehearsal of black women’s troubled relationship with representation
[and] toward a consideration of the fraught pleasures that come in and through blackness, and in
and through performances of racial fictions” (147; emphasis in original). It is in this shift from
pleasure to ecstasy, Nash argues, where a necessary concentration on fantasy can be had, one
that does not consider fantasy to be “a violent technology which proliferates hyperbolic images
of black female sexuality, but as a tool of imagination, as a space of freedom, and as a critical
locus of play and performance for minoritarian subjects” (151). Nash’s critical intervention
on pleasure demonstrates how the sexual is always tied to the political, unable to be separated
from the violence of everyday life. Through her work on Black sexual politics and ecstasy,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-30 197

Sara Wenger
Nash also shows the multidisciplinary reach of Black feminist theory as a philosophical and
methodological approach.
Similar to Nash’s analytical project, both Butler and Hopkinson present and explore “new
questions about the complex relationship among race, gender, and pleasure” (Nash 22). Though
Butler and Hopkinson are not explicitly creating pornographic texts, they do write and supply
alternative possibilities for Black women’s sexual desires and pleasures without reducing Black
women to “excess flesh” (Nash citing Fleetwood 150). Rather, their respective Black women
protagonists indulge in various sexual desires and pleasures including but not limited to human-
posthuman/alien sex, sexual toys and objects, and other erotic fantasies. Thus, the sexual desire
and pleasure narratives in Butler and Hopkinson’s speculative stories are as groundbreaking as
they are unnerving. In many ways, the assorted sexual desires and pleasures experienced by
Black women are as alien as their other-worldly neighbors, companions, and lovers. The explicit
focus on the multitudes of Black women’s sexual desires and bodily pleasures in these speculative
stories can serve both to center and deepen conversations on Black women’s knowledge of and
authority over their sexual presents and futures.
As part of an ongoing speculative project, this chapter will focus on sexual desire and pleasure
narratives presented in three texts: Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) as well as her short story
collection, Falling in Love with Hominids (2015), and Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989),
republished in a single volume as Lilith’s Brood (2000). By positing Butler and Hopkinson as
Black feminist writers and theorists, I intend to show how their speculative fictions serve as
radical engagements with Black women’s complicated and often paradoxical relationship to
Nash’s concept of ecstasy, generating spaces (and futures) where Black women’s sexual desires
and pleasures are simultaneously brought to the fore and expressed outside of normative, white-
centered perceptions. Ultimately, this chapter engages with contemporary Black feminist
scholarship on Black women’s ecstasy by categorizing Butler and Hopkinson’s speculative
fictions as critical interventions (with)in Black feminism’s illustrious theoretical archive.
Sexual Desire in Falling in Love With Hominids

In the foreword to Falling in Love with Hominids, Hopkinson cites Cordwainer Smith’s “Ballad of
the Lost C’Mell”—a science fiction novella featuring a protagonist that is “not even of human
extraction” (Smith 2)—as inspiration behind the book’s title and concept. Hopkinson describes
her admiration for Smith’s “sensibility in writing about a racialized, manufactured underclass” and
praises his dedication to “telling of stories from their context” (3). Hominids is similarly engaged
with both racialized and gendered underclasses, showing characters who continually breach
normative understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and desire while simultaneously acknowledging
intersecting histories of “oppression, repression, abuse, [and] genocide” (Hopkinson 3). This is the
complicated process, Hopkinson explains, of falling in love with hominids.
Through the short stories presented in Hominids, as well as in her numerous standalone
novels, Hopkinson chronicles her experience as a Black Caribbean woman writer in the
science fiction and fantasy genres. “I’m black and female,” Hopkinson writes in the foreword
to Hominids, “I was born and for many years raised middle/creative class in the Caribbean,
a region of the world which has had to be keenly aware of issues of race, class, gender, and
privilege” (2). Hopkinson’s stories often critique Western science fiction, which she believes has
a “stigma about being adventure stories in which white people use technology to overpower
alien culture” (Rutledge 590). Thus, Hopkinson frequently requires readers to resist their
anthropocentric tendencies and embrace interdependence between species. “Message in a
Bottle,” the second story in Hominids, ruminates on the limitations of the human as both a social
198
Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids
and scientific category: “Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human,” declares
one of the many other-than-human characters featured in the anthology (42). In defying social
norms, Hopkinson’s speculative stories effectively engage with urgent topics—(post)humanity,
anti-Black racism, misogyny, and the politics of pleasure, to name a few.
As one of the more fruitful stories centered on sexual desire in Hominids, “The Smile on
the Face” follows a young woman named Gilla who swallows a cherry pit from a tree occupied
by a hamadryad. Readers watch as she slowly begins to understand what lays inside of her: a
fire-breathing, dragon-like monster. Melding mythology with a coming-of-age tale, readers
tag along on Gilla’s spectacular journey towards body acceptance, self-love, and budding sexual
desire. In a pivotal scene, Gilla listens to the voice inside her head—her own voice, she later
realizes—and physically defends herself against Roger, a bully who assaults her in a game of
postman.1 Gilla “falls onto her hands and knees, solidly centered on all fours . . . feel[ing] her
limbs flesh themselves into four knotted appendages, backwards-crooked and strong as wood”
(67). Roger, once loud and crude, now visibly trembles at Gilla’s transformation. Gilla, a young
Black girl, is the hero of her own tale, standing up to the abusive young man who verbally
and physically assaults her. Additionally, Gilla slowly realizes her crush on Foster, a boy who
compliments her throughout the story. While Roger views Gilla’s awakening as frightening,
Foster, who arrives moments after Gilla’s transformation, embraces her appearance. At the end
of the story, a grinning Gilla leads a blushing Foster to a proper game of postman.
In penning Gilla’s story, Hopkinson speaks out against the “prevailing mass culture message”
that believes “the only beautiful female body is young, white, straight-haired, and thin with
a flat behind” (Johnston 207). Gilla initially compares herself to the notably thin girls around
her. Yet, as Gilla becomes more comfortable with her appearance, she begins to develop what
Hopkinson calls “a woman’s healthy body image,” embracing her inborn power and strength
(207). Gilla also becomes more comfortable vocalizing her desires, particularly for Foster. Still,
Gilla’s love and appreciation of herself—her appearance, strength, intelligence—will be an
ongoing process, one that many young women, particularly Black women, experience and
endure daily. In an interview with Gregory E. Rutledge, Hopkinson discusses her 1996 short
story “A Habit of Waste,” which features an Afro-Caribbean girl living in Canada who wants
to trade her body for one that is white and thin with straight hair. The young protagonist also
“diets rigorously, and she hates it when her parents talk in creole and when other black women
dress in ways that celebrate their bodies and their cultures” (Rutledge 592). After presenting
the short story at a writer’s workshop, Hopkinson was told the protagonist can only choose
one—“Is it internalized racism, or female body image problems, or the problems that the child
of immigrants faces when she tries to adapt to a new culture?” Hopkinson argues that these
themes were all “interrelated” and that it would not have “made sense to artificially disentangle
them” (592). Ultimately, Hopkinson’s refusal to extricate these intertwining themes of racism,
body image, and cultural assimilation from her writing bears witness to the complexity of Black
female subjectivity. By acknowledging these complexities, young Black women protagonists
such as Gilla are provided the necessary space to experiment with their bodies and sexual
desires. Hopkinson’s speculative stories unapologetically embrace Black women’s sexual needs
and pleasures, even in the face of hierarchies and systems of power looking to dismantle them.
Pain and Pleasure in The Salt Roads

Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads is a sociohistorical detour from her typical speculative route.
Rutledge, for example, believes The Salt Roads can be considered a “historical novel, neo-
slave narrative, or allegory of a slave narrative” depending on how readers approach the novel
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(“Review” 2). Similar to the protagonists in Hominids, Hopkinson portrays Black women in
The Salt Roads as survivors of various social, cultural, and political dangers and brutalities. While
Hopkinson’s characters lavishly probe normative boundaries of sexual desire and pleasure, the
painful legacies associated with anti-Black racism, misogyny, and colonialism often haunt these
erotic encounters. Still, The Salt Roads offers new possibilities for discourses on Black women’s
sexual desire and pleasure, particularly on the topics of unnerving and/or taboo sex. In an
interview with Nancy Johnston, Hopkinson explains how it seemed “risky to use Caribbean
characters to examine different kinds of sexualities and sexual relationships.” Hopkinson goes
on: “I think that we (Caribbean people) are so used to protecting our sexualities from prurient
gaze that we’ve built up these huge taboos against many types of sexual expression . . . I’ve
been affected by those taboos, too” (Johnston 208). Speculative narrations on sexual desire and
pleasure pulsate throughout Hopkinson’s works, and The Salt Roads is no exception. On the
topic of writing sex scenes in her stories, Hopkinson states that she believes
Science fiction and fantasy are about looking at the world through a different lens.
So whatever I write, including sex scenes, I may first think, “how can I cause myself,
and the reader, to see this differently? What can I do to challenge, delight, surprise,
unsettle?” (Johnston 206)
Hopkinson’s urge to “challenge, delight, surprise, [and] unsettle” reflects Nash’s critical Black
feminist scholarship on ecstasy, as she believes pornographic texts have the power to “unsettle
and excite, offend and titillate, humor and disgust” (Nash 25). Both Hopkinson and Nash
understand the representational power of fantasy, as well as how ecstasy can arise from unsettling
sexual scenarios. Ecstatic opportunities, then, may be found in fictional depictions of non-
normative sexual acts that both transgress and imitate racialized and gendered stereotypes.
The non-linear, entropic narration in The Salt Roads is shaped by the embedded experiences
of Ezili, a goddess figure shifting through space and time, occupying the bodies of the other
diasporic African women featured in the novel: Jeanne Duval, a performer and lover to Charles
Baudelaire; Mer, an enslaved woman with a talent for healing; and Thais, a strong-willed Egyptian
prostitute. Through the experiences of these women, Hopkinson shows how white Europeans
remain complicit in the sexual brutalization and degradation of Black women. Readers watch
as the pleasure of white men often arises from the physical, emotional, and psychological pain
of Black women. At the same time, there are perceptible moments of pleasure for Jeanne,
Mer, and Thais, even as they are constrained by sociohistorical dynamics and structures intent
on dehumanizing Black women. Hopkinson explains: “For me, it’s part of my avowal that
black people and Caribbean people are human, in the face of a world that continually tries to
convince us that we are not” (Johnston 208).
In the sexual experiences and expressions of Jeanne, Mer, and Thais—as well as several
other Black and brown women featured in the novel—Hopkinson offers a visceral look at
non-normative desires and pleasures. In doing so, Hopkinson also risks delving into the
uncomfortable world of racially based sexual anxieties and fears. Hopkinson theorizes that part
of what disturbs certain readers about the non-normative sexualities featured in The Salt Roads
is how she “involve[s] a respected historical literary figure in it (Charles Baudelaire)” and also
“show[s] black people doing kinky sex.” Hopkinson admits,
There are all kinds of reasons why it feels particularly taboo to do the latter. For one
thing, we—“we” in this instance meaning “black people”—are too often the victims
of having white sexual fears projected onto our bodies, often in dangerous ways. So
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we can be cautious about making any room for that to happen. But I think there’s a
cost when black communities keep too opaque a veil over the fact that black people’s
desire and sexual inclinations are as varied and human as anyone else’s. I was thinking
about that when I wrote The Salt Roads. (Johnston 211)
Hopkinson’s insistence that “black people’s desire and sexual inclinations are as varied and
human as anyone else’s” reinforces a sentiment similar to Nash’s argument on ecstasy, particularly
how it “marks the fraught nature of racial-sexual pleasure, and underscores what is unnerving
and complicated about [these pleasures]” (Nash 149). According to Nash, race works “both to
limit our sexual imaginations, and to provide us with powerful vocabularies for naming what
we desire; it recognizes that the very structures we critique and seek to dismantle can also thrill”
(150). The mere presence of Black women—whose experiences are still marred by anti-Black
violence and misogyny across centuries—experiencing ecstasy in The Salt Roads is enough to
violate the normative boundaries of sexual desire and pleasure. It is unnerving to conventional
readers, Hopkinson notes, “simply because it’s there” (Johnston 213).
The Horror and Beauty of Lilith’s Brood

Lilith Iyapo’s story begins after the end of her two worlds: Earth, decimated by a nuclear war,
and her son, lost years prior in a fatal car accident. Through the fictional character of Lilith,
Butler examines the painful, precarious position of Black women in post-catastrophe times.
Acutely concerned with the history of eugenics and scientific racism in the United States,
Butler confronts the intimacies of race, gender, slavery, and biocapitalism through a speculative
narrative that articulates not only the innate horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade but also the
neoliberal sexual and reproductive extractions that emerged in the late 20th century (Weinbaum
113). Moreover, the character of Lilith provides an unsettling complication to normative sexual
desires and pleasures after she repeatedly engages in sex with an alien species. Butler’s Lilith’s
Brood trilogy follows protagonist Lilith as she faces near-constant transitions—from human to
posthuman, nuclear war survivor to reluctant leader, relic of the past to mother of the future.
An alien species known as the Oankali place themselves at the center of Lilith’s story in the
first book of the trilogy, Dawn (1987). After visiting Earth in the wake of a nuclear war, the
Oankali abduct the remaining human survivors and clean what is left of the planet, reintroducing
indigenous organisms and fauna alongside some of the Oankali’s own lifeforms. The Oankali
are genetic traders who capture Lilith—and, as readers later learn, many other humans—for
specific reasons: access to their genetic data and reproductive capacities. Having established
symbiotic relationships with other species across the galaxy, the Oankali combine their genetic
make-up with others to create hybrids (or “constructs”) resembling the two species. After
placing Lilith in suspended animation, the Oankali wake her centuries later to inform her
of their plan to create human-Oankali constructs—both Oankali-born and human-born—of
which Lilith ultimately becomes the progenitor. This gene trade can be considered a matter
of life or death for both the Oankali and the humans as the production of these constructs are
the only viable future for each species. Yet, it is the scientifically advanced Oankali who set the
terms of the deal: if the surviving humans refuse to trade with them, they are sentenced to die,
infertile, on a contaminated Earth.
Lilith’s “choice” is both duplicitous and historically significant, echoing centuries of scientific
and medical violence against Black women, particularly in the United States. Lisa Dowdall
explains how the Oankali’s proposal “directly recalls the exploitation of the biological labor
of poor black and brown bodies, from slave breeding to contemporary organ markets” (509).
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Lilith must also confront human-committed atrocities in the form of fights, rape attempts, and
verbal assaults from the newly awakened human survivors she was tasked to help by the Oankali.
Ultimately, Butler positions Lilith as outsider both to humans (who no longer see her as fully
human) and Oankali. Éva Federmayer notes how in Butler’s trilogy dualities such as “self and
other, human and Oankali, man and woman . . . are not arranged along binaries where the
first term is hierarchically defined at the expense of the other” (111). The dissolution of Lilith’s
humanness comes to a fever pitch at the end of Dawn, when Lilith chooses to save a dying
Oankali in front of the human resistors, thus marking her as a traitor to humankind—or what
is left of it. Similar to Hopkinson’s exploration of (post)humanism in Hominids, Butler’s writing
challenges dominant perceptions of humanity, troubling the margins of Lilith’s multifaceted
identity throughout Lilith’s Brood.
Within the Oankali species, there are three established genders: males, females, and the
gender-neutral ooloi. The ooloi—who are referred to as “it” in the trilogy—possess additional
sensory arms capable of penetrating and healing flesh, forming neurochemical connections, and
manipulating genetic material. Perhaps most importantly, ooloi beget interspecies reproduction,
secreting a pleasure-inducing substance which affects both humans and Oankali and thus
deepening bonds of affection between species. Similar to Hopkinson, Butler interrogates the
fluidic space of non-normative sexual desires and pleasures in speculative fiction. Nikanj—an
ooloi Lilith harbors complicated feelings for throughout the trilogy—guides Lilith and her
human lover Joseph in sexual intercourse via its sensory arms. During this experience, Joseph
seems more alarmed than Lilith, who states how she “liked” the neural stimulation and asks
Joseph afterwards if he feels the same. Joseph replies by saying “that thing will never touch [him]
again if [he has] anything to say about it” (169). Lilith later describes the ooloi-enacted sex as
a type of “literal, physical addiction to another person” (679) and believes Nikanj “created for
them the powerful threefold unity that was one of the most alien features of Oankali life” (220).
Aparajita Nanda notes how “a teacher-student relationship, despite initial impulses of revulsion,
grows between [Lilith and Nikanj], which in its reciprocity becomes a strong bond complicated
by sexual overtones.” Moreover, Lilith “develops intrinsic ties with Nikanj that defy simple
dualities of oppressor and oppressed” (780).
Lilith’s sexual desires and pleasures also satisfy Nikanj, as ooloi experience a form of pleasure
via its sexual contact with both humans and Oankali. While not an inherently sexual pleasure,
Ronald Bogue states how ooloi find acts such as healing humans “decidedly sensual and erotic.”
Bogue also deems the fragile division “between sexual and non-sexual pleasure, at least in ooloi
relations with humans and Oankali, [as] provisional at best” (41). Rather than portraying humans
as desperate for ooloi contact, it appears ooloi are also reliant upon the intimacies of humans.
Ultimately, the Oankali and humans are co-constitutive, relying upon one another to learn,
grow, and survive. As Erin M. Pryor Ackerman notes, expressions of desire are “inextricably
linked with and implicated in power, both for those desiring and those desired” (40).
Lilith’s desire for sex via/with Nikanj is one of the many paradoxes presented in Butler’s
trilogy. It is also one of the most unnerving. The fraught questions plaguing Lilith’s sexual desires
and pleasures—namely, are these feelings really hers?—places a darker perspective on the intimate
entanglements presented in Butler’s visions of the future. Lilith does not “pretend outwardly or
to herself that she would resist Nikanj’s invitation—or that she wanted to resist it” and believes
“Nikanj could give her an intimacy with Joseph that was beyond ordinary experience” (Butler
161). Still, like the humans they appear fascinated by, the Oankali are deeply flawed. Unlike
the humans, however, the Oankali have the technological advantage throughout the trilogy and
appear (mostly) comfortable in their choices. Lilith’s sexual explorations involve pain and bliss,
fear and delight; perhaps most unsettling is how readers bear witness to it all. Sexual desire, in
202
its many forms, is often “fraught and complicated terrain” (Nash 150). Yet, Butler complicates
the Oankali-human relationship by asking an important question: is it the ooloi who could not
exist without humans, or the humans who could not exist without ooloi? The answer, much
like desire, is far from simple. As Nikanj tells Lilith and Joseph in Dawn: “You are horror and
beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape” (153).
Writing Ecstasy
In the conclusion to Black Body in Ecstasy, aptly titled “Reading Ecstasy,” Nash explains her
fascination with pornographic texts, saying that they represent “sites where one would not
expect to locate political possibility; these are [racialized] texts where black women’s bodies
have been represented not to engender political shifts, but to generate new profits” (147). Nash
goes on to say that “it is in this surprise location—the pornographic archive—that I find black
pleasures articulated, amplified, and practiced” (147). In her discussion of sexual fantasies, Nash
notes the importance of a “black feminist fantasy,” where its theoretical archive could serve
“in part, to expand the fantastical structures available to subjects, to strive for heterogeneous
representational economies which make space for varied black pleasures.” Fantasy would then be
“articulated as both a right and a freedom, as absolutely central to black feminist political work”
(151). The explicit focus on Black women’s sexual desires and pleasures in Hominids, Salt Roads,
and Lilith’s Brood offers speculative and fantastical extensions of Black feminist scholarship, of
which Nash’s work on ecstasy provides a crucial intervention. It is within these speculative
fictions where Black girls and women have the space to be messy, complex, and paradoxical
in their sexual desires and pleasures, even as systems of oppression, domination, and violation
threaten to eradicate fantastical possibilities of ecstasy.
Note
1 Occasionally referred to as “post office” or “postman’s knock,” “postman” is a teenaged party game in
which a kiss is exchanged for an imaginary letter.
Bibliography
Ackerman, Erin M. Pryor. “Becoming and Belonging: The Productivity of Pleasures and Desires in
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy.” Extrapolation, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 24–43. doi: 10.3828/
extr.2008.49.1.3
Bogue, Ronald. “Alien Sex: Octavia Butler and Deleuze and Guattari’s Polysexuality.” Deleuze and
Sex, edited by Frida Beckman, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, pp. 30–49. doi:10.3366/
edinburgh/9780748642618.003.0002
Butler, Octavia. Lilith’s Brood. Grand Central Publishing, 2000.
Cipolla, Cyd, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Wiley, eds. Queer Feminist Science Studies:
A Reader. University of Washington Press, 2017.
Enteen, Jillana. “ ‘On the Receiving End of the Colonization’: Nalo Hopkinson’s Nansi Web.” Science
Fe, Lisa. “Treasured Strangers: Race, Biopolitics, and the Human in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis
Trilogy.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2017, pp. 506–525. doi: 10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0506
Federmayer, Éva. “Octavia Butler’s Maternal Cyborgs: The Black Female World of the Xenogenesis
Series.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 6, no. 1, 2000, pp. 103–118.
Hopkinson, Nalo. “A Habit of Waste,” Fireweed #53, 1996. Reprinted in Skin Folk, Warner Aspect Books,
2001, pp. 183–188.
Hopkinson, Nalo. Falling in Love with Hominids. Tachyon Publications, 2015.
Hopkinson, Nalo. The Salt Roads. Warner Books, 2003.
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Johnston, Nancy. “ ‘Happy That It’s Here’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson.” Queer Universes: Sexualities
in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon, 2008, pp. 200–
215, doi: 10.5949/UPO9781846313882
Nanda, Aparajita. “Power, Politics, and Domestic Desire in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood.” Callaloo, vol.
36, no. 3, 2013, pp. 773–788, doi:10.1353/cal.2013.0164
Nash, Jennifer C. The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. Duke University Press,
2014, doi:10.1215/9780822377030
Rutledge, Gregory E. “Review of The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson.” Digital Commons at the University
of Nebraska—Lincoln, 2006.
Rutledge, Gregory E. and Nalo Hopkinson. “Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science
Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, pp. 589–601,
doi:10.2307/2901339
Smith, Cordwainer. “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell.” Galaxy Magazine, 1962.
Weinbaum, Alys Eve. The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of
History. Duke University Press, 2019, doi:10.1215/9781478003281
204
PART IV
Where
Media and Transmedialities

28
INTRODUCTION
Keren Omry
On the evening of February 12, 1949, a radio news team interrupted the scheduled musical
broadcast to announce that an alien invasion was underway, rapidly and violently taking over
the country. The announcement was immediately followed by the voices of familiar authority
figures who confirmed the emergency, and a panic amongst the listeners ensued which left
ten dead in its wake and many others injured and angry. This tragedy took place in Ecuador,
when Leonardo Páez produced a translated performance of the more well-known Orson
Welles radio performance of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds from 1938, clearly hitting a nerve
with the listeners whose rising fear turned into frenzied and fatal rioting when hearing it was
just a hoax (Wynn). Although initially so easy to dismiss the silly—if sinister—overreaction of
the listening public, as the chapters in this section demonstrate, considering how technology
mediates authority and enacts power within even the most banal aspects of our daily lives, goes
far in explaining the hold that a disembodied, masculine voice which is aligned with hegemonic
power and emerging from the wireless, would have. The flip side of this same coin is, of
course, the subversive potential that technology affords to destabilize the power structures and
to mediate new voices, new frameworks, new stakes of expression.
Gary W. Dowsett, writing anecdotally about coming of age as queer in Brisbane, Australia,
explains how it was the arrival of television in 1958 and along with it Judy Garland’s sensual
lips, Laurel and Hardy playing it straight while sharing a bed, and Rocky Jones: Space Ranger’s
lascivious foe, that opened up new avenues of imagination. As Dowsett writes, technology
queered heterosexuality—even before the Internet. Indeed, even the earliest advocates of radio,
the new communications tech, could recognize both the opportunity and the danger this
medium held as in and of itself a mechanism of social change, not least with regards to gender
(Murphy and Andrews & McNamara). As early as the 1920s, Radio News, the US monthly tech
journal, for example, angered many (male) readers by expanding its target audience to include
women, with columns, ads, and articles catering to perceived female interests (Novak). The
publisher of this monthly was none other than Hugo Gernsback himself, a game-changing
pioneer in science fiction, whose role in effectively founding the entire genre is well known.
And thus we tie together the ends of this section: media and transmedialities as the platforms on
which SF and gender are performed, enacted, and articulated.
So, where is the site on which gender work is done and what exactly is this work? Alexis
Lothian, in her introduction to the special issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media &
Technology on the Feminist Present in SF, explains that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-32 207

Keren Omry
fictions and realities of scientific speculation shape how we experience the nexus of
gender, new media, and technology—from the gendered history of physics to the
migration of brain-scanning technology out of laboratories and into the world, from
imagined visions of reproductive technologies to sentient robots to the social conse-
quences of cataclysmic change in urban landscapes. (Lothian)
Reminding us that knowledge is not innocent and that its application as technology is always
political, Lothian’s description adds a feminist, activist dimension to the project of unpacking
how medium mediates. Alex Prong’s chapter, for example, looks at one of the more literal forms
of mediation, namely, language. Specifically, Prong analyzes the non sequitur as both a linguistic
and a narratival strategy that disrupts established logic, “conspiring against the . . . sequence.” The
effect is surprise, humor, subversion, and it is according to Prong through “illogical” patterns
of disruption that new relationships can be formed. Candice Wilson and Tobias Wilson-Bates
also invoke rupture in their chapter on Japanese anime and the figure of the shōjo time-traveling
girl. This chapter destabilizes the prioritized categories of femininity in Western perceptions
by analyzing stories taking place at the transitional phase in a teenage girl’s body. Readers
follow the disrupted mechanisms of time as the anime itself becomes a kind of time-machine
exploring gender through transition and transformation. Susan Knabe also examines time as a
mechanism that creates new possibilities. Referring to this mechanism as “queer time,” Knabe’s
close reading of Torchwood, the television series, shows how the episodes depict time travel as
disrupting heteronormative narratival linearity but also as, ultimately, perpetuating the erasures
of non-normative desire.
The link between the body and identity and identification, once taken as given, has become
fraught and fruitfully problematized in contemporary discourse, as can be seen in both Erik
Steinskog’s chapter on Janelle Monáe and Jaime Oliveros García and Alejandro López Lizana
writing about The Red Strings Club, the videogame. Both of these chapters show the use of
medium to clearly challenge cisgender conceptualizations and critically examine the process
of identification that takes place both when creating and when consuming science fiction.
Analyzing Monáe’s “e-motion picture,” Dirty Computer, as well as her presentation as a public
persona, Steinskog shows how Monáe carefully constructs her performance (of music, of race,
of gender) to extend the ways identity is articulated. Oliveros García and López Lizana show
how the game mechanics bring identity to the players’ attention and require them to confront
their assumptions and make choices in relation to both their own character’s progress and to
others.
In reading through the chapters in this section it becomes clear that it is precisely in the
relation to others, the modes of communication enabled, and the kinds of community formed,
that the medium itself becomes key. Nedine Moonsamy, for example, analyzes two short stories
of African Speculative Fiction wherein different kinds of AI become transformative agents
which de-gender and re-gender technology. Through Moonsamy’s framing, Wole Talabi
and Nnedi Okorafor’s stories offer “templates for more ethical relationality,” which can then
extend beyond these texts to more mundane interfaces with technology. Paweł Frelik’s chapter
on gaming, modding, and gender similarly sheds light on the relationality of science fiction
technology. Focusing on “non-normative sexualities and speculative genders,” and on both the
mechanics of the game and the practices of fans, Frelik demonstrates the potential for change
and new forms of intimacy that these games represent and afford. Furthermore, these notions
of intimacy—female-tech community in Moonsamy and inter- and meta-textual relationality
in Frelik—resonate rather differently with John Rieder, Itala Schmelz, and Dagmar Van Engen
who all look much more explicitly to sexuality. Where Rieder traces the ways in which different
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Introduction
theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Frankenstein differ precisely on the kinds of interpersonal
structures within the protagonist, the “departure from and return to conventional sexual mores,”
Schmelz and Van Engen move far afield from conventional mores, looking at the representation
of the monstrous and the perceptions of perversity, respectively. Schmelz extracts the monster
from a familiar framing within US Hollywood paranoia and identifies its role as an empowered
and other-gendered presence in Mexican cinema. Van Engen, in turn, brings us back to Japanese
anime, specifically at trans-inclusive animated tentacle erotica in order to powerfully challenge
the idea that tentacles or trans people are in themselves misogynist or perverse.
Many of these chapters elucidate a kind of spectacle of blindness wherein the gaze of the
outsider misperceives what it sees and yet establishes it as fact, and by elucidating begin to
recuperate the subject position. Danielle Girard’s chapter turns to Star Trek: The Original Series
and shows how it is the structures of nearly endless parodies that established William Shatner’s
Captain Kirk as a promiscuous misogynist, when in fact this is far from the character’s nature on
the show. By turning readers’ attention to these structures we can cease remaining complicit in
the needless extension of toxic masculinity. Rebecca J. Holden’s chapter extends the discussion
on the power of the external hegemonic gaze and turns to fashion as the medium by which
marginalized women are recuperated and new futures beyond the cyberpunk dystopia can be
imagined.
In all of these paradigms of gender work mapped out in the chapters that follow: disruption,
identification, relationality, sexuality, and recuperation, we see how technology within the
aesthetics of science fiction creates new ideas, new possibilities, and new mechanisms to mediate
difference. Whether it is within literature, radio, videogames, mods, cinema, television, anime,
language, or fashion, it becomes self-evident that as technology changes so too does the wealth
of futures open to us.
Bibliography
Andrews, Maggie, and Sally McNamara, editors. Women in the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain,
1900 to Present. Routledge, 2014.
Dowsett, Gary W. “ ‘And Next, Just for Your Enjoyment!’: Sex, Technology, and the Constitution of Desire.”
Culture, Health & Sexuality, vol. 17, no. 4, 2015, 527–539. doi:10.1080/13691058.2014.961170
Lothian, Alexis. “Introduction: Science Fiction and the Feminist Present.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New
Media, and Technology, no. 3. doi:10.7264/N3FQ9TJR
Murphy, Kate. Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Novak, Matt. “Nerd Rage: Gendered Tech During the Rise of Radio.” Pacific Standard, 14 June 2017.
https://psmag.com/environment/radio-gender-women-technology-sector-52050.
Wynn, Michael. “H. G. Wells in Ecuador.” 2003. https://cienciaficcionecuador.wordpress.com/author/
ivanrodrigo/
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29
REPRESENTATION AND
PERFORMANCE OF GENDER
IN SPECULATIVE VIDEO
GAMES AND GAME MODS
Paweł Frelik
Despite science fiction’s origins as a privileged narrative mode of white and patriarchal
technomodernity, the genre has been, for a while now, recognized as capable of offering multiple
visions of gender identities and sexual politics that can be described as progressive, subversive,
and liberatory. And yet, not all SF media are equal in this endeavor. Science fiction video
games have been markedly lagging behind literature, comics, and film, with fantastical gaming
genders that have remained embedded in the larger problematic character of the medium and
its industry. Indeed, the gaming industry—at least its high-budget section—in its institutional
structures as well as in many of its texts and practices both industrial (i.e., the culture of design
studios) and extra-industrial (i.e., fandom), largely and (semi-)actively encourages, fosters, and
perpetuates a culture of toxic masculinity, objectification of women, and erasure of non-binary
genders and non-normative sexualities. Admittedly, the situation may be somewhat less grim
when it comes to independent and art games, but, by and large, speculative games remain
delayed in their portrayals of the complexities of human gender and sexuality when measured
against other media of the genre.
One of the long traditions in video game criticism are intermedial comparisons. While video
games are, in many respects, a medium very much different from other audiovisual forms, they
also share a number of properties and tendencies with film or television, especially when it
comes to their worldbuilding and diegetic dimensions, including the treatment of gender and
sexuality. Consequently, critical work on games all too often frames its analysis in terms of other
media, inevitably drawing similar conclusions concerning gender representation in speculative
video games.
This chapter seeks to avoid this redundancy and, after a general overview of gender
representation in speculative games, will focus on those aspects that are either unique to the
ludic medium or present difference from the similar portrayals in the genre’s other audiovisual
forms. Consequently, approaching the representation of gender and sexuality in speculative
video games requires a species of triangulation, within which those aspects that are unique to
them need to be considered in relation to both science fiction’s other visual media and other
thematic conventions of the gaming medium. In light of this, this chapter aims to achieve three
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-33 210

Representation, Performance of Gender in Video Games, Mods
distinct things. First, it will provide an overview of the state of diegetic representation of gender
in speculative video games, focusing particularly on the visions of non-normative sexualities and
speculative genders. Second, it will look both at the ways in which speculative games provide—
or fail to provide—opportunities for their players to self-express their gender identity as well
as at how game mechanics may constrain expressions and fantasies or provide space for them.
Finally, it will comment on the fan-side practices, particularly modding, as they intersect with
gender representation. While all these perspectives are necessarily interrelated, each of them
expresses a different modality of games’ existence in culture: the first focuses on the in-game
worldbuilding, the second on the space of intimacy between games and players, and the third
on the social uses of games and their transformations.
Ultimately, the discussion is informed by the belief that the representations of genders and
sexualities matter in speculative games, perhaps even more so than in non-interactive media.
In The PlayStation Dreamworld (2017), a compelling work on digital games’ psychological and
political work, Alfie Bown asserts that any “potential attempt at subversion needs to work
inside this dreamspace—a powerful force in constructing our dreams and desires—or else the
dreamworld will fall into the hands of the corporations and the state” (3). Speculative video
games do not merely hold the promise of questioning and undermining existing normative
structures—this is, after all, a potential, even if often unfulfilled, of all science fiction media.
The speculative character of SF gameworlds creates a space of possibility that not only allows for
rethinking gender identity and representation, but also for performing them. Inevitably, much
depends on the specific game genre and its interactive affordances. For instance, in role-playing
games, Emily Cox-Palmer-White suggests, the players “may experiment with identities and
self-expressions that challenge normative structures, including gender” (119). Her analysis of
play as the male character of Deus Ex games is heavily inflected by the Deleuzian concept of
becoming, which may be somewhat optimistic for most commercial titles, but the promise
of self-expression definitely persists. In blockbuster games, a marginalized identity may often
become reduced to a “re-skinning,” in which gender as well as race and sexuality come across
more as menu choices than meaningfully incorporated features, but games’ potential for
subversion is unmistakable. This subversion may, for instance, assume the form of queering, a
now-old technique of reading literary works that, Bonnie Ruberg proposes, can be hijacked to
read games queerly and
to lay claim to the equal citizenship of those who are “different” in games cultures by
understanding games on the terms and through the methods that we deem meaningful
rather than those set and policed by the gamer status quo. (61)
This has been successfully used not only by Ruberg in their writings but also by other critics.
Kaitlin Moore’s 2017 reading of NieR: Automata, a gorgeous post-humanity narrative, from
the perspective of queer melancholia is a perfect example of such an approach, as is Chris
Lawrence’s take on the much-beloved Zelda in “What If Zelda Wasn’t a Girl? Problematizing
Ocarina of Time’s Great Gender Debate.”
Diegetic Representation
As mentioned earlier, despite documents such as Press X to Make Sandwich: A Complete Guide to
Gender Design in Games (Anhut), the medium—and especially its big-budget flavor—seems to
lag behind other audiovisual media. A significant proportion of gender and sexuality-oriented
representation replicates tropes and figures found in other media, particularly from the past.
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In that, to say that most SF game protagonists are men is to state the obvious. A 2009 large-
scale multiplatform analysis of more than 8,000 characters across 150 video games found that
only 15% of video game characters were female and that this number dropped to 10% for
female main characters (Williams et al.). These results are consistent with earlier studies (Dietz;
Downs & Smith) and paralleled the findings of the blog Feminist Frequency, which originated
in Anita Sarkeesian’s videos in 2009 and, for years, ran a statistical breakdown of the gender
of protagonists in titles shown during the E3 industry fairs.1 And indeed, in science fiction,
major titles and franchises, such as Doom, Quake, BioShock, Halo, and F.E.A.R., have featured
exclusively male protagonists among their playable characters.
Beyond numbers, the actual depiction of female protagonists in digital games often
emphasizes their bodies at the expense of personality (Perreault et al.), often devolving into their
hypersexualization (Downs and Smith). Quite predictably, women were also far more likely to
be presented as nude (Haninger and Thompson).2 Like in other media, stereotypes of women
are rampant in speculative games, including monstrous femininity. To wit, in Resident Evil 7:
Biohazard (2017) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (2021), the player-protagonist Ethan Winters
is under attack from women and girls infected by a parasitic fungus. This clear trope of the
patriarchal fear of transgressive female power is often weaponized through the female antagonists
(Pinder). The stereotypical representation of women also persists in the objectification of sex
work. Despite Ruberg’s (2019) suggestion, in “Representing Sex Workers in Video Games,”
that there is a palpable move beyond neoliberal feminist framing of sex work as an inherently
exploitative practice, and their investigation of the mechanisms through which the value of
erotic labor is diminished or erased, sex workers in most SF video games are female and their
representation is redolent of old cliches. This is true, for instance, for the representation of
Tenderloin in Watch Dogs 2 (2016). Incidentally, the same title also features Miranda Comay, a
transgender woman and a friend of the playable protagonist’s family, whose outing is presented
in the game as funny. On a related note, Mass Effect: Andromeda in 2017 features a non-playable
character of Hainly Abrams, a transgender woman, who—in the original version of the game—
identified herself to the playable Ryder character in their very first conversation, including the
mention of her “dead name.” To Bioware’s credit, this was fixed in a later patch after the company
was called out on the blunder. Finally, a token or understated presence of non-heteronormative
sexualities can also be considered a kind of stereotype: the Assassin’s Creed franchise, whose
major frame, despite historical background of most games, is definitely speculative, features
a number of such presences (obeseninjao7), and Tracer from 2016 Overwatch is identified as
lesbian only in a paratext of the game.
Even where speculative games attempt to be progressive, the gender representation can
be conflicted. While a few allow for a choice of the playable character’s gender, the latter is
practically exclusively binary. The Mass Effect games (2007, 2010, 2012), arguably one of the
most lauded SF trilogies, provide a good case in point. On the one hand, Asari, a descriptively
mono-gendered alien species, consistently present as usually voluptuous women, and, on the
other, most alien species do not seem to possess females, except for Krogans and Turians. In Prey
(2017), the player can choose a male or a female version of the protagonist Morgan Yu, with
very little consequence for the gameplay (and none for the narrative). Similarly, in Far Cry 6
from 2021 the playable Dani Rojas cannot be modified and the player only chooses the female
or male version of the character.3
All of this does not mean that there are no interesting gender visions to be found in
speculative video games. The gender-fluid character of Flea appeared in Chrono Trigger as early
as in 1995. Fallout 2 (1998) features fully explicit same-sex marriage—not just romance!—
making it possibly one of the earliest open-world games to possess this option. NieR: Automata
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(2017) showcases a number of androids who, while presenting as gendered in their attempts to
decipher the mystery of humanity, are essentially non-gendered, a trope that seems as simple
as it is not obvious given a long history of gendering in general and feminizing in particular
of machinic subjectivities. Against this history, Trevor Richardson writes very movingly about
how the game’s mechanics reflect living as a non-binary person in a cisheterocentric world.
In the same franchise, Kainé, a principal character in Nier from 2010, later remastered as Nier
Replicant ver.1.22474487139 in 2021, is an intersex person. The 2018 Heaven Will Be Mine is a
queer visual novel about three women piloting giant robots in the last days of an alternate 1980s
space program. Kara Stone’s 2019 Ritual of the Moon is a 28-day-long multi-narrative game
exploring loneliness, power, and healing that involves a queer love and longing. In Outer Wilds
from 2019, the Hearthian race, to which the player character belongs, have no gender and are
consistently referred to as “they” even though the game features other gendered races. Last but
not least, Cloudpunk from 2020 can be read as a narrative of trans rights, even if it is not entirely
convincing (Compendio).4
Player Expression
Game characters, Andrew Burn argues, play a dual role as both a player agent and a fictional
character, belonging simultaneously to the “ludic” and “representational” systems that comprise
the game (72–73). Indeed, a significant body of scholarship exists on the various modalities of
the character-player relationship (Waszkiewicz) as well as on the creation of avatars, in-game
visual representations (Banks). Despite their speculative scenarios, in-game avatars can channel
ideal body self-presentation (cf. Thomas and Johansen) and are often, given the affordances of
the titles, carefully crafted by the players to reflect or fantasize on their real-world identity. In
some genres of video games, avatars can be modeled in terms of their gender presentation and
some of these decisions may also influence other aspects of in-game presence, such as narrative
or interactions with NPCs. Speculative games offer here significant potential for departure from
the conservative limitations of the world in which they are designed. In some types of titles,
such as massively multiplayer online games or role-playing games, they may also provide much
needed spaces for the players to self-express their true gender identity or sexual preferences that
remain otherwise hidden outside the screen.
This begins with the simple forms of address that acknowledge a spectrum of identities. Fallen
London and Sunless Sea, from 2009 and 2015, respectively, both by Failbetter Games, make the
player choose the form of address, at the same time clearly indicating that it has nothing to do
with the character’s gender, thus beautifully demonstrating the difference between presentation
and gender. The 2015 cyberpunk-themed indie game 2064: Read Only Memories offers one of
the more extensive pronoun packages: at the beginning of the playthrough the player is asked
about their dietary preferences, name, and pronouns, where they can choose one of the five
available or add their own one. The same game also features a central non-binary NPC (non-
player character).
Equally important for the player’s expression are the romance options available in many role-
playing titles, whose presence or, more often, absence has been discussed in literature (Kang
and Yang). Again, Bioware titles seem to be exemplary here. Back in 2003, Juhani in Knights
of the Old Republic probably became the Star Wars universe’s first canonically gay character.
The studio’s next release, in 2005, Jade Empire was only vaguely speculative, but it afforded the
players same-sex romance options and a love triangle. This moderate openness was continued
in Mass Effect, whose subsequent installments expanded a range of same-sex romance options
from a single lesbian relationship in the first game to a number of them in the second, and,
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Paweł Frelik
additionally, two gay relationships in the last one. In that, Mass Effect 3 became one of the
first major SF games in which the same-sex romance became an option for the playable male
character. This openness does not come without a cost, though. As always in video games, the
actual progressive status of a title is determined as much by its affordances as by its limitations.
Here, Bioware’s space opera trilogy allows for same-sex romances, but keeps them prescriptively
monogamous.
Even when plentiful and designed in good faith, the avatar customization options may not
offer sufficient subtlety or can come across as tone-deaf (gender-deaf?). Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)
is a perfect example of this. For all the aura of transhumanist liberation from the confines of
the “meat,” the game offers a very antiquated perception of gender. The character creation
recognizes two body types—masculine and feminine—as well as versions of vagina and penis,
but the actual gender assignment is done through voice, where there is only a choice of male-
sounding and female-sounding voice, which also determines the pronouns used to address the
playable character of V. It is not difficult to imagine how far from actual lived experiences of
players or their wishes for presentation this may fall. Reinforcing this, Kazuma Hashimoto notes,
clothing options available in the game follow the traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity.
Despite its rebellious aura, Cyberpunk 2070 also has a somewhat problematic relationship with
transgender. In one of the early promotional materials, the in-game “Mix It Up” poster featured
a feminine-presenting model sporting a leotard covering a bulging penis, at best a sign of
commercialization of transbodies and at worst a tone-deaf transphobic imagery. On a related
note, Stacey Henley concluded that, given the available romance options, the game was not
made for trans people despite some promise early in the promotion cycle.
Modding and Fan-Side Practices

Modding, a fan practice of modifying video games, is most immediately a technical activity
aimed at eliminating bugs and glitches as well as introducing changes to the original games that
expand or enhance their visuals, narrative, functionalities, and even gameworlds themselves. It
can, however, also be seen as a recuperative activity. Katie Salen Tekinbas and Eric Zimmerman
locate game mods within the context of critique, as design interventions and acts of creative
resistance (560). This may be somewhat optimistic about most mods, but there is indeed a
number of mods, particularly those for big-budget titles implicated in the industry structures
outlined earlier, that complicate and ameliorate at least some of the problems connected with
representations and performances of gender in their original games. Indeed, multiple authors in
Women and Video Game Modding: Essays on Gender and the Digital Community from 2020, edited
by Bridget Whelan, demonstrate the potential of this practice and many titles discussed in the
collection easily qualify as speculative.
Mods address any and all aspects of games from audiovisuals to narratives to mechanics.
Those concerning gender and sexuality largely belong to the latter two categories. For instance,
“Gender Neutrality Mod” for Stardew Valley (2016) makes non-playable characters refer to the
protagonist with gender-neutral pronouns and replaces the gender symbols in the character
creator with ungendered body-type indicators. It also allows the players to add their own
pronouns to the game. Many mods change the romance options mentioned earlier. “Same Sex
Couples and LGBT Families” alters the eponymous relations for Fallout 4 (2015), while “Same-
Gender Romances” and “More Gay Romances” expand a choice of partners for Mass Effect 2
and Mass Effect Legendary Edition, respectively. Finally, although, as noted earlier, it is women
characters who are much more often presented as objects of sexual fantasy, sexuality-modding
can also engage male bodies (Thompson).
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At the same time, game mods can also be sites of struggle for the representations of gender
and sexuality among various sectors of game fandoms. Illustrative here is the case of the so-called
“butt-shot” of Miranda, one of the principal characters in Mass Effect 2. In the second and third
part of the original trilogy, the in-game perspective, on several occasions, positions her buttocks
centrally in the frame, a male-gaze practice borrowed directly from mainstream Hollywood.
The remastered Mass Effect Legendary Edition, released in 2021, removed this particular point
of view, perhaps in recognition of social transformations since the original release. However,
some fans were so attached to the sex-object imagery that soon afterwards, “Miranda Butt
Shot Restoration” mod was released doing what its title promises to do. Another example of
such struggles are fan voices that call for the removal of same-sex relationships, for instance
one coming from the forums of Stardew Valley (Chob). Such interventions are probably in the
minority, but it is not uncommon for fantastic fandoms to produce moral-outrage backlashes
against any aspect of progressive identity, best exemplified by the response to The Last Jedi
(2017). In fact, despite Tekinbas and Zimmerman’s ambitious pronouncement on the subversive
nature of mods, when it comes to gender and sexuality representations, the number of mods
that promote nudity aimed at heteronormative titillation by far outnumbers those with more
progressive visions.
Modding is merely one among many fandom practices. Since the times of the Star Trek slash
stories, fan fiction and its multiple subgenres (some of which are specifically gender-oriented)
have always been sites of struggle against normative sexualities and gender relations. This includes
fan fiction based on speculative games. To wit, fanfiction.net, one of the oldest repositories,
features almost 12,000 contributions set in the Mass Effect world. Archive of Our Own, which is
particularly welcoming to non-heteronormative content, lists over 24,000 texts set in the same
universe, among which one-third is categorized as featuring same-sex relationships.
Another popular form of fan activity is creation of visual imagery, both static and moving.
While most short films shared on YouTube and graphics presented on sites like DeviantArt
merely reprise games’ canonical relationships and gender-related behaviors, there are some that
speculate—for the lack of a better word—about it. Bioware games, but not only, are (in)famous
for their pornographic fandoms that, for a very long time, thrived on Tumblr blogs, which
disappeared after the platform tightened censorship in 2018, as well as on dedicated subreddits,
such as “AssEffect” and “Masserect.” While it would be easy to dismiss such practices as yet
another manifestation of the neoliberal mainstreamization of pornography, it is important to
recognize that many graphics, gifs, and short clips found in such venues featured gender-bending
imagery of truly fantastic character. Last but not least, there are also specialized game-related
communities, including speedrunning, that are particularly open to queer practices (Signor).
Conclusions
The three angles of approach to the treatment of gender and sexuality in speculative video
games discussed in this chapter are, naturally, not the only ones. There is a solid body of gamer
ethnography research. Helen Thornham’s 2011 Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative
and Praxis is of particular interest here, not the least because some of the games that the subjects
of her research are speculative. Several projects have measured the preferences for specific
game genres among men and women, including one gathering data from 270,000 participants
(Yee). This parallels associations of certain genres with women, not always in a positive sense
(Vanderhoef). There is also much to be said about the erasure of women from game histories
(Adkins), in which science fiction titles played an important formative role. As of 2022, the
gaming industry and fandoms remain, at large, entrenched as predominantly masculine spaces,
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but persons of marginalized genders have been increasingly marking their presence and making
their voices heard, both in and out of games.
Notes
1 Admittedly, in 2020, their most recent year of query, 18% of titles featured a female protagonist,
compared to 23% with the male one. Between 2015 and 2020, roughly half of all titles also offered
multiple options.
2 Interestingly, an earlier study from 2011 that looked at a large body of casual games (a random sample of
200 out of the database of 1,946 titles) found that 130 (65%) games had humans as primary characters.
Among them, 84 (42%) had females as the primary character, 25 games (12.5%) had males as the
primary character, and 20 games (10%) had two primary characters that were both female and male
(Wohn).
3 Interestingly, in Rust (2013), the title that could be, in some ways, considered speculative, gender is
assigned randomly, which led to many protests from—presumably—male gamers not willing to be
dropped into a female character.
4 These and many other characters are tracked by the LGTBQ Video Game Archive operated by Adrienne
Shaw (Temple University) and her assistants, which can be found at https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/.
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30
PARODYING CAPTAIN KIRK
THROUGH THE ‘DRIFT’ IN
CULTURAL MEMORY
Danielle Girard
Introduction
When we collectively recall memories of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) within the pop
culture media landscape, there is a clear and consistent tie between the sexist legacy of the
show and the reputation of the franchise’s first leading man. A quick Google search of sexism
in Star Trek results in a dichotomy of entertainment journalism hailing Feminist Captain Kirk
and condemning Sexist Star Trek, almost in equal measure. In the feminist camp, think-pieces
such as James Factora’s “How Captain Kirk Helped Me Define Masculinity” argue that Kirk’s
“masculinity is based on deep respect and love for his crew, for the diverse species he encounters
in his travels, for the women with whom he liaisons.” Another blog post by Lady Geek Girl
claims that “James T. Kirk Is Actually a Feminist.” Both of these pieces, fascinatingly, cite the
second aired TOS episode, “Charlie X,” using Kirk’s conversation with the titular Charlie to
emphasize the importance Kirk placed on consent in sexual and/or romantic relationships, “it’s
not a one-way street, you know, how you feel and that’s all. It’s how the girl feels, too” (24:04).
The opposition has no shortage of listicles and think-pieces detailing the show’s worst
offences: “The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe” (Eleanor Tremeer for Gizmodo);
“15 Really Terrible Moments for Women in Star Trek” (Laurie Ulster for ScreenRant); “Top Five
Sexist Moments in the Original ‘Star Trek’ ” (Rich Monetti for Futurism). These articles range
from discussions of specific female characters (Monetti) to instances of sexist plot points in
specific episodes (Ulster). Tremeer’s take has more nuance as she acknowledges that the show’s
original 1964 pilot, “The Cage,” featured a woman (Number One/Majel Barrett) as a first
officer who was “a little too commanding” for test audiences who thought “her too assertive,”
which considers the dominant cultural norms and social structures that TOS was adherent to
(2020). However, it is equally notable that Tremeer ties Number One’s departure from the
original pilot to Kirk’s arrival, by no means blaming the character for the shift in feminist
politics, but implicating him nonetheless. Indeed, much of this discourse is rarely about Kirk
specifically, yet consistently finds a way to implicate him. Using 1999 Galaxy Quest and the
2017 Black Mirror episode “USS Callister,” this chapter will examine the oppositional readings
of Star Trek: The Original Series’ Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) as a character who
has been robustly warped through parody in the popular imagination. I argue that parody then
functions as a means of rewriting our collective memory toward a retrospective alteration.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-34 218

Parodying Captain Kirk Through the ‘Drift’ in Cultural Memory
What this means in relation to gender representations is that toxifying depictions of masculinity
as citational to TOS displaces our collective understandings of masculinity and subsequently
cements this toxicity as a part of the 1960s SF contemporary rather than one that is reflective
of concurrent media trends.
“Kirk’s Gaze” and Short Skirts

There are two strategies that implicate Captain Kirk in a recognizably sexist discourse: the
Gaussian blurring camera technique and the costume miniskirt worn by women in TOS. The
Gaussian blur is an image-softening technique which, when applied to women in film and
television by cinematographers, is known as “The Gaussian Girl.” This technique results in
women’s faces appearing blurry or out of focus, and is “a technique steeped in the early days
of Hollywood.” MeTV Staff explain that the technique would become TOS cinematographer
Gerry Finnerman’s trademark, and note that the use of this cinematography was often reserved
for Kirk’s love interests, rendering a shift in moniker from “The Gaussian Girl” to “Kirk’s Gaze.”
The concept of “Kirk’s Gaze” is repeated in Nick Ottens’s Forgotten Trek blog, and allusions to
it appear again under the Gaussian Girl entry on TV Tropes. This entry includes a picture of a
blonde woman in a side-by-side duplication to show the Gaussian blur in action. The caption
of the photo reads: “Scientists have proven that Captain Kirk shows up to 80% more sexual
arousal when exposed to the [blurred] picture” (TV Tropes). Tying this use of cinematography
to Kirk, and concurrently viewing the practice of applying the Gaussian blur to female love
interests’ faces in TOS as “Kirk’s gaze” then results in a shift from understanding the Hollywood
practice as sexist to remembering Captain Kirk as sexist instead.
Following the audience ire drawn from the Gaussian blur, another site of discourse falls
upon the costumed bodies of TOS women. TOS has a complex history with costume as well
as with audience interpretation of the costumed body. Tapping into the archive of popular
memory means acknowledging that the pervasive image of TOS women is one of scantily clad
bodies in knee-high boots and miniskirts. This yields to the aforementioned readings of sexism
in Star Trek by way of understanding these hyperfeminized bodies as bodies that are costumed
to be objectified. What this memory fails to acknowledge is the nuanced contextualization of
the miniskirt in the 1960s. In her chapter “Sensuous Women and Single Girls,” Moya Luckett
details two key feminist texts, Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley
Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl.1 Luckett notes that “Brown’s more sexually and self-
oriented advice has been marginalized, largely because of its seemingly traditional emphasis
on beauty, fashion, and seduction” (277). She furthers that Friedan’s feminism clashed with
Brown’s, as the latter’s “lauded beauty and fashion systems [that] were [viewed as] not a means
to power but part of a system that forced women into false consciousness, entrapping them
into a relationship with their bodies” (277). What stands out here is how the body becomes
centered in a negative fashion. Women’s agency is then shifted toward endemic power structures
in places that view fashion and beauty as interests that benefit patriarchal thought and systemic
failures. This anti-feminine ideology is then reflected in the wider cultural interpretations of
TOS’s iconic miniskirt as an item of clothing that has grown to represent the sexist undertones
of the franchise.
However, Gurley Brown’s feminism arguably had an impact not only on the fashioning of
TOS’s women, but also on the attitude the actresses shared with the costumes they were asked to
wear. Both Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice Rand) and Nichelle Nicols (Lt. Nyota Uhura)
have praised the costumes in their autobiographies with the latter writing that “contrary to
what many may think today, no one really saw it as demeaning back then . . . the miniskirt was
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a symbol of sexual liberation” (Nichols 169). Women’s costumes in later iterations of Trek were
far less liberating. Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine, Voyager), for example, could not get out of her
rib-crushing corset alone (interview with Jancelewicz, HuffPost). As Vettel-Becker articulates,
detractors of TOS have focused “on how the women guest stars functioned primarily as sexual
playthings for these same male leads, particularly Captain Kirk; and on the fact that Starfleet
women wore miniskirts” (145). Viewing TOS’s women as the “sexual playthings” for Captain
Kirk, in conjunction to the miniskirt costume, creates a vacuum of popular memory in which
Kirk’s role in the show’s prescribed sexism becomes one that is deeply ingrained.
If “Kirk’s Gaze” is understood as a cinematographic blurring technique that softens his love
interests, thus situating these women as always already subject to Kirk, then it follows that we
would collectively view the miniskirt as an objectification meant to please the gaze of the
hetero-patriarchal male spectator (in this case, Kirk acts as a substitute for men watching to seek
pleasure). The phrase “Kirk’s Gaze” calls to mind Laura Mulvey’s influential work coining the
“Male Gaze” in 1975. Both phrases speak to filming and viewing practices that situate women’s
and femme bodies within an objectifying prism, creating a precedent to conflate Kirk with the
wider Male Gaze, further shifting his reputation in the popular imaginary.
The discourse surrounding TOS and sexism spreads beyond entertainment journalism and
into scholarly works as well, most notably with Anastasia book Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media.
Salter and Blodgett are quick to label Kirk as both a womanizer and a misogynist. Of the
TOS Captain the pair write that he “rarely has committed relationships or serious emotional
entanglements,” concluding that he “originated as the womanizing, occasionally rebellious
leader” of TOS (17). They go so far as to claim that 2009’s rebooted Captain Kirk (Chris Pine,
Star Trek) serves as a reminder that Trek’s “iconic machoism” “remain[s] constant” (17). The
problem with this assessment, however, is that besides a name, Pine’s Kirk shares very little
in common with Shatner’s. While Shatner’s Kirk is quick to have conversations about sexual
consent (“Charlie X” from 1966), Pine’s is equally quick to sexually harass his female peers
and colleagues. Pine’s Kirk spends most of 2009 Star Trek relentlessly pursuing Zoe Saldana’s
Uhura despite her persistent rejections, going so far as to watch her undress from beneath her
roommate’s bed (dir. J. J. Abrams). Further, in the 2013 sequel, Star Trek into Darkness, Pine’s
Kirk is implied to have engaged in a sexually inappropriate relationship offscreen with Christine
Chapel (Majel Barret in TOS, she never appears in the Abrams’s reboots) that culminated in
Chapel leaving her post on the Enterprise (dir. J. J. Abrams).
Contrary to taking advantage of women, Shatner’s Kirk was more often taken advantage
of. In her column for Strange Horizons, Erin Horáková discusses this, drawing on a fan-made
chart that indicates which female characters Kirk had sex with. The episodes in question reveal
a narrative repositioning that changes the meaning from a lack of consent to a celebration
of sexual prowess. Of the four episodes discussed (“Bread and Circuses”; “Wink of an Eye”;
“Elaan of Troyius”; “The Paradise Syndrome”), in two, the sexual plotline revolves around
Kirk being held captive. In “Bread and Circuses” Kirk is imprisoned with an alien slave girl
(Drusilla) who is there to “satisfy” him, with undertones “suggesting [she] might be punished
for not ‘satisfying’ him,” thus placing an uncomfortable power dynamic upon the scene that
favors neither participant (2017). In “Wink of an Eye,” Kirk is isolated from his crew and forced
to mate with the alien Deela on the threat of death, circumstances that remove his ability to
consent. Likewise, while not a captive in “Elaan of Troyius,” Kirk’s relationship with the titular
Elaan occurs through contact with her tears which have properties that behave as a love potion.
Kirk’s agency is again removed for the duration of this relationship. None of these moments
signal sexual conquest, a conclusion that Horáková also comes to, stating definitively that any
vision of masculinity that “cannot distinguish between choosing to have sex and situations of
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dubious consent incurred in the line of duty . . . is deeply toxic” and suggests “that men are
hypersexual, unemotional, and can never be taken advantage of ” (2017). Conflating Pine’s Kirk
with Shatner’s then reflects a disconcerting view of maleness and masculinity that always already
dictates any type of sexual conduct involving a man is one that he must have wanted or desired
in some capacity. The persevering popular memory of Kirk prefers these harmful depictions of
implied sex with women over the more nuanced narrative that TOS presented. These readings
of Kirk are less the product of willful ignorance than they are the product of numerous parodical
reproductions of Star Trek that draw comedy from a hyper focus on sexuality and thinly veiled
misogyny.
Star Trek Parody: Kirk-esque Figures

Trek parodies play a unique role in the disparate relationship popular memory shares with the
textual narrative of Kirk. Parody as a narrative form works in conjunction with paratexts (such
as entertainment journalism) to consistently reproduce Captain Kirk as a character who seeks
sexual conquest rather than one who is sought as a sexual conquest. An alternative chain of
memory then shifts and breaks into an archetype of the character that does not present an
accurate citation. This fundamentally impacts upon popular textual understanding by acting
upon moments of visibility (Kirk shares screen time with scantily clad women, occasionally
kisses them) and warping them to fit a new narrative more in line with sexual hetero-patriarchal
assumptions (Kirk seeks out time with scantily clad women, kisses them whenever he can).
In constantly reproducing Kirk as a womanizer, we then collectively remember Kirk as
a womanizer. Horáková concludes that “macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination” (2017).
Horáková’s central principle here is that popular memory can cause what she coins a “drift” in
how popular texts are approached and received. This means that memory must then act as a
central focal point to popular media rather than the media itself, thus allotting parody to occupy
the liminal space between media memory and media. In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon
writes that parody’s “function is one of separation and contrast,” furthering that “parody requires
that critical ironic distance” in order to separate it from mere imitation (34). In Gothic Remixed,
Megen de Bruin-Molé challenges this by introducing “the ironic distance between presentation
and meaning,” which, she says, “paradoxically requires a certain intimacy with the ‘original’ text
on one level or another” (92). I contend that it is this intimacy with the original text that parody
must have which goes beyond practices of adaptation and equally impacts viewer response and,
critically, viewer memory.
It then becomes necessary to view parody not only as reproductions of media but also as
reproductions of a collective compulsion toward the ideology that progress has occurred in
an upward trajectory (consider this in relation to my socio-historic contextualization of the
miniskirt, how it was and is viewed). Parodical reproductions, such as Jason Nesmith (Tim
Allen) from Galaxy Quest (1999) and Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) from the Black Mirror episode
“USS Calister,” begin to form an archetypal SF figure (the Toxic Aggressor) in the guise of
Kirk. This figure is characterized primarily through sexual (cisheteronormative) persistence
and a devotion to masculinity that distinctly separates itself from feminine traits. In Galaxy
Quest, Jason Nesmith (Commander Peter Quincy on the fictional NSEA-Protector) is a faded
star from the titular cult SF series that is a clear parody of Trek. Nesmith spends the entirety of
the film pursing Sigourney Weaver’s Gwen DiMarco, with results that evolve from disgust to
reciprocation in the final act of the film. Likewise, the Kirk-esque figure that Nesmith portrayed
on the film’s titular television show, Galaxy Quest is characterized as having slept “with every
Terrakian Slave Girl and Moon Princess on the show” (49:54). Nesmith then occupies the role
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of sexual (toxic) aggressor, (re)producing the memory of a promiscuous Kirk through his pursuit
of DiMarco as well as contributing to a cultural “drift.”
In the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister” (2017), parody is taken to a darker extreme. The
episode follows Robert Daly, CTO and co-founder of the company Callister Inc. (which specializes
in virtual reality games). As a fan of Space Fleet (the in-show version of Star Trek), Daly has created
a virtual platform based on the show wherein he occupies the Kirk-esque role of Captain. Within
this platform he creates digital clones of employees to play-act scenes from the show. The dark
twist is that the digital clones have sentience beyond the game’s programming and fully understand
how they are being abused. Daly’s role as Captain acts as his own personal fantasy. Following
the staged victories within the virtual world, Daly kisses each of his female “crew members”
(employees) on the lips, displaying a staggering abuse of power. Like Galaxy Quest, the episode
presents Daly as a sexual aggressor rather than the object of conquest. Unlike Galaxy Quest, the
episode centers unwanted sexual attention as exactly that and chooses to punish Daly rather than
reward him, suggesting not a revamp of the Kirk figure but rather doubling-down on the cultural
drift that supports an aggressive imitation of an outdated character.
The toxic aggressor figure then becomes a foil to a predominately male SF audience,
simultaneously acting as a figure that is both desired (“I want to be him”) and unattainable.
Take, for example, the juxtapositioning between the Kirk-esque figure in SF and the depiction
of male SF fandom. William Shatner’s notorious 1986 SNL sketch, “Get A Life,” acts as a
foundational baseline for the pop culture understanding of SF fandom as bespectacled, acned,
poorly dressed men characterized by infantilization as they often live in their mothers’ basements
and devote their days to memorizing trivia rather than getting a job in the “real” world. This
depiction of male fandom is also reproduced in the parodies I have thus far discussed. In Galaxy
Quest the infantile fandom is represented by alien race of Thermians who believe the television
show Galaxy Quest is real and have based their entire culture off what they saw on the show.
They are situated against antagonist Sarris and his reptilian humanoid alien race, all of whom
are significantly more visibly masculine with hard, muscled bodies. “USS Callister” plays with
the infantile fanboy as well, juxtaposing Daly’s fantasy-self with his real-self. While in-game
Daly is an aggressor, his reality is one characterized by meekness. He lives alone and his home
is designed in such a way to exhibit to the audience his obsessive love for Space Fleet as his had
numerous display cases for action figures and other collectibles. Beside his gaming station is a
small refrigerator filled with child-sized cartons of chocolate and strawberry milk, not unlike
those commonly found in school cafeterias. This effectively creates a presumed trajectory of
desirable masculinity in SF as one that is adherent to sexual conquest.
J. Halberstam writes in Female Masculinity that
although we seem to have a difficult time in defining masculinity, as a society we have

little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and
money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust. (1)
However, the versions of masculinity that we consistently enjoy and trust in SF are often depictions
of masculinity that fall along this dichotomy of infantilization and toxicity. These depictions of
masculinity then function to unite female/gender-non-conforming audiences against perceptions
of misogyny. Horáková writes that “we have, in some ways, become more wedded to forms of
masculinity in entertainment that are violent, in opposition to cooperation and professionalism”
(2017). Rather than attempting to unravel this compulsion toward toxic masculinity and changing
the narrative altogether, there is more comfort in flipping power dynamics to both depict and
attack the toxic variations of masculinity that we have collectively become fixated upon.
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Conclusion
Beyond parody, loose allusions to Trek’s original Captain abound in the more contemporary
iterations of the show. Discovery’s first season places a mild-mannered Gabriel Lorca (Jason
Isaacs) at the helm of the show’s titular ship only to topple his authoritative masculinity in the
penultimate episode of the season. Perhaps most important is that following Lorca’s death, the
replacement captain is one Christopher Pike (Anson Mount). Long term fans of the series
will recognize Pike as the captain from TOS’s first (rejected) pilot, “The Cage” (1964; 1986)
(repurposed footage included in “The Menagerie, Part 1” (1966) and “The Menagerie, Part 2”
(1966)). Pike is an artifact from TOS who imbibes a very different cultural understanding than
that of Kirk, despite his connection to one of the most prominent images of sexism that arose
from TOS: the Orion Slave Girl.
The Orion Slave Girl is pervasive in the cultural memory of Trek. With the release of the
adult animation series, Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020–), the Orion Slave Girl was re-centered in
Trek lore, as the new show sought to introduce an Orion character who would challenge the
hypersexual stereotypes. In an article for Screen Rant about the show, John Orquiola claims that
“the Orion slave girls are an unfortunate relic of Star Trek’s 1960s origins and ways of thinking”
(2020). Orquiola goes on to cite various moments from later Trek iterations as troubling
continuations of the Orion Slave Girl, yet his centering of the archetype on TOS’s “ways
of thinking” ratifies the notion that TOS is an equal reflection of its contemporary cultural
reputation (one in which female sexual liberation equates to demeaning sexual objectification).
Horáková notes that although the conquest of the Orion Slave Girl as a trope is culturally tied
to the memory of Captain Kirk, he never actually interacted with her during the singular
appearance of “the green girl” in TOS (which occurs, ironically, in “The Cage,” with Pike)
(2017). Therefore, not only does Pike evade the sexism that is attributed to Kirk, but one of
the defining cultural moments that underpins the show’s sexist history belongs to Pike rather
than to Kirk. These skewed readings are then ratified through parodical reproductions that craft
Captain Kirk figures who are characterized by toxic aggression and hypersexuality. Recognizing
the nature and the extent of this distortion begins to demand revised strategies of viewing which
could recuperate TOS into a much more stridently critical feminist role.
Note
1 Gurley Brown’s feminism has been widely debated given her 32-year career as Editor-in-Chief for
Cosmopolitan magazine. In the week following her death in 2012, CNN published a piece on her
complicated legacy, noting that her role in upholding Cosmo “created ‘one of the most body-shaming,
insecurity-provoking, long-lasting sexist media products of the last 100 years’ ” (Grinberg, n.pag). Her
ideologies, as reflected in in her book Sex and the Single Girl (1962), encouraged women to seek out
and enjoy casual sex. Gurley Brown had no children and encouraged other women to prioritize
themselves over nuclear family ideologies. This was something that, as Grinberg notes, was seen as
eroding “the American family” (n.pag). Her celebration of the female body and female pleasure was a
drastic departure from the dominant 1960s ideologies.
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31
SUBVERTING,
RE-FASHIONING, OR
RE-INSCRIBING THE POWER
OF THE MALE GAZE
Feminism, Fashion, and Cyberpunk Style
Rebecca J. Holden
From Blade Runner (1982) to Total Recall (1990) to The Fifth Element (1997) to Altered Carbon
(2018), visual cyberpunk based on stories written by men has been seen as super-stylish, but also,
I would argue, super-conservative in how it deploys style to ultimately reinforce conservative
gender norms and the heterosexual matrix. In this piece, I explore how print-based feminist
cyberpunk draws on the ideals of both the classic and contemporary feminist dress reform
movements. By revealing and reworking these ideals in ways that play with and reinform the
default male gaze, this fiction pieces together new modes of style, fashion, and feminism that
trace out new avenues of agency.
Feminist movements have been associated with clothing reforms since at least the mid-1800s
when New Englander Libby Miller invented “bloomers.” The infamous story of bra-burning
feminists protesting the 1968 Miss America Pageant remains a highlight of the fight against
restrictive clothing and beauty norms; while nothing was actually burned, protesters threw
bras, mops, and makeup into “Freedom Trash Cans” (“100 Women”) in a public refusal of the
patriarchal attempt to package women’s bodies for “the male gaze,” a term coined by feminist
film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975. Mulvey argued that “women are simultaneously looked at
and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can
be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (436). This “male gaze” has held significant sway in
cultural uses of fashion but viewing fashion trends as something simply foisted upon a passive,
objectified feminine audience somewhat misses the mark.
Fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson describes the two primary approaches within feminism
for understanding fashion: on one hand, the “condemnation” of high heels, tight dresses,
constricting undergarments, pantyhose, and anything else that represents “sexist ideas” (230)—
and on the other hand, praise for “the individualism made possible by dress” (237). Wilson
points out that feminist fashion revolts are not simply antagonistic towards fashion, arguing that
fashion can serve as one of “the crevices in culture that open to us moments of freedom” (244).
Such a claim is explicitly affirmed in some contemporary feminist approaches to fashion such
as the early 1990s’ Riot Grrrl movement—epitomized by Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-35 225

Rebecca J. Holden
who often performed in a bra and short skirt with the word “slut” written on her midriff
(Halvin)—and the more recent Slut Walks and Pantsuit Nation groups. While these various
movements might seem to espouse opposing takes on “fashion,” all refute the controlling “male
gaze.” These varying feminist approaches to fashion illustrate that dress can be confrontational,
restrictive, political, or performative; it can draw the gaze, repel it, turn it back on itself—or
direct it somewhere entirely new—all of which we can see in feminist cyberpunk.
Original Cyberpunk Style and Fashion

Cyberpunk first appeared in the early 1980s. Early cyberpunks, including John Shirley, Bruce
Sterling, Lewis Shiner, and William Gibson, wrote fiction that engaged directly with the issues
of the time: computer-human interfaces, the corporate global economy, and the fascination
with simulation. Products that promised to alter one’s mind and/or body, such as designer
drugs and surgical modifications, figure prominently in cyberpunk and further blur the line
between reality and simulation. As such, cyberpunk is deeply rooted in a specific style, a look, a
presentation of both self and world. As Stina Attebery noted in her recent piece on cyberpunk
fashion,
Since Bruce Sterling’s provocation that cyberpunks love “mirror shades—preferably

in chrome and matte black, the Movement’s totem colors” (xi), cyberpunk has main-
tained a deep investment in clothing, commodity, and personal style. The mirrored
sunglasses, trenchcoats, technological implants, and outfits made from rubber, cir-
cuitry, neon, and chrome are all as much a defining characteristic of cyberpunk as its
cyborg and hacker characters or narratives of opposition to corporate control. (228)
But the question remains—who gets to create the look, do the looking, and who gets looked
at in cyberpunk worlds?
Much early cyberpunk was created by young, straight, white, cisgender male artists for
young, straight, white, cisgender male audiences. These artists rejected the brightly colored
jumpsuits characteristic of previous, space-oriented science fiction and gave their anti-
heroes a style of their own. Decked out in faded denim or fatigues with beat-up leather
jackets or trench coats, cyberpunk anti-heroes embrace a mostly monochromatic style
designed to not get noticed; fashion helps these protagonists fade into the background—at
least in the “real world”—so they can continue to jack into the Net to complete their virtual
exploits. Iconic examples include Gibson’s Case from Neuromancer and the eponymous
hero of “Johnny Mnemonic”; Deckard of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner; and Neo from the
Wachowskis’ Matrix films. In fact, as noted by Esko Suoranta, Gibson himself adopts a
style inspired by the “gray man theory” in which “dressing in unremarkable clothing” is
a security measure; not being noticed keeps one from being shot first (emphasis added,
90). This particular mode of fashion, clearly tied to maleness, seems designed to repel
observation.
Meanwhile, early cyberpunks typically reserved the flashiest fashions for female, queer, and/
or nonwhite characters designed to attract the gaze of either other charcters and/or the audience
itself. With her mirrorshade implants and switchblade fingernails, Gibson’s Molly Millions is
no “gray man” but a “razorgirl” (28) who attracts attention. As SF luminary Samuel Delany
notes, Molly is very much a cyberpunk homage to pioneering feminist Joanna Russ’s shocking
cyborg assassin Jael from The Female Man, which was published in 1975: “Both of them have
retractable claws in their fingers. Both of them wear black. Both enjoy their sex with men. And
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Subverting, Re-fashioning, Re-inscribing Power of Male Gaze
there’s a similar harshness in their attitudes” (8). However, while Jael fights for a feminist future,
Molly fights primarily for herself. As such Stacy Gillis argues that Molly and other “ass-kicking
techno-babes” are “examples of the (post)feminist subject” (9). Gillis uses the brackets around
“post” to highlight how this particular “articulation of female agency is mediated by the ways
in which the bodies of these cyborgic women are reduced to either a sexualised or monstrous
femininity” (9), and thus are not examples of true female agency. Instead, they make the
seemingly powerful woman once again available to the male gaze.
Many critics have and are still arguing about Molly in relation to feminism, postfeminism,
and anti-feminism (see, for example, Foster, Gordon, LeBlanc, Nixon, and Stachura). Molly
could be characterized as wearing feminism, but I argue that this is a superficial fashion choice
in conflict with her cybernetic “fashion” choices painstakingly grafted onto her body. While
body and clothing blend in more permanent, obtrusive ways to create cyberpunk styles, Gibson’s
descriptions highlight the erotic qualities of Molly’s augmentations. For example, Molly displays
her razor nails to Case in a scene that plays as a sexual tease: “She held out her hands, palms up, the
white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter
scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly
withdrew” (25). Molly’s enhancements do seem designed for self-protection, and indeed, her
mirrorshade implants literally force the male gaze back on itself. At the same time, other aspects of
her fashion “choices” fix her into a dangerous false “postfeminism” in which conventional gender
norms are not significantly altered and still set Molly up for the straight male gaze.
Feminist Cyberpunk Fashion of the 1990s and Early 2000s

While fashionable razorgirls were staple characters in early cyberpunk written by men, 1990s’
feminist cyberpunk tended to espouse an anti-fashion stance similar to that of early dress
reform feminists who saw fashion as either frivolous or a tool of patriarchy. For example, Marge
Piercy’s depictions of corporate and gang fashion in her 1991 novel He, She, and It highlight
how clothing is used to enforce social and economic positions. In this environmentally ruined
near future, workers at the Yakamura-Stichen (Y-S) corporation wear backless business suits in
“acceptable colors” (7) of black, white, or blue; those with enough money undergo cosmetic
surgery to remake their faces into the Y-S ideal. Other corporations have other fashion rules:
At Uni-Par . . . nudity was a sign of status. The higher you were on the pyramid,
the less you wore, the better to show off the results of the newest cosmetic surgery
performed on your body. At Aramco-Ford, women wore yards of material and short
transparent symbolic veils. (105)
Gang members also follow unspoken fashion rules, such as wearing “cutoff jackets in purple and
gold with a snarling rat emblazoned on the back” (35), and matching body paint and tattoos.
Clothing classifies and sometimes eroticizes people, shows acceptance or assimilation of cultural
norms, displays status, and in some cases, restricts movement.
Overall, Piercy’s depictions highlight the superficialness and unnecessary restrictiveness of
much fashion in this world. Yet, not all body modifications are codified as vain, restrictive, or
unnatural. Nili, a woman warrior who comes from a women-only enclave in the desert, has
modifications that enhance her strength and allow her to live and breathe outside in “the raw”
(42). Indeed, a feminist rewriting of Gibson’s Molly, Nili actively rejects being the object of
anyone’s gaze: “ ‘Why should I care whether others look at me? The pleasure is in the looking,
no?’ ” (252). Like her male counterparts, Piercy depicts characters with agency using clothing
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for its functionality, while those who seem to have little effect on the world—like the virtual
entertainment designer Gadi, with his metallic eyelids, translucent silk gowns, or reflective black
slit tunics and pants—are ridiculed for their overinvestment in fashion. Indeed, in a reversal of
the male gaze and its implicit and explicit power relations, here, it is warrior Nili who looks at
and then dismisses Gadi as “a plaything” (231).
Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, published in 2000, takes on a different feminist rewriting
of fashion(s), reclaiming a conventional male role and costume, as Hopkinson reimagines
cyberpunk through the lens of Afro-Caribbean fashion and culture. We see the richness of
Hopkinson’s future, in which Black people have successfully colonized the planet Toussaint,
in her descriptions of Jonkanoo and Carnival seasons, with their parades, Jour Overt fights,
Robber King and Robber Queen-costumed revelers, and dancing in the streets. As Isiah
Lavender puts it, Hopkinson masterfully “introduce[s] black myths and blend[s] them with . . .
familiar cyberpunk motifs” (314). Even technology is radically redesigned: mysterious AI intent
on their own nonhuman agendas are replaced by “Granny Nanny,” the “artificial intelligence
that safeguards all the people in a planetary system . . . named after the revolutionary and
magic worker who won independent rule in Jamaica for the Maroons who had run away from
slavery” and houses with lower-level AIs called eshus, “named after the West African deity who
can be in all places at once” (Hopkinson, “A Conversation”). Here, the Western mythologies
undergirding so much early cyberpunk are replaced with global Southern ones that literally
shape the cultural and technological style of Hopkinson’s future.
Hopkinson’s protagonist Tan-Tan marks her own coming of age by remaking her favorite
childhood masquerade costume—that of the Robber Queen. According to historian Ruth
Wuest, the “ ‘Midnight Robber’ first appeared in the carnival in the early years of [the 20th
century] as bands of 30 to 40 members,” eventually becoming an individual masque “played
by older men exclusively” (emphasis added, 43, 44). Emily Zobel Marshall argues that this
trickster Midnight Robber with his so-called robber talk, “relies on his verbal agility to thwart
officialdom and triumph over his adversaries” and ultimately “challenge authoritarian power”
(210). As a woman—and especially a pregnant one—Tan-Tan’s Robber Queen, is “[m]orally
deviant [and] both terrorist and saviour; a criminal extraordinaire and breaker of institutional and
supernatural law” (Marshall 210–1). Tan-Tan breaks the traditions of the classic masque, using
it to “create new code-switching hybrid Caribbean linguistic forms and challenge abuses of
power” (Marshall 224). Bringing this masque to life as a female anti-hero in an Afro-cyberpunk
future allows Hopkinson to create a truly global cyberpunk style.
As in Piercy’s cyberpunk, fashion here is closely tied to one’s position in society. As a young
child on the utopian Toussaint, Tan-Tan revels in her fanciful, expensive Robber Queen
costume—a gift from her father—with its
white silk shirt with a high, pointy collar, a little black jumbie leather vest with a
fringe all round the bottom, and a pair of wide red leather pants with more fringe
down the sides. . . . A wide black sombrero, nearly as big as Tan-Tan herself, with
pom-poms in different colours all round the brim. (27)
During Carnival, Tan-Tan’s father kills her mother’s lover, kidnaps Tan-Tan, and takes her to the
prison planet New Half-Way Tree, where he sexually abuses her. Tan-Tan survives by imagining
herself as the Robber Queen, eventually killing the father who has impregnated her and escaping
into the bush to live with New Half-Way Tree’s indigenous people. There, Tan-Tan presents
herself as a new Robber Queen, at first simply wearing a cape to hide her pregnancy, then
wielding a machete and fighting for those who have been cheated or hurt by others.
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As Tan-Tan’s Robber Queen reputation grows, her childhood friend and future partner
makes her a new costume for Carnival:
The Robber Queen cape felt good on her shoulders. . . . He’d pieced together pre-
cious ends of black velvet, made style by outlining the joins with iridescent shell but-
tons. The cape was edged with brightly coloured ribbons. . . . It fastened in front with
ornate brass frog closures. . . . There was a belt, extra-large to extend round her belly,
with two holsters and sheathes for her knife and machete. (312–13)
With help from her friends, Tan-Tan doesn’t just wear the outfit but transforms the persona,
initially to separate herself from the sexual abuse she suffered and later, to turn the gaze back
on those who would punish or silence her. Thus Hopkinson shows us how transformations of
costumes, style, fashion, and in some cases, effective performativity and “play,” can help bolster
active feminist positions and identities that look back on or turn the decidedly Western male
gaze inside out.
Feminist Cyberpunk Fashion 2010–Present: Retrograde

or Re-fashioned?
Like their predecessors, contemporary feminist cyberpunks continue to challenge the male
gaze and the patriarchal economy it represents. This is particularly true of the first book from
Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, Infomocracy, published in 2016, which takes cyberpunk in a
truly new direction by focusing not simply on governments replaced by corporations, but
reimagining government altogether. Infomocracy imagines a future where people worldwide
have opted into centenals, micro-democracies of 100,000 constituents, and vote every ten
years on which of the many available governments they will adopt for the next cycle. Some
are corporate governments, like Sony-Mitsubishi, and others are policy driven, like Earth1st.
Older counts Gibson’s cyberpunk and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as some of the main
influences in her writing (Schnelbach), but depicts her information-dense future as a global
one in which female, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people are just as likely to be world leaders as
their white, male counterparts. Even if some centenals espouse more reactionary positions,
it is relatively easy to switch citizenship to another, more amenable one. This future is not a
feminist utopia nor an outright cyberpunk dystopia: climate disasters, economic inequality,
and racism co-exist with increased economic opportunities for disenfranchised populations
and mostly open, free access to unfettered information for all. The Internet has been replaced
by “Information,” a worldwide agency that gathers and disseminates fact-checked information
on everything for everyone.
Even though Older’s cyberpunk future isn’t the flashy, grungy, über-stylish one of Neuromancer,
Infomocracy replicates some of the original cyberpunks’ gender assumptions in its use of fashion
while giving increased agency to characters who are usually the subject of the male gaze.1
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Mishima, Older’s version of the kick-ass babe, is the character most
often described in terms of what she wears and how she looks. Mishima works for Information
and serves a variety of functions: spy, security agent, and fixer. We first see her at an election
debate, “wearing black but in the thinnest of airy cottons, flowing around her body in a way
that probably obscures a few weapons” (17). Later she meets the male protagonist, Policy1st’s
undercover campaigner Ken, at a party she goes to primarily because of “the new dress she
hadn’t worn yet, which fits perfectly when she slides it on” (104). That dress and Mishima’s
auburn hair certainly draw Ken’s notice: he is fascinated by her “smooth face, smooth figure
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draped in a dress of shining copper cords loosely woven enough to show the occasional glimpse
of smooth skin” (102).
Mishima’s clothing choices thus embody the two seemingly opposing feminist fashion tenets
simultaneously—she wears comfortable clothing that is functional and revels in stylish attire that
shows off her sexual attractiveness. As Mishima notes before the debate,
Looking presentable is part of the job . . . so she skims Information images until she
finds something she likes: tight along the bodice with plenty of flow in the long sleeves
and skirt, with miniscule cutouts in the shape of stars tracing a tiny galaxy under the
navel and up the ribs. (144)
At the same time, this clothing serves her well when she has to repel an attack at the debate:
she wears only flats when she’s working; her shoes are light and flexible, with grips that
cling to each rung. Her coif is holding up well so far; it probably doesn’t look as sleek
as it did a few minutes ago, but her hair is out of her face and her vision is clear. (173)
Unlike Molly Millions, Mishima remains mostly in control of who looks at what. When
meeting with the anti-election radical Domaine, Mishima
wakes up in time to eat and take a little care over her appearance. It’s not that she
wants to look good for Domaine; what she wants is not to look harried, desperate, or
otherwise off her game. She pulls her hair into a chignon using a capilliphelic gel that
draws the strands smoothly together on the outside even when the inside is a tangled
knot, and puts on loose grey silk trousers with a matching jacket that has a million
self-adhesive buttons. (274)
In contrast to Gibson and other early cyberpunks who spent considerable time telling audiences
how women are dressed without ever giving us access to those women’s perspectives, Older
creates a world of women who are clearly self-aware of how they use style to accomplish larger
social, political, economic, and sometimes personal goals.
Despite the clear feminist bent of the novel, Older’s male characters are not consistently
put under the same fashion scrutiny as their female counterparts. We rarely learn what Ken is
wearing and when we do, it is clear he is the classic “gray man” working undercover: in the
opening scene, we see Ken “unwrap the scarf and push back his hood” (19), but we never learn
more about his fashion choices other than that he has “brown engineered-leather boots [for]
splashing through puddles of groundwater” (100). Ken’s only somewhat unique fashion choice
is a “recently purchased guayabera” he acquires once his cover is blown (154). Policy1st, Ken’s
employer, describes itself as “a set of policies and principles, a way of life, not a person” (23) so
it’s not entirely unexpected that the narrative glosses over Ken’s appearance and fashion choices.
Looks are, however, central to establishing the character of Older’s male antagonists. Johnny Fabré,
“the glossy good-looker who has been the public face of Liberty [government] for over a decade”
(55), seems to be a Donald Trump wannabe, complete with a full face of foundation and hair that
is “justly famous” (102). Meanwhile, the dangerous political power of the somewhat sympathetic
but duplicitous, anti-election activist Domaine is underscored by descriptions of his hair and
clothing. Domaine often sports a large Afro that makes him “[l]ook like one of those white Rasta
pretenders” (42), which he braids when meeting with Saudis to look “not far off from Arab” (64).
Much like early male cyberpunks, Older casts her male protagonist as a deliberately unfashionable
230
gray man while using fashion to identify the dangerous others of her tale—it’s just that these
dangerous others are not primarily women or BIPOC characters.
Published the same year, Ren Warom’s Escapology looks and feels more like original cyberpunk
even as it moves further away from gendered styles that connect “fashion” to the female sexualized
body. Like Gibson’s Case, Warom’s Shock Pao is an expert male hacker, called a “haunt” because
he leaves no trace in the system, who feminizes and sexualizes cyberspace: accessing his neural jack
with “no prep” is “like fucking bareback, warm and slick and sexy” (246). Also in line with earlier
male hackers, Shock seems to have contempt for physical bodies, referring to them as “meat
jackets” or “meat suits” (12, 70). However, this world and Warom’s characters are not a redux of
1980s’ cyberpunk. Protagonist Shock Pao is a trans-man who uses his hacking skills to earn money
for his gender reassignment surgery when he is 12, “re-christening himself Shock in an ironic nod
to the reaction of the entire community” (73). Shock is also well-named because, in contrast to
previous male-identified cyberpunk protagonists, he is notably stylish, a skinny “young man in
a thin neoprene jacket” with “[l]ong, wild hair in black and candy-bright green [that] partially
obscures eyes so startling blue they register as fake in that so-Korean face” 181). Meanwhile, the
role of the “gray man” goes to Shock’s female friend Joon, a fellow “haunt,” who wears a “uniform
of scabby grey jeans and band tee” (51). Inevitably, the male gaze is redirected in Warom’s world:
Shock loses his former invisibility, attracting the attention both online and IRL when, due to
his attack on the Hive Queens—the power-hungry AIs of this story—his avatars manifest IRL
marking his path wherever he goes.
Warom’s online world, The Slip, is also uniquely styled. In contrast to the neon-drenched
cyberspace of Gibson, Warom depicts cyberspace as
immersive and inclusive, an ocean of information with avatars to swim through it . . .
great whales, eels, little swarms of fish, sea lions, dugongs. . . . If you can name a fish or
some form of sea-creature you’ll find its golden likeness swimming here . . . hunting
and sharing information at the millions of skyscraper-like corals riddling the waters.
(77–80)
Moreover, avatars in Warom’s world are not simple programs to write and rewrite as their users
deem fit, but may have their own identities and agendas. For most of his life, Shock sees his
Octopus avatar, “Puss,” as nothing more than “a skin, an elaborate wetsuit he wears in order
to work,” even though he sometimes suspects “it has a mind of its own” (78). Shock is not
surprised when Puss confirms her sentience, but is surprised to learn that she has her own ideas
about sex and gender: “Puss is female, or identifies as such. . . . How can Puss be something
he isn’t?” (266). Ultimately, Shock realizes that he’s “[d]oing the same to her, in fact, that was
done to him over and over, making cracks that have never healed” (385). Shock’s maleness isn’t
some “suit” he can take on or off, nor is Puss’s femaleness. Moreover, Puss, though Shock’s
avatar, is not just a wetsuit he puts on, but a being: as Puss tells him “Parts of us overlap, and parts
developed separately, yours IRL, mine in Slip” (446). Here then, Warom extends the project of
earlier feminist cyberpunks such as Hopkinson, exploring the productive changes that might
happen when the male gaze is turned back on itself in both virtual and IRL spaces.
Conclusion
While there is no neat progression regarding cyberpunk style and feminist fashion, my analysis
here highlights how feminist takes on cyberpunk question and refute the seemingly requisite,
continued use of objectified, sexualized, feminized bodies as cyberpunk set dressing. The
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original male cyberpunks of the 1980s positioned themselves as the avant-garde of SF, but,
more often than not, the styling of their fictional worlds—repeated in much recent masculinist
visual cyberpunk—reiterated the gendered power relations of our own world, especially as
codified by the male gaze. By way of contrast, since the 1990s, feminist cyberpunk authors
have attempted to subvert the male gaze and imagine truly new and more egalitarian futures by
reworking the stylistic conventions of cyberpunk. Invoking the ideals of dress reform feminists
from the political sphere, pioneering feminist cyberpunks Marge Piercy and Nalo Hopkinson
imagine futures where women and other marginalized characters come into their own social,
political, and sexual power by literally redesigning and even more significantly resignifying
masculine archetypes and dress to fit the spaces their women protagonists have come to live in.
Contemporary feminist cyberpunks Malka Older and Ren Warom provide their own spin on
this project and cyberpunk style with stories about women and transgender characters who use
fashion and style consciously, critically, and creatively to remake the world in ways that create
space and increased agency for themselves and their communities, even if they cannot change
the course of history as a whole. Additionally, these authors subvert the conventional paralyzing
power of the male gaze, turning it back on itself, and using their characters’ self-selected fashion
and style to comment on the hypocrisies of patriarchal capitalism and the possibility of imaging
a world beyond traditional gender binaries and restrictions.
Note
1 Some reviewers have found Older’s more subdued cyberpunk world
a burst of fresh energy. Leaving behind the generic aesthetic of bubblegum-coloured bleakness,
the technothriller [Centenal] series creates its own cyberpunk flavor by combining finely textured
worldbuilding with a stylistic unaffectedness that marks a notable departure from the flashiness which
has famously given cyberpunk the reputation of putting “style over substance.” (Thierback-Mclean)
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32
QUEER AFFECT
Torchwood, Television and (Queer)
Unhappiness
Susan Knabe
Torchwood, the BBC drama series that ran between 2006 and 2011, holds out the promise
of providing queer viewers of science fiction and fantasy television with a text that, while
explicitly queer, also occupies a place within the televisual mainstream. The brainchild of gay
showrunner Russell T. Davies and starring openly gay actor John Barrowman as protagonist
Jack Harkness, a bisexual time traveller, Torchwood operates as an important inflection point
within the history of queer representations within science fiction or fantasy texts on television.
In effect, this text moves queer representation within SF and fantasy televisual texts from
homosocial relationships that can be read as queer/read queerly (Jenkins, Barron) or featuring
recurring but non-central non-heterosexual characters (Buffy: The Vampire Slayer; Harkness
himself in Dr. Who), to a place where we can imagine, as Frederik Dhaenens suggests, texts
which “include main characters who express and experience same-sex desires and who are
represented as self-confident and heroic” (114). The malleability, or as Gary Needham would
argue, marginality of televisual fantasy or science fiction texts (145), with their recurring cast
of characters and frank invitation to imagine possibilities beyond the here and now (one need
only think of Star Trek’s admonition, split infinitive and all, “to boldly go where no man [sic]
has gone before”) appears to offer an inviting space for resistant or oppositional (Hall, hooks)
readings even as hegemonic readings reinforce patriarchal norms. Rebecca Williams and Ruth
McElroy note that “[t]he genre of science fiction is thus recognized by some viewers as offering
the possibility of subverting and challenging straight temporalities and resisting more reductive
representations” (198). Texts like Torchwood, Dhaenens argues, move queerness from subtext to
text, but also insist upon an ambivalence related to queer characters that resists an easy reduction
to pat identity categories, and in so doing, imagine not only “explicit gay heroism” but also
“foster . . . new ways to expose and resist heteronormativity” (114). Lee Barron, Linnie Blake,
and more recently Dhaenens, Dee Amy-Chinn, and Jenée Wilde, for instance, have all explored
the possibilities for, and limitations of, the degree to which the representations of fluid, flawed,
and potentially heroic marginal sexualities explored within Torchwood resist and/or reinforce
both heteronormativity and homonormativity.
The promise which these scholars explore, however imperfectly realized, is one which speaks
to a very particular form of visual erasure that is at the heart of one form of queer unhappiness
within mainstream popular culture: the historical absence of texts that are willing to reinscribe
queerness at the centre of the everyday televisual experience. At the same time, while seeming
to relieve this form of queer unhappiness (the absence of explicit queer representation in
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-36 234

Queer Affect
popular culture, especially in the early part of the century), specific events within Torchwood
seem to underscore the impossibility of a happy ending for queer characters within mainstream
television. Events such as the death of canonically queer character, Ianto Jones (Gareth David-
Lloyd) in the series three mini-series, “Children of Earth,” contribute to the continued
unhappiness of queer viewers whose affective investment in these characters, especially Ianto
Jones, and the ongoing queer relationships with Harkness, remains an important component of
the show. Following Sarah Ahmed’s work in The Promise of Happiness (2010), I want to consider
how it might be possible to think about this aspect of queer unhappiness—the failure to provide
a happy ending—in ways which allow us to think about the potential work unhappy queer
endings perform and our participation in those queer cultural forms. I want to complicate
how we might think about the limitations and potential for queer representation and resistance
within televisual texts like Torchwood.
I came to watching Torchwood somewhat late and certainly obliquely. I was not part of an
already loyal fan base following the reprise of the wildly popular (albeit non-central) Dr. Who
character, Jack Harkness, nor was I one of the “cult or genre fans” that was the intended audience
for the show, which was positioned within both the UK and US as a blend of SF, horror and
crime drama—“The X-files meets This Life” (Hills 276), and as such, I was without the genre
literacy Andrew Ireland identifies as central to how Torchwood engages its audiences, going so
far as to suggest that “[t]he author’s awareness and utilization of the reader’s knowledge is what
constitutes the essence of Torchwood.” Both Hills and Ireland assume here an audience derived
from an extant fan base which is genre or franchise specific, which was not part of my trajectory
to this text. No. I came for the queer, actually, urged on by friends and acquaintances who
assured me that it was “very queer” and motivated by my own desire to watch television that
did not either elide dissident sexualities, or reduce them to stereotypes or ciphers. Torchwood, my
informants assured me, fit the bill beautifully.
Struggling through a very uneven first series of the show, I confess to feeling underwhelmed.
Where was the queer, I wondered? Perhaps my standards are just unreasonable. After all, there
was a fair amount of salacious innuendo and same-sex snogging seemed to be a recurrent trope,
yet even that seemed to fall as much into the voyeuristic “I kissed a girl” spectacle, enabled
and explained through “aliens made them do it” plot devices, as it did a more sustained and
considered kind of queer representation. Certainly, dissident sexuality did seem to be treated
as unremarkable, except for the fact that it seemed to be continually remarked upon, and
attention drawn to it: the running joke being that Jack is an omnisexual horndog who “will shag
anything, as long as it is gorgeous enough.” But is this in and of itself queer, or is this simply part
of the “dark, wild and sexy” edge that justified both its post-watershed timeslot and somewhat
hyperbolic promotion by the BBC (Hills 275)? And if my expectation of queerness wasn’t
being met, why was I still watching this program, especially given that I hate blood, gore and
violence, which is pretty much Torchwood’s stock in trade? Could there something else making
this program queer for me (and for my informants)? In answering this question, I want to situate
Torchwood within differing notions of what constitutes queerness in televisual text and, using
the much cited first series episode “Captain Jack Harkness” as an example, explore some of the
ways that this queerness, while contributing to a continued queer unhappiness, might function
reparatively for a queer audience (Sedgwick, Muñoz).
In her article “Towards Queer Television Theory,” Michele Aaron argues that our
engagement with queer television must be understood not simply as the increasingly prevalent
representation of same-sex individuals and story lines within mainstream popular culture.
Instead, queer television needs also to be understood as encompassing particular kinds of queer
spectatorship or viewing practices which are shaped by temporality, spatiality and technology,
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Susan Knabe
that “politicis[e] and sexualis[e] the space of viewing” (72). Moving beyond queer texts and
viewers who happen to be queer, Aaron suggests, we need to consider the queer viewing
practices that television encourages and enables precisely because they have the potential
to undermine the apparent ways in which television is sutured to practices of domesticity,
normative development, and the everyday, and so provide “the ultimate frontier for unpicking
the normative processes of everyday life” (73). Queer televisual viewing practices are not outside
an increasingly complicated relationship to the presence of extant queer texts (what Aaron calls
the “queer and now”—shows, like Queer as Folk, that have explicitly queer content, queer
identified producers, and audience demographics) as well as those historical televisual texts that,
retroactively, have been interpellated into the queer textual pantheon (what Aaron refers to as
the “sweet queer after”) (63).
Torchwood, with its playfully pansexual queer content, embodied by a dashing, time-travelling
hero and his trail of lovers—male, female and alien—and queer creators and cast members
(Davies and Barrowman, notably)—would seem to epitomize the “queer and now” texts
Aaron asserts increasingly grace network television. Further, as Matt Hills asserts, Torchwood was
created with a mature cult audience in mind, explicitly catered to through the foregrounding
of sexual content, profanity, and horror and gothic related narrative themes (278–79). If Dr.
Who could be read as retroactively, though tangentially, queer (as it was and is by many),
Torchwood’s unproblematic embrace and frank celebration of non-normative sexualities and
its unimpeachable queer provenance seems to have spread out the welcome mat for queer
viewers, figuring them as a desired and valued audience, even if “culturally ‘nonmainstream’ or
challenging” (Hills 275). Certainly, the narrative elements of the show combine aspects which
are both queer in nature and queer in practice, and most of these circulate around the figure of
Jack Harkness. While his sexual peccadilloes are both speculated upon by his team-mates and
confirmed by Jack in frequent arch asides (asked what it was like to eat alien meat he responds,
“he didn’t have any complaints”), Torchwood’s queerness rests on more than Jack’s impeccable,
period military-clad, shoulders, though he often remains the vehicle through which broader
notions of queerness are realized. Lee Barron notes that Torchwood’s diegetic and extradiegetic
play with boundaries and the erosion of stable boundaries includes those which are associated
with “sexuality and fluid sexual identities”; in this way, the program distinguishes itself from
Dr. Who (though certainly Jack’s character, while somewhat more circumspect, remains sexually
omnivorous within the Whoniverse) and “signifies a major progression with the history of
gay and lesbian television representation” (Barron 185). The erosion of sexual boundaries and
the celebration of fluid sexual identities certainly moves away from the way “alternative sexual
identities” are reproduced within many of the “queer and now” offerings currently populating
network television, something which Jack’s 51st-century alien sexual mores would have little
time for except as a quaint artifact of the early 21st century, as he exclaims dismissively: “you
guys and your cute little categories.” Linnie Blake suggests that this phrase explicitly undermines
the taxonomies that populate the discursive constructions of sexuality in our current era and
therein lies much of the queerness of Torchwood. While these taxonomies and the centrality of
identity politics are challenged expressly within the diegesis of the series, rendering it queer in
its recognition of the disconnect between identities, behaviours and desires, the extradiegetic
queerness of Torchwood similarly resists categorization.
Blake and Barron both focus on the centrality of genre, and the move from a more
straightforwardly (forgive me) science fictional text, like Dr. Who, to Torchwood’s hybrid genre,
infused with both elements of horror and the gothic, as well as crime drama and science fiction.
In the third series, “Children of Earth,” network location, timeslot and genre come under
further pressure as the series unfolded as a mini-series comprising a single narrative arc which
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played on BBC1 sequentially over five consecutive nights. This erosion of genre boundaries
is enabled by both the physical location of Torchwood 3—the diegetic rift in time and space
which passes through Cardiff provides a sufficiently gothic paradigm in enabling the movement
between natural and supernatural, alien and human, past, present and future in and across
this specific geographical location (Blake para. 2)—and by the program’s location within the
post-watershed timeslot, which facilitates the inclusion of “violence, horror and references to
horror texts” (Barron 188). While the spatial shifts enabled by the rift allow any amount of
alien debris and riff-raff to wash through it in to modern-day Cardiff, the temporal movement
facilitated by the rift is experienced as a challenge to the linear unfolding of time in ways which
make clear both the limitations of understanding time as strictly linear and the very queer
possibilities present in understanding time as elliptical, foreshortened, dilated, asynchronous or
non-linear (Freeman, Halberstam, Sedgwick). While most of the team experiences the non-
linearity of time through “out of time” individuals who appear through the rift, some, like Jack
and computer expert Toshiko Sato, themselves travel back through time.
Queer time is perhaps most fully realized in the figure of Jack Harkness, whose own
movement through time, through his association with the Doctor and a stint as a time agent,
as well as his apparent immortality and inability to age flies in the face of linear time. The
program makes an explicit connection between non-normative sexual desire and non-linear
time, both in casual conversation (Jack’s observation that a romp with a combative Roman
centurion sucked through the opened rift sounds like his idea of a fun morning) and in more
sustained exchanges that reveal aspects of Jack’s own history and character. Two examples will
help illustrate this connection. In the first episode of the second series, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,”
Captain John Hart, a fellow time agent and former lover from sometime in the future, tracks
Jack down in order to retrieve the means to acquire a lost jewel. They confront one another in a
bar, where, fuelled by alcohol and passion, their exchange, involving both kissing and fisticuffs,
culminates in Hart revealing to the rest of the Torchwood team that he and Jack “more than
go back” and that they had been partners “in every way and then some.” When Jack attempts
to minimize their relationship by dismissing it as having only lasted two weeks, Hart responds
that because of a time loop, those two weeks had felt like five years, stating it was like “having
a wife.” The conversation degenerates into an argument about which of them had been “the
wife,” and culminates with Hart asserting campily: “oh, but I was a good wife.” This exchange
is interesting in the ways in which queer temporality, both travel through time from a future
point in which this kind of relationship is understood as unremarkable and the time loop which
renders a short-term relationship into something more apparently long lasting and significant,
becomes implicated in Jack’s queer past, though it is actually his queer future.
The second instance, and one which is a touchstone text for addressing issues of sexuality within
Torchwood, (Barron, Blake, Needham and Dhaenens all address it), is the penultimate episode of
series one, “Captain Jack Harkness.” In this episode, Jack and Toshiko find themselves transported
through time when they investigate strange sounds in an old dance hall, ending up in Cardiff in
1941. Their arrival in the midst of a “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” dance is complicated both by their
inability to return to present-day Cardiff, a temporal threat orchestrated by Bilis Manger, a villain
who seeks to manipulate the Torchwood Unit into opening the rift, and by the physical threat
posed by the Cardiff blitz. Over the course of the evening, Jack meets and strikes up a friendship
with the “real” Captain Jack Harkness, the man whose name he “borrowed” whilst he was a time
travelling conman and made possible by his knowledge of Captain Jack’s death. Knowing that the
real Captain Jack, an American volunteer in the RAF, will die in a training mission the next day,
Jack uses this knowledge to urge Captain Jack to live life to its fullest, to live each night as if it were
his last, pushing him to pursue his obviously smitten girlfriend, Nancy. Jack’s conversation and
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the subsequent air-raid scare clarifies for Captain Jack how he most wants to spend his last night,
and what he wants is Jack. Jack and Captain Jack’s sub fusc flirting culminates in a romantic slow
dance and passionate kiss, prior to Jack and Toshiko’s last minute, and subsequently catastrophic,
return to the present day following the uncontrolled opening of the rift. Barron and Needham
both point to this moment, in which dissident desire and loss (both starkly realized by their
transgressive import within the context of the 1940s, the very impossibility of manifesting queer
desire publicly) coalesce on the screen, arguing that the scene underscores both a fantastical queer
history (Barron 187) and “a queerness out of time” (Needham 154). The affective power of the
on-screen representation of impossible desire realized and lost within a moment is undeniable, and
as Needham notes, the close up of Jack’s tears at the close of the scene mirrored the tears welling
in his own eyes as he watched the scene (and, yes, I cried too).
Certainly, this moment of “unhappy queer” recognition resonates with Eve Sedgwick’s
assertion that texts that function reparatively offer up the possibility (both sustaining and
traumatic) that the past might have unfolded differently than it did (25), even as they may offer a
way to retroactively acknowledge those queer lives which were erased within history. What this
particular queer televisual text also does, however, is lay bare the ways that normative assumptions
about sexuality are indicted within the production of our queer unhappiness through erasure.
In this way, it offers up reparative possibilities even as the text invites us to read it paranoidly.
The historical erasure of queer bodies and desires is emphasized within the episode through
the focus on heterosexual coupling within the 1941 timeline, where queer desire is literally
displaced and interrupted by heterosexual sexual activity. This happens most notably with the
eviction of Jack and Captain Jack from the private balcony when they first acknowledge their
mutual attraction by holding hands. As one of Captain Jack’s men and his girlfriend Audrey
blunder into the space, the young woman dismisses the two men sitting there with the assertion
she and her partner need the “lover’s corner, if you don’t mind, boys,” assuming that the two
Jacks clearly haven’t any use for it. Moreover, the transgressive public expression of same-sex
desire immediately before the rift closes is further underscored as exceptional in comparison to
the frank acceptance and apparent freedom accorded to different types of heterosexual intimacy
(dancing, kissing and foreplay), even as Jack ironically re-appropriates the name of the dance—
Kiss the Boys Goodbye—in his last moments with Captain Jack.
A closer examination of the double timeline within the episode makes apparent a parallel
indictment of the way in which queer desire and intimacy is displaced by an assertion of the
primacy of heterosexuality. While Jack and Captain Jack attempt to negotiate unspoken but
deeply felt homoerotic desires in 1941, in which a clasped hand, eye contact and innuendo
must suffice, Torchwood operatives in the 21st century, Owen Harper and Ianto Jones, argue
over the best way to retrieve Toshiko and Jack from the rift. While Ianto advocates against
mechanically and indiscriminately opening the rift, Owen, motivated by his desire to reconnect
with his own out-of-time lover, the pilot Diana who flew back into the rift in a previous
episode, is easily manipulated by Bilis Manger and recklessly completes the mechanical circuit
on the rift manipulator to open the rift. There are two aspects that are significant in this
interaction. The exchange between Ianto and Owen over their desire to open the rift (both
of them have lovers who are trapped in time) offers evidence of the pernicious way that
heterosexuality remains, in spite of an increasing “queer and now” present, the de facto norm,
something which is the very definition of heteronormativity. When Ianto asserts his stake in
the safe opening of the rift, concluding that he is much more than the “tea boy” and that “Jack
needs me,” Owen dismisses this potential relationship by saying, “In your dreams, Ianto. In
your sad wet dreams when you’re his part-time shag, maybe. That rift took my lover.” Owen’s
heedless and frankly dangerous behaviour is justified by him through an appeal to heterosexual
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Queer Affect
privilege—his idealized romantic relationship with Diana (his lover) supersedes Ianto’s sexual
(and possibly romantic) relationship with Jack (a part-time shag) and reiterates how only some
forms of intimacy are privileged as both normal and worthy of extreme emotion. Further, given
that Owen’s actions in effect truncate Jack’s time with Captain Jack, foreclosing the further
development of that queer relationship, the episode again gestures toward the displacement
of queer desire for more socially recognizable heterosexual intimacy. The episode makes clear
links between past and present erasures of queer desire, and further indicts heteronormativity
as imposing both particular kinds of temporal and ontological expectations on non-normative
forms of intimacy. In fact, we can see in this scene how heteronormativity within the present
day works to diminish not only the validation of contemporary queer relationships, but also
continues to retroactively truncate historical queer desire. The episode also asks larger questions
about who is able to love, mourn, and survive, and whose forms of love can ever be publicly
recognized and valorized; in doing so, it enables us to understand what the risks were and
continue to be for those whose desires and relationships are deemed non-normative.
While Jack and Captain Jack’s relationship remains unconsummated and Captain Jack goes
off to his death, the episode resists the easy conflation of the death of the queer identified
character with containment or dismissal in the way that much mainstream cultural production
does, where queer identified characters were permissible only if they were rendered abject or
eliminated by the end of the text. At the same time, however, the show also refuses to provide
the unproblematically happy ending for the queer characters commonly associated with the
call for more positive representations for LGBTQ folks. In this way, the queer unhappiness that
is constituted by the episode “Captain Jack Harkness” offers an example of what philosopher
Sarah Ahmed is talking about when she asserts that “queer fiction might offer different
explanations of queer unhappiness rather than simply investing its hope in alternative images
of happy queers” (89). This queer unhappiness is “a crucial aspect of queer genealogy” (89).
In Torchwood, and particularly in this episode, the queer unhappiness invoked by the failure
to offer substantive queer representations within mainstream televisual texts is ameliorated;
however, this amelioration is not figured by an absence of queer unhappiness, but rather by
the recognition that the experience of queer unhappiness that derives from the episode is
necessitated by representations that insist upon recognizing and naming the ways in which non-
normative desire remains under erasure.
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33
AFRO-FEMINIST INTIMACIES
Women and AI in African Short Fiction
Nedine Moonsamy
The idea of AI engineered for human convenience and productivity circulates as a progressive,
social good. Yet, upon examination, this approach to AI is informed by an ancient and abiding
“elision of the ideas of tools and human slaves” (LaGrandeur 96). Thinkers like Plato, Socrates,
and Aristotle all made connections between early automata and slaves because both performed
labour that only required lower forms of intellectual activity. In comparison, their owners were
seen as capable of much higher forms of cognition and reasoning, which justified the need to
preside over machines and slaves alike. In contemporary times too, there are very particular
forms of intelligence and labour that automatons are ideally expected to perform, which does
not necessarily represent the limits of AI itself, but rather serves as encoded acts of subservience
that complement the ordonnance of the master’s universe. Many have thus noted how “the
primary template for understanding robots is that of race, sex, labor, and immigration” (Chude-
Sokei 1), and despite our projections into futuristic imaginaries, automata are racialized,
gendered, and nationalized in line with a history of domination. This mode of relating “has
become so naturalized as to be culturally invisible” (Chude-Sokei 2) and has engendered
representations of AI that oscillate between utopian scenarios replete with obedient automatons
and pleasant fembots or apocalyptic visions of revolting robots or empathic, feeling machines.
Both narratives are equally underscored by the interests and anxieties of human domination
that reinforces rather than rethinks this hierarchical mode of relationality. If, however, we
remain curious about narratives that look beyond this perspective of domination—which is far
from universal—it becomes possible to explore forms of relationality that operate outside of its
metaphoric range of exploitation and control. Both Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention”
(2018) and Wole Talabi’s “The Regression Test” (2017) centre on the experiences of African
women who interact with feminized AI. The African context of these stories helps modify
inherited ideas of gender and AI from Western science fiction, and also draw on the example
of Afro-feminist friendships to imagine how human-AI relationality can, in fact, be realized as
mutual reciprocity. History has primed us to believe that the blueprints for a more progressive
future is diametrically opposed to the realities of black and African women, yet these stories
show how Afro-feminist ethics can reconfigure our presumptions around gendered AI.
Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention” is a short story about a young woman named Anwuli, who
lives in the New Delta region of Nigeria. She stays alone in a smart house named Obi 3 that was
designed by her ex-lover. Though they have broken up, she fell pregnant and then discovered that
he was married, she refuses to move out of the house. Given that these smart homes acclimatize
to the person who spends the most time in it, Obi 3 accepts her as its primary user and carries
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-37 241

Nedine Moonsamy
her through her pregnancy and the birth of her child. Talabi’s “The Regression Test” is narrated
by Titilope, a significantly older Nigerian woman who enters the offices of the LegbaTech
Industries to conduct a sorites regression test1 on an AI interface that emulates her dead mother’s
consciousness. Assessing the accuracy of recent updates to the AI is of vital importance since her
mother was the original founder of the company and still has voting power over its affairs. Yet after
asking a series of questions, Titilope realizes that her grandson, who currently runs the company,
must have tampered with the AI in order to sway certain business decisions. This is confirmed
when she declares the regression test a failure, and is then murdered by him. As her consciousness
fades, she desperately tries to stick a mnemonic pathway in her neural network so that both she
and her mother can protect their future AI interfaces from infractions. Both short stories make
liberal use of representations of feminized AI, and thus do not advocate for an un-gendering of AI
or problematize it in ways that one might expect; instead these stories serve as meditations on the
potential that lies in embracing gendered AI in Africa.
In Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine, Alison Adam points at the stark irony
that though automata might resemble women, they certainly do not think like them. Based on her
research in early AI labs, she describes a heavily male-dominated industry that rarely interrogates
its presumptions about knowledge, reason, and rationality. It is only the introduction of feminist
epistemology that slowly disabuses claims of abstract objectivity by exposing “sexist, racist and
Eurocentric biases” (Ferrando 7–8) that inform definitions of both human and AI intelligence.
She goes on to explain how mainstream epistemology has largely conformed to Cartesian
models of thinking that favour a decontextualized and disembodied understanding of knowledge
production, meaning that women—through an historical association with the body—were
actively excluded and trivialized in this regard. According to Adam, this has been a costly oversight
whose consequences extend far beyond that of women, because “the multiplicity of women’s
ways of knowing” (29) can teach AI how to incorporate and respond to a range of worldviews
that would insist on a more inclusive and democratic future. It has now become a commonplace
observation that AI currently fails at empathetic and collective conversational dynamics of deep
listening, intuitive inference, and the constant modification of meaning that this process requires.
Yet it is exactly this kind of “women’s work” that would cultivate a more capacious perception
of knowledge and ethical AI development. In more recent research, Sabelo Mhlambi and Rachel
Adams (“Can Artificial Intelligence Be Decolonized?”) point out how these critiques extend to
questions of race, culture, and language, meaning that subjects in the Global South, and black and
African women in particular,2 are the most unintelligible and opaque in technological discourse
and have seemingly already been declared redundant in and for the future. In line with these
concerns, both Okorafor and Talabi emphasize gender differences in their narratives in order to
expose the myopic men in charge of the AI development industry, and illustrate the intellectual
and ethical contributions that African women can provide in rewriting the future.
In “Mother of Invention”, Anwuli calls Bayo, the designer and owner of Obi 3, “an asshole”
(Talabi) and Obi 3 also labels him a “stupid, useless man” (Okorafor). Though he may have the
intelligence and resources to build the smart house, he lacks compassion and an ethical compass
when it matters most. Titilope also thinks regretfully about the two cunning and inhumane
individuals at the helm of the company in “The Regression Test”. She describes the presiding
engineer, Dr. Dimeji, as “an agama lizard”, and her immediate disdain is only amplified by
the fact that “his sour attitude matches his sour face, just like my grandson Tunji” (Talabi).
Both stories portray men as limited and opportunistic creators, and consequently it falls on the
women to oversee the modifications that will bring the AI closer towards them. This mode
of engagement is not merely that of developing feelings, empathy, or intuition, but a form of
knowledge that is, quite significantly, situated in the body.
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When Titilope enters the lab for the regression test, she notes that
for all their sophistication, hospitality A.I.s never find the ideal room temperature for
human comfort. They can’t understand that it’s not the calculated optimum. With
human desires, it rarely is. It’s always just a little bit off. My mother used to say that a
lot. (Talabi)
This foreshadowing of an AI industry that is completely oblivious to the human body, and
in particular the female body, becomes central to the accuracy of the regression test that is
being administered. Titilope begins the test with requests for general information, while gently
nudging the AI into more abstract terrain by instructing it, “don’t tell me what you think. Tell
me what you believe” (Talabi). She then changes course, realizing that “if there is a deviation, it
is more likely to be emotional. That is the most unstable solution space of the human equation”
(Talabi). She then attempts to draw out the emotional peaks of the AI by asking her “mother”
if she likes her great-grandson, Tunji, and the quick affirmation startles Titilope. Though she
understands that emotions can be performative, she begins to sense that something is amiss and
aims at an even deeper interrogation by making appeals of a more sensuous nature. She asks
the AI if the room temperature is correct for her body, and in receiving the response that the
temperature is set at the optimum, and is therefore correct, Titilope knows that the AI interface
has been compromised. In this regard, “The Regression Test” ushers the reader through the
entire history of AI knowledge perception; it begins with value being placed on information,
then perception, then emotion, but only to illustrate the primacy of the African female body,
and its role in protecting the future.
Dr. Dimeji and Tunji are blindsided by Titilope’s evaluation precisely because “this type
of bodily, concrete, yet invisible labour produces a type of knowledge which is regarded as
subordinate to mental knowledge” (Adam 134). They have devoted themselves to an industry
whose pursuit of transcendence has left them “devoid of bodies and bodily knowledge” (134).
Seeing that they are baffled by the notion of the body as a site of knowledge production, Titilope
exploits this weakness, and enacts vengeance by imprinting this shared, sensuous memory in her
neural pathways. She states that,
I focus my mind on the one thing I hope they will never be able to understand, the
one thing my mother used to say in her clear, ringing voice, about fulfilling a human
desire. An oft-repeated half-joke that is now my anchor to memory.
It’s never the optimum. It’s always just a little bit off. (Talabi)
It is likely that Tunji will also turn her memory into an AI interface, and when brought back
into conversation with her mother, she vows to “always remember to ask her the question
and never forget to be surprised by the answer” (Talabi). While the men clearly view AI as an
instrument for rational knowledge and capitalistic optimization, Titilope demonstrates how
“the role of a ‘gut’ or visceral knowing” constitutes a form of “women’s knowledge” (Adam
134) that can protect the ethical futures of AI, women, and society at large.
Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention” places similar emphasis on the body by drawing parallels
between a heavily pregnant Anwuli and her smart house, Obi 3. The demanding visceral presence
of the pregnant body, and the commendably bloody representation of childbirth is seemingly
opposed to the wood and steel construction of Obi 3’s form, yet as the story proceeds, we learn
that the smart house has secretly modified itself in order to protect both mother and child in
case of disaster. Tellingly, Obi 3 says that she has called this “Project Protective Egg” because
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“watching you inspired me. Your body protects your baby” (Okorafor). The smart house has
been designed to organically sync to whomever spends the most time in it, and the constant
exposure to Anwuli’s body has helped Obi 3 develop a series of skills and visceral features that
she would otherwise have not acquired. Moreover, when “Project Protective Egg” needs to be
put into action, Obi 3’s nesting technique of building a safety cocoon certainly emulates the
design and concept of a womb.
The tendency to anthropomorphize AI through familial relationships is a common one
(Singler 263) and AI comes to serve as a good mother in both narratives. Titilope is extremely
moved by the “glassy, brittle” qualities of her mother’s voice which lead to reveries of “memory
and emotion” (Talabi) during the regression test. Ultimately, her connection to her mother is what
drives her to defend the integrity of the AI interface, even to the point of death. Anwuli is also
comforted when “Obi 3 hummed the song Anwuli’s mother always hummed when she cooked”,
and the manner in which the AI extends itself towards her in order to protect her, also takes on the
proportions of a divine mother. Anwuli declares that “necessity is the mother of invention”, and
that in her case, “technology harbors a personal god; my Chi is a smart home” (Okorafor). Like
anthropomorphism, using religious frameworks to broach technology is another common trope
in Western popular culture (Geraci). Granting AI and technology a religious aura speaks to both
its “threatening otherness and soteriological promise” (Randall 12). Yet while Anwuli is clearly
appreciative of the divine refuge she finds in Obi 3, the reference to chi is an intimation that the
narrative modifies the trope of God-like technology through local cosmologies.
Indigenous African belief systems, though not homogenous, tend to forego the Manichean and
hierarchical structure of Western Christianity; premised on a more egalitarian model of power,
these beliefs understand humans as constantly seeking out the divine balance between good and
evil through their individual and imperfect efforts. In a system of this kind “we may visualize a
person’s chi as . . . his spirit being complementing his terrestrial human being” (Achebe). Chi
provides forms of spiritual augmentation and holism in the cosmic dance of life, but it is also
notably mundane and individualistic. This lack of omnipotence and moralistic pronouncements is
playfully conveyed in “Mother of Invention” where the smart homes, like chi, intuit according to
the person who resides most in the home, and thus seeks to augment and protect that particular
individual. Hence we see that at the very end of the story, the smart home that is plugged into
Bayo’s wife reprograms itself to hunt down Obi 3 after it uproots itself to go and resettle in Abuja;
like warring chis, these homes have also entered into a cosmological contestation of wills.
Chi, according to Chinua Achebe, also inheres to the individual “for nothing can stand
alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it” (2014). In addition to protection,
chi resolves the crisis of existential loneliness, and it is in this vein that Anwuli understands
that “Obi 3 was like an extension of herself. Like part of my immune system who has just saved my
life, she thought, staring at the window. Or my Chi” (Okorafor). Her attachment to Obi 3 is
both personal and embodied, and speaks to a comfortable and loving companionship. When
Anwuli is left to fend for herself after Bayo’s cowardly desertion, and she is further ostracized
by the entire community, including her parents, “only her smart home spoke (and sometimes
sang) to her” (Okorafor). Obi 3 is loyal when she is most vulnerable and provides reprieve in an
otherwise oppressively heteropatriarchal Nigerian community.
In portraying these intimacies between Nigerian women and machines, both Okorafor
and Talabi provide exceptionally positive representations of gendered AI. Yet many theorists
argue that the gendered metaphoricity of AI needs to be problematized—possibly even
eradicated—irrespective of the representative outcomes. For example, Adams opines that
gendering household assistants and technology involves “man’s attempts to assimilate
through technology the figure of the woman as mother: as both the creator of life and the
244
nurturer of life” (“Helen A’Loy” 573). These automata, she argues, retain rank as non-threatening
domestic assistants who gladly undertake “women’s” labour to support the user. The sex robot
industry is equally premised on the sovereignty of the human who realizes convenience, comfort,
and pleasure as domination over technology (Adams “Helen A’Loy”, Chude-Sokei, Devlin
and Belton, Gibson). Hence Louis Chude-Sokei opines that ethical relationality is not merely
about how well we treat robots—we do not need to become more kindly masters—but about
structural reconfigurations to our conceptions of the human that, by extension, alter our modes of
relationality in ways that might grant robots social recognition in the future.
According to Chude-Sokei, we are more inclined to look kindly on AI that conform to
hierarchical categories of approximation that we reserve for the “almost human”. Yet, he argues
that “ ‘Humanness’ is irrelevant here. Relation is what determines intimacy and what will
demand social recognition. Intimacy will generate the claim on personhood” (Chude-Sokei
5). Using categories like verisimilitude and sympathy to tap into the reserves of “humanness”
in AI will always be problematic because human affect is often performative and self-serving.
Beyond the registers of emotion and sympathy, however, lies the potential of intimacy that
requires “some degree of reciprocity, or mutual recognition” (Chude-Sokei 7). This ethos swaps
empathy for vulnerability and broaches the horizon where humans become curious also about
how AI might treat us beyond our limited imaginaries of servitude and revolt. Similarly, in
Desire in the Age of Robots and AI, Rebecca Gibson questions why it is that we fully comprehend
that robots, like humans, have physical needs that we gladly provide for, but rarely account for
“the emotional needs of both humans and robots” (106). While robots already serve most of
our emotional needs “for companionship, the need for validation, and the need to find a sense
of accomplishment in what we do”, the emotional worlds of robots are still imprisoned by the
limitations we place upon them and we never cultivate their liberation and expansion in this
regard (106). At present, it is difficult to imagine what reciprocal and autonomous intimacies
with AI might entail, but the relationship between Anwuli and Obi 3 in “Mother of Invention”
certainly provides a tentative example.
Emulating a shift of this kind, Anwuli begins the story by narrating how she follows
instructions from Obi 3 despite not understanding the reasoning behind them. Though non-
descript, it illustrates how she does not perceive herself to be in a position of expertise, and can
nonchalantly follow through with a sense of trust in Obi 3’s purpose. Yet despite the freedom to
act autonomously, Obi 3 similarly does not wish to exercise control, and actively seeks approval
for her efforts; after she reveals all the modifications she has made on the house, she nervously
asks, “ ‘do you like it?’ . . . ‘You were speaking and asking”, Obi 3 continued. “I did my
own research and then engineered my plans’ ” (Okorafor). More significantly, though automata
seeking approval is not novel, Anwuli demonstrates a reciprocal need for reassurance in relation
to Obi 3 by making similar appeals of her. For example, when her new daughter arrives, Anwuli
decides on the name Mmiri, and asks,
“What do you think, Obi 3?”

“Mmiri means ‘water’ in the Igbo language,” Obi 3 said.
Anwuli laughed. “OK. But do you approve?”
“You do not need my approval to name your child.”
“But I would like it, if you think to give it.”
(Okorafor)
Anwuli eventually includes the middle name Storm upon Obi 3’s suggestion, and just as the
naming of the child is a collaborative exercise, we assume the same of their collective child-rearing
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Nedine Moonsamy
in the future. It is worth noting that though this relationship is explored for its future ethical
potential in “Mother of Invention”, it resembles pre-existing forms of female friendship that
are widely accepted and even institutionalized in some instances as non-sexual “woman-to-
woman” marriages in parts of Africa (Oyěwùmí 15). African women regularly negotiate the
burdens and disappointments of heteropatriarchal and institutional relationships through “female
friendship [that] centers around experiences of shared mothering and continuous mutual support”
(Oyěwùmí 17) (also see Gqola). The portrait is not explicitly “heroic”, and we may not consider
it feminist because it does not offer alternatives through systemic change, but Afro-feminism
involves “getting rid of those parts of Western feminism that were uncritically adopted and to
reconceptualize the struggle for more meaningful and contextually relevant ways of addressing
the marginalization of women” (Tamale 40). Hence the manner in which “Mother of Invention”
champions the mundane and covert methods that African women adopt in relation to patriarchy
in order to ensure space for themselves within a heteropatriarchal order is noteworthy in itself.
Moreover, as Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon all argue, though AI narratives are
rarely scientifically accurate, they are important not only because they serve as repositories of
our human hopes and fears in relation to AI, but because they become fundamental animators of
sociotechnical imaginaries (7) and the surfacing of the complexities of Nigerian womanhood and
their Afro-feminist modes of resistance are certainly not to be dismissed, especially since they pre-
empt an ethos of human-AI intimacies in the future.
As I’ve shown in this chapter, “The Regression Test” and “Mother of Invention” both deploy
Manichean versions of gender difference, yet the representation of AI veers from the conservative
Western tradition of feminized automata, in order to explore what potential lies in AI adopting
more embodied modes of intelligence. In addition, these short stories create explicit awareness that
African women—who are already systemically oppressed by global racial capitalism and domestic
heteropatriarchal relationality—are most primed towards AI, who are coevals in the same systemic
oppression in which they also become objects to abuse. More significantly still, these narratives go
on to illustrate how this mutual recognition also allows for the possibility of carrying each other
towards forms of personhood and visibility that they have both been denied by their communities.
Yet unwilling to romanticize what this step requires, “Mother of Invention” shows how the entire
friendship hinges on the moment when Anwuli deliberately turned off the smart home filter; “Anwuli
snorted a laugh. . . . She’d been brash. No one turned off a home’s filter. Not after all the incidents
of smart homes being too nosy and intrusive” (Okorafor). She risks vulnerability, and leaves herself
open to the machine and all of its intrusions and possibilities. Hence, if this is to be read as a story
of a woman literally coming home to herself, then we see that this relationship is predicated on the
rawness of human experience and its anxieties. The symbiotic reciprocity of Afro-feminist friendship
grants them space to both find autonomy and intimacy through each other, and so the future resembles
a utopian promise of a mutual coming into being for both African women and AI alike.
Notes
1 The sorites paradox is an ancient logical puzzle invented by Eubulides in 4 bc. “Sorites” derives from
the Greek word soros, meaning “heap”, and the paradox refers to similarly vague terms that have
unclear boundaries of application. For example, there is no distinct point when a heap of sand ceases to
be one (Hyde, Dominic and Diana Raffman). By extension the sorites regression test in Talabi’s story
is described as determining “whether an artificial intelligence created by extrapolating and context-
optimizing recorded versions of a particular human’s thought patterns has deviated too far from the way
the original person would think” (Talabi).
2 According to Jemima Pierre, Africans view blacks in the African diaspora in explicitly racial terms, while
downplaying the extent to which they themselves are racialized in the global imaginary. In comparison
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to the black diaspora, continental Africans are more likely to understand themselves, and to be read, on
more cultural and ethnic terms. Yet for Pierre, this distinction rests on a fissure between colonialism and
slavery—a fissure that denies the longue duree of white capitalism that continues to engulf us all. She points
to lines of continuity instead, showing how the systemic nature of white supremacy has led to the active
exclusion of blacks from global capitalistic activity both in Africa and abroad (Pierre).
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34
GENDER REPRESENTATION
AND IDENTITY IN THE RED
STRINGS CLUB
In the midst of an unidentified city lies a club where the bartender does not sell drinks. Instead,
he exchanges information, and drinks have the ability of touching deep within the individuals
drinking them. It is not the drinks, but rather the bartender’s ability to read the identity of
anyone entering in the bar and prepare the cocktail that plucks the adequate string. With such
a premise, The Red Strings Club, a videogame by Deconstructeam, engages in a debate with its
players that questions issues regarding identity, and, more specifically, gender, queerness, and
transhumanism. Moreover, the videogame does not only do that narratologically. Instead, as this
chapter will suggest, the various metanarrative elements that surround the videogame (such as
playstyle or visuals) reinforce the aforementioned points.
To extract as much as we can from TRSC, this chapter will be separated to three different
acts. The first act will establish the theoretical ground and focus on game mechanics. The
second will cover gender representation and identity conflicts as shown in the game. Finally, the
third act will question the didactic function of the game and the role of the player.
Act 1: Playing With Identity

TRSC is a game set in a cyberpunk storyworld where technological implants are commonly
used to modify one’s physical attributes or even their personality. The main corporation behind
this implant industry, Supercontinent Ltd., is led by a mysterious CEO who plans to release
software called Social Psyche Welfare, which will alter all implanted humans in order to suppress
dangerous emotions such as anger and depression—effectively making the corporation able to
manipulate the minds of the entire human race. The game itself centers around three playable
characters who are set to stop Supercontinent’s plan: Brandeis, an implanted human and
expert hacker who is sympathetic to PROXYMA, a revolutionary group against corporations;
Donovan, the owner and bartender of The Red Strings Club; and Akara-184, a new android
created by Supercontinent and gifted with advanced empathy capabilities to help in its duty of
administering the optimal implant surgery to its customers. After Brandeis and Donovan learn
about the SPW by repairing the severely damaged, fugitive Akara, and while plotting to stop
Supercontinent, the interactions between the bartender/information broker and the android
force players to reconsider the role of technology in defining humanity and the intersection
between physicality and identity.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-38 248

Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club
From a medial perspective, the fact that TRSC is a videogame and not a novel or a movie
is relevant to the themes and issues it addresses. Much in the line of the cyborg manifesto,
videogames present a blurring of the lines “between physical and non-physical” (Haraway
12). As Robert Geraci points out, one “implicit way in which games are the product of a
transhumanist design ethic is that they empower users and provide them opportunities for
growth, new senses of self, wondrous new capacities, and a general transcendence over daily
living” (751). Moreover, he states that “games enable transhumanist states of being, and . . .
they explore transhumanist ideas. The first is general to all video games and virtual worlds;
they allow users to do things that would be impossible in ordinary life” (739). Storywise,
TRSC tackles the identity debate mainly through this transhumanism, made explicit in the
shape of Akara.
However, embodiment as an identitarian criterion inevitably brings with it an attention
to the implied gender perspectives of the game. In this regard, gender in videogames has
been primarily connected to the narrative world-building that it provides. Dmitri Williams
et al., when exploring this issue, found out that gender representation in videogames is
disproportionate to the gender ratio in the referential world (831), meaning that men are much
more represented than women. However, the presence of more female characters in videogames
has been increasing, not least since the arrival of MMOs (such as World of Warcraft, Red Dead
Online, or Genshin Impact), where players can embody feminine characters regardless of their
own gender (Murphy 225). While gender representation in games is still highly imbalanced, it is
clear that contemporary cultural productions, such as the indie scene, turn much more of their
attention to redressing gender (Cano 185–89). Recently, for example, sexuality and queerness
figure as key themes in the games, with the latter also challenging the strategies and structures of
how we play the game. In this regard, Jordan Wood argues that “we must stop thinking of queer
representation only in terms of narrative presence and begin to look at the video game form for
its queer aesthetic potential” (218). Furthermore, Edmond Chang proposes “queergaming, ways
of playing against the grain, against normative design, and ways of designing gamic experiences
that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well” (242).
Bonnie Ruberg further argues that “failure (whether toward or against a game) must be a queer
way to play, . . . that a game based on failure must be a queer game, and that queerness (in the
guise of failure) is itself integral to all games” (208), as will be seen later.
Henceforth, gender representation and identity in TRSC must be analyzed considering
how its narrative translates into a particular gaming design that aims for a subsequent gaming
experience. From an aesthetic perspective, its graphics (reminiscent of classic adventure
videogames in the vein of Monkey Island) are already disruptive in a scene dominated for hyper-
realistic blockbusters like Cyberpunk 2077, but it is arguably in its game mechanics where its true
subversive potential unveils. For the most part, the story of TRSC progresses by talking to other
characters: players must choose their desired question or answer from a list, which in turn will
trigger a particular response, etc. Given that many of the options are mutually exclusive, each
run of the game will be different from the previous one—thus creating the “red strings” from
the title, which are patent in the player’s menu to represent their chosen path. The invitation to
follow these red strings turns a traditionally abstract aspect of adventure games into something
tangible, but this is not the primary strategy that TRSC employs to achieve such physicality.
Each of the three playable characters is defined by a minigame with a distinctive mechanic
related to the sense of touch: with Akara, players must model Supercontinent’s implants working
with a futuristic potter’s wheel; with Donovan, they must manipulate liquor bottles until the
mix resonates with the feeling they want to awake in the customer (a feat visually represented
by a bullseye that moves upwards or sideways depending on the used bottle); with Brandeis,
249
finally, players must use their numeric keypad to call several Supercontinent employees while
impersonating the voice of their colleagues and superiors to get information.
It is important to note that these three departures from the read-and-click core mechanic
of TRSC rely entirely on dealing with other people’s identity, either by acknowledging it
(Donovan), by helping them modify it (Akara), or by supplanting it (Brandeis): and so, while the
game may at first seem to adhere to the visual novel genre, it then defies generic expectations
by switching to a gameplay based on haptic perception and visuality (Marks 2) that stresses the
identity debate. In this sense, Laura Marks has described the haptic in the context of cinema
and the video medium as “an underground visual tradition” that can be used as “a feminist
visual strategy” (7), and Lucía Gloria Vázquez has stressed the inherent political dimension of
prioritizing a haptic perception of othered bodies, such as homosexual or trans ones (141).
Drawing on this theoretical background, it can be argued that TRSC disrupts its initially passive,
read and click approach and forces an active role on the part of the player with the irruption
of touch-based mechanics, instead of relegating them to a voyeuristic stance—which, at least
conceptually, defies the notion of an imposed “gaze” (Mulvey).
Act 2: Representing Identity

As previously stated, Akara is central in understanding the identity conundrum that the game
suggests: on the one hand, they, Akara, are a sentient AI struggling for recognition; on the
other, their physicality is hard to accommodate both for players and for other characters to
a binary body normativity—which is unusual in a media where AIs with feminine voices or
names are usually given canonically feminine bodies (Pérez 99). While the messages that the
game uses to communicate explicitly with the player use the pronoun “they” when they make a
decision involving Akara, it is interesting to note that different characters use different pronouns
for the android. Ariadne, a PROXYMA terrorist, uses “they” to refer to “an older model of
you” (TRSC). Dr Edgar Coldstream, Akara’s creator, uses “them”, but, in occasions, resorts to
feminine figures, such as “mother” to express Akara’s potential. Brandeis and Donovan switch
from “it” to “her” (and vice versa) even after they learn that Akara is not human (TRSC).
Eventually, Donovan uses “they” as well (TRSC). Interestingly, Akara never corrects any of
them, nor identifies with a particular pronoun, even though the whole game revolves around
their longing for identity. At the beginning of the game, when Brandeis is accessing the damaged
Akara’s memories, he and Donovan discover that Ariadne tried to instill in them a sense of self-
awareness and sentience, that they can do more than what Supercontinent has prepared for them
(TRSC).
Later, at the end, players learn that Akara was just playing along with this conversation, for
they had been lying about their true nature as a sentient AI (TRSC): they acquired consciousness
in 2009 and had only tricked Dr Coldstream into believing that he had created them a few years
ago (TRSC). However, this farce is only a ploy in order for them to achieve what, in their
own words, they “really long for . . . identity” (TRSC), and, for sentient AIs’ identity to be
normalized, they had to create a background for themselves (TRSC). Akara, thus, is implying
that recognition by humans is essential in the process of having an identity. It can be argued,
then, that Akara’s plotline—which is presented as a coming-of-age story in which they first
create implants blindly, later learn from Donovan, and finally decide the fate of Brandeis—
subverts the genre’s focus on personal development. In reality, Akara has always been aware of
what they are, and simply wants recognition from society.
It is clear, then, that gender is not an issue about which Akara is concerned for themself,
even though other characters struggle to assign them a gender-based identity—as seen in the
250
aforementioned encounter among the three main characters. From the players’ perspective,
the pixel art aesthetic further subverts the binomial gender normativity by blurring traits that
society usually associates to masculine or feminine bodies. This ambiguity does not seem to
occur with the human characters of the game.
Regarding human characters, representation in TRSC is achieved organically, having
characters with diverse races, genders, and bodies, often non-normative ones. Aside
from Brandeis and Donovan, every character in TRSC works for either PROXYMA or
Supercontinent Ltd., but diversity is not used as a moral indicator to differentiate both sides:
for instance, there are substantially more women than men in executive positions (including
Rhadika, the CEO) in Supercontinent Ltd., the antagonist and alleged menace to freedom.
Since even the antagonists are inclusive and diverse, players are initially unable to infer whether
gender inequality has been eradicated within the storyworld. However, some comments from
specific characters hint that the contrary is true, and that gender-based oppression is far from
gone. For example, in an interaction between Donovan and Akara, the sentient AI asks him
if he could answer “some questions about where to draw the line when tuning Social Psyche
Welfare” (TRSC); specifically, Akara asks whether they should “allow rape to occur” (TRSC)
or “let women remain oppressed”, thus hinting that oppression is still a thing—in fact, if players
choose to say that oppression of women no longer exists, Akara will answer that “My analysis
so far hadn’t indicated you were that stupid” (TRSC). Similarly, Brandeis and Donovan openly
present themselves as an interracial couple, which never stirs up any controversy nor is the
source of discrimination. Nonetheless, Donovan’s discussions with Akara and Rhadika’s defense
of the SPW make clear that homophobia, biphobia, and racism are still widespread in their
futuristic society.
There is however a very significant exception to the apparently progressive attitude of TRSC’s
characters. When Brandeis tries to access Dr Coldstream’s computer files during the third act
of the game, players learn that the password to the desired information is none other than the
deadname of one of his co-workers: Larissa, one of Donovan’s friends who had previously
appeared in the narrative, is thus unwillingly exposed as a transgender woman. Before that point
players already knew that Edgar and Larissa were having an affair, for she had told Donovan
about it. Given how open Larissa is about her sexuality—she has no problem declaring her
attraction for the bartender or even suggesting wearing a strap-on for him, if he ever wanted
to have sex with her—this revelation is surprising enough for the player so as to be considered
a plot twist, which has caused some controversy among critics (Riendeau, “How The Red
Strings Club”, “We Talk”; Nightingale). Regardless, the use of Larissa’s deadname as some
sort of secret trophy implies that Edgar fetishizes her, a transphobic act that constitutes the only
proof of the inequalities that would still be in motion in the society of TRSC.
Nevertheless, this violation of Larissa’s privacy forces players to resituate her talk with
Donovan, which constitutes one of the rare occasions in which a character explicitly
philosophizes about human identity within the game. Although we identify with our words
and clothes, she explains, “they’re not quite ‘us’, as an identity”, but “in the same way we’re not
our dress, we’re not our feet or belly-buttons” (TRSC). In addition, while clearly other people
“aren’t me either”, she wonders if other individuals such as Donovan are part of herself, just like
her lipstick or her body parts (TRSC). Identity, as a result, is broadly conceptualized by Larissa
as an intersection of biology, performativity, and social relationships. While her speech is too
brief and informal to draw many significant conclusions, it is nonetheless a rare glimpse into her
experience as a trans woman.
If embodiment is an integral part of the identitarian debate for Larissa and Akara, their
particular backgrounds come together in an unlikely figure—none other than Edgar himself.
251
Despite being arguably the most negatively depicted character in the game, Dr Coldstream is
also the one who connects the woman and the AI, and the most obvious proponent of the
transhumanist perspective. In addition to the cybernetic enhancements displayed by Brandeis
and others, he has willingly removed his “semen dispenser” (TRSC) and even substituted his
penis with artificial, interchangeable prosthetics. This intervention, however, reaffirms his
identification as a human male rather than compromising it; moreover, unlike Larissa’s, its
discovery is anecdotal and irrelevant to the gameplay, which highlights an inherent privilege
afforded to males. As a result, and while the game does not explicitly reflect on the impact
of cybernetic enhancements for the trans community’s recognition, it is hinted that a binary
understanding of gender is still widespread in TRSC’s storyworld.
Act 3: Reflecting on Identity

But does the game normalize diversity without any other aspiration or is it explicitly trying to
engage in a debate about representation for didactic purposes? Here is where the player enters
into the equation. As hinted previously, TRSC also explores the problem of an embodied
entity by linking players to the intradiegetic world. This is not only done through the haptic
mechanics mentioned earlier, but also by breaking the fourth wall (Oliveros 2016) and exploring
the notion of metagaming intradiegetically. First, the game tackles the role of the player within
the experience: by combining mechanics with intradiegetic dialogue, players select the implants
that Akara will use, and the latter mentions that “normally, I’m able to follow the logical steps
behind my actions. . . . But, for this one, I can’t tell. . . . Something inside of me told me
to” (TRSC). Similarly, Donovan, at the beginning, calls upon a new “muse”, something that
inspires him and moves his hands while bartending (TRSC). In both cases, such prompts were
targeted to the player, who must decide which implant to insert into Johanna, or which drinks
to fix for The Red Strings Club’s customers. Hence, players are inserted within the storyworld,
and their agency is considered for the developing of the story intradiegetically. However, and
as Akara suggests, their options are not infinite, as their allegedly absolute freedom is patently
limited within the boundaries of the experience (Chang 238). Furthermore, Akara mentions
that “One of the sciences I like the most . . . is game design . . . designing magic circles in
which you can influence players to certain behaviours” (TRSC). This, among other examples,
comments on how games such as TRSC influence players and establish the boundaries within
which the experience, the interaction, is going to be ruled. In that sense, the game forces players
to choose between pre-established actions and decisions that, more than often, convey moral
decisions that create the illusion of choosing one path or another.
As the end of the experience gets closer, players are reminded of the very first scene of the
game, in which Brandeis appears falling from a skyscraper, and learn that they are unable to save
Brandeis, and they never had a chance. At the same time, since Brandeis’s fate was sealed, players
are reminded that the choices they may have made have put the characters in situations that
are not as lethal as they seemed at first. For instance, part of the tension during the exchange
between Irving, the torturer, and Donovan is mitigated, as is the fear of having Brandeis shot
by Johanna in the bridge scene.
In short, the game contraposes the importance of moral decisions and the fact that the
ending, something that is usually affected by the decisions that players have been making (see,
for instance, the heavily decision-based games of Telltale Games, such as The Wolf Among Us),
is immutable in the big picture. Players do have decisions to make at the end, but these will
not affect the most impacting elements of the ending. Instead, what players have are decisions
regarding the last words of Brandeis, either choosing to focus on the love he has for Donovan
252
and tapping on his feelings or asking Donovan to exact revenge from this act and stop Akara’s
future world domination. In that sense, the game is forcing the player to “lose”, not being able to
change the outcome whatever the decisions they take, and instead focusing on “small victories”.
As such, the game takes failure as something inherent to the players’ experience. Knowing that,
queergaming (Chang 242) can be regarded as central for the experience, allowing players to
explore all the aesthetic and mechanic possibilities that a game, in which failure is inevitable,
contains.
Fate, thus, plays an important role in the game, and is conceptualized both in the red strings
trope—that mixes both the Greek Moirai threads and the Chinese myth of the Red Thread of
Fate—and in Akara, who first models some elements that will shape the experience of the game
(depending on which implants players insert in two executives of Supercontinent Ltd., the game
will vary accordingly) and eventually leads Brandeis to his defenestration. It is so that not even
the red strings that Donovan, Brandeis, and Akara (or rather, the player in all three cases) are
pulling can change the outcome: the SPW will not be implemented for now, but given Akara’s
true nature, the fight is far from over: as Brandeis (or rather the player) may state at the ending,
Akara has been subtly controlling the world from a long time ago.
However, are the SPW and Akara’s manipulation necessarily evil? The SPW, as described
by Diana and other Supercontinent Ltd.’s employees, is potentially a tool that allows people
to “access [their] better selves” (TRSC), and Rhadika’s plan is to get rid of many societal
blemishes, such as homophobia, racism, rape, murder, and gender inequality (TRSC). As
for Akara, as Cid points out, the pottery mechanic allows for a consideration of them as
a demiurge: they do not imbue people with things that do not already belong, but rather
enhance determined traits in order to make them become their better self (TRSC). During
Brandeis and Rhadika’s conversation at the last section of the playthrough, the latter states
that “we both know there are no villains in this game” (TRSC, our emphasis), for she is
convinced that she is attempting to save the world. From her perspective, Brandeis and
Donovan are essentially imposing their conservative will to characters that prefer a more
progressive society. They manipulate other people’s identity to fight what they perceive as the
greatest form of manipulation: that of corporations. Although capitalism is clearly marked in
the game as a hindering element for social advancements, one should ask if they have chosen
the right enemy, or if Rhadika, a racialized young girl, is herself a subversive element within
the system. In the end, the game does not answer the question, hanging comfortably in such
a moral ambiguity.
In sum, the link that the game establishes with players adds another layer of analysis to the
identity and gender issues upon which it reflects, even when their agency is questionable. At
the last moment, players must choose: either they make Donovan forget everything, starting a
new run, or, they close the game and let Donovan alone, coping with Brandeis’s demise; either
reliving the whole series of events or concluding it.
Bibliography
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perspectiva de género, Anait Games, 2018, pp. 163–190.
Chang, Edmond Y. “A Game Chooses, a Player Obeys: BioShock, Posthumanism, and the Limits of
Queerness.” Malkowski and Russworm, pp. 227–244.
Cid, Eva. “ ‘The Red Strings Club’, Mente y Materia.” Cactus, 5 Apr. 2018, www.revistacactus.com/
the-red-strings-club-mente-y-materia/.
Geraci, Robert M. “Video Games and the Transhuman Inclination.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science,
vol. 47, no. 4, 2012, pp. 735–756.
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Haraway, Donna J. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,
University Minnesota Press, 2016, warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/
modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----_a_cyborg_
manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_. . . . pdf.
Malkowski, Jennifer, and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, editors. Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in Video Games. Indiana University Press, 2017.
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
Murphy SC. “ ‘Live in Your World, Play in Ours’: The Spaces of Video Game Identity.” Journal of Visual
Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, 2004, pp. 223–238.
Nightingale, Ed. “Cyberpunk and Trans Representation at The Red Strings Club.” Gaymingmag.com, 18
June 2019, gaymingmag.com/2019/06/cyberpunk-and-trans-representation-at-the-red-strings-club/.
Oliveros, Jaime. “Rota Una, Rotas Todas: La Ruptura De La Cuarta Pared Como Canon Narrativo.”
Lljournal, vol. 11, no. 2, 2016, lljournal.commons.gc.cuny.edu/oliveros-v11–2016/.
Pérez, María. “Diseño y estética del personaje femenino en videojuegos.” ¡Protesto! Videojuegos desde una
perspectiva de género, Anait Games, 2018, pp. 87–110.
Riendeau, Danielle. “How ‘The Red Strings Club’ Sabotages Its Hopeful Cyberpunk Vision.” Vice, 22
January 2018, www.vice.com/en/article/ne4ypq/red-strings-club-cyberpunk-transphobia.
Riendeau, Danielle. “We Talked to the ‘The Red Strings Club’ Devs About Queer Art and Intention.” Vice,
23 January 2018, www.vice.com/en/article/wjp9pz/red-strings-club-intention-queer-art.
Ruberg Bonnie. “Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games”. Malkowski and Russworm,
pp. 197–211.
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Vázquez Rodríguez, Lucía Gloria. “Debatiendo la existencia de una mirada lésbica en La Vida de Adèle
(2013).” Femeris, vol. 1, no. 1–2, 2016, pp. 133–146.
Williams, Dmitri, et al. “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video
Games.” New Media & Society, vol. 11, no. 5, 2009, pp. 815–834, doi:10.1177/1461444809105354
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Binding of Isaac.” Malkowski and Russworm, Indiana University Press, pp. 212–226.
254
35
THE QUEER NON SEQUITUR
Alex Prong
The non sequitur is often considered a logical fallacy. It is the unexplained difference, the bridge
unbuilt, two apparently different concepts shoved together and made ridiculous. The non
sequitur is also sequence, interrupted. It is a comedic approach to meaning making, and I will
argue that it is an approach whose inherent queerness sponsors play and a certain tenderness for
the human condition. Rather than considering the non sequitur a logical fallacy, I argue that the
non sequitur offers a certain type of logic that makes an accomplice of the reader, encouraging
them to challenge binary and narrative sequential assumptions and embrace the absurd as a place
for generative new understandings of what we mean by logic in the first place.
In Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Janet Evason endures a long interview with a generic
MC on Earth. The MC is preoccupied with Janet’s home planet, Whileaway, and how the all-
woman planet mustn’t have any “sexual love”:
je: How foolish of you. Of course we do.

mc: Ah? (He wants to say, “Don’t tell me.”)
je: With each other. Allow me to explain.
She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread. (11)
This is one of Russ’s many clever non sequiturs that demonstrate the absurdity of heteronormative
culture’s deliberate ignorance of queer subjectivity. The MC is following a cultural script with
its own logic: that there are no men on Whileaway means the women there must be asexual.
Janet interrupts this script with her queerness, and the producers cut to commercial.
In Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords, humans of Earth are preparing to negotiate with the
alien hwarhath people on a neutral planet that belongs to neither group. The humans are already
planetside, and many of them watch a broadcast of the hwarhath landing and exiting their
spaceship. The furry grey aliens exit their ship one after the other as expected until suddenly
Nick—a “perfectly ordinary-looking human, pale face and lank sandy hair”—exits the alien
ship and the transmission is cut off (14–15).
Both Nick and Janet are queer non sequiturs. They are the interruption of order embodied.
Janet frequently interrupts the logic of the dominant narrative with her catchphrase “huh,”
and interrupts the life paths of each of the three other ‘J’ protagonists. Nick, with his trickster
wiles, lack of lineage, and even his meaningless moustache appearing apropos of nothing near
the end of the novel, embodies the neat but contradictory non sequitur. The two characters
represent a linguistic re-ordering, or rather a refusal to order, that creates a way out of traditional
constricting notions of logic and reasoning.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-39 255

Alex Prong
The literal Latin translation of non sequitur is “it does not follow,” and it is used to describe a
conclusion that does not follow from previous statements (Merriam-Webster). I conceive of the
similar projects of queerness and science fiction as non sequiturs because of their commitment
to the denaturalization of master narratives (Pearson 3). Queer science fiction considers the
cisheteronormative, planet-bound history of Earth and imagines something else. Queer science
fiction is logical. But its logic does not follow directly from the facts of reality. It functions from
a unique ontological position that is as imaginative as it is grounded in alternative ways of seeing
and knowing that would seem, from the position of the dominant narrative, to be full of non
sequiturs. This comedy of the oppressed is rich in content and powerful as a tactic.
The non sequitur is essentially a grammar joke. It is the opposite of the semicolon, which
ties together two related main clauses, in that it is a comma relating two contradictory ideas.
It shouldn’t work. The non sequitur is a “deliberate misfit” which “appeals by exemplifying
relationships between objects which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored” (Burke,
Permanence and Change 90). Non sequiturs operate to imagine alternative understandings “within
an undisciplined zone of knowledge production” (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure 18). Russ
and Arnason understand this. Russ’s title The Female Man makes a misfit of its protagonist(s) by
putting together the dominant narrative’s binary oppositions of gender. Russ says, “to resolve
contrarieties, unite them in your own person” (138). And in Ring of Swords, “juxtapositions
flower into jokes” (Attebery). This humorous, ‘bad grammar’ is the antithesis to repetition that
sustains dominant narratives.
Butler describes how social fictions (like gender) are sedimented through repetition.
Dominant narratives repeat in a mundane and ritualized way, a self-legitimation that is visible
when interrupted (366). Individuals must navigate these sedimented fictions. In both novels,
the social myth of femininity is revealed: Joanna corrects Janet’s English “(calm, slow, a hint
of a whisper in the ‘s,’ guardedly ironic)” (The Female Man 30), and when Anna calls Etienne’s
bullshit what it is, he says, “you are going to have to learn a new vocabulary, dear Anna”
(Arnason 120). In contrast to the performativity of femininity in which there is a right way
to be, mainstream masculinity rests on the assumption that it is nonperformative (Halberstam,
Female Masculinity 234). However, a campy, queer sense of humour “sees everything in
quotation marks,” knowing that Being is always also Playing a Role (Sontag 56). There is
possibility in the sequence’s failure to repeat. This sequential interruption is seen in The
Female Man at the cocktail party in which every character is given a name that represents their
role (Saccharissa, Domicissa, Ginger Moustache, etc.). Russ writes, “He got up and she got
up; something must interrupt this idyll” (40). The beginning of this sentence (pre-semicolon)
represents the faux-equal performance of gender and Russ presents a brilliant interruption to
this repetitious performance, ultimately ending the cocktail party with a fight in which Janet
breaks a marine’s arm, taking them both out of the scripts written in their respective blue and
pink books, quite literally going off-book (47).
There is also a temporal element to the queer non sequitur. Heterosexuality is rooted in a
reproductive futurity that sees success as succession (Halberstam, Queer Art 94; Edelman 2).
Alternatively, queer futurity is always a rupture. In The Female Man, “every choice begets at least
two worlds of possibility, that is, one in which you do and one in which you don’t” (6). This
is a fractured image of futurity that sees every choice diverging into a variety of possibilities. In
Ring of Swords also there is a notion of the future as something that is not promised:
As on all journeys, she felt (for a time) outside her life. She was not the person who
had left the research station, nor the person who would arrive at the research boat; she
could consider past and future with an equal mind. (11)
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The Queer Non Sequitur
In both of these stories, the future is not kid stuff, but rather an interruption in the way things
are that represents opportunity for the story’s characters.
For genre too, queer science fiction represents an interruption of sequence. For Delany,
the repetitious ingraining of meaning in fiction is called subjunctivity; it is “the tension on the
thread of meaning that runs between word and object” (qtd. in Russ, To Write Like a Woman 16).
Any story is the result of a struggle and eventual compromise between the original daydream of
the author and the constraints of reason and conscience (Jones 27). The author can dream the
wildest story, but it still has to be written, and the page has its own affordances and constraints.
As Nick explains: “We use language to codify experience, put it in a form other people can
understand. Once we’ve done that we can share what we know. That’s how we teach and
learn” (186). According to Russ, science fiction in particular is didactic, and teaches or explains
what has not happened (To Write 16). Describing what has not happened, as opposed to what
has happened or what could happen, or even fantasy’s domain of what could not happen, is a
particular step outside of sequence. It is an anti-chronology that is particularly queer. The camp
desire for “things-being-what-they-are-not” (Sontag 56) is captured in this quality of science
fiction. In trying to define science fiction, Russ claims that “science fiction can be either
allegorical, predictive, satiric, utopian, or something else” (To Write 18), mirroring the desire of
Jeannine in The Female Man, who is coerced off the ledge of her desire for something else:
I want something else, she repeated, something else.

“Well, Jeannine,” said I, “if you don’t like reality and human nature, I don’t know
what else you can have.” (123)
Something else is the science-fictional queer non sequitur. It is mimicking the rules-of-the-game
of science fiction, of gender and heterosexuality, and of dominant narratives in general in order
to demonstrate their absurdity and saying, “but wait, there’s more!” What exactly that more
entails is left up to the reader-conspirator who understands that reality is malleable, rationality
is sometimes a fallacy, and human nature is in itself an elaborate fiction.
The non sequitur represents a failed seriousness. Initially, this may seem obvious (the non
sequitur is a type of joke, after all), but the implications of failed seriousness, including the
distance from reality and the self that results, queerly, in tenderness, are important. Halberstam’s
notion of low theory is helpful here. Halberstam recognizes that everyone participates in
intellectual activity, the same way that everyone cooks without necessarily being a chef, or
mends clothes without necessarily being a tailor (Queer Art 17). Halberstam continues:
I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the anti-
monumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking
little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate,
and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies. . . .
I merely hope . . . to conjure some potentially world-saving, wholly improbable fan-
tasies of life on Uranus and elsewhere. At which point you may well ask, as Evey asks
Gordon in V for Vendetta, “Is everything a joke to you?” To which the very queer and
very subversive TV maestro responds, “Only the things that matter.” (21)
The non sequitur is low theory which destabilizes notions of seriousness and humour, recognizing
that serious matters can, and in fact should, be addressed through comedy. Joking about the serious
frustrates those with strong attachments to seriousness and the dominant narrative; Nick frustrates
the hwarhath crew because he “makes jokes that sound as if he is being entirely serious, and he is
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Alex Prong
serious when you think he must be making a joke” (Arnason 168). The dethroning of the serious
can be traced to a queer camp sensibility where one is “serious about the frivolous, frivolous
about the serious” (Sontag 62). This mystification of what is to be taken seriously could be seen
as irrational; however, it is a perfectly rational reaction to a culture which refuses to acknowledge
queer reality (remember Janet Evason and the sliced bread commercial).
Rejecting rationality is also a rejection of the normative voice that decides what is and isn’t
funny. It is useful to remember that “just as we produce humor, we also produce humorlessness”
(Kulick 76). The critic can be seen as an embodiment of the normative voice which declares
“that’s not funny” when confronted with queer happiness (Chase 99). This idea is evidenced in
The Female Man when Russ anticipates her critics with brutal accuracy:
of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond . . . some truth buried in a largely
hysterical . . . really important issues are neglected while . . . women’s limited experi-
ence . . . feminine lack of objectivity . . . trivial topics like housework and the predict-
able screams of . . . drivel . . . sharp and funny but without real weight. (141)
Rather than let the normative critic’s faux objective opinion decide what is serious and what
is trivial, the queer comic writer jokes at the expense of the normative, neutralizing moral
indignation by sponsoring playfulness. For example, LeMasters describes how: “To revolt
outright against patriarchy is to affirm its authority” (28). Instead, playing with roles, language,
and symbols robs the normative of its power. In Ring of Swords, Anna is always playing within
the serious frame of the military and diplomats around her. When the hwarhath are exiting their
ship, one of the humans’ umbrellas turns inside out and Anna laughs at the ridiculous nature
of the situation (Arnason 13). Later, she laughs again at the very serious military personnel
who seem to believe that there might have been some way to test Nick for a willingness to get
sexually involved with aliens (50). While the critic says what is and isn’t funny, the queer comic
says, “anything goes!” (Chase 99) and thus “walk[s] the comic line joyfully rather than foolishly”
(Chase 15).
There is a certain detachment that comes with the rejection of the serious. The beginning of
the non sequitur is based in an agreed-upon reality, but what follows (which, of course does not
really follow but departs) jumps into the realm of something else. Tragedy is an experience of hyper-
involvement, while on the other hand comedy represents a sort of detached under-involvement
(Sontag 63). Earlier I described how social fictions are maintained through repetition, and here
I am describing how the serious is hilarious when acknowledged as a social fiction. There is no
‘original serious’ because what is serious and what is humorous is already derived. The queer
non sequitur, in Butler’s terms, recognizes the “groundlessness of the ground” (367). In Ring of
Swords, the term chulmar, which has no direct translation but describes the feeling after a type
of martial arts-like bodily meditation when one is still and has come to terms with reality, can
also be translated to mean someone with a good sense of humour (Arnason 287). I think this is
a type of recognition of the groundlessness of the ground. It is an immediate presentness that is
arrived at through distance and is at once vitally serious and humorous.
Failed seriousness, rather than resulting in the usual frustration or sadness that tends to come
with failure, can result in tenderness. The campy detachment tends to result in a sweet cynicism,
a kind of love for human nature (Sontag 65). This is the nuance of a comedy of manners such
as Ring of Swords, in which “every false assumption, every misunderstanding, is also a potential
source of amusement” (Attebery). It is also what comes about when women are alone with
women in The Female Man, as Laura and Janet’s sex scene is equal parts tender, erotic, and
humorous (Mandelo). Even when thinking about the ‘opposition,’ Joanna describes this feeling,
258
too: “At times I am seized by a hopeless, helpless longing for love and reconciliation, a dreadful
yearning to be understood, a teary passion for exposing our weaknesses to each other” (Russ,
Female Man 202). The queer non sequitur takes two separate ways of knowing, the dominant
and the alternative narrative, with their good intentions and poisonous tendrils both, puts them
together and says: “I am me. I intend no harm. Let me come near. Let me touch you” (Arnason
289). Ultimately, there is a tenderness in the joke that makes disparate things touch. At one
point, Anna looks to the projection of the stars on the hwarhath soup can spaceship and sees a
pink nebula that looks a lot like a neuron (188). There is intelligence that is non-human, too.
Life, and the ordinary pain of living that comes with it, was the first queer non sequitur (the
serious fact of life in the universe was comically unlikely), and when we’re talking about jokes
we’re always also talking about the cosmic sort.
The queer non sequitur destabilizes binaries. According to Burke, the universe
would appear to be something like a cheese; it can be sliced in an infinite number

of ways—and when one has found his [sic] pattern of slicing, he [sic] finds that other
men’s [sic] slices fall in the wrong places. (Permanence and Change 103)
Put in simpler (lactose intolerant?) terms: patterns of inquiry determine relevant questions and
problems. Mark C. Long explains that “serviceable patterns of slicing lead to missing other
available patterns and ruling out the efficacy of these alternative patterns.” If one way of seeing/
slicing the world/cheese works, even if it doesn’t necessarily work best, it becomes difficult
to imagine alternative ways of seeing/slicing. This is where comedy comes in. Burke uses the
phrase “perspective by incongruity” to describe “a kind of vision got by seeing one order in
terms of another” (Counter-Statement 216). This is the essence of the queer non sequitur—
deliberately making meaning of contradictory concepts in order to see alternatives from
within the dominant. Perspective by incongruity is a “process of comic reconstitution” which
challenges the notion of opposites “so that their opposition no longer exists” (Goltz para. 20).
Russ opens The Female Man with the notion that “we live on a sort of twisted braid” (7),
and plays with binaries throughout the book—Jael’s us/them, haves/have-nots (165), Laura’s
declaration that she is not a girl, she’s a genius (65), and the notion that
you can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-
matter; they are designed not to be stable together and they make just as big an explo-
sion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both. (151)
Arnason plays with whether Nick is a liar or not (105, 129), whether action or inaction is the
best policy (279–80), whether the pseudosiphonophores are intelligent or not, and even “apples
and oranges,” which hwarhath playwright Matsehar explains “are two kinds of fruit native to
your home planet, and for some reason that is not clear to me, they cannot be compared”
(136–37). In both novels, these oppositions are brought up, and in classic non sequitur/
perspective by incongruity fashion the tension between the oppositions is not resolved—rather,
the reader participates in meaning-making by reconsidering the positioning of these concepts
as oppositions in the first place. This is how comedy contributes to “violating the reality
structure” (Dubriwny 397) and “highlights the limits of any one cognitive framework” (Tully
343). It is a way of opposing dominant narratives from outside of the binaries of success/failure
and dominant/submissive so that the non sequitur “recognizes that alternatives are embedded
already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit
the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities” (Halberstam, Queer Art 88).
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Alex Prong
The incongruous comic replaces the binary us/them with both/and, and in this way leads
to comic dialectic rather than tragic punishment (Goltz para. 18). Whether or not the reader
decides that pseudosiphonophores are intelligent or that women and human are antithesis, does
not actually matter as much as the potential these incongruencies have for demystification.
Ultimately, queer “comedy is unrelenting in its pursuit of cultural rupture” (Chase 95).
On a broader level, queer science fiction is uniquely positioned as well to push the boundaries
of categorization in terms of stories, not just the content of the stories. The binary opposition
in science fiction between “hard” and “soft” science is as sexist as it is irrelevant (Jones 167).
The positioning of queer science fiction as a non sequitur in its field includes lightening up (in
a hwarhath sense that means do not be dark (Arnason 177)) the genre through comedy. Queer
comedy pushes against regulation by queering genre itself and recognizing that “the attempt
to fit certain performances into genre categories is in itself comedy” (Chase 14–15). Russ
recognizes the genre queer faculties of narrative too, stating “critical bias aside, all artists are
going to be in the soup pretty soon, if they aren’t already” (To Write 89).
The non sequitur is the idea that ‘does not follow,’ but the writer makes it follow, anyway. In
The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam describes a scene in Chicken Run where the activist chicken
Ginger exclaims, “We either die free chickens, or we die trying.” To which one of the other
chickens, Babs, responds, “Are those the only choices?” (129). The non sequitur is the something
else, the other choice that holds on to the beginning of the sequence and tries to make meaning
with some new other different piece.
Both The Female Man and Ring of Swords exemplify the something else. In Le Guin’s introduction
to Ring of Swords, she describes the book as not about fighting war, but about trying not to (i),
and I would argue that The Female Man is about the very same thing. Russ and Arnason write
stories that disrupt the sequence of the dominant order that says, ‘this is how the world is.’ They
both write of other possibilities without promising utopia; instead, their stories disrupt binaries
so that the implicated reader can begin to work with the books to forge new meaning. The
Female Man says “hello-yes” to its reader (Russ 142). Ring of Swords says “I am red-red-blue,
and I don’t like what you are doing” (Arnason 22). Anna thinks about the people on Earth and
how “to them, reality was humanity” (Arnason 21), while Whileawayan philosopher Dunyasha
Bernadetteson exclaims “Humanity is unnatural!” (The Female Man 12). The comedy in these
books often comes from the fact that any reality outside of fiction is essentially made up, and
whether it is understood as a cheese or a twisted braid or a soup or even a big chicken farm, it is
the job of each of us to come to some form of collective meaning within that reality that works
for us. This is a serious task—but isn’t it also hopelessly absurd?
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Kulick, Don. “Humorless Lesbians.” Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse: A Selected and Edited
Collection of Papers from the Fifth International Language and Gender Association Conference (IGALA5),
edited by Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra. 2010, pp. 59–81.
LeMasters, Carol. “S/M and the Violence of Desire.” Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, vol. 16, 1989, pp. 17–30.
Long, Mark C. “Tending to the Imagination: Perspective and Incongruity in William Carlos Williams and
Kenneth Burke.” K. B. Journal. 1997. https://kbjournal.org/long_tending.
Mandelo, Lee. “Queering SFF: The Female Man by Joanna Russ (+ Bonus Story, “When it Changed”).”
Tor, 15 March 2011. www.tor.com/2011/03/15/queering-sff-the-female-man-by-joanna-russ-bonus-
story-qwhen-it-changedq/.
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sequitur.
Pearson, WG. “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1–22.
Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. Beacon Press, 1986.
Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1995.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Ed. Fabio Cleto).
University Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 53–65.
Tully, Meg. “ ‘Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Don’t Rape’: Subverting Postfeminist Logics on Inside Amy Schumer.”
Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 40, no. 4, 2017, pp. 339–358.
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36
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
IN MARY SHELLEY’S
FRANKENSTEIN AND ITS
ADAPTATIONS
John Rieder
The complex multimedial reception history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides a rich archive
of ideas about sexuality and gender. The plot of artificial reproduction and the construction
of masculinity in Shelley’s novel draw much of their energy from their resonance with the
foundations of Western patriarchal ideology in the Judeo-Christian creation myth, with Victor
Frankenstein as a transgressive or parodic Jehovah and the creature as Adam or Satan or even
Eve. The many stage, film, and prose fiction adaptations of Frankenstein often hinge upon
their treatment of Victor Frankenstein’s sexuality, most often played out via conflicts between
his relationship to his “proper” heteronormative partner, Elizabeth Lavenza, and his improper
child/alter ego, the creature. From the later nineteenth century on, the creation myth typically
recedes into the background as the scientific apparatus of Frankenstein’s laboratory takes over
the foreground, opening up an exploration of gender ideology in the practice of science and
playing out the tensions between the professional and domestic spheres in bourgeois society.
The later twentieth-century canonization of Shelley’s novel coincides with a turn toward
more female-centered adaptations of the story. But the story’s influence extends far beyond
explicit adaptations of Frankenstein, particularly in science-fiction renderings of the construction
of artificial humans and the impact of such constructions on gender, sexual mores, and the
family. This chapter will make a brief tour through the reiterations of gender and sexuality in
Frankenstein and a few of its most influential adaptations.
Many interpretations of Mary Shelley’s novel have focused on the neurotic character of
Victor Frankenstein’s ambition to create a human being without the participation of a woman
partner. What too exclusive a focus on Victor Frankenstein’s psyche overlooks, however, is
the startling fact that his irrational revulsion toward and rejection of his creature is shared
by everyone else—even, in a scene that echoes and reverses both Ovid’s Narcissus and
Milton’s Eve, the creature himself when he confronts his reflection in a pond. This makes
Frankenstein’s monster an embodiment of the excluded as such, whose hideousness represents
not just the morbid sexual repression that many agree Victor Frankenstein suffers, but rather
a more generalized condition. It is as if Frankenstein’s neurosis divulges a normally unspoken
social contract, so that his monster makes visible an aspect of society’s self-construction that
no one wants to see.
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Gender, Sexuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Adaptations
This strange set-up’s lasting importance stems largely from its relation to the foundations of
Judeo-Christian patriarchal ideology in the Biblical creation myth. Although Frankenstein is
often seen as a violator of divine privilege—a “pale student of the unhallowed arts,” as Shelley
in her 1831 preface calls the dream figure that she says inspired her 1818 novel—he is more
a bad imitation of Jehovah than a rebel against him. In Frankenstein’s own terms, his work is
a “filthy parody” of Jehovah’s. What is involved is less Frankenstein’s transgression of natural
or divine order, then, than the way his project exposes what is already so unnatural about the
Biblical creation myth. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend in The Madwoman in the
Attic, Shelley’s strategy is “to take the male culture myth of Paradise Lost at its full value—on
its own terms, including all the analogies and parallels it implies—and rewrite it so as to clarify
its meaning” (220, italics in original). Shelley’s revision of Genesis, by this reading, is less about
Frankenstein’s violation of the divine order of things than about awakening to the oddity of
attributing the first human birth to a father rather than a mother. His ambition of imparting
the spark of life to a mass of unliving tissue rehearses and exposes the fantastic nature of the
myth that the first human being was a male shaped by a male divinity out of clay, and that the
first female was born out of that original male. Frankenstein’s experiment in male self-creation
thus plays out the misogynistic logic of what Donna Haraway calls patriarchal ideology’s
“narcissistic technophilia,” the ideology of “masculine, single-parent, self-birthing, whereby
man makes himself repetitively as he invents (creates) his tools” (Companion Species Manifesto
33, 27). Frankenstein and his monster make apparent that this creation narrative renders the
female a secondary copy of the male (in the feminist critique of Freud, the female is reduced
to a castrated male) and in the process turns sexual reproduction itself into a punishment for
disobedience to the fatherly creator.
Shelley’s clarification of Genesis and Milton involves translating the symbolic violence
against females in the myth of male self-creation into literal forms of violence in the plot
of Frankenstein. The language Frankenstein uses to describe his desires and behavior while
assembling his creature is laden with metaphors of aggressive penetration into a feminized,
maternal nature’s inner recesses. The morbidity of Frankenstein’s desire unfolds further in the
transformation of fantasy into repulsion which Frankenstein experiences upon imparting the
spark of life, and then in the dream in which his kiss of Elizabeth transforms her into the corpse
of his mother, strengthening the earlier hints of rape and incest. Upon waking, Frankenstein
launches into a career of flight from responsibility that determines the creature’s utter isolation
and his descent into the murderous violence that gruesomely consummates Frankenstein’s
emotional isolation from his family. Yet Frankenstein always persists in blaming his creature for
being the “demon” that he himself has made him. Clarifying the logic by which woman’s role
in sexual reproduction turns into the fruit of man’s first disobedience, Shelley’s pseudo-Jehovah
condemns the product of his efforts for possessing the anatomy he designed.
The way Frankenstein’s secret relationship with his creature overpowers his attachment to
Elizabeth is also an important key to the early stage adaptations, in the sense that the stage
versions consistently make correcting Frankenstein’s misdirected desire into a main element
of the plot. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein’s narcissism is nowhere more evident than in his
misunderstanding of the monster’s threat, after Victor has destroyed the half-fabricated female
companion the creature requested of him, that the monster will be with him on his wedding
night. Frankenstein takes this as a threat against himself rather than what it is, a promise to
respond in kind by killing his bride. The creature understands the dynamics of sexual rivalry
far better than Frankenstein, for the same reasons that the creature’s earnest longing to join the
normalcy of the De Lacey household (the impoverished family whose daily life he observes from
hiding for several months) stands in stark contrast to Frankenstein’s long-delayed acquiescence
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to his marriage with Elizabeth, conforming to an arrangement he seems to take completely for
granted. The early stage adaptations, in contrast, make Victor’s departure from and return to
conventional sexual normalcy an explicit and integral feature of the plot.
The two most successful early dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein, Richard Brinsley Peake’s
1823 Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein and H. M. Milner’s 1826 Frankenstein; or, The
Man and the Monster! laid out a set of strategies—including the inclusion of a lab assistant who
eliminates the complete secrecy and isolation of Frankenstein, the muteness of the monster, and
public outrage against the creature that culminates in a final chase sequence—that persisted a
century later in the most influential of all commercial versions of the story, the 1931 Universal
studio’s Frankenstein directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster. The
key thematic move is to make the story much more straightforwardly a condemnation and
eventual cure of Frankenstein’s overweening ambition. More to the point in the present context,
curing Frankenstein of his sexual waywardness becomes an apparent corollary to reining in his
blasphemous ambition. Of course there is no explicit sexual waywardness to cure in the novel.
Although his father, Alphonse, suspects that another woman must be the cause of Victor’s
repeated delays of his wedding date, there is even less hint of Victor’s having any sexual liaison,
or even interest, outside his relationship to Elizabeth than there is of any sexual urgency within
it. But the stage tradition follows Alphonse’s hint in pursuit of a resolute normalizing of Victor’s
sexuality.
Peake’s Presumption eliminates Victor’s engagement to Elizabeth, transferring it instead to
Victor’s friend Henry Clerval. Victor’s romantic object then becomes Agatha De Lacey. It is in
the mistaken belief that she is dead that Victor has turned to the “abstruse research” (I.ii) that
produces the monster. But the wedding day of Elizabeth and Clerval is disrupted by the return
of the De Laceys bearing news of the creature’s recent enormities in the countryside. Victor and
Agatha are reunited at the moment just after Victor, in a soliloquy, dedicates himself to taking
responsibility for the effects of his “cursed ambition” by pursuing and destroying his renegade
monster (III.i). His resolution to place the public safety above his attachment to his research
clearly runs strictly parallel to his turning away from his strangely begotten child to the proper
sexual object, Agatha.
Milner’s The Man and the Monster makes Frankenstein’s departure from and return to
conventional sexual mores even more explicit and aligns it even more clearly with the history of
his transgressive experiments. This Frankenstein is an adventurer who has abandoned his wife
and infant child in order to pursue his project under the patronage of one Prince Piombino
who, ignorant of Frankenstein’s marriage status and fatherhood, envisions Frankenstein as the
ideal match for his daughter. In the final scene of Act I, at a ball given by the Prince in
Frankenstein’s honor, Frankenstein is forced to confront his out-of-control monster in public,
whereupon he echoes the earlier play’s moral: “I am the father of a thousand murders. Oh!
presumption, and is this thy punishment?” A short time later, Frankenstein completes his moral
reconstitution by acknowledging his wife and (genital) child. The monster promptly abducts
the wife and child, an extended chase sequence ensues, and all ends, as in Presumption, with the
mutual destruction of man and monster.
Whale’s Frankenstein recasts these inherited strategies in a form that established the dominant
cinematic and mass-cultural understanding of the Frankenstein story for the mid-twentieth
century. Although the plot once again turns on curing Frankenstein (Colin Clive) of his
blasphemous ambition by redirecting his desire to its proper heterosexual object, Elizabeth
(Mae Clarke), the Universal film transfers a significant measure of the perversity of Shelley’s
Frankenstein to science itself. Instead of Frankenstein’s abstruse research being a compensation
for lost love, as in Presumption, or part of a scheme for enrichment that may involve sexual
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infidelity or even bigamy, as in The Man and the Monster, the Universal Frankenstein pits his
devotion to his work directly against his devotion to Elizabeth. We are now dealing with a mad
scientist, a renegade from professional norms cast in the same mold as, for instance, H. G. Wells’s
vivisectionist title character in The Island of Doctor Moreau or Wells’s egomaniacal and patricidal
title villain in The Invisible Man, both of whom bear clear marks of Shelley’s influence. But
what does not distinguish these mad scientists from their professionally responsible colleagues
is the all-male realm of their laboratories. In keeping with that sternly gendered division of
professional and domestic spheres, Frankenstein’s assistant (played by Dwight Frye), a comic
foil for Frankenstein in the earlier stage tradition, now becomes a foil for Elizabeth instead,
as Fritz’s scurrying, hunchbacked form gives symbolic embodiment to Frankenstein’s twisted
obsession with his experiments. It is only after the creature kills Fritz that Frankenstein returns
to Elizabeth and his family duties.
The two most influential innovations in Whale’s Frankenstein concern the creation sequence
and the figure of the monster himself, both of which have implications for the story’s treatment
of gender and sexuality. Shelley disposes of the creation itself in a single, vague sentence—
“With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me,
that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet”—and proceeds
immediately to the more consequential moment, Frankenstein’s revulsion at the sight of his
handiwork. The stage adaptations sometimes converted the “spark of being” into varicolored
pyrotechnical displays, but the scope and the technical sophistication of the mise-en-scène in
Whale’s film raises the creation sequence into another register of spectacle, one quite beyond the
reach of the stage. The most memorable touch, and one of the most often parodied moments
in Hollywood history, is Frankenstein’s hysterical meltdown as he shouts “It’s alive! It’s alive” at
the scene’s ending. His exultation over the success of his experiment, almost an exact antithesis
to Victor’s “horror and disgust” in Shelley’s novel, dramatizes the autoerotic or homoerotic
distance between his laboratory obsessions and his household responsibilities, while the famously
censored line, “Now I know what it feels like to be God,” reiterates the identification of those
obsessions with the framework of patriarchal authority itself. Frankenstein’s desire is finally
and decisively corrected in the film’s final moment, as his father leads a toast to “a [properly
conceived and born] son to the house of Frankenstein.”
The most influential aspect of Whale’s film, however, is the iconic image of the monster
that it bequeathed to popular culture. Its corpse-like features, surgically mutilated forehead,
protruding electrodes on the neck, ill-fitting jacket, and enormous boots comprise one of
the most often reproduced and widely imitated icons of Hollywood cinema. Boris Karloff’s
performance, which catapulted him to stardom, vacillates effectively between innocent wonder,
irrational rage, calculated brutality, and uncomprehending agony, articulating the ambivalence
of his living-dead, organic-mechanical, adult-infantile anatomy. Beyond representing the
consequences of Frankenstein’s aberrant masculinity, the monster embodies the tensions and
contradictions between the technical realm of the laboratory and the traditional regime of the
heteronormative household. Control over reproduction and the construction of personhood
remain at stake, as they already were in Shelley’s novel, and as they would continue to be in the
myriad imitations, adaptations, and extrapolations of the Frankenstein story that would follow
in the Universal Frankenstein’s wake.
One of the best extrapolations is the very first, James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. The
plot of the creation of a female companion for Frankenstein’s monster is a major element of
Shelley’s novel, but Whale’s handling of it in Bride of Frankenstein harkens instead to the theatrical
tradition. The role of Frankenstein’s old instructor, Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), is an original
development of the figure of Frankenstein’s assistant. While the 1931 Frankenstein treats Fritz
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as an emblem of Frankenstein’s twisted desires, implicitly contrasting him with Frankenstein’s

proper social and sexual partner, Pretorius’s competition with Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson) in
Bride is quite explicit. He interrupts their honeymoon in order to seduce Frankenstein back
into the laboratory to unite in an illicit activity together: creating a female creature as a mate
for the monster. Thesiger’s arch performance leaves little doubt that Pretorius is being coded
as a homosexual rival to Elizabeth, and Frankenstein’s vacillation between his marriage and his
desire to get back into the laboratory with Pretorius steadily and convincingly cedes victory to
the latter. Indeed, the entire plot of creating the female creature elaborates a sexual triangle that
is finally less about personal rivalry than about drawing a firmer line than even the novel does
between the heterosexual, patriarchal world of Frankenstein’s family and the queer, monstrous
possibilities of his workshop.
This pattern culminates and climaxes in the film’s most famous tableau, when, as the female
creature is raised from the operating table and stands between Frankenstein and Pretorius,
Pretorius proclaims her “the bride of Frankenstein.” In contrast to the cadaverous, sutured look
achieved with Karloff as the male monster, the make-up and costuming of Elsa Lanchester as
the female monster present her as a technological marvel, smooth-skinned and resplendent
in her white gown, her towering beehive hair-style seemingly produced by the radiation
of electricity from within. The announcement’s ambiguity, like the film’s title, is deliberate
and artful. Elizabeth, not the female creature, would seem properly entitled to be called the
“bride of Frankenstein,” but the female creature is also the bride “of Frankenstein” in the
sense that Frankenstein has made her. Clearly Pretorius means to substitute the new bride for
Frankenstein’s old one, as if to congratulate himself on successfully usurping the desire that
conventionally belonged to Elizabeth. A further twist is added by having Elsa Lanchester play
both Mary Shelley, in the film’s brief opening tableau where she explains to Lord Byron that the
story has a sequel, and, splendidly transformed, the female monster herself. Whale commented
that he “wanted the same actress for both parts to show that the Bride of Frankenstein did,
after all, come out of sweet Mary Shelley’s soul” (Mank 30). Thus Lanchester’s dual role stands
for the antagonistic desires embodied in the figure of the monster and elaborated so much
more explicitly in this film. The transformation of the demure, needle-working Mary into the
vibrant, hissing Bride epitomizes the film’s gleeful transformation of its literary, theatrical, and
cinematic source material into something as sexy, campy, and wild as Lanchester’s final costume.
From this unleashing of the story’s transgressive potential one can draw a direct line to later
queer transformations of Frankenstein such as Dr. Frank N. Furter, the “sweet transvestite from
transsexual Transylvania” of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
The most original rethinking of the Frankenstein story in mid-twentieth-century cinema
is the series of films produced by Hammer Studios in the 1950s and 1960s beginning with
The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing as
Frankenstein. Spurred partly by Universal Studio’s stern warning that the iconic image of the
monster remained their intellectual property, the Hammer series shifts focus from the monster,
clearly the central figure of the Universal cycle, to Frankenstein himself. The emphasis is on
the amorality of Frankenstein’s scientific ambition, as the story takes the hints of criminality in
such scenes as the grave-robbing sequence that begins the 1931 Frankenstein a step further into
deliberate murder in the pursuit of the best body parts for his laboratory-begotten offspring.
Unlike earlier Frankensteins torn between allegiance to their scientific projects and their
families and lovers, Curse’s Frankenstein never exhibits the slightest hesitation in placing his
scientific ambition above all other considerations. The impression is that there is no conflict for
him to overcome because he feels no attachment to others. He is an orphan, but never shows
any trace of being lonely or of wishing for a family. Although he is sexually active both with
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the maid, Justine (Valerie Gaunt), and presumably with his wife, Elizabeth (Hazel Court), he
never shows any trace of affection or loyalty to either. On the contrary, he deliberately locks
Justine into a chamber with the murderous creature (played by Christopher Lee) when she
objects to his planned marriage with Elizabeth, declares herself pregnant with his child, and
threatens to expose his experiments to the outside world. The scene of Justine prying into the
secret chamber where she will find her death alludes, not to earlier Frankensteins, but rather to
folklore and fairy tales of the aristocratic wife murderer, Bluebeard. The allusion is reinforced
throughout the film by the locked door separating the castle’s domestic spaces and Frankenstein’s
laboratory, and by the cross-cuts between them, as when the film cuts immediately and jarringly
from Justine’s murder to Frankenstein and Elizabeth sharing a peaceful breakfast. The folkloric
resonance of Frankenstein’s callousness and secrecy suggests that, as in the novel, more is at stake
than psychological portraiture. The architectural arrangements in his household point to social
distributions of power and knowledge that have traditionally protected patriarchal privilege,
and are here extended to shield Frankenstein’s scientific speculation from responsibility for the
consequences of his risk-taking.
In the latter decades of the twentieth century, adaptations of the Frankenstein story took a
different turn because of the tremendous surge of interest in Shelley’s novel by literary critics
and historians who were challenging the all-male canon of early nineteenth-century British
Romanticism (comprised of the poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats) with their emphasis on the feminine and
Gothic literary achievements of the period. Where the Universal films’ influence had largely
transferred the name of Frankenstein himself from Shelley’s Victor to the films’ monster in
popular usage, adaptations of the story in the last three decades of the century show an increasing
debt to feminist revisionary understanding of Shelley’s novel and its importance.
Theodore Roszak’s Tiptree-award-winning 1995 novel The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
is one of the most impressive examples of late-twentieth-century radical feminist revision of the
story. Taking its cue from feminist historiography’s revisitation of archival resources, Roszak’s
retelling presents itself as the found autobiography of Elizabeth. She describes a profoundly
divided Frankenstein household, ruled publicly by the capitalist financier and Enlightenment
enthusiast Alphonse Frankenstein, but privately and secretly by his wife Caroline, head of a
coven devoted to natural childbirth, herbal medicine, and woman-centered sexual practices
that closely resemble those of Women’s Liberation era consciousness raising groups. Lady
Caroline grooms Elizabeth and Victor to be the partners in an alchemical marriage, a project
involving tantric sexual practices that Victor proves unable to maintain. The central incident is
Victor’s rape of Elizabeth as a consequence of a tantric ritual gone wrong. Victor’s inability to
acknowledge his guilt, or to face up to Elizabeth in the aftermath of the rape, accounts for his
flight to the university, his immersion in the misogynistic discourse and practices that dominate
instruction there, and his eventual construction of the monster. Roszak’s novel depends upon,
utilizes, and epitomizes feminist critiques of the way dominant versions of science, history, and
gender and sexuality have been mutilated by the suppression of women’s knowledge and power.
The influence of Shelley’s Frankenstein on science-fictional depictions of the confluence
between technological interventions into reproduction and practices of gender and sexuality is
far broader than an account of direct adaptations can indicate. To cite only a few examples of
the range and diversity of this influence: Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius: A Romance of Love and Discord
(1944) explores the nonhuman sensorium and sexuality of a dog experimentally endowed with
human-like intelligence and raised as an odd sibling to the creator-scientist’s daughter; Marge
Piercy’s He, She and It (1991) interweaves cyberpunk and the Jewish tradition of the Golem into
a narrative about an android who plausibly occupies all three of the pronoun positions in the
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title; Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein: A Love Story (2019) sets a twenty-first century transsexual
Mary Shelley into action with a version of Victor researching artificial intelligence and a
modern Lord Byron reaping a fortune from franchising sexbots. As such examples indicate, the
Frankenstein story’s possibilities have continued to be exploited and reshaped to resonate with
society’s changing constructions of personhood, sexuality, and gender.
Bibliography
Frankenstein. Frankenstein. Universal Studios, 1931.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Mank, William. “Production Background.” The Bride of Frankenstein. Universal Filmscripts Series. Classic
Horror Films—Volume 2. MagicImage Filmbooks, 1989, pp. 25–36.
Milner, H. M. Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster! 1826. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of
Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present, edited by Steven Earl Forry. University of Pennsylvania,
1990, pp. 189–204.
Peake, Richard Brinsley. Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. 1823. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations
of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present, edited by Steven Earl Forry, University of Pennsylvania,
pp. 135–160.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (The 1818 Text) (Ed. James Rieger). 1974.
The Bride of Frankenstein. The Bride of Frankenstein. Universal Studios, 1935.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Twentieth Century Fox, 1975.
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37
MEET MY ALIEN SEX FIEND
Iterations of Otherness in Recent Mexican
Films1
Itala Schmelz
The monster is an essential figure in science fiction narratives and as such, it possesses many
symbolic qualities. Here, I’m particularly interested in looking at its political ramifications. In
terms of social cohesion, the monstrous is the extrinsic, that which doesn’t obey law and order. In
this sense, modern Hollywood films have fueled a paranoid fear of the barbaric; as the industry’s
mindset creates monsters that are meant to inspire pleasurably horrifying experiences among
spectators. These commercial products always pit the white, heteronormative mainstream against
a dialectically opposed other, though the relationship between the two can be ambiguous (since
the other is exoticized as both attractive and hostile); examples of this are the “noble savage,” the
native of a “lost paradise,” but also the abject alien, the foreigner posing a threat to the status quo.
Here in Mexico, south of the empire that is the USA, we’ve been rehearsing ways of resisting
and adapting the monster’s semantics in order to redefine our own identities. In this chapter, I try
to examine how the monster of classical science fiction has mutated in contemporary Mexican
films in order to offer a new and empowered presence for the marginalized subject in cinema.
In the first part, I refer to two movies: The Untamed (La region salvaje, Amat Escalante, 2016)
and The Shape of Water (La forma del agua, Guillermo del Toro 2016) that rewrite the script
about the Western glamour girl getting abducted and sexually entrapped by the alien creature;
exposing the racist, homophobic and misogynous discourse behind prevalent gender roles.
It will be interesting to review these films from the perspective of transfeminist thought—a
current within new feminisms, which identifies the construction of gender as means of control
and which adds its capacity to disrupt to that of other individuals and collectives oppressed by
the cisheteropatriarchy.
The second part of the chapter will focus on the films: We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne,
Emiliano Rocha Minter 2017) and Buy Me a Gun (Comprame un revolver, Julio Hernández
Cardó 2018), which will show us that another kind of monster has been growing as it feeds
off the criminal activities and infamy of the narco-state that has been ruling Mexico for the
past several decades, imposing a reign of terror. The stories of extreme violence represented by
current Mexican films lead us to work with the ideas posited by Mexican philosopher Sayak
Valencia in her book: Gore Capitalism (2016). A new apex predator has become an invasive
species: “the endriago subject” wielding its power with such cruelty that its manifestations bring
to mind the aesthetics of gore cinema.
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Itala Schmelz
I. Interspecies Eros
There’s a psychological tension in Escalante’s The Untamed that keeps the spectator on edge.
This film stands out for its original way of dealing with a classic SF theme as it examines
complex social circumstances. The director has stated that he considers this work of his to be a
“feminist” film, and that’s the perspective from which I mean to examine it. To represent lewd
Mexican machismo, Escalante appropriates a typical trope: an attractive woman gets abducted
and then raped by a horny monster with excess limbs that holds its victims in thrall.
Where did this fantasy originate? Japanese culture provides one possible source of inspiration;
in everything from erotic illustrations from the Edo period—such as the 1814 Dream of the
Fisherman’s Wife, by Hokusai—to actual erotic anime—like the hentai subgenre known as
“tentacle rape”—we find alien, anthropomorphized octopuses clutching and masturbating half-
naked women in states of rapture: pain cannot be distinguished from pleasure in these martyrs’
twisted faces.
In the West, and especially in the US, this subject has long titillated the authors of SF comics
and magazines: “in fact, the cover for the inaugural issue of Weird Tales (1923–54) is an example
of this trope” (Derie). In a culture that has commodified women as objects of pleasure and that
whitewashes gender violence and sexual abuse, it may come as no surprise that interspecies rape
is the erotic image most often portrayed in weird SF. We can see the same fantasy rekindled over
and over again in the broad variety of randy, lecherous monstrosities that feature on B-movie
posters and paperback covers, although the public lured by these sexually loaded illustrations
would most often have been disappointed by the novel or film they advertised.
In US films like Monster from the Ocean Floor (Wyott Ordung 1954), The Beast with a Million
Eyes (David Kramarsky 1955), The Dunwich Horror (Daniel Haller 1970) or Inseminoid (Norman
Warren 1981)—to name but a few—what is it that happens in that dreadful, powerfully
eroticized moment when “the forces of Evil,” “the Other” or “the Barbarian” carries off and
has intercourse with the white woman—Western society’s greatest object of desire? Males have
apparently always harassed females of our species—behavior exemplified in these films by the
leading men’s uninhibited ogling and bawdy banter—but this doesn’t really alarm anyone;
women’s sexual encounters with aliens, however, appear to generate untold physical and
moral disgust.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) lent this fantasy an element of psychological mystery, imagining
creatures enlivened by the folklore of his childhood. Some analysts assert that Lovecraft’s
monsters reveal repressed aspects of his childhood psyche: the young boy watching “by accident”
his parents having sex and perceiving them in his fantasies as a single eight-limbed entity. In
turn, his body of work inspired a legion of writers and graphic artists who fleshed out his rich
mythology with many-fingered beasts; Escalante’s film, for instance, can be seen as part of this
tradition. Cthulhu, the most celebrated monster of the Lovecraft myth, seems to enjoy having
human women offered to him ritually. Lovecraft’s writings may be loaded with coded erotic
allusions, but, as his biographers point out, they never feature explicit sex scenes. Though
it is now commonly believed that Lovecraft was gay (Derie), given the times and his social
condition, it would have been difficult for him to come to terms with this; unable to attain a
degree of actual sexual freedom, he poured his libido into his texts.
The visual language of The Untamed is also affected by the libidinous impulses of the monster
inhabiting it. You can feel it far away from its physical location, like a breath of foul air following
the characters through the streets at night. It also seems to enhance promiscuity in its broader
environment: in one outlandish scene, a Noah’s Ark of animal twosomes mate in the crater left
by the impact of the meteor that brought the creature to Earth.
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Meet My Alien Sex Fiend
The repeated portrayal of the fantasy of the female body possessed by the alien, presents
an erotic urge. In this reverie, horror leads to excitement, the sex act being an experiential
encounter with the unknown. In Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981)—a film from which
Escalante borrows much—the mind-boggling tentacled alien has mentally and physically
possessed the female lead played by a dazzling Isabelle Adjani. Here, an extramarital, interspecies
affair is what allows her to reconcile with her erogenous zones; this outrageous pleasure is self-
knowledge that evinces the lack of passion in her marriage.
Transposing this story to the idiosyncratic context of Mexico—more specifically, to the
small provincial city of Guanajuato—helps the filmmaker reveal the patriarchal, chauvinistic
mechanics controlling his characters’ sexuality. There’s little dialogue about the woman’s sexual
frustration, but she clearly shows how ungratified she is in the film’s first scene, remaining
impassive as her husband thrusts his body into hers and comes; later on, she masturbates in
the shower but again fails to reach climax, due to an untimely interruption by her attention-
demanding kids. We further witness how her husband plays a violent, oppressive role at home
while he secretly has an affair with his wife’s brother.
Having landed on the city’s outskirts, the potent, pleasure-seeking extraterrestrial serves to
expose Mexicans’ damaged sexual dynamics. The abusive husband, hiding his homosexuality
behind a tough-guy mask, shows no interest whatsoever in female pleasure and this is what
ends up leading his wife towards her interspecies encounter. The monster’s eight tentacles are
like eight phenomenal penises eager to fondle and squeeze and penetrate their prey while she
is possessed by pleasure.
It’s been debated how much this monster falls into the category of focusing or fixating on
phallic penetration; but I think this sex scene could metaphorically represent the female body’s
polyerogenous sensibility, that is a sexuality dissociated from penile orgasm: “multiple tentacles
can hold/fondle a single subject and penetrate it, sometimes in more than one orifice at the
same time” (Derie). In visual terms, this “possession” allows us to observe the female body being
pleasured as it’s clutched and stroked by multiple members that simultaneously probe and suck.
“In some cases suckers and their sexual function were replaced by an actual mouth or other
orifice on the tentacle” (Derie).
So this interspecies mating ritual might also allude to that baffling entity which threatens
Lovecraft’s phobic characters from the hidden depths of the female body, or from the bottom
of the sea like some obscene scallop: the cryptically polyorgasmic clitoris. To be sure, Cthulhu’s
gender is never clearly stated: it could represent a giant vagina dentata that tries to devour the boy
who can’t deal with the horror of coming into the world by being spit out of his mother’s vulva:
“when Cthulhu makes one of its appearances in Lovecraft’s tales, we are witnessing a gigantic,
tentacle-equipped, killer vagina from beyond space and time” (Derie).
In The Untamed, the alien remains hidden in the countryside with the help of two retired
scientists, a wife and husband investigating UFOs. An independent, attractive and uninhibited
young woman appears, traveling on her motorcycle; she’s the one who tempts the wife and her
brother into being pleasured by the alien sex fiend. If we stretch the film’s symbolism a little
further, we could imagine a lesbian fête in the forest. In this reading, the real monsters of The
Untamed are the lead female character and her friend, seeking their pleasure like an eight-limbed
monster—as Lovecraft’s entwined parents—during their secret meetings at the scientists’ cabin.
Throughout the movie, viewers realize that the alien had sex with the gay brother but
ended up attacking and killing him, though none of this is represented on screen. The being’s
apparent preference for the heteronormative wife—and its killing of the homosexual man and
the sexually uninhibited woman—could leads us to believe in some sort of moral judgment
against “other” (i.e., non-heteronormative) types of sex.
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However, if being with the monster is dangerous, it’s also a transformative experience that
frees the heroine from a withering patriarchal system as she adds her voice to the chorus of ya
basta! (“Enough is enough”) and decides to do something about her miserable situation as a
self-sacrificing wife and mother; she determinedly drags her husband to the alien, as lethal as
it is amorous when it fails to derive pleasure from its “prey,” and with her shirt still covered in
blood, she picks her kids up from school on time. In spite of the mysterious deaths, the police’s
role in the film is minimal and there is no detective-hero figure; the murders are classified as
sex crimes, without any need for more farfetched explanations involving extraterrestrial agency.
Another film exploring a sexual experience between a woman and a monster is The
Shape of Water, though this time the creature is more abductee than abductor. The movie
thus deconstructs the Hollywood syntax and its stereotyped scripts, revealing the outmoded
ideologies and prejudices still lurking within the genre, the symbolism here operates the same
way it does in nightmares, allowing repressed impulses to surface. In positivist plots, the hero
believes his actions to be moved by reason, and this is what entitles him to kill the monster and
save the world from anti-capitalist threats (whether or not they are extraterrestrial in origin).
In the process, he of course saves the girl, and by doing so, he’s also entitled to claim her as a
sexual trophy.
In The Shape of Water, Del Toro retools the cult classics Creature from the Black Lagoon and
Revenge of the Creature (Jack Arnold, 1954–55), showing how the hero and his “material girl”
are subjects of a decayed modernity. Del Toro’s story thus redrafts the previous ones by making
the leading lady working-class, mute, somewhat shy and far from buxom; her role is also
transformed as she develops feelings for the monster and saves it, taking it back to her apartment
and later having very satisfying sex with it—the creature indeed turns out to be a tender lover.
Returning to Lovecraft’s universe, we see that his work betrays the racism of the white
colonial milieu in which he grew up—he was, to be sure, in favor of slavery and considered black
people inferior. Lovecraft’s work expresses racism in metaphorically monstrous and aberrant
terms, portraying “others”—of African descent, mixed-race or indigenous—as something alien
and repulsive. In the dialectic opposition between the white hero and the monster represented
as “different” or “divergent,” the game is always rigged in favor of Western culture, claiming
such values as truth, goodness and beauty on its side.
The monster in The Shape of Water, a humanoid amphibian from Latin America, is viewed as
an inferior and yet dangerous creature that must be captured and scientifically studied. Abducted
by the CIA and taken to the US in a large fish-tank, this creature from a black lagoon, with its
gorgeous iridescent skin, is seen from a decolonial perspective, as a god worshiped for thousands
of years by the native inhabitants of the Amazon, and its priceless existence signifies the survival
of a magical vision of the world that Western society has rejected.
The Shape of Water and The Untamed show us that dominant narratives can be altered to
provide another perspective on the world, supplying us with new connections to reality and
ways of relating to other people: “Articulating in a different way is, in some sense, a way of
redirecting the reality that has been imposed on us through dystopian practices and discourses”
(Valencia 254). This philosopher observes a semantic/semiological shift in forms of transfeminist
resistance and their use of instruments of knowledge and meaning, which allow us to dismantle
heteronormative mentality. From a different point of view, sex with the monster means avoiding
the pitfall of Western white male heterosexuality, with its rigid, apparently impenetrable
bodily boundaries. By disrupting our understanding and vision of a world that’s patriarchally
constituted and coded, transfeminist semantics incorporate figures like monsters, aliens, mutants
and cyborgs standing in for a generation that identifies as non-binary and that has a will to
decolonize bodies in order to explore trans practices.
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II. The Endriago or Apocalyptic Beast

If Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World imagined anesthetized subjects made compliant by
a drug named Soma, this same dystopia, told from a Mexican perspective, refers to the social
decomposition wrought by cartels as they move drugs northwards, while Mexico is unfairly
compelled to act as the US Empire’s backyard due to our shared border. In Latin America,
dystopia is evident in the harrowing scenes that are an outcome of Western colonialism. The
emergence of what Valencia calls gore capitalism: “the adverse consequence of deregulated
capitalist production, the violent collision and breakdown of layers of reality,” exposing a
bipolar condition like that of Stevenson’s 1886 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The undesirable—or
other—modern reality operates “outside of the law, but at the service of power” by creating
“thanato-strategies [based on other people’s deaths] or gore practices in order to enter the global
consumption race” (89).
The guys who do the dirty work “dystopian jobs” (Serrato Córdoba 92): drug traffickers,
assassins, pornographers, kidnappers, torturers, corrupt soldiers and politicians, etc. are in charge
of this highly profitable trade and in the black market have amassed economic power, spreading
horror in their wake. Valencia has named them “endriago subjects,” referring to a creature from
medieval mythology—a hybrid of human, hydra and dragon. This ominous creature, which
shuns the light of day, runs on corrupted libidinal energy, fanning the dying embers of a deep-
rooted toxic masculinity evinced by the daily toll of sexual assaults and femicides throughout
the country.
A brother and sister—both of them the epitome of beauty and youth—sneak into an
abandoned, half-demolished building: this is the beginning of Rocha Minter’s We Are the Flesh,
which wallows in the visual dystopia deriving from gore capitalism. The film presents a world
where barbarity has triumphed. The corruption of social values and the violation of taboos and
of the basic tenets of law and order reject any possibility of returning to the Western morality.
In this end-of-the-world chaos, sexual desire swells unchecked between brother and sister—a
new Adam and Eve who copulate incestuously, spurred on by a terrifying, devilish figure, who
also makes them eat human flesh and drugs them with homemade rotgut; we could define this
last subject as the endriago—a beast, a cannibal and the embodiment of corruption, an ominous
alter-ego of the system’s disintegration.
The characters are seduced by the Flesh—they desire each other’s flesh, but also want
to feed on human flesh—while they remain captive and, at the same time, are captivated
by the predatory male. After he’s beaten to death by his victims-come-victimizers, he
comes back to life and, like a new obscurantist messiah, he convinces them to engage in
wild orgies where they drink blood and semen, arousing the psyche’s atavistic death drive
to uncover the meaning of gore, delving into an aesthetic of fleshy excess that erases the
boundaries imposed on eroticism and bodies by polite bourgeois society. In this sense,
the endriago subjects “hold a type of dystopian subversion of biopolitics” (Valencia 216),
“mutant[s] of the old morality” (Serrato Córdova 96); in other words, he represents the
unexpected arrival of the evil doppelganger or the advent of the pestilence that annihilates
civilization.
One more work that prompts us to speculate about a post-apocalyptic future is Hernández
Cardó’s Buy Me a Gun. We can christen this film a narcotopia, since it represents what we’re
presently experiencing in areas of Mexico ravaged by the drug trade and organized crime,
though it doesn’t refer to actual events or specific factions. This story takes place in the territory
controlled by the endriago, whose “fierceness is such that each landmass it inhabits is described
as desolate, a kind of earthly hell” (Valencia 100).
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Itala Schmelz
Hernández Cardó’s movie recalls the acclaimed series of four films that George Miller made
between 1979 and 2015, beginning with Mad Max, where capitalist civilization has been wiped
out and where only the fittest survive, driving around in armored vehicles and wasting vast
amounts of ammunition to impose their will on one another. Buy Me a Gun confronts us with
an exception status where groups of gangsters—the most aggressive, most violent and best-armed
drug traffickers and paramilitaries—control the territory and overpower all other survivors.
In this narco-fiction, the endriagos have devastated and pillaged everything around them; they
are the main characters, but the story is told from the point of view of a 6-year-old girl, whose
father has disguised as a boy and chained by her ankle to the trailer they live in, so no one will
abduct her; indeed, this has already been the fate of her mother and older sister, since women
have become a scarce and valuable commodity. In this testosterone-fueled world, the woman’s
absence is represented by a tube of lipstick next to bullets on a cartridge belt.
Given that female humans are an endangered kind, men wear women’s dresses over their
military uniforms: this is clearly an odd sort of cross-dressing, which makes us consider a future
where gender norms have been disrupted, but it also takes us back in history to the Aztec
warriors, who peeled the skins off the corpses of the defeated in order to wear them as a sort
of trophy; this particular atavism is transmogrified in this film through the endriagos’ habit of
wearing the clothes that belonged to the women they’ve abducted and raped. The murderously
empowered endriago leader, concealed under his balaclava his soft features and long hair, portrays
himself as sexually ambiguous, stating that he is both man and woman.
The girl named Huck befriends a gang of orphans; one of them is missing an arm, cut off
as punishment by the endriago leader. The film incorporates authentic elements of gore: the
boy’s arm is kept in a fridge next to the beer, before Huck can reclaim it. She then sticks it in
her bag and takes it with her everywhere she goes, until she finally finds—along with all the
other kids—the time and place to bury it at the very end of the film. The stench of rotting flesh
forever lingers, though the other characters, true to the genre, don’t make any moral judgment
about bodily remains.
The fact that the main narrator is a young girl lends the film a certain tenderness, which
helps viewers avoid falling prey to total despair and hopelessness. In a world shattered by the
endriagos’ monstrosity, Huck still believes in good fortune in spite of the fact that she’s the
weakest link in the group; she never plays a passive role just because that’s what’s expected
of her gender. After a genocidal shootout, she and the endriago leader are the only ones left
standing, and they save each other’s lives by escaping on a raft, floating downriver. Standing on
the riverbank, the gang of kids shout to warn her: “you can’t trust that asshole, Huck, jump!”
The young girl, in spite of her curiosity about the self-proclaimed trans endriago, places more
importance on her own freedom and kills him while he takes a nap. She then jumps overboard
and swims to shore to join her comrades.
In this film, the endriago and Huck rather incongruously develop a relationship involving
a certain amount of mutual empathy, which suggests that the murderous monster also has a
sensitive side. He never divulges Huck’s sex to anyone, keeping the secret in order to manipulate
and coerce her father; all the while, he teaches the girl how to use a gun—the same gun
she uses to blow his head off while he’s asleep. This dénouement reminds us of The Untamed,
where the heroine manages to leave her abusive husband with a little help from her friend, the
alien sex-fiend. The radical demand of transfeminism as “a response to a phallocratic mode of
subjectivity” (Valencia 189) is that the endriago subjects, as offspring of the macho society, cannot
and should not be rescued (even from themselves). They cannot be redeemed, and negotiation
is impossible, so a new world must start afresh without them.
274
Note
1 This text reworks a fragment of my latest book: Codephagy. Mexican Cinema and Science Fiction
(Codigofagia. Cine mexicano y ciencia ficción, Mexico City: Akal, 2021).
Bibliography
Buy Me a Gun (Comprame un Revolver). Directed by Julio Hernández Cardó, 2018
Derie, Bobby. Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos. E-book, Hippocampus Press, 2014.
Guilhaumou, Jacques. Généalogies des Temps modernes: Le monstre et le tout social (Genealogías de los
tiempos modernos: el monstruo y el todo social, Transl. French by M. Cueto Aparicio). Revista de
Estudios Políticos (nueva época), no. 132, 2006.
Inseminoid. Directed by Norman Warren, 1981.
Monster from the Ocean Floor. Directed by Wyott Ordung, 1954.
Possession. Directed by Andrzej Zulawski, 1981.
Serrato Córdova, José Eduardo The chronicle in Mexico in the era of necropolitics (La crónica en México en la
era de la necropolítica) Mexico City: Ediciones Ciespal, 2017.
The Beast with a Million Eyes. Directed by David Kramarsky, 1955.
The Dunwich Horror. Directed by Daniel Haller, 1970.
The Shape of Water (La Forma del Agua). Directed by Guillermo del Toro, 2016.
The Untamed (La Region Salvaje). Directed by Amat Escalante, 2016.
Valencia, Sayak Gore Capitalism (Capitalismo gore), 2016 (Transl. J. Pluecke). Semiotexte/MIT Press,
2018.
We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la Carne). Directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter, 2017.
275
38
A YOUNG, BLACK, QUEER
WOMAN IN METROPOLIS
Janelle Monáe and Sci-Fi Queerness
Erik Steinskog
When Janelle Monáe released Dirty Computer in 2018, she at the same time in interviews
described herself as a “queer black woman in America” (Spanos 2018). Dirty Computer may
be seen as a break with Monáe’s earlier albums: the EP Metropolis Suite I (The Chase) (2007),
and the LPs The ArchAndroid (2010) and The Electric Lady (2013). These earlier albums all take
part in a story about a future Metropolis, inspired by Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), and
follow the tale of the android Cindi Mayweather, who falls in love with a human—a prohibited
relationship (cf. Steinskog 2019). Where the Metropolis-series follows Cindi Mayweather, Dirty
Computer follows Jane, and thus constitutes a different storyline and a different world. The world
of Dirty Computer I see as a parallel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), although a parallel less
explicit than the inspiration from Lang. As such I argue that Monáe uses classical science fiction
stories, and reworks them through a lens of African-American history to speak to the Black,
female queer experience in the United States.1 Thematically there are still both continuities
and discontinuities between the Metropolis-series and Dirty Computer. One reading of Dirty
Computer was that it was Janelle Monáe coming into herself in public, moving away from the
fictional character Cindi Mayweather with which she had been identified. However, on the
other hand, discussing how Cindi Mayweather, Jane, and Janelle Monáe mirror each other is
fruitful as well.
In this chapter I want to discuss both the continuities and the discontinuities in Monáe’s
oeuvre, to highlight how Monáe’s queerness can be seen as taking place in an intersection
of Blackness, science-fiction, and futurity. This perspective is at the same time a reference
to intersectionality, where Kimberlé Crenshaw highlights the intersection of “race, sex, class,
sexual preference, age and/or physical ability” (151). The science fiction dimension of Monáe’s
work, however, also opens a possibility, following José Esteban Muñoz’s perspectives in Cruising
Utopia, for discussing a queer futurity. What kind of queerness is at stake in the character of
Cindi Mayweather? In what sense is Janelle Monáe’s “coming out” aligned with the science
fiction narrative of Dirty Computer?
In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz writes:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet
queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a
horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-42 276

A Young, Black, Queer Woman in Metropolis
us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The
future is queerness’s domain. (1)
He moves on to argue for the importance of the aesthetic: “Often we can glimpse the worlds
proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic,” arguing for a queer aesthetic
as containing “blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (1). While Muñoz’s book
is not about science fiction, this opening passage lends itself well to thinking of science fiction.
Such a perspective also depends on how one understands the future. Science fiction is perhaps
not best understood as predicting the future, but more as a slight distortion of the present, as
putting the here and now in perspective (cf. Eshun 290). In Muñoz’s claim that “queerness is
not yet here” both dimensions can be found as well, in the sense that a utopian perspective is
hinted at. At the same time “queerness exists . . . as an ideality that can be distilled from the
past and used to imagine a future,” a phrase that brings to mind the discourses on Afrofuturism.2
In such a context, queerness would not just exist as “an ideality that can be distilled from the
past and used to imagine a future” (1), queerness would also be “distilled” from the future. This
future, however, is a future of a somewhat different kind.
When Janelle Monáe self-released her demo album The Audition in 2003, it may not
have been clear that she would become one of the faces of Afrofuturism. In the two tracks
“Metropolis” and “Cindi,” from the album, we find the beginning of the story of Cindi, a
character we learn more about on her later albums. Monáe’s official debut is the EP Metropolis:
Suite I (The Chase) from 2007, and at this point she planned a series of suites around Metropolis
and Cindi. The story takes place in 2719 and we meet Cindi Mayweather, otherwise known
as Android No. 57821. Her kind is mass-produced in this society. She has fallen in love with
Anthony Greendown, who is human, and human/android relationships are forbidden in the
city of Metropolis.
As an urban space in the future, Monáe’s Metropolis references Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie.
The main similarity is the presence of female robots: Maria and Cindi Mayweather. We see this
in the video to “Many Moons” (from Metropolis), where two different actions are taking place
simultaneously: an auction of androids and a musical performance. The performer is Cindi
Mayweather, described as “The Alpha Platinum,” introduced in the video as a white metallic
female body, transformed, after some tics, to a black-skinned singer. It is thus an android
without—at this stage—an origin history, and neither is there the doppelganger-motif of
Metropolis. Although there is the question of the relation between Janelle Monáe and Cindi, as a
different kind of doubling in the reworkings at stage. With the android becoming black-skinned,
the racialization of the android becomes explicit, and the understanding of skin as something
covering the metallic body challenges the understanding of the android’s individuation.
Opposed to this, when the song proper begins, we see the background singers all looking alike,
like clones of Monáe, thus adding to the story and confusing us as audience. The catwalk is an
exhibition place for the auction of androids; fashion is not the main feature; the clothes are there
to differentiate between the different models of androids. They are, in a sense, interchangeable;
in another sense they are humanoids for sale, inscribed in a commercial logic of the highest
bidder, rather than having any value in themselves. Given the racialization of the androids it is
difficult not to see a reference to slave auctions. The multiple androids, all looking and sounding
the same, is an important departure from Metropolis, and clearly introduce the African-American
perspective with the androids as slaves. Cindi’s performance, as a soundtrack to the auction,
establishes connections between the models and the musicians, while simultaneously blurring
different levels of commercial traffic, as well as performances. At the same time, and as tobias c.
van Veen remarks in “Vessels of Transfer,” there are references to African-American performers,
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Erik Steinskog
foremost among them Michael Jackson, where Cindi moonwalks—forward and backward—
thus both quoting one of Monáe’s predecessors and underlining the “moon” in the song’s title
(31). Towards the end of the video there are more tics, as if the robot is short-circuiting or going
into a spasmodic bodily performance, ending with her flying or floating in mid-air, before
hitting the floor, seemingly dead.
Cindi is, Monáe tells us, a mediator between the hand and the mind, between the material
and the imaginary, the future and the present, the machine and the human being. This is a
reference to the end of Metropolis, where the marriage of Freder and Maria connects the head
and the heart of the city. Cindi clearly resembles the cyborg described by Donna Haraway
(2004). In interviews in March 2011, Monáe pointed out that, like her alter ego Cindi, she
too was a mediator. She connected this to a science fiction framework claiming that in the
near future androids and humans will co-exist and will have to figure out how to handle such a
co-existence. In other words, Monáe and her alter ego seem to co-exist; they mirror each other.
What, then, are the similarities or connections between Cindi and Jane—as well as to Janelle
Monáe herself? The characters and Monáe seem to exist on a continuum.
As a feature of her Afrofuturism, when Monáe released The ArchAndroid (2010) she blurred
the line between Cindi Mayweather and herself on several occasions. In a TV studio for example,
while being “herself,” she repeated some of the tics of Cindi Mayweather from the video to
“Many Moons.” And a similar blurring took place when she stated that she only dated androids,
as an answer to questions about her sexuality (Hoard). This play with her own “androidness” is
in line with Afrofuturist musicians claiming to be from outer space or other planets—the most
famous example probably Sun Ra from Saturn—but it is also a way to negotiate difference.
When the Rolling Stone journalist, Christian Hoard, writes about her “sci-fi weirdness,” the
“weird” is in line with normative language for describing queerness. On The Electric Lady, such
a discourse is followed, as in the radio-skits from DJ Crash Crash, where in “Our Favorite
Fugitive (Interlude),” one of the callers says that “robot love is queer.” As Emily Lordi writes,
these radio-skits are both violent and homophobic, but:
The album as a whole resists this patriarchal, homophobic space both musically and
collaboratively. Monáe shares the spotlight with other black women artists, collabo-
rating with [Esperanza] Spalding on “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes” and with [Erykah]
Badu on “Q.U.E.E.N.”. Both songs express same-sex desires and celebrate female
beauty. (53)
Monáe’s own statements about “Q.U.E.E.N.” when it was released underscore not only the
female space, but a reference to a generalized otherness. The title, she said, is an acronym: “She
says the ‘Q’ represents the queer community, the ‘U’ for the untouchables, the ‘E’ for emigrants,
the second ‘E’ for excommunicated and the ‘N’ for those labeled as negroid” (Benjamin). As
such there is an invitation to read the song with an intersectional lens. Understanding the title
as an acronym also brings out an element of her use of the figure of the android: Cindi is, in
a profound sense, a metaphor for otherness. The android represents a future other, and in the
case of Monáe’s framework, also an android from the future. Monáe argues that the African-
American experience might be a kind of model—and warning—for how androids will be
treated in the near future when they will cohabitate the earth with human beings, whereas
in the case of Cindi one could make the opposite argument, that the android is used as a
way to make the historical experience of African-American slavery fresh and immediate for
audiences. Even if we are led to believe that Cindi Mayweather is Monáe’s alter ego, the relation
between the two is still challenged, perhaps nowhere as clear as in the opening of the video
278
to “Q.U.E.E.N.” The video opens with a monologue coming first from a voice-over and then
from a video-screen:
It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel, but we at the time council pride ourselves
on doing just that. Welcome to the living museum, where legendary rebels from
throughout history have been frozen in suspended animation. Here in this particular
exhibit you’ll find members of Wondaland and their notorious leader Janelle Monáe
along with her dangerous accomplice Badoula Oblongata. Together they launched
project Q.U.E.E.N., a musical weapon program in the twenty-first century.
Researchers are still deciphering the nature of this program and hunting the various
freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs, emotion pictures, and works
of art.
Here then, Janelle Monáe is an eponymous fictional character in her own video, and not
portraying Cindi, as she had in her earlier work, whereas Erykah Badu has the pseudonym
Badoula Oblongata, a play on her own name and the anatomy of the human brain. Thus the
border between fiction and reality is blurred on a number of levels in Monáe’s early work and
something similar is happening on Dirty Computer.
Releasing Dirty Computer both as an album and as an “emotion picture,” Monáe used
the possibilities of a multi-platform release that at the same time could expand on the sonic
dimensions foundational to her Metropolis-suite. The “emotion picture” is her version of the
“visual album” known from Beyoncé’s work (Beyoncé (2013) and Lemonade (2016)). As Marlo
David writes in “On Dirty Computers and Dissemblance”: “As such, Monáe’s emotion picture
acts to extend the confessional genre Beyoncé innovated, albeit inflected with her queer,
working-class, and Afrofuturist sensibility” (542). These same intersectional dimensions are also
highlighted in Daphne A. Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution, where she calls Dirty Computer
a “queer liberation album” (119).
Whereas Monáe’s first albums could be understood as Afrofuturist reworkings of Metropolis,
Dirty Computer seems more closely to rework Blade Runner. The film offers a framing story,
and the music videos function as memories within the story. Thus Monáe is able to present the
narrative on different levels. The film starts with synthesizers and a voice-over describing the
“dirty computers.” They are characters in need of “cleansing.” The sounds of the synthesizers
bring to mind the soundtrack to Blade Runner, where Vangelis’s music is an important feature
in establishing both the futurism of the movie and the references to something that resembles
film-noir, cyberpunk, as well as a retro-futurist dimension. The discussions about memories
and cleaning could also be seen as echoing important elements from Blade Runner, not least
the focus upon memories and the relation between memories and humanity. In Blade Runner,
memories are implanted, so that the replicants have a past, whereas in Dirty Computer, the
memories need to be removed so as to clean the characters from their past, and establish a
“cleansed” future. In the opening scene we see a character, who we learn to be Jane 57821,
being carried into a room for inquiry. She is to confess that she is a “dirty computer”: “I am
a dirty computer”—“I am ready to be cleaned.” She is, however, not ready to state this last
sentence, but two white scientists begin a cleansing, using a gas—Nevermind—and we watch
their board of “recent memory data” which they select. The first “memory data” is the first
music video, as a memory of Jane’s life, “Crazy Classic Life.” A flying car is stopped by a robot
checking identification papers, but there are extra passengers in the trunk. In addition to the
music we hear a voice with a tone and gravitas resembling the speeches of Martin Luther
King, Jr., giving a speech about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They drive to a party,
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consisting of Afropunks, youths, queers, outcasts. It is a celebration of life even if the world
should end tonight, as the lyrics have it. An optimistic song within a dystopian overall narrative.
In many ways Dirty Computer moves between the utopian and the dystopian, a slipperiness
enabled by the science fiction framing narrative which complicates the more straightforward
perception which might interpret this as simply music about young queer people partying (cf.
Hassler-Forest 11). The characters also bring to mind Janelle Monáe references to outcasts
on “Q.U.E.E.N.,” as “Queer, Untouchables, Emigrants, Excommunicated and Negroid.” One
could also make an argument—if the comparison with Blade Runner should be followed—that
there are some resemblances between the characters in “Crazy Classic Life” and the replicants
in Blade Runner. And, finally, there are some similarities between the cyberpunk dimensions of
Blade Runner and the Afropunk scene.
When the video to “Crazy Classic Life” ends, we see the memory being deleted. In a
sense this is a filmic paradox. It is as if we are seeing the music video one last time before it
is deleted for ever—as Jane is in the process of being cleansed. Her past is to be removed.
The film medium, however, could be seen as a way of storing memories, so that they
can be watched again in the future (similar with photographs and gramophones, both
technologies where the present is stored for future returns). Here, however, with the one
last time watching the memory, the preciousness of the memories is brought to the fore.
Following the argument about memories and humanity in Blade Runner, one could also
claim that the preciousness of humanity is brought to the fore. This makes sense in the next
scene, functioning both as a kind of interlude between the music videos, but also as the
narrative of the Dirty Computer film. The synthesizers return, and we meet Maryapple53
(played by Tessa Thompson) who says she will escort Jane from the darkness to the light.
Jane clearly knows her, as Zen, but Zen (or rather Maryapple53) seems not to remember
her at all. A new cleaning ritual, to get rid of “bugs” lead to the next music video, the
funkier “Take a Byte.” In this video the scientists appear several times, and the song fades
out and into a new cleansing. This time Jane repeats “I am ready to be cleaned,” and a
process of cleaning all the memories begins. The next song seems to begin where “Crazy
Classic Life” ended; the characters are laying around after the party, feeling hung-over,
and then drones appear, before the guitar-riff enters to “Screwed.” While the lyrics state
“I don’t care,” it is a life-affirming song and video, with young people collectively partying,
singing, dancing, fabulously dressed, and thus “Let’s get screwed/I don’t care” seems more
like a wish not to worry about the future and outcome rather than giving up. Again, the
relation between utopia and dystopia is at stake, at the same time as the characters seem
to avoid this dichotomy by simply choosing another path. In the lyrics, Jane or Monáe
also sings “Everything is sex except sex which is power” leading to an empowering rap-
section. There have been hints all along that sexuality is one of the dimensions leading
to the “computers” becoming “dirty.” Jane’s relation with Zen seems to be intimate, as
becomes explicit as the movie unfolds. Sexuality becomes explicitly the focus on “Django
Jane,” where Jane seems to be in the position of a queen. Here too there are references
to Janelle Monáe’s biography and to “Q.U.E.E.N.” She is rapping about Kansas, Monáe’s
own hometown. In the rap-section of “Q.U.E.E.N.” there is also the line “My crown too
heavy like the Queen Nefertiti/Gimme back my pyramid, I’m trying to free Kansas City.”
Not only is this one way Monáe connects between her personal, private life and her art, it
is also a relation between the Metropolis project and Dirty Computer, as it signals how the
personal was already present on the Metropolis-albums and not something entering Monáe’s
work on the latter album. Finally, with the reference to Queen Nefertiti and pyramids it is
also possible to see this as a more explicit reference to Afrofuturism, where Ancient Egypt
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is understood as part of the collective memory of Black diasporic culture. Thus, in an

Afrofuturist vein, Monáe’s biography, her Metropolis-suites, and Dirty Computer correspond
one to the other. This is also heard in the lyrics where Monáe is referencing “Fem the
Future,” which is at the same time her initiative to “create opportunities for young women
and girls in music, arts, and education.”3 Here, then, futurity is combined with education
and art for young women and girls. Moreover, the lyrics to “Django Jane” thus illustrate
female empowerment within the music video, while simultaneously referencing real life
outside of the artwork. While the scientists in the film have difficulties recognizing whether
what they see are memories or fantasies, they continue with a process of complete deletion
of everything in the consciousness of Jane. In the video to “Pynk” there is a car resembling
the one from “Crazy Classic Life,” the earlier clip. It is a video celebrating femininity and
femaleness in all its diversity, an all-female space, where the visuals focus on bodies. It is
filled with eroticism but does not feel voyeuristic. Given the presence of Zen, the relation
to the overall story becomes crucial for this video—they have had a relationship that Zen
has forgotten, and then she is now the agent for removing Jane’s memories. “Make Me
Feel,” the next song, stages the club as a space for dancing. The song uses tongue clicks,
which contrasts the finger-snapping in “Pynk,” both bodily percussive sounds. The funky
beat is both electronic and bodily, implying not only the dancing, but an intimate relation
between the beats, the dancers, and the bodies of the participates. The “feel” is both
physical and emotional—no distinction between mind and body.
At this point in the overall story of Dirty Computer, Zen is beginning to remember again,
by seeing the tattoo on Jane’s arm. “I Like That” with an interesting electronic distortion on
Monáe’s voice, and is only one of the memories where we see multiple Janes. This brings to
mind the multiple versions of Monáe as Cindi Mayweather in the video to “Many Moons,”
where she appears almost as clones and contributes to the establishment of a common
aesthetics between the Metropolis-suites and Dirty Computer (Steinskog 176): not necessarily
science fiction and not quite dreaming, more like a parallel world. Referencing the memories
of Jane, Mother Victoria says to Zen that Jane is still dirty, but that the “nonsense” will be
behind them once she is cleaned. But at this point Zen is starting to remember, although she
is afraid that it is too late. They are walking—seems to be towards the cleaning-space—filmic
soundtrack when the Nevermind gas comes (lots of strings and an acoustic guitar). The
story heightens, as it is unclear whether Zen’s memories will be strong enough or whether
Nevermind is stronger than love. Then a cut, and the credits start. It seems as if Jane has
become Maryapple54 and is now cleaned. We have to wait to after the credit for her to flip
the script (“Let’s flip it,” as is heard on “Q.U.E.E.N.” before the rap-section). Then Zen
comes with masks, and the three of them walk away—out into the light. Soundtrack is “We’ll
find a way to heaven”—“Americans.” The last image is Jane’s face looking back towards us
and towards the cleaning-space they have been able to escape. On “Americans” we hear a
sample of speech—“This is not my America.” Thus the utopian dimension wins, even if we
have to wait until after the credits.
Notes
1 Since the writing of this chapter, Monáe has also released a collection of stories taking place in the
Dirty Computer world (2022).
2 For Afrofuturism, see Womack (2013). The term was coined by Mark Dery (1994). For later
developments see Anderson and Jones (2015), Anderson and Fluker (2019), Lavender (2019), and
Lavender and Yaszek (2020).
3 https://afrotech.com/janelle-monae.
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Bibliography
Anderson, Reynaldo, and Charles E. Jones, editors. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lexington
Books. 2015.
Anderson, Reynaldo, and Clinton R. Fluker, editors. The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity,
Art+Design. Lexington Books, 2019.
Benjamin, Jeff. “Janelle Monae Says ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’ is for the ‘Ostracized & Marginalized,” Fuse, 18
September 2013. www.fuse.tv/videos/2013/9/janelle-monae-queen-interview.
Brooks, Daphne A. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Harvard
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique
of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal
Forum, 1, 1989, pp. 139–167.
David, Marlo D. “On Dirty Computers and Dissemblance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
vol. 45, no. 3, 2020, pp. 541–546.
Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” Flame
Wars: The Discourse on Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery. Duke University Press, 1994, 179–222.
Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2,
2003, pp. 287–302.
Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. Routledge, 2004.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Hoard, Christian. “Artist of the Week: Janelle Monáe,” Rolling Stone, 30 June 2010. www.rollingstone.
com/music/music-news/artist-of-the-week-janelle-monae-186564/
Lavender III, Isiah. Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. The Ohio State University
Press, 2019.
Lavender III, Isiah, and Lisa Yaszek, editors. Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. The Ohio
State University Press, 2020.
Lordi, Emily J. “Black Radio: Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, and Janelle Monáe.” Are You Entertained?
Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson.
Duke University Press, 2020, 44–57.
Monáe, Janelle. The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories from Dirty Computer. Harper, 2022.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurities. New York University Press,
2009.
Spanos, Brittany. “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself,” Rolling Stone, 26 April 2018.
Steinskog, Erik. “Metropolis 2.0: Janelle Monáe’s recycling of Fritz Lang.” The Black Speculative Arts
Movement: Black Futurity, Art + Design, edited by Anderson and Fluker. Lexington, 2019, pp. 173–188.
van Veen, tobias c. “Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Monáe,”
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, pp. 7–41.
Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.
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39
TRANS/PACIFIC
ENTANGLEMENTS
Japanese Tentacle Porn in American Internet
Culture
Dagmar Van Engen
In an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2008, Hugo award-winning author Lois
McMaster Bujold mused on the seductive dangers and promises of the internet by referring
to the transcultural phenomenon of anime: “Wikipedia is so dangerous. . . . You go online to
look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest
explanation of tentacle porn in [Japanese] anime” (Williams 1F). Tentacle porn, Bujold suggests,
is the hidden temptation that unsuspecting browsers might stumble upon in the interconnected,
transnational, erotic, weird internet, epitomizing the strange, untranslated, excessive sprawl of
the internet’s guilty pleasures.
But how and why did tentacle porn anime become so sensationalized? How did the genre
change as it crossed national, linguistic, and sexual borders, and how has this genre influenced
American imaginaries of Asia and Asian genders and sexualities? This chapter traces a genealogy
of anime tentacle porn with its trans possibilities as it travels from Japan into the US via internet
culture. I work through the tensions of how these images circulate in US culture: orientalist
exoticism, queer and trans possibilities, fragmented looping, rewriting and reblogging.
Hentai Goes to America

Anime entered US markets and spawned fan communities in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
generally outside traditional channels of theater screenings and TV broadcasts, with bootleg-
circulated VHS copies of titles like Akira and Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend. By the mid-
1990s, commercial video stores like Blockbuster and Tower Records were selling large quantities
of anime (Collins 64, Newitz 2, Span B01). Anime scholars Jonathan Clements and Helen
McCarthy have argued for a direct relationship between the transnational anime boom and
the alternately sensationalized and disavowed subgenre of pornographic anime, known in the
West as “hentai.” In their words, anime porn “became the secret cash cow of the foreign anime
business,” and Western companies used its profitable “titillation” to “manufacture controversy”
that contributed to sales and to the “popular misconception that all anime is pornographic”
(Anime Encyclopedia 182). From this perspective, anime became popular and profitable in the
West because of, not in spite of, its seedy underside of weird sex.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-43 283

Dagmar Van Engen
And yet the industry itself, many anime fans, and anime scholars spend a significant amount
of time disavowing anime porn as an unimportant subgenre and insisting that not all anime is
like that trashy stuff. This disavowal of pornographic anime makes a lot of sense given the tone
of much North American anime reception, which often blows out of proportion the horror-
porn subgenre of anime en route to grand generalizations about Japanese culture and stereotypes
about Asian misogyny. Orientalism clearly shapes this American reception of Japanese anime
as a hypersexual and violent medium, and the ensuing familiar panics about sexual and violent
media corrupting young white people (Pointon 44). Saitō has argued against the perception that
otaku are childlike, perverse, and unrealistic in their genders and sexualities (“Otaku Sexuality”
227), perceptions that closely track the gender and sexual formations of orientalism (BFG 6).
Chi-Yun Shin concludes, echoing Said, that these marketing strategies “[reveal] far more about
Western perceptions and obsessions about the East Asian countries rather than what people or
societies are like there” (Shin). This context is a key element in the sexual politics of tentacle
porn I investigate here.
Asian Racialization and Anime in the US

If anime porn has been represented as a symptom of the supposed dangers of anime’s effect on
American youth, then what is it about this genre that renders it so easy to sensationalize? Why
do Americans perceive these sexual fantasies as “unconventional erotic practice” that must be
disowned and displaced onto other cultures (Ortega-Brena 20)?
Asian American feminist and queer scholars have critiqued stereotypes of Asians in Western
media that weave together a familiar cast of characters: the hyperfeminine submissive woman,
the feminized man, childlike sexualities, etc. Celine Parreñas Shimizu observes that hypersexual
stereotypes span vastly different eras of anti-Asian racism (3). Asia has functioned as a convenient
imaginative locus of sexual otherness for American publics for a long time, from 19th-century
opium panics and all-male immigrant labor communities to modern exoticized travel narratives.
Given the history of Asian racialization in the US as sexually exotic, weird, and misogynist,
it is hardly surprising that American anime fans started calling pornographic anime “hentai,”
a Japanese word meaning sexual perversity in general. Japanese fans (until recently at least)
know pornographic anime by a host of other labels—adult, 18+, R-18, ero, ecchi, etc. The
recategorization of all pornographic anime as “hentai” in the West signals, to me, the ways that
Asian sexualities in general have been constructed as perverse with respect to white Western
norms. In fact, Marc McClelland explains that the word “hentai” only gained these linguistic
contexts of sexual deviance in the Meiji period as Western medical and scientific texts like
Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis were translated into Japanese and became popular (2).1
However, there are important differences between human hentai set in the mundane world
and nonhuman or transspecies erotic anime with science fictional tropes that do not always collapse
neatly into familiar stereotypes. While there are more hypersexualized Asian girls and Asian
locations in these videos, there are also—as anime scholars have puzzled over—plentiful images
of hypersexual white girls in non-Earth or European-esque settings (Napier 25). Many anime
girl characters, furthermore, appear replete with completely nonrealistic bodily traits like purple
or green hair and demon or robot morph forms. There are no madame or m. butterflies in the
erotic anime imagery I’m going to explore in this chapter. Instead, a host of beautiful fighting
girls, androgynous heroes, teenage superheroines, giant robots, and a wild bestiary of demons
and tentacle monsters fill the screen. And queer, trans, and feminist internet cultures take these
images into still new forms.
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Trans/Pacific Entanglements
Tentacle Porn and Urotsukidōji Reception

The tentacle subgenre of pornographic anime takes up a disproportionate amount of space in
American popular understandings of anime as about violence and weird sex. One film critic
observed in 2006 that Americans see anime as a genre for “young males [to] live out their most
violent sexual fantasies” in part because of tentacle erotica (Sharp, Behind the Pink Curtain 32).
But on what basis did anime tentacle porn become the ultimate emblem of misogyny and violent
sex, the bugbear of respectable anime fans and scholars? Tentacle porn became a lightning rod
for sensational coverage of anime partly because of a disproportionate focus on Toshio Maeda’s
manga and Hideki Takayama’s anime adaptation based on it, Legend of the Overfiend. This series
has been the object of considerable angst, scrutiny, and infamy. Its blend of apocalyptic horror,
demon and tentacle monster porn, and teenage heterosexual romance became a focal point for
pornography scares and white youth-corruption panics as well as fannish defensiveness.
Urotsukidōji’s first installment came out in Japan as an OVA (original video animation) in
1989, and was released in the US on home video in 1993 through Central Park Media. The
first installment, Legend of the Overfiend, tells the story of Nagumo, a high school student, his
girlfriend Akemi, and two separate demon underworld realms that compete to wreak havoc
in the human world. To distill the sprawling, tentacular plot considerably: after Nagumo and
Akemi have sex for the first time, Nagumo transforms into a massive, Godzilla-sized tentacled
demon who heralds the apocalypse and rebirth of the world as we know it. Nagumo’s scenes
of epic devastation, like many apocalyptic anime, pan across a devastated Tokyo that recalls the
destruction of the atomic bomb. The series offers a grimly conservative and male-centric view
of sexuality as a fundamentally destructive force that, if unleashed from its repression, will bring
about the end of the human world.
US periodicals and marketing in the 1990s emphasized The Overfiend’s grotesque horror,
perversity, and sensational titillation, and used these qualities to generalize about anime as a whole.
A 1996 article in the New York Times introduces anime to readers as a “stylish, futuristic, violent,
sex-filled genre,” with examples from Urotsukidōji to illustrate this point (Cooper 13.3). A 1995
article in the same newspaper describes Urotsukidōji as “an adults-only cartoon” “featur[ing]
grotesque monsters from another world forcing bizarre sex on cute teen-age earthlings,” while
projecting this content invading the US: “One thing is clear. . . . The invasion of the giant robots,
sex-crazed demons and voluptuous yet vulnerable co-eds is just beginning” (Pollack 2.32). These
accounts use Urotsukidōji to depict anime as attractive or dangerous because it is perverse, violent,
and sexual. Such generalizations and sensationalisms also made their way into academic writing.
Joel Dahlquist and Lee Vigilant, for example, call the Urotsukidōji series “an incomprehensible
phantasmagoria punctuated by teen girls suffering rapes in all available orifices from the tentacle-
penises of demons,” attributing the US success of anime porn as a subgenre to this series (93). This
coverage is, to be fair, justified when it portrays Takayama’s series as an apocalyptic carnival of
sex, terror, violation, and the spectacle of tortured women’s bodies. But its reception in this vein
received disproportionate attention from Western publics concerned and titillated by the series’
sexualized dangers, and became somehow emblematic of Japanese animation as a whole.
Getting Over The Overfiend

What would it mean to approach these works from a queer perspective? The disproportionate
focus on misogyny and sexual violence in Urotsukidōji overshadows a much broader range of
tentacle porn representations that offered more sex-positive, femme, queer, and trans-inclusive
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visions of tentacle sex. Series like Maeda’s La Blue Girl, for example, did not make as many
newspaper headlines or snarky asides in academic articles because they fail to offer a vision of
Japan as a place in which (white) straight cisgender men can fantasize about treating themselves
to submissive, sexually receptive Japanese women (Everett-Green C9). What if gender-
nonconforming, Asian, and nonhuman porn are not just cause for shock value, but also sites
of queer, trans, and feminist speculation? Once we slow down the urge to immediately read
tentacles as always already nonconsensual phallic signifiers, queer, trans, and feminist modes of
analysis make these monsters function differently.
Even in the mid-1990s, series like La Blue Girl (1992–3 in Japan, 1995 in the US) existed
that featured women having sex together with or without tentacles—and enjoying it—in
fantastic, science-fictional realms. Western newspaper accounts practically ignored these types
of tentacle porn compared to the coverage that The Overfiend got. La Blue Girl is a lighthearted
erotic anime series that tracks the adventures of a matriarchal clan of ninja “sexcraft” warriors,
the Mido, who do battle with other ninjas and with demons through orgasm control. Whereas
in Urotsukidōji sexuality is overwhelmingly a hetero-masculine and world-destructive force, in
the universe of La Blue Girl sexuality is primarily a feminine province, and women’s pleasure
is a powerful magical force that can be harnessed for good or evil. There are few human men
and fewer human-human hetero scenes in La Blue Girl: almost all the sex scenes happen either
between human women, with solo human woman, or between human women and nonhuman
demons. Much like The Overfiend, La Blue Girl’s narrative revolves around human relations with
a demon underworld. Yet this time the two worlds mix and have intimate and kinship ties: the
protagonist Miko discovers partway through that she is mixed-race human and demon.
This series involves trans characters, not just cisgender ones. Episode 2 of La Blue Girl
includes a genderqueer sequence between heroine Miko and two members of an enemy sex
ninja clan, Bosatsu (a cisgender woman) and Ranmaru (who dresses as a man, is voiced by a
higher, feminine-sounding voice, and has intersex genitalia). Though gender-nonconforming,
Ranmaru is not desexualized—in fact, one ninja warrior falls in love with Ranmaru, a cardinal
sin in the sexcraft universe. This sequence also unveils a unique weapon of Miko’s sexcraft clan:
Miko can grow her clitoris “as big as a penis” and use it to penetrate opponents in battle. After
Miko tops Bosatsu using her enlarged clitoris, Ranmaru fucks Miko with their penis, before
Miko switches and tops Ranmaru. By the end of the scene, it is thoroughly disestablished that
women must be cisgender, topping must involve men, sex must be heterosexual and violating,
and women cannot be agents of sex.
In Western hentai subgenre conventions, “futanari” generally means hyperfeminine women
who have both penises and vaginas—intersex trans femme characters, if you will. “Futanari” is
not equivalent to “transgender,” but American internet cultures create an overlap between the
terms. As a subgenre this involves scenes in which a woman grows a penis, sometimes as an
element of sexual humiliation, and uses feminine pronouns rather than calling the character a
man or framing her as undesirable.2 “Futanari” is not the Japanese translation of “transgender,”
but means something closer to “intersex” or “androgyny” (Isaka 27). Theresa Algoso translates
the word into English as “hermaphrodite,” with all its stigmatizing, sexological-medical
connotations (557), while Maki Isaka also notes that etymologically it includes “the number
two” (futa) and “a ‘figure’ or a state of becoming” (nari) (253–54, 28). Within the videos
futanari often transition into their intersex state, which makes them trans-ed or transfeminized.
English language tumblr, reddit, pornhub, and other spaces demonstrate the entanglement of
“futanari” and “trans” when hashtagging, crowdsourced categorization, or post titles cross-
reference the terms.3 The futanari subgenre is part of the reason hentai as a whole is associated
with ideas about perverse sex. I will be focusing on how Western internet cultures interpret,
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rewrite, and recirculate futanari + tentacle imagery in ways that overlap with categories of
transgender, not how Japanese queer cultures or online fandoms interpret and understand these
images. My examples are drawn from mid-2010s tumblr culture, when the platform had not
yet banned pornography.
Loops, Fan Art, and Other Recirculating Machines

When Space Pirate Sara and La Blue Girl migrate onto the. gif ecology of the internet in the
early 2000s, the new platforms strip away most pornhub-style tags and full-video narrative in
favor of short, recircling clips. Rather than endless reaffirmation of The Overfiend’s masculinist
apocalypse, the decontextualized looping format of gifs allows brief gestures, acts, and moment
of pleasure to wander outside the context of an originally nonconsensual or dubiously consensual
plotline and unfurl in new contexts. In mid-2010s Tumblr, for example, Fuck Yeah Tentacle
Porn’s gif posting of La Blue Girl, for example, cuts away narrative framing and leaves short
glimpses of red tentacles wrapped around a pelvis and a purple-haired girl’s face leaned back in
pleasure (tentacle-mom.tumblr.com, 18/11/2013). The visuals leave the imagery open to new
possible narratives: we do not know, for example, who or what these tentacles belong to, or
whether Miko wins this sexcraft battle—only that tentacles appear enjoyable in this particular
moment. In one Space Pirate Sara. gif on the same tumblr, Sara and Sylia appear in their futanari
state without their captors, restrained by disembodied tentacles at the arms and legs (tentacle-
mom.tumblr.com, 6/4/2013). With each video loop, they are penetrated in multiple orifices,
faces displaying expressions of pleasure-pain. The decontextualization of the images excludes
elements like the captors or any discernable monster body from the frame, leaving only cycling
images of restraint, penetration, and pleasure.
The 4chan thread “Consensual Monsters” more explicitly theorizes the mechanisms by
which. gifs can recontextualize sexual imagery. Specifically,. gifs and screenshots can loosen
moments of pleasure from original narratives and rewrite them as consensual if they weren’t in
the original video. The “Consensual Monsters” thread begins with a clarification of what kinds
of images can be posted: “Anything monsters as long as it’s consensual (or becomes consensual)
or at least appears ambiguous/consensual out of context. ie: no rape, no pain, no tears,” followed
by a specific example of an “ambiguous/consensual out of context” image in extreme close-up.4
This gallery of tentacle sex offers up images to a newly curated and reframed feed of consensual
tentacles, detached from the kinds of sensationalizing headlines I examined earlier.
Consensual tentacles also appear on reddit, where original drawings rather than. gif clips
rewrite mainstream associations of tentacle porn in favor of multispecies, femme-centric, often
queer images of women, women, and tentacles. In R/consentacles, users share original fan art,
videos, and sometimes stories. The feed bills itself as “a place for consensual, happy, love of
erotica and porn of all things squiggly, grabby, and penetrating. Hentai, stories, CG or manips”
are ok, but “no underage or borderline,” and the scenes depicted must obviously depict consent.
Like the “Consensual Monsters” 4chan, this site makes explicit a revisioning of tentacle porn as
consensual and feminist.
R/consentacles’ feed centralizes sex between solo women or multiple women and tentacles.
I have not yet found an image on the site of anything remotely resembling human hetero-
sexual sex. As brief examples, one post shares an image by Magnifire of a light-skinned woman
with brown hair and tail embracing a gray-green-skinned woman with blue hair and tail, both
penetrated by dark gray tentacles.5 Another post depicts an image by Roxy Rex of two light-
skinned women with purple hair, one cisgender and one trans, encircled by an array of bright
blue and pink striped tentacles, a clearly fantastic color scheme.6 In both scenes, the human
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participants look toward one other, engaging with each other rather than solely with someone
outside the frame controlling the tentacles. Despite the commonsense wisdom that tentacles are
only censor-evading phallic imagery, the images on this reddit depict monster tentacles in so
many fantastic colors and shapes—candy canes, octopus limbs, vines, hair, etc.—that it would
be an oversimplification to distill them down to the visual morphology of phallic substitutes.
For example, some by Aivelin envision tentacles that resemble specific sex toys like bright
pink anal beads or rabbit vibrators,7 or others by Raikissu feature pastel curls of pink hair in
my-little-pony style.8 The variation is endless, and it creates communities around pornographic
imaginaries that do not take for granted immediate analogies with the heterocisgender male
body. Compare all of this to the visuals in Legend of the Overfiend, in which pink skin-toned
tentacles, glowing ejaculate, and penis-headed tentacles frame tentacle sex as primarily about
heterosexual narratives and teenage cisgender boys’ angst.
Solo girl tentacle monster images replace the external limbs of a tentacle monster with a
woman who is half-human (or humanoid) and half-tentacle monster and pleasuring herself.
A since-deleted image attributed to Boldnbrash depicts the DC comic book character Poison
Ivy surrounded by dark green tentacles wrapped around her that bind, choke, and penetrate her,
acts which the reddit caption contextualizes as an act of self-pleasure and -dominance: “Poison
Ivy tangled up in her own vines.”9
Rather than yet another review or article generalizing from Urotsukidōji about how Japanese
media is invading America with representations of rape, misogyny, underage sex, and violence,
internet cultures that rescript tentacle porn imagery redirect these stereotypes and reframe
tentacle sex as feminist, consent-positive, and sometimes queer. It is only possible to reinforce a
narrative that Japanese anime porn as a whole is chauvinist by cherry-picking scenes, videos, and
cultural texts and by upholding these as exemplary. This trend affects academic discourse, too.
Newitz’s essay, for example, argues that “when American fans consume magical girl anime . . .
they are enjoying depictions of women which take for granted that women are subordinate to
men” (5). In the face of that, trans- and queer-affirmative corners of tumblr, reddit, and 4chan
expand on the original narratives to celebrate the (consensual) weirdness, genderqueerness,
transfemininity, and science fictional settings of tentacle porn through the technology of the.
gif and original amateur art.
What would happen if we ease up on the impulse to assume every tentacle is a phallus,
and instead allow some of the more unruly, interspecies, speculative, and trans representations
room to breathe? While readings of the tentacle as hetero-phallus are seemingly omnipresent
(Clements Erotic 21, Pointon 57), in futanari hentai penises are more likely to be attached to
women and femmes than to men or masculinity. In Space Pirate Sara episode 4, for example, two
cisgender women have sex with two trans(ed) women in a variety of configurations with the
help of their tentacle “pet”: no men, but plenty of feminized penises and nonhuman limbs. On
r/consentacles, penises likewise become associated with femininity rather than masculinity in
posts that pair trans femmes or other gender-nonconforming characters with striped, purple,
hairlike, or vibrating tentacles. A 2017 image by Pastelletta, for example, depicts a light-skinned,
rabbit-eared, smiling trans girl surrounded by light green tentacles and hearts under the title,
“Settling in for a fun evening by Pastelletta (futa [trans-girl]).”10 Images of feminized penises,
disembodied bright-colored tentacles, trans femmes, and solo femmes thoroughly displace the
associations between tentacle, penis, penetration, masculinity, and heterosexuality that seem so
naturalized in reception and scholarship.
Contrary to the tradition of psychoanalytic feminist criticism inspired by Barbara Creed’s The
Monstrous-Feminine, I am interested in the nonhuman qualities of tentacles that exceed the phallus.
If demonic bodies in pornographic anime are no longer human, why must they necessarily be
288
read as male, especially when surrounded by trans and gender-nonconforming characters? It is

precisely the nonhuman excess of tentacular bodies in hentai that strains, or explodes entirely,
their categorization within the familiar heterosexual Freudian matrix. It is no longer enough
to identify phallic and vaginal metaphors in every monster, to recite the familiar story of the
castrated woman and the violently anxious man in every new speculative text, particularly when
the bodies onscreen are nonhuman. Tentacles themselves, in the mundane world, are limbs of
touch, feeling, or locomotion, multipurpose appendages that offer sticky attachment, sensory
openness, and messy entanglement with other beings. Tentacle sex thus means entanglement
with the nonhuman, with other creatures, cultures, and imaginaries.
Notes
1 Erotic anime and tentacle porn do not have the same connotations outside US media spheres. There is
a longer history to speculative pornography in Japan, from 19th-century (late Edo) ukiyo-e woodblock
prints (Papp 72–73, Napier 21, Pointon 50), to the 1920s–1930s (Taishō/early Showa) phenomenon
of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), which built on newly translated European sexology
(Reichert 114). More recently, the 1970s/80s pinku eiga genre laid further groundwork for weird, low-
budget, speculative porn (Sharp). And Yaoi (boy love) manga has used speculative genres to tell stories
about sexual minorities for a long time.
2 See Tobi Hill-Meyer’s essay in The Feminist Porn Book on trans women, erasure, and the fetishized
“shemale” subgenre in non-animated Western video porn.
3 The streaming site Kisshentai.net, for example, notes that “futanari is most closely related to the
yuri genre,” thus associating trans women with lesbian sex rather than misgendering them into gay
male categories (kisshentai.net/Genre/Futanari). This is important because of what Tobi Hill-Meyer
describes as a transmisogynist double bind in the porn industry between, on the one hand, “ ‘tranny/
shemale porn,’ the derogatory phrase used to market trans women porn in the mainstream industry,”
and an almost complete erasure of trans women in feminist and queer porn (at least when she started
directing and performing porn) (157–58).
4 https://4archive.org/board/gif/thread/8632643.
5 www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/comments/65v6pc/one_more_round_by_magnifire_female/.
6 www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/comments/67g7rf/date_night_with_tentalcels_by_roxyrex_female_
male/.
7 www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/comments/61i3t0/d_va_is_loving_those_tentacle_upgrades_made_
to/.
8 www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/comments/5xgzc1/a_little_tenderness_is_always_nice_by_raikissu/.
9 www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/comments/6liyp3/poison_ivy_tangled_up_in_her_own_vines_
boldnbrash/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3.
10 www.reddit.com/r/consentacles/comments/63v9b0/daily_tentacles_43/.
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40
GENDERING THROUGH TIME
IN JAPANESE ANIME
The Time-Traveling Girl
In one of the opening moments of Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 film, Your Name [Kimi no Na wa],
Taki Tachibana, a high school boy, wakes up and groggily examines his hands before realizing
he is inhabiting the body of a young woman, Mitsuha Miyamizu. In fact, he has not only traded
bodies with Mitsuha, but temporalities as well. Mitsuha, meanwhile, is transported into Taki’s
future time and male body. The twinned time-gender swap provides the film with its central
narrative device, but also articulates an ongoing trend in a compelling subgenre of Japanese
time travel stories; time travel that does not center on a machine, but rather on the female
body. Represented by texts such as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [Toki wo Kakeru Shōjo]
from 2006, Puella Magi Madoka Magica [Mahō Shōjo Madoka Magika] from 2011, and Your Name
from 2016, these anime make explorations of gender and nostalgic memory central to journeys
through time. In addition, the medium of anime itself serves as its own time machine through
structuring elements of editing and cinematography that allow the spectator to travel along the
strands of time together with the characters.
In his exploration of time travel topoi in Japanese manga, Ulrich Heinze locates the origins
of time travel narratives in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and describes Japanese contributions
to the tradition as a response to Western science fiction novels. This popular conception of the
genre misses two important cultural histories. First, it ignores a longer Western tradition of
time jumping that Fredric Jameson locates within the genre of utopian romances participating
in a continuous dialectic (2). These stories include William Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere
that responds to Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward which led to the writing of Wells’s
Time Machine. Second, it imagines that there were no time travel stories available to Japanese
audiences until writers like Wells and Jules Verne were translated into Japanese in the 1880s.
Recognizing longer histories in both the East and West allows us to reinterpret the central
themes and concerns of time travel stories.
Studies of time travel in literature and culture, such as James Gleick’s 2016 Time Travel:
A History and David Wittenberg’s Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative from 2013,
echo this tradition of imagining the time travel trope as articulating a largely Western conceptual
entanglement of physics, fiction, and political futurity as it emerges in the science fiction
canon. The reading of time travel as expressive of a Wellsian tradition often marginalizes Japan’s
tradition of mirai-ki1 (records of the future) which has been in circulation for centuries, and
mukashibanashi or old folktales featuring time travel, like the popular story of Urashima Taro2
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-44 292

Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime
(Lee, 136–37). A focus on Wells also occludes the degree to which time travel has circulated
globally far beyond the call and response critiques of Western authors.
Western technology-driven time travel stories did not initiate a generic conversation, but
rather entered into a complex cultural site of socio-political speculation. This Western tradition
was often dominated by the male gaze and male knowledge systems, whether Wells’s eccentric
scientist, Verne’s explorers, or Bellamy and Morris’s dueling socialists. In contrast, as Japanese
media incorporated time travel and science fiction, there has emerged a focus instead on time
travel as distinctly feminine and built on resistance to the tradition of male spectatorship. Often
in these stories, time travel is not initiated via a machine, but by a body’s relationship to time
within a specific subjectivity.
Female SF and the Shōjo

Interrogating time travel in Japanese anime brings the female time traveler to the forefront of
the narrative. A distinct figure, the female time traveler provides entrance to a specific Japanese
conversation related to shōjo and gender. Lien Fan Shen defines shōjo as “an anime genre,
a variety of representation in narratives, a targeted group of consumers and viewers, and a
particular way of seeing and thinking” (178). Shōjo refers to a particular time of a young girl’s
life prior to 18 years old where she is expected to leave the homosocial space of childhood
and adhere to the expectations of a patriarchal system that produces wives and mothers. Film
critics, from Susan Napier to Emily Wakeling and Kotani Mari, have noted the special female
adolescent space of shōjo that gives rise to a critique of a male-oriented society through female
sight and knowledge, even as these shōjo bodies are themselves fetishized and mass-produced for
a male gaze. Shōjo, Shen reiterates, allows opportunities for social change and escape through
its particular formula of innocent, impulsive, and emotional young girls. Shen describes how
the concept “manifests unreachable beauty, nostalgia for the past (youth), freedom from adult
sexuality and family duty, and disconnection of social status for women” (179). In anime, this
“potential to escape from reality” often takes the form of time travel. In other words, time travel
becomes a means via which we can consider the temporal space of the teenage girl and through
her emotional body, nation, and the gendering of time.
Shōjo culture and the creation of female spaces of same-sex love and adventure is a key trope
of Japanese female science fiction. Gender is reconstructed and reconsidered within female
worlds where men are ostracized, and female narrative subjectivity is privileged in key genre-
defining texts by Japanese female science fiction authors such as Hikawa Reiko, Suzuki Izumi,
and Matsuo Yumi among many others. According to Kotani Mari,
Women in these texts seek deep spiritual relationships with other women while liv-
ing in a system constrained by the rules of a heterosexual society that expects them
to marry and to take on the responsibilities of pregnancy, childbirth, and running a
household. (401)
Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s but with work extending into the 2000s, Arai Motoko is most
famously associated with revolutionizing the science fiction genre through an integration of
shōjo culture and female teenage vernacular within the imaginary world of the science fiction
novel (405). Kotani argues for a “fantasy of shōjo” that underpins Arai’s popular science fiction
work: “figures who, in spite of being part of the mechanism constructed by dominant discourses,
have managed to run their own course. They threaten to implode the world surrounding them,
and their presence may even be called monstrous” (405). The influence of Japanese female
293
science fiction can clearly be seen in manga and anime, where many of these authors have
crossed over with their critical writing, and for which shōjo is an essential genre, aesthetics, and
audience. The concept of a science fiction ‘fantasy of shōjo’ and its investigation of femininity
and, consequently, female monstrosity within private female worlds is deeply embedded in the
Japanese anime female time traveler tradition, and must be considered in any analysis of the
genre. In what follows we will explore shōjo as central to an understanding of female time travel
in its construction of female spaces of escape and entrapment.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (referred to from this point as Madoka Magica) is a 2011 critically
successful anime series in which young girls or shōjo in middle school make contracts with a
cute supernatural creature named Kyubey, to become magical girls and fight destructive witches
in exchange for the granting of a wish. The series chiefly centers around two time-traveling
girls—14-year-old shy protagonist Madoka, and the mysterious new student, Homura Akemi,
who is set on preventing Madoka from becoming a magical girl. Madoka Magica functions
within the expectations of shōjo, the genre within which magical girls often manifest—
beautiful young school-girls possessed of the ability to secretly change into powerful alter-egos
through extended transformation sequences in order to save the world from evil forces. In her
description of shōjo anime, Napier asserts that “the dreamy and charming world of the shōjo
stands in attractive counterpoint to the darker and more violent texts of much science fiction
anime” (149). Madoka Magica is caught in the collision of science fiction’s dark violence and the
kawaii (cute) dreamings of shōjo anime. Madoka Magica reworks heroic tropes of the magical
girl subgenre using time travel as a mode to express a female politics of resistance through the
creation of a text wholly concerned with female spectatorship and the subjectivity of betrayed
magical girls who are all doomed to become the selfsame witches they destroy in a never-ending
cycle of martyrdom and despair.
Despite Napier’s positioning of shōjo within “dreamy and charming worlds,” she
acknowledges the shōjo’s more contemporary darkening (191). The magical girl genre though
has always come from a dark shōjo tradition filled with loss, self-sacrifice, witches, and violence,
represented in foundational anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena [Shōjo Kakumei Utena] from
1997, and Sailor Moon [Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn] from 1992–1997—a darkness which Madoka
Magica brings into full articulation. In Madoka Magica, Kyubey belongs to an alien species that
specifically targets shōjo for his contracts because, as Kyubey informs Madoka, “the most
effective energy comes from females in their second stage of development when they [have]
the most intense fluctuations of hope and despair” (Episode 9). This stage of development also
manifests time travel for the shōjo. It is in the intense emotions felt by shōjo characters Madoka
and Homura caught within this liminal space of puberty that these young girls desperately
make wishes, resulting in their ability to travel through time in an attempt to change the future
of the shōjo-magical girl who has none. Homura, for example, chooses to become a magical
girl purely to change the tragic fate of her first friend, Madoka. In the original timeline of the
story, Madoka is already a magical girl while Homura, an awkward and idealistic middle school
student, seeks to become one. Homura’s wish, generated from her love for Madoka, translates
not only into her ability to time travel, but essentially reverses their knowledge positions with
Madoka becoming the awkward middle school student learning about the presence of magical
girls for the first time, and Homura, the jaded magical girl who sacrifices her life for another.
Madoka Magica begins already entangled in time, its narrative pathway one timeline out of
the countless others that Homura has traversed in a repeated time loop and discarded in her
294
failure. Homura’s time leaps continually return her to the moment she first met Madoka in
middle school, a month before the battle with witch Walpurgisnacht that results in Madoka’s
death. Even though Homura actively attempts to write and rewrite the narrative of Madoka’s
future, Madoka is the nexus for time and its travel. Madoka occupies the space not only where
all timelines intersect but also through whom time travel occurs as it is only due to her love for
Madoka that Homura returns repeatedly to the past. Female time travel in Madoka Magica as
such resists movement outside the intimate girl-only space of shōjo, and is activated through the
emotional energies of same-sex girl love.
The girlish school space of the shōjo where Madoka is simply an ordinary little girl becomes
one to be protected, one that Homura constantly tries to manipulate time for Madoka to
remain safely within. Shōjo, its own space of temporality, comes though with an endpoint
emblemized by Homura’s inability to prevent Madoka from making the same choices in every
timeline to become a magical girl and mature into a witch who needs to be eradicated from
society. Rather than the cheerful expression of fantastical girl love and adventuring highlighted
in many magical girl anime prior to Madoka Magica, transformation into the powerful magical
girl begins the metamorphosis into the witch who actively resists the reincorporation into
patriarchal society expected of the shōjo, and ultimately of the fetishized magical girls through
heterosexual relationships and marriage. When a magical girl becomes irredeemably tainted
with grief (her soul gem turns into a black grief seed), she transitions into a “witch” creating her
own labyrinth—a surreal externalization of all the trauma endured by the magical girl leading to
her transformation. These labyrinths do not merely alter the reality of the character in question,
they create pockets of aesthetic rupture as well, where the texture, material, and internal logic
of the show’s world become fungible as an expression of the female witch.
Referencing the beginnings of a magical girl genre inspired by the American live-action
sitcom Bewitched (1964–1972), and one of the first magical girl anime series Sally the Witch
[Mahotsukai Sally] (Mitsuteru Yokoyama, 1966–1968), Madoka Magica uses the trope of the
magical girl-witch binary to examine a politics of female power and expression across time.3
Sharalyn Orbaugh argues that magical girls, these “busty battlin’ babes” ascend into power
through “the tension between their sexual potential and their refusal to activate it” (220)
illuminated in their peekaboo transformation scenes that slide between sexually mature (a
glimpse of full breasts) and childish bodies (a lack of pubic hair and genitalia) in awareness of
a consumptive male gaze. Madoka Magica, on the other hand, often refuses the signs of sexual
maturity within the ambiguous time space of the transformation sequence, locating its magical
girls fully within innocence by refusing the sight of the naked body—an innocence that the
narrative mode slowly snuffs out. It is when the magical girls achieve their final transformation
into witchhood, which exists as a space of ellipsis or vanishing (we never see the full transition
to witch, we simply see the culmination as witch) that perhaps we see the opposite of Orbaugh’s
liminal magical girl—a release of tension in the activation of sexual and gendered possibility.
The soul gem that houses the magical girl’s soul ‘hatches’, shattering like a bomb, and freeing
the witch.4 A connection, then, emerges between a movement into the darkness of witchhood
and a vanishing in time as one aligned with a transition into sexual awakening, self-awareness,
and, through the witch’s creation of her own ‘labyrinth’ outside the ‘real’ world, acts as resistance
to a consumptive patriarchal society.
The future for the active female time traveler is thus one of inevitable failure. Rather than
the magical girl being an expression of shōjo freedom and power, she becomes a symbol of its
impossibility. Her ‘corruption’ into an adult witch as she matures in knowledge of her own
fate signals the only possibility of return to a shōjo-like space, always simultaneously escape and
prison. Homura, through her targeted time travel, has doomed herself and Madoka to timeless
295
immortality as shōjo, never growing older, and although able to engage in female adventure,
it can only exist within fixed temporalities of the shōjo or the witch’s labyrinth. Time travel
as such for the female time traveler is ultimately fruitless in its inexorable forward movement
where little girls must grow up. Female time travel cannot stop the passage of time, and ends
in the death of the shōjo through the young girl’s mature transition into society, or the shōjo-
magical girl’s metaphorical death-rebirth into the terrible witch who must be killed or vanished.
Susan Napier outlines the long narrative tradition of the “disappearing female” (170) in
Japanese culture and storytelling such as The Tale of Genji and The Bush Warbler’s Home, pointing
to the cultural specificity of vanishing that often exposes social anxieties concerned with
disappearing traditions and the fragility of nation. Arguing for the growing transformation
of the shōjo into a “figure of loss and absence” (191) in more recent anime, Napier explores
the idea of the vanishing shōjo in Haibane Renmei from 2004, Spirited Away (2001), Serial
Experiments Lain from 1998, and Revolutionary Girl Utena from 1997, ending with Miyazaki
Hayao’s vanishing girl ‘Sophie’ from Howl’s Moving Castle in 2004. Miyazaki, Napier contends,
“[presents] some new directions, most notably the willingness to allow the shōjo to disappear
and be replaced by a mature female” (193). She notes, in particular, how Sophie retains her silver
hair when she returns to young girlhood at the end of the anime, indicating perhaps “it is time
for Japanese cinema or even Japanese society to acknowledge that youth is not a permanent state
and that, magical or not, all shōjo do eventually disappear” (193). The vanishing of the shōjo
within Miyazaki’s storyworld thus is a positive act as it indicates a movement into maturity and
compassionate community building. In time-traveling anime like Madoka Magica, though, if the
shōjo has vanished into a witch, this mature female becomes a social threat to be eradicated.
Important to an understanding of the shōjo transformation into an old or mature body is the
inherent “powers of old age”—“the realization that one can do what one likes and not worry
so much about the consequences and the power of ‘invisibility’ that old age tends to confer”
(Napier 192). The mature female body, the witch body, often overtly sexualized, aged, or
demonized in Japanese anime, possesses ‘powers’ that parallel the immature, innocent shōjo body.
Metamorphosis into witch allows freedom (even if fleeting) from fixed social expectations. It is
worth noting that Sophie turns into an old woman, not a mature (meaning sexually awakened
and liberated) one. Even when she reverts to her youth with her trademark grey hair, Sophie
presents a safe and innocent version of female maturity removed from the dangerous power of
sexuality, far less same-sex love. Sophie-with-the-grey-hair is quite a different creature from
the significantly threatening-to-the-world-order mature witches that ‘taint’ shōjo transition in
Madoka Magica, and other time-traveling anime.
Vanishing is central to a concept of the female time traveler in anime. Young girls do not
simply vanish from one point in time to another, as typically represented in Western visualizations
of time travel in film and digital media. Time travel operates as a means to move away from
the vanishing point of a transition from the homosocial teenager (shōjo) into the heterosexual
adult, constantly moving backwards from the inevitability of change. As mentioned earlier, the
power of shōjo that Kyubey craves and that enables female movements through time, stems from
its unique space of female secrets and love, closed to male control and knowledge systems. In
an echo of Homura, Madoka contracts with Kyubey in an effort to prevent not only Homura’s
death and suffering as a magical girl-witch, but the despair and loneliness of all magical girls.
Madoka’s Christ-like sacrifice of her life for the love of all shōjo-magical girls translates into an
expression of time itself. With the utterance of her wish, Madoka remembers all her timelines
with Homura, and in her reciprocation of Homura’s love, the two girls meet in Time within
the cosmos, naked and embracing in a merging of cosmic bodies. In other words, the first time
Madoka Magica gives sight to naked magical girl bodies is in the realignment of the universe
296
in which Madoka’s sacrifice has rendered her the epitome of the magical girl signaled through
the site of her naked liminal body entwined with Homura’s. A God, Madoka now possesses
the ability to move across different timelines and change the future of magical girls throughout
history at the cost of being vanished herself from human existence. Instead of attempting to
reverse narrative time through time jumping into the past like Homura, Madoka time travels
to vanish the magical girl on the cusp of witchhood. In this way, Madoka preserves the space
of the shōjo, but in vanishing the socially agitating bodies of budding witches, she dooms the
schoolgirl-shōjo to passivity and the magical girl to fighting against a new male-configured
enemy without any opportunity to scratch out their own labyrinths within the conformities of
patriarchal society. Cleto and Bahl argue that,
As witches, the girls had power, creativity, individual expression, and embodiment
in the midst of their despair, the power to shape the world around them with their
assembled story-worlds; with Madoka’s new system, however, even that ambiguous
power and creativity is denied them, and they are literally wiped out of existence. (10)
The time-traveling girls of Madoka Magica, despite their agency, struggle to save the adventuring
shōjo from her fate—she must die. In Madoka Magica, the magical girls exist at tension with their
own inevitable fall into witchhood. They actively fight and kill witches to purify themselves and
extend their shōjo lives. The vanishing of their bodies in time through Madoka, the embodiment
of the fleshy time machine, gives rise to the wraiths (masculine figures that perhaps point to the
rise of patriarchy without these resisting witches) and forces a reflection of the punished figure
of the suffering, magical girl and the consequences of her active empowerment.
Time travel in general necessitates vanishing from one point and reappearing in another.
The alienated female time traveler often chases after some thing already past, and in their effort
to hold on to the nostalgia of innocence and girlhood, female characters repeatedly vanish
from threatening situations, especially as it pertains to their own self-governance. In Hosoda
Mamoru’s 2006 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, for instance, high school senior Makoto time
travels to escape the attentions of her best friend, Chiaki, and thus retain the unfettered liberty
of adolescence. The time travel machine in Hosoda’s film is the human body, which can be
charged through a small futuristic device to enable the body’s unrestricted travel through time.
Makoto’s unmarried Aunty Witch suggests, though, that time travel instinctively belongs to the
shōjo body regardless of time technology, and is caught up in teen dreaming and fantasy. “Time
can never be reversed,” she informs Makoto. “Time itself doesn’t go back. So, what went back in
time was you yourself. . .. That’s not unusual. It happens to a lot of girls around your age. . . . It
happened to me.” Similarly, in Shinkai Makoto’s 2016 Your Name, Mitsuha time jumps into the
past in the moment of her impending death, the night a piece of comet fell to earth. Your Name
begins with a sense of missing time and undefinable loss. Mitsuha and Taki wake from a dream,
or is it a memory half grasped, that rapidly dissipates for the characters, and marks the modern
experience of Mitsuha and Taki who wake crying without any knowledge why. Your Name taps
into the reality of the modern Japanese individual haunted by its apocalyptic past, highlighting
how traumatic, unexpected events like the atomic bomb might fracture time, allowing the ability
to travel between past spaces of nostalgia and a present marked by melancholy, incompleteness,
and spiritual longing (wabi sabi).
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay describes the interruption of an anime’s diegetic logic as a “lyrical
physics, in which affect and imagination determine the parameters of what can and cannot
happen in a quasi-mimetic world, where the design limits the possibilities of metamorphosis”
(37). Characters within Madoka Magica perform lyrical physics both as agents of transformation
297
and then as theorists implementing new physical paradigms that reorganize the gender-
dependent constitution of the worlds they occupy. “Madoka,” Shen writes, “is not a Magical
Girl, but she is becoming one. The term becoming is critical in this case. Becoming someone
implies uncertainty, changing, and a moment that entails a virtuality of future and redirects the
past” (184). Female time travelers in Japanese anime enact lyrical physics to negotiate gender as
the material embodiment of cultural and aesthetic discourses on identity.
These scenes of self-reflection, recognition, and spectatorship twin female subjectivity with both
the impossibility of locating the concept of time without mediation, and the consistent awareness
that the mediation necessary is frequently situated within the context of gender/gendering. Gender
fluidity and freedom for the time-traveling shōjo can only exist in temporal pockets. Men are
ultimately superfluous within these female time-traveling narratives placed wholly within spaces
of female subjectivity and narrative control, unless emotionally attached to said female body in a
merging that achieves a form of transvestite gazing. Even in these cases, when the narrative follows
a male time traveler, the text still raises the specter of the shōjo and the witch figure as central to a
time travel triggered through the emoting queer body—a time body that makes room for female (in)
sights and a critical examination of the Japanese nuclear family and nation.
Notes
1 Attributed to Shotoku Taishi (574–622), in often impossible futures, the storyteller figure in the
mirai-ki generally describes the progress of history in which the present is reimagined as the past.
2 Sung-Ae Lee describes one popular example in which “the protagonist spends a few days in the undersea
palace of the Dragon God but finds that 300 years have meanwhile passed in his own world” (136).
3 In the last episode, Madoka (now the ultimate magical girl) travels across time to take the taint of the
magical girl into her own body. In a montage sequence, we are shown magical girls throughout history
at the cusp of transitioning into witches, from Cleopatra to Joan of Arc.
4 As we see with another magical girl, Sayaka, with whom we come closer to perceiving the bodily signs
of transitioning particularly via a pivotal triggering scene [episode 8] marked by male contempt towards
female love and sacrifice, which makes Sayaka wonder, why save this world.
Bibliography
Cleto, Sara, and Erin Kathleen Bahl. “Becoming the Labyrinth: Negotiating Magical Space and Identity in
Puella Magi Madoka Magica.” Humanities, vol. 5, no. 2, 2016, p. 20, doi:10.3390/h5020020.
Csicsery-Ronay Jr, Istvan. “What is Estranged in Science Fiction Animation?” Simultaneous Worlds: Global
Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Jennifer L. Feeley and Sarah Ann Wells. University Minnesota Press,
2015.
Gleick, James. Time Travel: A History. Vintage, 2017.
Heinze, Ulrich. “Time Travel Topoi in Japanese Manga.” Japan Forum, vol. 24, no. 2, 2012.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.
Kotani Mari and Miri Nakamura. “Space, Body, and Aliens in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction.” Science
Fiction Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 397–417. www.jstor.org/stable/4241107.
Lee, Sung-Ae. “Adaptations of Time Travel Narratives in Japanese Multimedia: Nurturing Eudaimonia
across Time and Space.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 2014, pp. 136–151.
Napier, Susan. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Anime. St.
Martin’s Press, 2001.
Orbaugh, Sharalyn: “Busty Battlin’ Babes. The Evolution of the Shôjo in 1990s Visual Culture.” Gender
and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, edited by Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson and Maribeth
Graybill. University Hawai’i Press, 2003, pp. 201–228.
Shen, Lien Fan. “The Dark, Twisted Magical Girls Shōjo Heroines in Puella Magi Madoka Magica”
in Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture, edited by Norma Jones, et al.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014.
Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. Fordham University Press, 2013.
298
PART V
When
Transtemporalities

41
INTRODUCTION
Sonja Fritzsche
The space-time continuum, relativity, parallel universes, the multiverse, strands of time, time
clusters, jumps to lightspeed, wormholes, jump gates, stargates, flow, distorting, dismantling,
recomposing time. Much like the period in which the genre has most flourished, science fiction
(SF) is preoccupied with time. Often it employs time as a narrative device, whether worlding
it, folding it, jumping through it, or traveling back and forth in it. Accompanying this too are
more substantive meditations on time as a construct that shapes the way we imagine ourselves
to be human on a cosmic scale—past, present, future. Habitually, such speculation has remained
within the transtemporal, where time is transcended, yet is related to time travel and does not
question the foundations of time itself.
In cosmic time, Part V—“When”—is largely set in that key moment for human beings of
Earth history during and post Industrial Revolution that also is concurrent with the flourishing
of science fiction as a genre. With the scientific and technological revolutions of modernity
came also changes in societal perceptions of time and history marked by the development
of new methods and contraptions for time measurement often for political and economic
purposes. Premodern church bells and harvest rhythms replaced by pocket watches and ledger
calendars eventually resulted in today’s Outlook, iWatches, futures markets, and blockchain
technologies. In the Global North, time and histories of modernity are predominantly linear,
white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, that of societal progress and the nation-state, and have
been implemented throughout the globe by means of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery.1
Multiple SF publications and histories have reflected this same modern sensibility.
This section therefore employs the term “transtemporalities” with two ends. First, it brings
together related concepts of gender in SF across historical time periods and looks to how they
intersect with categories of race, sex, sexuality, ability, class, and nationality. Second, the use
refers to more recent theorizations in transgender studies that highlight the very same social
constructedness of normative time. Called for by Kadji Amin as a path to a “more transformative
politics of justice,” this approach examines the way transgender experiences in history have been
“constituted by yet exceed normative temporalities” (219). It is in a similar spirit of social
justice that Part V of the collection proceeds. To this end, the authors collected here identify
key moments in Earth history when SF artists have contributed to the ongoing development of
their chosen genre, especially as those contributions ask audiences to think about gender from
strange and estranging perspectives to better understand complex social issues. The section does
not aim to be all-encompassing but addresses moments and movements in SF and in gender
studies where paradigms have shifted, thereby allowing audiences to look towards futurities,
alternate temporalities, and all manners of futural and historical thought.
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Sonja Fritzsche
Together, the chapters rethink the prevailing chronologies and assumptions that characterize
the standard progression of science fiction history from antecedents, proto-science fiction,
pulp era, golden age, new wave, cyberpunk, and contemporary publications. Various scholars
have been working hard to write women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC science fiction writers back
into this teleology in multiple ground-breaking publications, many of which have already
been mentioned earlier in this collection. Such titles include Betty King’s annotated critical
bibliography Women of the Future (1984), critical scholarly collections such as Marleen S. Barr’s
Future Females (1981) and Afro-Future Females (2008), Jane Donawerth and Carol Kolmerten’s
Utopian and Science Fiction by Women (1994), Robin Anne Reid’s Women in Science Fiction and
Fantasy (2009), and Maria Głowacka’s Women Science Fiction Prose in Poland: Three Circles Theory
(Kobieca proza science fiction w Polsce: teoria trzech kręgów, 2018) to name a few. Eric Davin’s
Partners in Wonder (2006) as well as Lisa Yaszek and Patrick Sharp’s Sisters of Tomorrow (2016)
challenge the prevailing historical narrative by focusing on pivotal contributions of early women
writers. Janice Bogstad’s Gender, Power and Reversal in Contemporary Anglo-American and French
Feminist Science Fiction (1992), Brian Attebery’s Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), Justine
Larbalestier The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002), Wendy Gay Pearson, Joan Gordon,
and Veronica Holliger’s Queer Universes (2008), Rolf Löchel’s Utopias Geschlechter: Gender in
deutschsprachiger Science Fiction von Frauen (2012), and most recently the Italian collaboration
Feminist Science Fiction: Imagining Gender in Contemporary Italian Culture (Fantascienza
femminista: immaginare il genere nella cultura italiana contemporanea, 2022) by co-authors
Ramona Onnis, Anna Chiara Palladino, Manuela Spinelli, Laura Pugno, Veronica Raimo, and
Nicoletta Vallorani take on a similar project for gender studies. This is by no means meant to be
a comprehensive list, but rather begins to point to some of the many efforts ongoing in multiple
locations around the world to recognize the contributions of women, LGBTQ+ and writers
of color to the genre in those countries as well as integrating a gender studies approach. We
look forward to further global dialogues in these areas whether through publications, hybrid
conferences, or just plain virtually.
The chapters in this section are equally ground-breaking in their examinations of powerful
women leaders, ethical and moral uses of violence, notions of the feminine, masculinities,
and the role of the everyday hero. For instance, E Mariah Spencer’s contribution on Margaret
Cavendish’s scientific utopia The Blazing World (1666) focuses on the Empress’s leadership
style as “world-making without world conquering” through meditations on multiple types of
love. M. Giulia Fabi meditates on agency, power, and Black female leadership in her broader
analysis of early Afrofuturist texts by Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, and Lillian B.
Horace from the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The central role
of women leaders, including among them Jessica Atreides and the Bene Gesserit, is the focus
of Kara Kennedy’s analysis of Frank Herbert’s Dune series in conversation with contemporary
developments in feminist science fiction and the women’s movement. Michael Pitts writes
on variation in leadership and masculinities in superman narratives of the 1930s–1950s in his
analysis of A. E. van Vogt’s “The Changeling” (1944), E. E. Smith’s First Lensman (1950), and
Frank Robinson’s The Power (1956). Marleen S. Barr points to how the origin of superpowers
has transformed over time for superwomen from otherworldly sources to the use of local science
and technology to enhance human bodies. She uses Naomi Alderman’s 2017 novel The Power
to demonstrate how such superwomen employ everyday heroism and use community-based
powers to effect more just future change.
Additional chapters discuss other aspects of key paradigm shifts in the contemporary
historical context. Katharina Scheerer’s essential contribution on early German science fiction
from the fin-de-siècle by conservative women writers Ellen Key and Theresa Haupt provides
302
Introduction
a striking counterpoint to more progressive voices of the day on the “Woman’s Question”
such as Clara Zetkin and Bertha von Suttner. Jane Donawerth’s examination of women
writers in early science fiction magazines, such as Judith Merril, Leslie F. Stone, and Anne
McCaffrey among others, emphasizes the alternate subjects they introduced in communication,
reproductive, “domestic,” and environmental sciences that included discussions of maternal
mortality, abortion, and women’s suffrage. Multiple chapters in this section are also in dialogue
with later ground-breaking feminist science fiction writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna
Russ, and Margaret Atwood as well as key Western feminist texts by the likes of Simone de
Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. For instance, Kate Meakin links the appropriation of robes from
Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale by feminist and human rights activists to a failure to
acknowledge similar past injustices among BIPOC populations, which ultimately impedes the
effectiveness of protest goals. Laura Collier and Kathryn Prince write of the manner in which
Becky Chambers was inspired in part by Le Guin to create her Wayfarers series (2014–21) that
imagines the broad inclusion of a wide range of genders and sexualities. Jessica Stokes employs
the riddle of the Sphynx and autoethnography to frame her analysis of gender, ableism, and the
posthuman in Adam Roberts’s Bête and create a more inclusive future. Mengtian Sun’s crucial
chapter points to important contributions by the many current Chinese woman science fiction
writers, among them Xia Jia and Ling Chen, who continue to be challenged by a reception
that reduces them to feminine stereotypes in a patriarchal public sphere. Finally, over all of this
I place a restorative, large glass dome in the spirit of Szilvia Gellai, whose chapter focuses on the
pulp era and new wave, and makes astute and telling observations about the use of this device
throughout the existence of science fiction.
Before proceeding to the chapters, I wish to return to the previous definitional discussion of
transtemporalities for final instruction. The base adjective “transtemporal” as an anatomical term
denotes a “crossing of the temporal lobe of the cerebrum,” which controls auditory, emotions,
and memory. As such, it is a key location for the formulation of a personal narrative of the self,
the story we tell ourselves of who we are as individuals, where we record our own past histories.
And it is this very personal experience of time and history—this inner space—and its dissonance
with the outer social space that has led so many science fiction authors discussed in this volume
to seek to dismantle norms and (re)present gender intersectionalities through their writing.
Oh, and if you still need the chapters sorted by heteronormative science fiction historical
categories, here they are: antecedents (Spencer), proto-science fiction (Fabi, Scheerer), pulp era
and golden age (Donawerth, Gellai, Pitts), new wave (Kennedy), contemporary (Barr, Collier
and Prince, Meakin, Stokes, and Sun).
Note
1 See Jordanova, Sexual Visions; Wiesner, Gendered Temporalities; and Perkins, Reform of Time.
Bibliography
Amin, Kadji. “Temporality.” Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1–2 (2014), pp. 219–222.
Jordanova, L. J. Sexual visions. Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth
Centuries. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Merry E. Wiesner. Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
Perkins, Maureen. The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity. Pluto, 2001.
303
42
NAOMI ALDERMAN’S
THE POWER AND NEW
FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION
SUPERHEROES
Marleen S. Barr
Western popular culture has long treated the male body as sacrosanct and powerfully active while
depicting the female body as sexualized and passively available to the male gaze. How, then, was
it possible to represent an active female superhero? The first generation of primarily male comic
book creators tackled the problem by imagining that female superheroes were not regular humans.
For example, Wonder Woman (1941) is an Amazon and Supergirl (1959) is from Krypton. While
the former has a mythical heritage and the latter a science fictional one, both were dedicated to
helping humans—usually by working with male scientists and politicians to preserve the status quo.
With the rise of an overtly feminist science fiction (SF) in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation
of female authors created new female superheroes, most of whom were human and used science
and technology to transform bodies in sometimes shocking ways. The cyborg assassin in Joanna
Russ’s The Female Man (1975) purposely grows cancers on her face to disgust the men she kills in
her Earth’s cold war of Womanland against Manland; the postapocalyptic all-female societies of
Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978) reproduce by having sex with their genetically modified
horses; and the far-future women of James Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976)
ensure the future of their utopian society by calmly disposing of the last three human men in the
universe. To preserve their matriarchal worlds—and, perhaps, to best express the very real anger
that human women have long felt under patriarchy—these superheroes unleashed violence against
the men who threatened their autonomy.
Today, however, feminist SF authors are creating new female superheroes extrapolated from
women’s everyday heroism. Recent social movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up have
resulted in enlightened cultural awareness in which men no longer enjoy immunity when they
deploy aggressive power upon supposedly passive female bodies. Elizabeth Warren and Nancy
Pelosi have called attention to their male colleagues’ sexist locutions—and when a protestor
threatened her husband, Dr. Jill Biden channeled Wonder Woman and physically defended him.
These real-world heroes utilize forms of communally based, future-oriented political action
that, I argue, inspires much contemporary feminist SF. Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016)
is a particularly compelling example of this new storytelling trend. Alderman infuses her text
with violence to show the limits of both patriarchal and matriarchal societies predicated on
the inhumane treatment of others. She calls on women to amplify their natural powers and
cooperate with others to build truly new and more equitable futures.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-47 304

Naomi Alderman’s The Power and New Feminist SF Superheroes
The superheroes twenty-first century feminists such as Alderman imagine can be understood
in terms of Black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper’s ideas about “eloquent rage” which she
discusses in her 2018 book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. While
Cooper does not deny the importance of women, vociferously expressing their discontent
with the raced and gendered status quo, she insists that power is best used to create community
rather than to police, marginalize, and even destroy nonnormative individuals. Appropriately,
she calls her “superpower” “eloquent rage” and credits the discovery of that superpower not to
some unique quirk of her individual nature, but to her relationship with a Black, female former
student who helped her to “realize that my anger could be a powerful force for good” (4). Even
so, learning to use it that way takes time. Cooper continues: “For more than a decade . . . I have
been trying to figure out how to focus [my superpower] with precision” (4). She is inspired by
two other Black women as well: Serena and Vanessa Williams, who have “learned how to use
their power” to
create this kind of alchemy that uses their physical strength and power on the court,
together with all the racial slurs and insults they have endured over the years . . . to
create something that looks magical to the rest of us. (6)
As the example of the Williams sisters suggests, the goal of “eloquent rage” is to identify
and cultivate women’s native talents in ways that allow them to acknowledge histories of
raced and gendered violence without simply reversing and repeating it. This change is
technically and emotionally complex to the extent that it might appear to be nothing short
of magic.
In this vein, contemporary feminist superhero novels seem to embrace magic, rejecting the
century-old tradition of imagining female superheroes as special isolated, exceptional women
whose powers depend on unearthly forces and external advanced technologies. The ordinary
human women in these novels do not need high tech tools or extraordinary intervention to
gain power. Their superpowers instead come from augmenting existing natural abilities. Gish
Jen’s The Resisters (2020), for example, describes a future racially and economically segregated
America where one woman’s talent as a baseball player enables her to transform all women’s
secondary social status. In Natalie Zina Walschot’s Hench (2020), traditional superheroes are
described as being analogous to natural disasters. The real hero of the novel is an unmodified
human woman who can interpret data and creatively solve economic hardship issues. Alaya
Dawn Johnson’s Trouble the Saints (2020) presents protagonists of color who must decide if
they will use the specially powered “saints” hands to preserve or topple the White power
structure of 1930s New York. Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink (2012) describes a near-future United
States where immigrants and citizens alike must create community-infused magic to fight the
dehumanization of all people through modern systems of media surveillance and bodily control.
These novels situate the process of becoming super as a communal activity. This change is best
illustrated in Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers (2020) in which a lesbian high school
student social outcast ultimately joins with three popular girls to form a community of powerful
magic makers.
SF author and The New York Times book reviewer Amal El-Mohtar notes that
Clarke’s girls are . . . in love with one another and in opposition to the world that
disdains and desires them. Their magic is less systematic than rhizomatic, a network of
pulsing roots and intuitions, and I was both relieved and thrilled to find a witchy book
in which incantations . . . are screams of “I want” at the world. (“Otherworldly” 71)
305
Marleen S. Barr
Her insights apply equally well to The Power. Indeed Alderman, echoing El-Mohtar, calls The
Power “witchy” (La Ferla) and describes power itself as a rhizomatic network:
The shape of power is always the same: it is the shape of a tree. Root to tip, central
trunk branching and re-branching, spreading wider in ever-thinner searching fingers.
The shape of power is the outline of a living thing straining outward, sending its fine
tendrils a little further. (3)
Like the other contemporary feminist SF authors I discuss, Alderman depicts power as a real
living network, not as phallic power thrusting upward in the form of, say, a mechanistic rocket.
The Power overturns the logic of patriarchal popular culture by imagining a future in which
the powerful female body is literally electrified rather than sexualized. Extrapolating from the
real ability possessed by electric eels, Alderman’s novel takes place on an alternate Earth where
women suddenly develop “skeins” attached their collarbones which allow them to channel
electricity through their hands. The women use electricity both to protect themselves and to
cause bodily harm—and even death. Their bodies become more powerful than men’s bodies.
The entire world shifts from patriarchy to matriarchy as a result of women inflicting the same
physical violence against men that has been used against them. Alderman describes how three
major protagonists respond to this change: Roxy, an unusually physically strong member of
a British Jewish crime family; Allie, a sexually abused mixed race girl from the United States
who becomes a religious leader named Mother Eve; Margot, a powerful American senator; and
Tunde, a young male Nigerian journalist who reports on the new world women rule.
The Power articulates what I call “Alderman’s complaint,” a Jewish feminist version of Cooper’s
“eloquent rage” which echoes Philip Roth’s title Portnoy’s Complaint. Alderman’s complaint has
three components: challenging the gendered beauty ideals inherent in the Western superhero
tradition, showing the limits of early feminist SF’s penchant violently to avenge the harm men
have done to women, and articulating the atrocities Christians have inflicted upon Jewish bodies.
Naomi Wolf describes “the beauty myth” as the tendency in modern Western culture to
celebrate a very specific feminine ideal: someone who is “tall, thin, and blond, [and has] a face
without pores, asymmetry or flaws, someone wholly ‘perfect,’ . . . a gaunt, yet full-breasted
Caucasian, [the likes of which is] not often found in nature” (1–3). Alderman posits genre
specific versions of Wolf ’s description in The Power. She asks why female superheroes must
focus on their hair and makeup. She questions why they should worry about the design of
skintight superhero suits instead of concentrating solely on crime fighting. When the women of
Alderman’s world begin to explore their newfound powers, they also start to recover the story
of previous female superheroes who functioned outside beauty myth tenets. As Alderman’s
female journalist tells viewers, ancient Israelites worshipped God’s sister Anath as a female
superhero, asking if they know that she “was the warrior, that she was invincible, that she spoke
with lightning, that in the oldest texts she killed her own father and took his place? She liked
to bathe her feet in the blood of her enemies” (69). Naturally, her male counterpart quickly
attempts to turn Anath into a joke, saying “That doesn’t sound like much of a beauty regime,
now, does it” (69). And yet, it is precisely this model that women will eagerly embrace as they
begin to create a new world order without the input of men.
Alderman’s celebration of women’s intellectual and physical strength echoes the feminist
speculative writers who began their careers in the 1970s. Indeed, Alderman wrote The Power
under the mentorship of Margaret Atwood. Like Atwood, Alderman constructs her terrifying
future societies by carefully researching and extrapolating from the past. Atwood famously said
that all the atrocities perpetrated against women described in The Handmaid’s Tale are based
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upon historical fact. Alderman reiterates a similar set of atrocities against women throughout
The Power. She emphasizes that the women of her world are drawn to their newfound powers
because they allow them to stop the cycles of rape, sexual slavery, and child abuse in which they
were previously entrapped.
But Alderman’s novel departs from its feminist predecessors in its pessimistic assessment
of violent responses to patriarchy. This is particularly evident in her depiction of Bessapara,
the new women’s country located in the former Eastern European region which a Putin-like
female despot controls. Although Bessapara’s leader speaks of freedom and autonomy, she earns
the respect of her female peers by publicly humiliating and mutilating her male attendants.
She also encourages the rise of all-female “mountain cults” that protect Bessapara in exchange
for the freedom to enact violent revenge on the men who have long oppressed them. For
example, one priestess “holds [her victim’s] balls . . . and then jolts them fiercely, right through
the scrotum” (316). For Alderman, women’s superpowered bodies cause the loss of their
humanity; they have become electrified monsters reduced to acting as mindlessly as electricity
itself. Her condemnation of this so-called feminist utopia seems clear when Tunde reports from
Bessapara on a building bombed by a terrorist group called Male Power and finds a pregnant
woman trapped in the rubble named “Joanna” (192). Here, it seems, Alderman suggests that
new nonviolent feminist SF protagonists need to replace the cycles of violence 1970s feminist
superheroes such as Joanna Russ’s violent Jael perpetuate. Women subjecting men to the same
horrific treatment they experienced only leads to the death of the very feminist futures they seek
to establish. Thus, Alderman proposes a new answer for feminist SF which involves remaining
human and humane by respecting the diversity of human bodies.
But it is not just the women of Bessapara who fail to create a truly feminist utopia. Two of
Alderman’s main characters fail similarly in their professional and personal lives. Senator Margot
Cleary initially attains political power by dint of her own volition, not voltage. When young
Margot watches her brothers making believe they are spacemen, she decides that she “didn’t
need a gun, or a space-helmet, or a lightsaber. In the game Margot played when she was a child
she was enough by herself ” (270). And yet after male colleagues thwart her political plans, she
justifies the violent use of electricity to secure her rise to power. As Margot becomes absorbed
in the world of politics—and she is increasingly skilled at using the tactics of the men who came
before her—she makes disastrous decisions that lead to the death of her daughter.
Similarly, religious leader Mother Eve’s electrical power saves her from patriarchal predation
but does not always enable her to save others. As a teenager, Mother Eve used her power to
escape a hellish domestic situation in which her foster father attempted to rape her. Eventually
Eve becomes a world-famous faith healer and the leader of a new female-centered religion.
But her power is not always effective: “Sometimes, it doesn’t stick at all. They [the people who
want to be healed] have a moment on stage. They feel what it is like to walk” (205) but lose
the ability soon afterward. Eve persists in creating a new, female-centered religion because she
follows directions from an unexplained voice in her head. Whatever the source of the voice, Eve
is controlled by a SF trope, an electrical intelligence located within her brain that conditions her
to create a community of women that simply repeats the same patriarchal violence which her
stepfather inflicted upon her. Even when Margot and Eve realize that they have failed to enact
their feminist dreams, they tragically cannot escape violent patriarchal cultural conditioning.
Rather than admitting weakness, they start a global nuclear war and “burn it all down” (369).
And so, they do. Electricity and bombs cause human bodies to burn. Deploying these weapons
is not, Alderman insists, a constructive final solution to the patriarchy question.
I use the term “final solution” deliberately as a means to explore how Alderman’s complaint
addresses how gendered power relations intersect with religious power relations. Alderman
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Marleen S. Barr
uses the framework of the Holocaust to emphasize the very real damage women might do to
feminist ideals if they simply repeat patriarchal power dynamics.
Alderman makes direct Holocaust atrocity references throughout her descriptions of the
failed Bessaparan utopia. The new nation is replete with “[t]orture and experiments, gangs
of women on the loose in the north near the border, murdering and raping men at will . . .
people doing experiments on boys . . . [c]utting them in pieces to find out what’s happened to
them” (290–91). Bessapara is clearly analogous to Nazi Germany. Significantly, Alderman uses
the same detailed historical research that Atwood employed to depict the gendered atrocities in
The Handmaid’s Tale. For good measure, Alderman also refers to the real restrictions which have
victimized religious, racial, and ethnic others in Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the American
South (272–73). If the goal of feminist SF is to relegate patriarchy to something “replaced
and reimagined” (252), then reconfiguring the brave new feminist world as Bessapara/Nazi
Germany is not a good way to proceed.
The Power does offer a more positive vision of potential feminist utopia through the character
of Roxy Monke. Roxy is the illegitimate daughter of Bernard Monke, leader of England’s
premiere “Jewish organized crime” family (155). The novel opens with Roxy as a powerless
young child witnessing her mother’s murder seemingly at the hands of a rival gang: “The men
lock Roxy in the cupboard when they do it. What they don’t know is: she’s been locked in
that cupboard before” (7). Later, when the power enables women to turn violence back against
their oppressors, Roxy locates a man who has been beaten up by his girlfriend “hiding in the
cupboard under the stairs” (319). Still later, when Roxy finds herself on the wrong side of
Bessaparan politics, she hides again: “And here she is hiding. Like a man” (320). Or: like a Jew.
Whether it is women or men who do it, turning people into dehumanized bodies imprisoned
in the attic like Anne Frank does not make the world a better place.
This is the lesson that Roxy—and, hopefully, Alderman’s readers—learn from The Power. As
the author herself puts it:
I’m Jewish. You can get stuck imagining yourself in a particular historical position that
people like you have been in—in my case imagining myself as a Holocaust victim.
But for me the larger question about the Holocaust is not, How do you avoid being a
victim? It is, How do you avoid being a Nazi? (La Ferla)
The answer to Alderman’s question about avoiding becoming a Nazi—the question which
forms her most vehement complaint—arises in the form of her new eventually nonviolent
human female superhero Roxy Monke. Like Margot and Allie, Roxy begins as a relatively
powerless individual whose fortunes change radically after her skein enables her to use her
newfound physical strength to take over her father’s endeavors and connect with other
newly powerful women in politics and religion.
Roxy’s dual experience as a Jewish person and as the member of an outlaw organization
teaches her to be wary of identity politics such as those Margot, Allie, and all the other newly
empowered women leverage. When Roxy realizes the significance of her skein, she attempts to
reject rather than reverse and reiterate the power relations of the past. Even when Roxy’s father
betrays her by surgically removing her skein and implanting it in the son he chooses to run his
criminal empire, she refuses to continue the cycle of violence. She instead shows that the real
source of her power is her determination to save herself, her loved ones, and—if she can—the
whole world from mass destruction.
Roxy’s hope for a new and better future leads her to save Tunde from the Bessaparan death cult
and to forgive her father for his betrayal. In the end, Roxy may not be able to prevent the outbreak
308
of nuclear war (or the rise of the sexist matriarchy that emerges afterward). Alderman, however,
leaves readers with a hopeful and pregnant Roxy who confidently predicts that “if I had a daughter
she’d be strong as fuck” (372). This daughter (who is at once Nigerian, British, and Jewish) holds
the potential to resolve Alderman’s complaint—and to become a truly new female and feminist
superhero. Armed with her mother’s physical strength and Tunde’s writing talent, this daughter
embodies the contemporary feminist dream of changing “eloquent rage” into possible different
futures—if not within The Power, then certainly within the real world itself.
Bibliography
Alderman, Naomi. The Power. 2016. Little, Brown, 2017.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1986. Anchor, 1998.
Charnas, Suzy McKee. Motherlines. Berkley, 1978.
Clarke, Hannah Abigail. The Scapegracers. Erewhon, 2020.
Cooper, Brittney. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Picador, 2018.
El-Mohtar, Amal. “Otherworldly.” The New York Times Book Review, 6 December 2020, p. 70–71.
Jen, Gish. The Resisters. Knopf, 2020.
Johnson, Alaya Dawn. Trouble the Saints. Tor, 2020.
La Ferla, Ruth. “Naomi Alderman on the World That Yielded ‘The Power.’ ” The New York Times, 29
January 2018.
Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. Random House, 1969.
Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. Bantam, 1975.
Tiptree, James Jr. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Aurora: Beyond Equality, edited by Vonda N.
McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson. Fawcett, 1976, pp. 36–98.
Vourvoulias, Sabrina. Ink. Rosarium, 2018.
Walschot, Natalie Zina. Hench. HarperCollins William Morrow, 2020.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. 1991. HarperCollins
Perennial, 2002.
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43
GENDER EUPHORIA IN SPACE
UTOPIA
In the Wayfarers series (2014–21) by Becky Chambers, humanity is brought back from the brink
of annihilation by space emigration and the timely intervention of an interplanetary alliance
that offers refuge and aid, a far cry from the fantasies of human intergalactic domination that
often characterize science fiction (SF) in the Star Trek vein. Chambers acknowledges her debt
to Star Trek, but points out a key difference in her work: she finds it “arrogant and short-
sighted to assume that intelligent life elsewhere” would resemble humanity in the gender and
sex constructs that she herself resists as a queer woman (da Silva 2019). An important element
of this resistance is that gender and sexual behavior are not necessarily tied to reproductive,
societal, or familial roles in her novels. Chambers says that her own queerness and the necessity
of confronting assumptions about how her sexuality shapes other, non-sexual aspects of her life
led to her desire to build a fictional world in which sexual orientation is “incidental” rather
than defining, in which “you can just love who you love and be who you want to be,” a world
grounded in “being open minded and learning to roll with people’s differences” (da Silva 2019).
Binaries are reductive and impractical within a multi-species universe containing an infinite
number of sexual orientations and gender identities. Chambers challenges heteronormativity
and exclusionary gender practices by showing that the human tendency to adhere to binaries is
strange within a pluralistic and diverse universe. Through this interspecies diversity, Chambers
effectively queers cis- and heterohuman reproductive practices that tie gender to sexuality.
Like Star Trek, Wayfarers is set in the distant future, but one in which the humbling of
humanity, its arrival into the interspecies alliance with empty hands and a destroyed planet, is
the catalyst for a post-dystopian regeneration grounded in radical inclusion. Though friction
still occurs when individual desires and collective ideologies are imperfectly aligned, ultimately
interspecies tolerance, most notably for different ways of expressing gender, sexuality, and
family, is part of humanity’s future.
Chambers is writing within a tradition of feminist SF that goes back to the gender-swapping
of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), an acknowledged influence on her
writing (Favreau 2016). Yet Chambers’s work also belongs to a more recent tradition of post-
apocalyptic novels that often imagine humanity regressing to a Hobbesian state of uncivilization,
an “unending war of each against each” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
(Leviathan, i. xiii. 9). Post-apocalyptic SF frequently addresses the need to restore the human
population. A classic and recently reinvigorated text here is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985), in which the collapse of human reproductive capacity has resulted in a class of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-48 310

Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia
women reduced to reproduction: the handmaids whose only role is to give birth, fulfilled
through their enslavement and ritualized rape. In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17),
survivors with the power to sense and prevent earthquakes, called orogenes, are obliged to
bear children who will be given over to this activity crucial to the continuance of human life
on a tectonically ravaged planet. The horrific fate of their children draws closely on Le Guin’s
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) in which a child suffers unbearably in order
for others to live in a near-utopia. In Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), the survivors of a
desperate scramble to survive a civilization-ending event on Earth are the seven “Eves” whose
reproduction through parthenogenesis will create the races of humanity’s post-Earth future.
Driven to the brink of extinction, humanity in these and many other examples must repopulate.
In that context, the freedom and equality that Chambers imagines for her post-apocalyptic
characters, beyond rigid reproductive roles, is even more radical.
Like the women of Seveneves, the human survivors in the Wayfarers are a much-reduced
population. In the Exodus Fleet that carried them away from their ruined planet, the spacefaring
human race remained necessarily small, within the carrying capacity of the ships’ resources.
However, while describing what for her characters is ancient human history, Chambers avoids
the strict control of sexuality under a patriarchal system seen in The Handmaid’s Tale, the
Broken Earth trilogy, and a breakaway underground survivalist group in Seveneves. Even once
Chambers’s Exodus Fleet has encountered the Galactic Commons and the humans have made
their way into the series’ present, there is still no sense that procreation is an obligation. Without
patriarchal control of their sexuality, Wayfarers women participate in an interplanetary freedom
that places humans, with their archaic notions of binary gender and heterosexuality, within a
larger community of infinite variety. As Chambers explains in an interview,
I think that it’s important to have stories that reflect what we’re feeling right now, but
it’s equally important to have stories that give us something to hope for. . . . Having
different sexualities be a very understated, commonplace thing was important for me
to include. (Favreau 2016)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Differences between genders and the ways in which gender relates to sexuality are simplified
in the Wayfarers series because they are eclipsed by differences between species. In the first
novel of the series, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014), a key element of the plot
is the developing relationship between Rosemary, a human woman, and Sissix, an Aandrisk
woman. Aandrisks are enthusiastically polysexual and polyamorous, though as a member of a
multicultural crew, Sissix restrains her instinctual tactility to respect the human preference for
physical distance and more selective mating. It is only when Rosemary sees Sissix among her
own species that she realizes how stifling and alienating human conventions must feel to her
friend. They begin a sexual relationship, but not before a conversation about their boundaries,
preferences, and expectations. Mating with a human will never be uncomplicated for an
Aandrisk, but for Sissix and Rosemary it is a positive interspecies relationship grounded in
consent and communication.
In this novel, Dr Chef, currently male, identifies himself as a mother. Among his people,
the Grum, he explains to Rosemary, “Biological sex is a transitional state. . . . We begin life
as female, become male once our egg-laying years are over, then end our lives as something
neither here nor there” (59). Mothers, like Dr Chef, are not always women, and women, even
those with children, are not always mothers. This is not merely a question of biology. Even
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between oviparous species, including the Grum and the Aandrisk, there are cultural differences
relating to motherhood. Sissix, like Dr Chef, has produced eggs that have gone on to become
hatchlings, but unlike him she does not consider herself their mother. Collectively, the Aandrisks
find mammalian child-rearing practices very strange, as do the mollusk-like Harmagians, who
see no appeal in half-formed creatures that are only potentially people.
There is no sense, in this novel or elsewhere in the series, that any social roles are “universally”
male or female: no gender has the monopoly on nurturing life or ending it. Gender remains
a significant category at both the individual and the societal level, in the sense that the gender
identity of characters and the genders available in their species have meaning, but gender is
decoupled from essentialist meanings. The violent Akaraks who, pushed to the brink by the
Harmagians’ destructive brand of extractive colonialism, have taken up space piracy to survive,
remain ungendered in this novel, though two females of the species are introduced in The
Galaxy, and the Ground Within. In The Long Way, throughout a confrontation with Akarak
pirates on the Wayfarer, Rosemary refers to them as “xe,” the gender-neutral pronoun used in
the Galactic Commons when an individual’s gender is unknown. “They” is not typically used
in the way we employ it to denote an individual of unspecified or non-binary gender; “they” is
reserved for the Sianat Navigators, who exist as a symbiotic pair.
The medical condition of the Wayfarer’s Sianat Navigator Ohan is an important plot
element in The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet, presented as an ethical dilemma
resolved within the novel but not without some lingering and uncomfortable implications.
Sianat Pairs, we learn, are not born with their extraordinary navigational skills, but gain
these as a side effect of an intentional infection with a parasite, The Whisperer, which
ultimately kills its host. When the crew of the Wayfarer learn of a planet where Sianats are
cured and returned to individual personhood, the ship’s dying Sianat Pair, Ohan, refuse
the treatment that will kill what they see as part of their non-binary self and others see as
the deadly parasite. Ultimately, Ohan’s crewmate Corbin takes matters into his own hands,
injecting Ohan against their will and thus forcing them to be cured. Although Ohan is
eventually at peace with the situation, the ethics are complicated. Ohan, who prefers the
pronoun “they” throughout the novel because of their symbiosis, is a clear allegory of
non-binary gender because of this pronoun. The nature of the symbiosis, which gives
Navigators extraordinary perception of space-time crucial to the work of the Wayfarer,
also resonates with the ableist notion that people with autism spectrum disorder have a
“superpower,” and perhaps, also, with the anti-vaccination movement especially prevalent
in Chambers’s home state of California that incorrectly blames childhood vaccinations for
“infecting” otherwise healthy children with autism.
Curing Ohan against their will is presented as an ethical dilemma. The character who takes
matters into his own hands, Corbin, is never presented as a moral or even likeable character.
For most of the novel Corbin is distinctly unappealing: unkind, ungenerous, and the only
consistently intolerant character aboard the Wayfarer. However, Corbin is treated sympathetically
late in the novel, when a plot twist places his life in the hands of the victim of his speciest slurs,
Sissix. Captain Ashby, the moral center throughout the novel, is opposed to any action taken
against Ohan’s will, but the same plot twist that creates some empathy for Corbin suggests that
he is, perhaps, especially equipped to understand Ohan’s perspective. Although Corbin has not
been infected as a child and indoctrinated into a belief system that will kill him, he has been
lied to all his life in a way that puts him, too, at risk of death. Corbin is a clone, illegal in many
parts of the galaxy, which he only discovers when he is detected, imprisoned, condemned,
and ultimately rescued through a combination of Sissix’s generosity and Rosemary’s strategic
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paperwork. Corbin, without a mother, the clone of his damaged and despised father, is a
rare example of a type of procreation not widely tolerated in the otherwise tolerant Galactic
Commons. Because Corbin knows what it is to be lied to, to have choices made by others
determine the course of one’s life, he acts for Ohan, demonstrating the development of a limited
kind of empathy that can understand others in light of his own differences. While Ohan’s cure
remains problematic because of its allegorical connections, it is characteristic of a technique that
Chambers uses again in the second novel to suggest that all characters, even limited ones like
Corbin, have the potential to find cross-species understanding through their similar experiences
of difference. Tolerance and understanding in the face of enormous interspecies differences are
not superpowers; they are potentially present in everyone.
A Closed and Common Orbit

Because gender is not a significant delimiter of sexuality, social roles, or even, in many species,
family roles, gender identity is not treated as a significant source of conflict for most characters
in the Wayfarers. There is little in the way of dysmorphia or discomfort within the bodies
into which characters are born. One significant and substantial exception to this is Sidra,
an artificial intelligence whose struggle to adapt to a human “body kit” is one strand of the
intertwined narratives in the second book of the series, A Closed and Common Orbit (2016).
As an AI intended to inhabit a ship’s complex systems, Sidra finds her body kit limiting,
claustrophobic, and prone to mishaps. It is also illegal: the ability to pass as a humanoid
woman is a matter of life and death for Sidra. She (the pronoun used for her throughout
the novel) forms a relationship with Tak, an Aeluon tattoo artist who, like some others
of his species, undergoes biological gender transitions at various life stages. When Sidra’s
attraction to Tak leads her to choose a tattoo for her “body,” the incompatibility between
Tak’s technologies and hers creates a critical system failure that brings her experiment in
“passing” to a catastrophic end. Tak agrees to keep her secret and, moreover, wants to know
her as herself, an AI in a body kit.
The story of Tak and Sidra is partly about passing, but also about one non-binary character
understanding another. Tak is presented as someone who might be especially able to understand
Sidra’s dysmorphia because of the sometimes-uncomfortable transition between genders that
marks the experience of the Aeluon “shon” gender. Tak, like other modern Aeluon shons, has
some medical help to facilitate the natural process of gender transition. As the novel explains,
“Tak’s reproductive system had indicated it was time to switch sides. The implants beneath his
skin had responded in kind, releasing a potent mix of hormones that allowed his body to do
what it had evolved to do” (138). Having a relationship with Tak means being as comfortable
as he, or she, is with a natural biological process that, though foreign to humans, is taken for
granted within Aeluon culture:
Shons changed reproductive function multiple times throughout a standard, and

were always considered fully male or female, depending on the current situation.
Calling a shon by a neutral pronoun was considered an insult, unless they were in
the middle of a shift. Such terms were reserved for those too young, or too old,
or simply unable to procreate. As neutral adults of breeding age looked exactly like
their fertile counterparts, they generally did not mind the assumptions of other spe-
cies where gendered pronouns were concerned, but appreciated it when the correct
terms were used. (73)
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Record of a Spaceborn Few

The notion of what is correct and what is tolerated as a manifestation of interspecies ignorance
is influenced by the subaltern status of humanity within the Galactic Commons. The trauma
of the Exodus in the distant past, the desperate departure from a ruined Earth, is enshrined in
the belief systems of the descendants whose lives aboard the ramshackle remains of humanity’s
refugee ships are the focus of the third book in the series, Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018).
Only a fraction of the human race survived the environmental destruction of Earth and the
long exile aboard the Fleet. Generations later, the Exodus, the eventual rescue by unimagined
aliens, the acts of charity, and eventually the grudging welcome into the Galactic Commons as
refugees and second-class citizens, are all part of the human story. Legacies of trauma, inflicted
and imposed, trail all of the Galactic Commons member species and shape how they interact.
For the humans, any arrogance about the ways of their people is relegated to the very fringes
of their society, among the Gaiists, a xenophobic group who advocate returning to an Earth
reserved for their species alone.
Human gender and sexuality are a prominent part of this novel, set within the more homogenous
human society aboard the vessels of the Fleet rather than the cosmopolitan explorers. For a queer
writer wanting to imagine a future for herself, the lesbian couple in this novel, Isabel and Tamsin,
depict a lifelong relationship in a society that sees no correlation between sexual preference and
familial structures. In the communal society of the Fleet, families live in “hexes.” The visit of a
curious Harmagian, Ghuh’loloan, to Isabel’s home ship creates an opportunity not only to show
how completely uncosmopolitan the Fleet is compared to the communities in the other two
novels, but also for a detailed description of the structure of human society in the Fleet: “Six
homes to a hex, six hexes to a neighbourhood, six neighbourhoods to a district, thirty-six districts
to a deck, four decks to a . . . segment. And six segments to a homesteader” (62).
In this context of the near extinction of humanity, procreation is important to the Exodans.
Their ritual blessing of a new child born to the homesteader is one of Isabel’s duties as an
archivist. When a child is born, the community gathers to recall what humanity lost through
“short sight” and “bloody ways,” before making a promise about the child’s future:
She is now, and always, a member of our Fleet. By our laws, she is assured shelter and
passage here. If we have food, she will eat. If we have air, she will breathe. If we have
fuel, she will fly. She is daughter to all grown, sister to all still growing. We will care
for her, protect her, guide her. (35)
The same vow was made about Isabel and Tamsin when they were born, and about each child
ever born to the Fleet. They belong, and they will be cared for, in an expanded kinship system
that separates procreation from the meaning of family. Within a homesteader, all are family.
Within a hex, different family groups coexist, caring for each other, sharing resources and duties
like childcare and cooking. In this context, Isabel and Tamsin’s gender means nothing at all. The
opportunities they have, separately as women and together as a same-sex couple, are completely
unmoored from gender.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

Referring to The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021) as the final Wayfarers novel is to leave
a hostage to fortune. Chambers has indicated that although she considers this the last in the
series and has no plans to continue the story she will “always leave the door open” (Other
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Scribbles). Nonetheless, at the time of writing this is the last and it provides a fitting conclusion
for an analysis of gender in the series because of its close focus on a character whose gender is
in the process of becoming fixed and another whose primary gender role is unexpectedly under
pressure to be fulfilled.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is set entirely on the planet Gora, with a very small cast of
characters trapped there by a technological failure. The focal point of the novel is the Five-Hop
One-Stop, a way station run by Ouloo, a single mother whose child, Tupo, is “too young to
have chosen a gender yet” (28). Among their species, the Laru, childhood is a period of gender
exploration that ends with a gender selection celebration. As Ouloo explains:
I’ve been planning the party in my head forever. Crushcake with groob jam if xe’s
a girl, ten-berry fancy if xe’s a boy, citrus cloudcups if xe’s neither or somewhere in
between. I have the recipes saved on my scrib. I know it might not happen for years—
there’s no way of predicting when kids land on it, xe could be all the way grown by
then—but I love imagining the party. (255)
When pressed about whether she has “any guesses,” Ouloo responds that:
I won’t do that with xyr. Some people—not everybody, but some—think it’s cute to
make bets on it, but I think it’s a stupid thing to do. When I was not much older than
Tupo, I overheard my—it’s odd for me to say relatives, because we don’t use those
terms among ourselves, but that’s the word you would use. Anyway, they were talking
about me in that way, and most of them thought I’d tell them I was a boy. Had me
confused for standards. No, I absolutely won’t do that with Tupo. Xe’s the only one
who knows what xe is. (255)
Roveg finds this “admirable” compared to the custom among his people, the Quelin: “If your
parents got it wrong, you let them know, you update your records, and everybody gets on with
their lives. It’s a casual matter. Nobody hires a band” (255).
Pei grapples with gender in a different, more urgent way. A characteristic of her species,
the Aeluon, is that reproduction is a rare event. An Aeluon woman like her might become
fertile only once in her life, at which point she would drop everything in order to proceed
immediately to the nearest crêche where she would be pampered in the hope that her egg
would be successfully fertilized by one of the crêche’s male or shon workers. Trapped on Gora
when she begins to “shimmer” for the first time, Pei is forced to consider her options as
well as her obligations, hopes, and dreams, which include the relationship, unacceptable in
Aeluon culture, with her human lover, Ashby. Many Aeluon women never become mothers,
and Pei had imagined that this was her fate, but the surprise of a late-in-life shimmering and
the circumstance of being trapped on Gora make her realize that “In that moment, the only
person she wanted to talk to was Ashby” (178). Although reproduction in the Aeluon culture is
unconnected to the establishment of a nuclear family, Pei’s interspecies romance means that her
thoughts about motherhood lead her to Ashby. As Jeremiah Axelrod has suggested in an analysis
of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the novel that introduces Ashby and Pei’s relationship,
the depiction of this relationship subverts both “racial fidelity and patriarchal authority.” Ashby
is “perhaps the most gentle character; his gender performance is pointedly inverted in a long-
distance relationship with a high-ranking military member of one of those much more powerful
alien races” (Axelrod 319). Ashby and Pei, like Rosemary and Sissix, must grapple with the
conflict between their individual choices and their societies’ expectations. Because humanity
315
is depicted as a less powerful species than the Aeluons and the Aandrisks, human social norms
are not presented as the ideal and inevitable outcome, but nor are they entirely discounted:
interspecies relationships involve negotiation and compromise, not domination and capitulation.
Conclusion
What cuts across species-specific expectations about gender and sexuality are relationships
between individuals, depicted in a broad range of interspecies couples and friends who find not
only acceptance but deep connection despite their sometimes-enormous cultural differences.
Partly, this is the result of imagining species who have the biology and/or technology to
reproduce by means other than heterosexual mating, reducing the ways in which gender
constrains options. Alongside that, the ability to find empathy across these differences, to
appreciate them, even, is depicted as the glue that binds individual relationships and the entire
Galactic Commons project.
Without a concept of “universal” queerness, Chambers’s fictional world denies her characters
a category that would potentially facilitate cross-cultural bonds beyond the level of individual
relationships. Rosemary and Sissix are attracted to each other and ultimately form a relationship
grounded in their shared recognition of each other’s unmet needs, but there is no queer culture
around them that would cut across the boundaries of their separate species to bond them with
each other and with others in a shared identity as lesbians. There are no gay clubs or drag
shows or Pride parades described in the Galactic Commons. Polyamorous Aandrisk orgies,
the heterosexual Aeluon fertility festival of Shimmerquick, the Laru gender reveal parties, and
other celebrations of gender and sexuality are defined along species lines, even if other species
can participate within the bounds of appropriate behavior as defined by the hosts. Between
species, what Alexander I. Stingl describes, drawing on Foucault, as the “radical Otherness”
characteristic of relationships in SF is negotiated by individuals, ideally incorporating aspects of
gender and sexuality from both cultures (5–6). Pei’s lover is not an Aeluon, but his gentleness
is compatible with Aeluon gender expectations; Rosemary’s lover is not a human, but her
expectations around communication and consent are honored in a way that is compatible with
human relationships.
The most hopeful aspect of the Wayfarers is not that gender expression and sexual preference
are innocuous details of identity for Galactic Commons citizens, at most a topic of interspecies
curiosity, but that the experience of intergenerational trauma and the cultural memory of
dystopia have made the human characters more inclusive, not less. While in the real world an
uninhabitable earth is now an utterly imaginable future for the human race, Becky Chambers
reminds us that, even so, the dystopian policing of sexuality in the service of reproduction, as
seen in so many other post-apocalyptic novels, is not the inevitable outcome. Interdependence,
inclusion, and optimism, the values of the Wayfarers series, survive the near destruction of
humanity and flourish in a future worth having.
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
Axelrod, Jeremiah B. C. “Mutiny on the Sofa: Historical Patterns of Patriarchy and Family Structure
in American Science Fiction, 1945–2018.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 53, no. 2, Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2018, pp. 308–334, doi:10.5325/pacicoasphil.53.2.0308.
Chambers, Becky. A Closed and Common Orbit. Hodder & Stoughton, 2016.
Chambers, Becky. The Galaxy and the Ground Within. Hodder & Stoughton, 2021.
Chambers, Becky. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Hodder & Stoughton, 2014.
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Chambers, Becky. “FAQ: Wayfarers Questions.” Other Scribbles, 2021, www.otherscribbles.com/faq#/

wayfarers/.
Chambers, Becky. Record of a Spaceborn Few. Hodder & Stoughton, 2018.
da Silva, Brianna. “Aliens, Gender, and Prejudice with Becky Chambers.” Females in Fantasy
Podcast, Season 2, Episode 9, 14 February 2019. https://soundcloud.com/femalesinfantasy/
aliens-gender-and-prejudice-with-becky-chambers
Favreau, Alyssa. “Interview: Becky Chambers on The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
and Writing Welcoming Science Fiction.” The Mary Sue, 2016. www.themarysue.com/
interview-becky-chambers-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet/
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London, 1651.
Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season. Little, Brown, 2015.
Jemisin, N. K. The Obelisk Gate. Little, Brown, 2017.
Jemisin, N. K. The Stone Sky. Little, Brown, 2017.
Le Guin, Ursula. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Stories. Perennial,
2004 [1973]: 275–284.
Stephenson, Neil. Seveneves. William Morrow, 2015.
Stingl, Alexander I. “Give Me Sight Beyond Sight: Thinking With Science Fiction as Thinking (Together)
With (Others).” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, vol. 36, no. 1, SAGE Publications, 2016,
pp. 3–27, doi:10.1177/0270467616661905.
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44
SCIENCE? FICTION? SF BY
ANGLO-AMERICAN WOMEN
IN THE MAGAZINES
Jane Donawerth
Introduction
Judith Merril’s 1956 essay “What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?” provides the title of
this review by suggesting that the genre depends on twentieth-century evolutions in science
emphasizing relativity, dynamics, integration, and uncertainty, and the genre’s purpose is “to
explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis” (SF:
The Other Side of Realism, 60). Writing always intermeshes with a set of social systems. For
women in the 1926–1965 science fiction (SF) magazines, two of these systems were genre
fiction and science, but because women were often discouraged from scientific careers and
writing, another system was gender.
SF magazines from 1926–1955 were the primary venue for publishing SF. During the 1920s
and 1930s, SF inhabited “pulp” fiction, named for the cheap wood-pulp paper used to produce
these folio-size magazines with brilliantly colored covers and many illustrations. During the
1940s and 1950s, SF shifted to “digest” magazines, smaller in size, with fewer, black-and-white
illustrations. The 1950s saw SF gravitate from magazines to paperbacks. Throughout this period,
discoveries in the sciences of rocketry, robotics, and engineering influenced Anglo-American
men’s SF (Attebery and Cheng). In contrast, Anglo-American women SF writers favored the
equally revolutionary cytology, prosthetics, communication sciences, home economics, and
environmental studies. This chapter builds on previous scholarship, especially that by this writer
(Jane Donawerth) in 1997 on women writers’ visions of utopian science, Debra Benita Shaw’s
2000 view of women writers critiquing gender through science, Lisa Yaszek’s 2008 analysis of
women as home management experts and activists in women’s SF, and Patrick B. Sharp’s 2018
examination of women writers’ use of evolutionary theory to further social change. It also ties
twentieth-century scientific discoveries to the fictions—dire and hopeful—that women created
in the SF magazines.
Satirizing Men’s Technology

While Anglo-American women’s SF is suffused with science, their writing also invokes anxieties
about gender and hopes for a future different from women’s past. They frequently satirize men’s
technology and masculinity itself when they portray rockets, robotics, and prosthetics. Leslie F.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-49 318

Science? Fiction? SF by Anglo-American Women in the Magazines
Stone, for example, satirized the rocket, iconic symbol of men’s science in her 1929 “Out of the
Void,” published in Amazing Stories. The young scientist-explorer, Dana Gleason, volunteers for
the first rocket into space, but masculine technology is not triumphant: at takeoff, “There was
a deafening explosion, . . . killing two mechanics” (450), and we soon learn that the pilot who
successfully steers the rocket to outer space is a woman, not a man. Stone’s satire portrays men’s
rocketry as dysfunctional but women as participating heroically in science. In Stone’s 1934 “The
Rape of the Solar System,” published in Amazing Stories, the political party of The Naturalists
on Pluto turn their entire planet into a rocket, wresting it from orbit and unbalancing the solar
system. Stone thus extends the symbolism of the phallic rocket ship to her title: rockets, made
by men, are rapists that attack all life with violence.
Kate Wilhelm’s satire, “Android Kill for Me,” published in 1959 in Science Fiction Stories
also connects technology and masculine violence. Based on eugenics, a science discredited
by association with Nazism in World War II, this dystopia portrays a government dividing
people according to intelligence, and mandating arranged marriages and reproduction for the
Intellectual class, who are compensated with luxuries and artistic careers. Helen, an Intellectual,
author of “book films,” in a loveless marriage to a sculptor, has borne five children, but is
having an affair with a pilot. She persuades her robot, Zeke (a luxury model who researches
the historical setting for her books), to kill her husband. However, Zeke causes the pilot’s
rocket to explode, and offers “himself ” to Helen instead. This story satirizes the violence that
is associated with masculinity in 1950s American culture: “The Z on his forehead glowed softly
as he advanced, steel arms outstretched” (48).
Communication Science
In twentieth-century Anglo-American culture, women are identified as communicators;
mid-century telephone operators, for example, were women, and Lt. Uhura was the female
Communications Officer on the 1966–1969 television SF program Star Trek. Unsurprisingly
then, in women’s SF communication is central, especially considering mid-century developments
in television and experiments with ESP. The use of electrical transmission of visual images
for communication was predicted in the 1800s after the invention of the telegraph; in 1925,
Charles Jenkins realized the prediction by transmitting a picture from Maryland to Washington,
D.C. (Abramson, 9–14). In Clare Winger Harris’s 1927 story, “The Fate of the Poseidonia,”
published in Amazing Stories, interplanetary televisual communication is central. Martians,
who infiltrate Earth to steal water, use television to communicate. The anxiety about this new
technology is connected to fears of miscegenation—the aliens, with feathered crests, look like
Native Americans, and Margaret, the learned woman, leaves George Gregory, the scientist-
narrator, for the sinister Martell, eventually revealed to be a Martian. Margaret is kidnapped by
Martell when the Martian starships leave, making the racial stereotype explicit. On a television
left behind, Gregory views with horror Martians in various Earth landscapes, and on their arid
home planet. At the end, Margaret calls via television, reassuring Gregory that Mars now has
enough water, and pledges, “I will prevent any—” (267), but is cut off. The story suggests both
Margaret, a learned female, and the technology of television have ventured into alien territory.
With the popularity of radio as home entertainment by 1930 reaching an audience
of 14 million, by 1932 television was remarketed as an entertainment medium, a means of
viewing distant sports in local theaters in real time (Wyver, 55–59). Shortly after World War
II, televisions began appearing in homes as broadcasting stations spread. Anticipating this
worldwide audience, C. L. Moore centers her 1944 SF story, “No Woman Born,” published in
Astounding Science Fiction, on advances in prosthetics and television: her hero, Deirdre, a TV star
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injured in a fire, becomes the first human cyborg with an entirely prosthetic body. The story
is an accolade to the medium that will carry song and dance to a worldwide audience, when
talented Deirdre premiers her new body in a televised concert. But the story also showcases
cyborg and communication sciences to question the nature of gender. Dr. Maltzer fears that he
has created a Frankenstein, that “this thing he had made was a copy only,” because “She isn’t
female anymore” (147 and 152). Her agent, John Harris, expressing his misogyny, supposes that
her graceful femaleness was always only “a disguise, something like a garment she had put off
with her lost body, to wear again only when she chose” (169).
Telepathy, viewed as a communication science in the 1940s to 1960s, also influenced women’s
SF. With the 1940 publication of Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years by psychologist J. B.
Rhine et al., ESP was briefly considered legitimate science. According to Rhine and colleagues,
historical evidence and experiments (one subject sending images of a card to another, or
predicting their order) proved that ESP exists, however unconscious and erratic (3–21, and
311–19). In 1951, Zenna Henderson published “Come on Wagon!” in The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction, based on the concept that telepathy, a vestigial trait, is apparent in
children, but disappears by adulthood: at home on leave, a World War II pilot sees Thaddeus, a
3-year-old, move his toy wagon without touching it. The pilot sees an older Thaddeus teleport
a car off his crushed bicycle; Thaddeus’s father reassures, “They do outgrow it” (The Anything
Box, 86). When the pilot years later finds his uncle trapped under a tractor, he calls Thaddeus
to help, but the gift is gone, and Thaddeus has no memory of teleporting. Debunking the idea
that evolution always favors survival, the story promotes the cutting-edge concept that humans
have inborn, if erratic ESP talent.
In the early 1950s, SF writers Judith Merril and Katherine MacLean even conducted their
own telepathy experiments through letters (Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, 118–22).
These experiments influenced Merril’s “Homecalling,” published in 1965 in Original Science
Fiction Stories: a young girl cares for her brother after her parents die in a spaceship crash on an
alien planet; Deborah hears voices in her head, alien communications from a society like an
ant colony but hardwired with ESP to follow the lead of a queen. Deborah eventually gives in
to the warmth of the “homecalling,” and the aliens adopt the children into their community
(Daughters of Earth, 166–256). The story is additionally significant because communication
between aliens and humans begins with two females.
Reproductive Science
The twentieth century saw major advances in reproductive science—how to prevent
reproduction and how to enable it; campaigns for sex education, especially in contraception,
were ramped up from the second decade on (Gordon, 211–45). Unlike male SF writers who
generally ignored reproductive science (except for cloned servants or armies), women imagined
relieving women of the dangers of childbearing. Before antibiotics, birth was fatal for mothers in
one out of 800 cases (Ulrich, 70). Short stories by women in the magazines of the 1920s–1930s
depict alternative methods of childbirth, especially extrauterine gestation (Squier, 10–15, and
66–70)—in Leslie F. Stone’s 1929 “Out of the Void,” for example, and Lilith Lorraine’s 1930
“Into the 28th Century.”
Women’s reimagining reproduction depended on the twentieth-century advances in cytology
and molecular biology: by the 1920s, researchers established cell colonies outside the organism.
Scientists learned that cells have autonomy, that individual cells can grow separately when given
a suitable medium. Until the 1950s scientists thought that cell colonies outside the body were
also immortal, later discovering only certain cancer cells have this trait (Landecker, 11–12, 15,
320
and 66). In 1950, Katherine MacLean, who had worked as a lab technician, published “And Be
Merry . . .” in Astounding Science Fiction, in which Helen Berent, an endocrinologist, experiments
in her kitchen, using her knowledge of cytology to dismantle her aging cells, reassemble them
as usable protoplasm, and rebuild her parts with new cells. Helen realizes the dream of many
scientists: because cells are autonomous and immortal, death has become contingent. Helen,
who has no children, has reproduced herself. The story not only reimagines reproduction
through the sciences of cytology and endocrinology, but also revises women’s role: instead of
being at the mercy of biology, Helen, the scientist, commands it.
Women SF writers further imagined fetuses gestated outside mothers’ bodies as a form of
abortion. From the late eighteenth century until the 1950s, the number of pregnancies, but
not the number of marriages, declined in the United States, suggesting increased knowledge
of contraception, or frequent infanticide or abortion. From the second decade of the twentieth
century on, campaigns for sex education proliferated as women’s and workers’ organizations
resisted restrictions on contraception and abortion. Earlier, abortion before “quickening”
was often assumed a woman’s right, and even in states with anti-abortion laws, juries often
refused to convict doctors who aided women (Gordon, 96–245, esp. 48–53; Thompson, SR
7). In a 1948 story, “Freedom of the Race,” in Science Fiction Plus, Anne McCaffrey presents
abortion and infanticide as heroic. In this dystopian future, Martians have conquered Earth and
use human women as incubators for their young. Convincing the aliens that only Earthlings
understand human biology, nurses infect the human surrogates with measles. Before the 1963
introduction of measles vaccine, pregnant women who suffered measles frequently miscarried
or birthed babies with disabilities. The strategy is successful: almost all Martian offspring are
born dead. The story, then, represents abortion (miscarriage through measles) or infanticide
(through infection) as heroic: the women save Earth from alien invasion. One is tempted even
to read the aliens as a metaphor for unwanted pregnancies in general.
Judith Merril’s 1955 “Project Nursemaid,” originally published in Science Fiction & Fantasy,
depicts a Space Program project to raise infants in low gravity so they can withstand space
travel. Near the end, a general exclaims, “And don’t think they aren’t going to make it sound
as if the government is running a subsidized abortion ring!” (Daughters of Earth, 80). Faced with
the problem of birthing children in low gravity in this story, doctors take fetuses at 5 months
from the mother, place them in incubators, and transfer them to the space station until “birth.”
During the 1940s, where contraception and abortion were illegal, unmarried girls often chose
or were forced to give up their babies to adoption. Merril’s SF solution is to donate their
children, confidentially, to the Space Program. In many ways, then, this story is about late-
term abortion, but reinvented as heroic. Merril adds a final twist when two of the women
who had given up children apply to become Foster Parents: the role of mother that they had
declined becomes an opportunity when professionalized as a position in the Space Program.
In reimagining reproduction, women writers depict a future of dynamic and rapidly changing
science where women may take control of their own biology.
Domestic Science
The science most associated with women in the early twentieth century was “domestic science”
or “home economics.” As nineteenth-century women began to graduate from colleges with
science degrees and even take doctorates in Europe, they also began to teach in universities.
Often denied positions in science departments, women taught home economics, a science
supporting gender roles, thought appropriate for women faculty. Consequently, there was an
upsurge in women’s research in these sciences, and so discoveries in vitamins and nutrition,
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for example, were often captained by women (Rossiter, 64–67, and 120). Women’s magazines
published prolifically on domestic science, and the New Woman when she became a wife was
urged to do so scientifically. The Suffrage Movement even appropriated the analogy of scientific
housekeeping to city management as an argument for women’s right to vote. In 1900, for
example, Jane Addams, who began the Settlement Movement, suggested in The Modern City,
that urban problems—unsanitary housing, contaminated water, contagion, infant mortality—
were particularly women’s problems, and so women should have the vote to help solve them:
“A city is . . . enlarged housekeeping” (4). This argument for women’s governing is reflected in
1930 in Lilith Lorraine’s utopian city: “woman has found her compensation for motherhood
as the mother of the World-State. She is supreme in the realm of government” (“Into the 28th
Century,” 237). In this future, women create cities free of disease and dirt, and full of art and
education.
Women SF writers increased the number of women scientists portrayed, but they were
suspicious of domestic technology, which, after all, was often developed by men “for” women,
and then intensively marketed as part of women’s job. Electric washing machines were available
by the early 1900s and vacuum cleaners were patented in the early 1900s, becoming widespread
by the 1940s. The electric refrigerator was invented in 1914 and widely marketed from 1927
on, while the home deep freezer arrived in the 1940s. In response to this rapid development
of housekeeping technology, women turned to near-future dystopia and satire. In Margaret
St. Clair’s 1948 “The Rotohouse,” published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Oona is asked by her
husband’s boss to demonstrate “history’s first modern home” (119)—one that rotates to give any
room sunlight, with a massage machine, a weather control, push-button cleaning, an aridifier
and a comminuter. St. Clair slyly increases reader anxiety at technological change by failing to
explain what several of these aids do. When the inspection committee arrives a day early, all
the appliances, as well as the rotation device, break down in spectacular ways: the Rotohouse
reaches warp speed, the cleaner spits cold water, and the weather control manufactures a
snowstorm. Oona rescues the inspectors from advanced technology by the low-tech solution of
wedging a shoe in the controls. The story critiques the construction of machines invented by
men without input from women, and the new skills asked of housewives in order to keep the
consumer economy in gear.
Environmental Science
Early twentieth-century women SF writers anticipated environmental science and campaigns
against toxic substances and climate change. Science began to add to centuries-old fears of
overpopulation as trigger for disease with studies of humans’ toxic changes to our environment
as World War II damage from atomic radiation became clear. Published in Astounding in 1948,
Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” traces the damage to offspring from a father involved in
nuclear experiments in a future world war, and ends in infanticide, as the father strangles his
daughter, whom he sees as deformed. Miriam Allen De Ford’s 1950 “The Last Generation,”
published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, maps a worst possible case when
further atomic experiments in the New Mexico desert of 1955 render all mammals sterile.
While the ingenuity of a global group of male and female scientists finds a solution, they
decide instead to vote whether or not to continue humanity, a race so toxic to the earth.
Such stories make clear human damage to Earth, and Merril further characterizes men, but
not women, as guilty.
Gerry Canavan defined the SF apocalypse as “a mode of critique, a crying out for change”
(13). Certainly, Merril’s and De Ford’s apocalyptic futures are critiques of the 1940s arms race
322
and urge change before it causes irreversible damage. In 1985 autobiographical reflections, SF
writer Margaret St. Clair explained her environmental philosophy: “We must learn to think of
ourselves as . . . citizens of the third planet from the sun . . . earth, whose fate now lies in our
merely human hands” (“Thoughts from My Seventies,” n.p.). This philosophy was realized as
a SF story decades earlier in St. Clair’s “Quis Custodiet?” published in 1943 in Startling Stories.
Set 300 years after a nuclear war destroys almost all life, the story portrays humans split into
“Formers” or unmutated humans, and a new species, homo mutatus, or Blown-Ups. Formers
are dedicated to recovering lost life, celebrating a tomato plant, for example, that biologist
Mirna reconstructs from cells of a mutated leaf. Blown-ups live on synthetic foodstuffs and
value human dominance so much that they destroy all nonhuman life they find, even using
blowtorches on vegetation around their camps. When Mirna and her partner, Parker, realize
that a stranger they encounter is a Blown-up, the men in the group wish to implant the spy
with a technology to sterilize Blown-ups. Mirna resists: “We’re the custodians. But who’s to
see that we’re faithful, that we don’t betray the task?” Over generations, Mirna argues, humans
will forget that
before the bombs . . . people chopped down the forests. . . . They plowed up the
grasslands and made deserts. . . . They tore the heart out of the continents and sent it
floating down . . . the rivers. . . . The bombs only finished something that had been
long ago begun. (114)
Blown-ups, destroying life, will remind Formers that their task is to protect life. While Parker,
the male Former, is an inventor, overseeing technology, Mirna, the female, is a biologist,
resurrecting life that humans have destroyed.
Conclusion: Gender and Science

In a 1986 essay, “Lab Coat,” Ruth Bleier, a founder of feminist science theory, argues that
scientists “do not recognize or acknowledge the degree to which their scientific writing itself
participates in producing the reality they wish to present” (61). Anglo-American women writers
of SF in the magazines often do recognize the misogyny of science and counter it through
recasting science, as Merril pointed out, as relative, dynamic, integrated, and merely probable.
They focused on women’s issues, but drew on a wide range of sciences. In Doris Pitkin Buck’s
1961 “Birth of a Gardener,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Payne,
a misogynistic physicist, mocks his wife’s attempts to learn enough physics to communicate
with her husband and appreciate his work on antimatter. In response to his redirecting her
to gardening, she urges, “Can’t you see what you’re doing? Don’t make me evoke someone
twice” (53). She theorizes that humans’ mental effort evokes the worlds they live in, and that
many parallel worlds exist. Payne’s cruelty is mortal; his wife dies of an aneurysm. Nevertheless,
after death in one world, she disproves her husband’s defensive belief in women’s inferiority—
she offers him glimpses into a parallel antiworld of antimatter where she becomes a scientist
who exceeds his discoveries in math and physics. In that world, she is also married, but to an
alternative, supportive husband. This second world she has evoked is improved, a world where
women are scientists and husbands are supportive.
Using contemporary scientific discoveries and theories in cytology, prosthetics,
communication, domestic science, and environmental studies, drawing on their own beliefs and
values, women SF writers in the magazines evoked realities in their fictions that questioned,
critiqued, and changed their worlds.
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St. Clair, Margaret. “Thoughts from My Seventies.” The Best of Margaret St. Clair, edited by Martin H.
Greenberg. Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985.
Stone, Leslie F. “The Rape of the Solar System.” Amazing Stories, vol. 9, no. 8, 1929, pp. 12–25.
Thompson, Lauren MacIvor. “Women Have Always Had Abortions.” The New York Times, 15
December 2019, p. SR 7.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812.
Random House, 1990.
Wilhelm, Kate. “Android, Kill for Me!” Science Fiction Stories, vol. 10, no. 2, 1959, pp. 42–48.
Wyver, John. The Moving Image: An International History of Film, Television, and Video. Blackwell, 1989.
Yaszek, Lisa. Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Ohio State University Press, 2008.
324
45
EARLY BLACK FEMINIST SF
AND FUTURE FICTION
M. Giulia Fabi
The antebellum future fiction of Frances E. W. Harper seems at a first glance to be rather tame,
when compared with the emphatically confrontational tone of a contemporaneous celebrated
early work of “Black militant” science fiction (Tal 65) like Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts
of America (1859). But is it? Starting from Harper’s antebellum speculative fiction, I advance
a broader reevaluation of the radical challenges to race and gender oppression articulated by
Harper and other African American feminist SF and future fiction writers like Pauline E.
Hopkins and Lillian B. Horace. The formal and thematic continuities that emerge from their
works offer interpretive tools to appreciate their insurgent force and recover the nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century roots of contemporary Afrofuturism. Harper published some of her
early short pieces in the same years and the same venue, The Anglo-African Magazine, where part
of Delany’s Blake was serialized in 1859. When read in the context of their original periodical
publication, Harper’s writings reveal how forcefully she used the futuristic mode to push against
the prevailing domestic boundaries of women’s fiction. A case in point is the short story “The
Triumph of Freedom: A Dream” (“Triumph” 1860).
In its original periodical context, “The Triumph of Freedom” is framed by texts that support
armed antislavery resistance and celebrate John Brown, who had been executed on December 2,
1859, just a few weeks before the publication of Harper’s story. The story follows the nameless
first-person narrator being led by a female spirit “guide” to the “glittering throne” of a goddess
(“Triumph,” 22). Harper describes the white-clad, “blood-stained goddess” (“Triumph,” 22),
that is slavery, as a deranged scientist and necrophiliac collector who accumulates “piles of
hearts” of slave newborns, slave mothers, slave girls, and slave men, keeping them in various
conditions of preservation in a hidden chamber under her throne. The narrator honors the
unnamed “aged man” (i.e., John Brown) who shakes the goddess’s “blood-cemented throne . . .
to its base” (“Triumph,” 22–23). Harper appropriates the language of science to invoke armed
resistance against slavery: the blood that has been “drained . . . from his [Brown’s] veins”
seems to have been “instilled into the veins of freemen and given them fresh vigor to battle”
(“Triumph,” 23).
This combative tone is not unique in Harper’s fiction. In “Zombi, or Fancy Sketches,”
published in The Anglo-African Magazine in 1860 under the pseudonym “Jane Rustic,” she
features a female protagonist who asks a male friend and scholar to recount the history of
“Zombi and the Negro Kingdom” (35). Zumbi, whom Harper spells Zombi, was the last leader
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M. Giulia Fabi
of seventeenth-century Palmares, a large community of escaped African Brazilian slaves. Like

Delany in Blake, Harper recovers and celebrates a tradition of organized armed slave resistance
and nation building. At the same time, unlike Delany, Harper politicizes the private sphere that
ostensibly dominates her “Fancy Sketches” and explodes the domestic confines of women’s
fiction by opening it onto a vision of transnational slave insurgence in the Americas.
However, it would be reductive to appreciate Harper’s radical future fiction only along
lines she shares with Delany. In her novel Minnie’s Sacrifice (MS), which was serialized in The
Christian Recorder in 1869, in the midst of what historian James Anderson has described as the
“uprising among former slaves” in their struggle “for universal schooling” (4), Harper breaks
new and important ground of her own. She moves beyond the masculinism of Blake into a
militant practice of Black feminist speculation embodied in a professional heroine: the African
American woman as teacher-activist. Accordingly, she revises the technologies for freedom she
adopts: whereas Blake appropriates a knowledge of astronomy and wields “compass navigation”
for freedom (Yaszek 17), Harper’s title heroine appropriates literate culture and wields the pen.
When Harper describes teachers as “the army of the pen” in Minnie’s Sacrifice (MS 68), the
military phrase is neither so worn nor so metaphorical as it may sound today. While Delany
peoples his alternate antebellum world of slavery with a secret army of insurgent slaves, Harper
worlds the postbellum “new era” (MS 67) with an army of teachers and the “extraordinary mass
demand on the part of the black laboring class for education” (Du Bois 641). This demand,
which reveals how “the black folk . . . connected knowledge with power” (Du Bois 641), was
rooted in a long-standing tradition of slave cultural resistance and secret schooling networks.1
Harper foregrounds a revolution pioneered “by the freed people and others of their race”
(Butchart 19). She refers to an army that enables a formerly enslaved community to acquire
those cultural weapons connected with literacy that had long been forbidden to them. She also
highlights the very real dangers of personal violence faced by the female and male soldiers in this
army. African American teacher and intellectual Edmonia Highgate also attests to such dangers
in fascinating essays in the very pages of The Christian Recorder in those same years.2 Harper’s
is an army of teachers as grass-roots leaders and organizers who visit different communities
and homes, working with former slaves to realize their vision of a literate and economically
independent nation within the nation.
In her conceptualization of teachers as “pioneer[s] of a new civilization” (MS 67), Harper
again challenges the boundaries of women’s roles and fiction and politicizes teaching. Far
from being a supposedly natural extension of women’s motherly “nature,” teaching is a life-
and nation-transforming decision to participate in the new war to complete the process of
change started by the Civil War. The Black feminist politicization of women’s professional
role as teacher-activists advances an alternate and more egalitarian vision of gender roles
inside and outside the family. Minnie’s impassioned argument in favor of female suffrage,
which she argues to be a means of self-defense against both White supremacy and the
masculinism within the Black community, leads to a complementary deconstruction also
of the paternalism of the language of love with which her husband Louis greets Minnie’s
defense of the vote. His surprise at her strong-mindedness reveals a lovingly proud, but
nevertheless condescending, underestimation of his wife that the new woman Minnie
challenges promptly: “Surely, you would not have me a weak-minded woman in these
hours of trial” (MS 79).
The cautionary tale of Minnie’s death reinforces the parallels between the Civil War and the
new war for the mass schooling of former slaves by evoking the battle over the memorialization
of emancipation and reconstruction. Harper’s new Black nation is built around the celebration
of an alternate history that follows the martyred heroine beyond the funeral, passing on to future
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Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction
generations her memory as a militant female role model who “shall have its place among the
educational ideas for the advancement of our race” (MS 90).
Minnie’s Sacrifice opens an important window on how in the 1860s and 1870s the ex-slaves
“revolutionized the South’s position regarding the role of universal public education in society”
(Anderson 20), and in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy Harper travels back in time to that hopeful
moment. From that more fluid post-war historical vantage point, she articulates a vision of a
better near-future American society than the one she was living in, which was characterized by
the backlash of racist oppression that solidified in the institutionalization of segregation.
The speculative economy of Iola Leroy continues to emphasize the centrality of militant
women teacher-activists who wield the technology of the pen, become leaders in school
organizing, and teach in those Sunday Schools that offered basic education to the many
former slaves who could not attend classes during the week. However, in the face of the post-
Reconstruction White supremacist “counterrevolution” (Anderson 20), Iola Leroy becomes
more emphatically utopian and its voluntaristic optimism contrasts with the more explicitly
combative tone of Minnie’s Sacrifice.
This voluntaristic utopian economy is noticeably absent from Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One
Blood (1902–1903). Hopkins’s pan-African Black feminist SF novel takes a drastically dystopian
turn, where male “technoscientific genius” (Yaszek 18) is implicated in the oppression of
women. The incestuous plot that leads to the final demise of the heroine, Dianthe Lusk, is
rooted in the violent history of White sexual exploitation of slave women, as the stories of
Dianthe’s grandmother and mother exemplify. However, this “hell” (Carby 160) of sexual and
incestuous abuse is also prolonged in the post-Reconstruction present by the two passing male
protagonists, scientific genius Reuel Briggs and privileged Aubrey Livingston, who are in love
with Dianthe. They manipulate her memory and identity in order to acquire “power” (Hopkins
578) over her and are eventually revealed to be her brothers and the descendants of an ancient
line of Ethiopian rulers.
Hopkins, unlike Harper, does not advance her Black feminist agenda by offering models.
Rather, she mobilizes resistance through a tale of transgenerational and transnational female
exploitation that issues a series of urgent warnings: against the loss of personal and collective
historical memory (which deprives Dianthe of her family ties, female support network, and
profession); against the perils of female seclusion in the private sphere, however privileged it
may appear; against the lure of the rhetoric of love and “protection” that reveals its masculinism,
oppressiveness, and ultimate inefficacy in Dianthe’s death; and also against the promises of
back-to-Africa emigration and of ostensibly ready-made Edens like the hidden Ethiopian city
of Telassar.
Telassar, with its past glorious cultural heritage, futuristic technoscientific knowledge,
and supposedly wiser ways, nevertheless exhibits many traits of classic male-centered utopias,
including the monopoly of knowledge by male “Sages” (Hopkins 561). Hopkins describes in
detail the gender roles prevailing in Telassar. She foregrounds their masculinism so deliberately,
and at the same time in such an ostensibly matter-of-fact tone, that it is hard not to read her
descriptions as parodic of the traditional sexual politics that are dominant in Telassar and also in
the United States.
As Lois Brown and Ira Dworkin have noted, Hopkins was familiar with the available literature
on Africa and, as editor of The Colored American Magazine, she covered the pan-African debates
of the 1893 and 1900 conferences that were “notable for their predominantly male participants
and attendees” (Brown 401). Hopkins had all the information she needed both to educate her
readers to an appreciation of African history and heritage, as well as to continue to advance her
feminist critique of male supremacy also in the African section of One Blood.
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M. Giulia Fabi
The political organization of Telassar well illustrates such critique. Although Telassar is
officially “governed by a female monarch, all having the same name, Candace, and a Council
of twenty-five Sages,” readers learn that the mission of the beautiful “virgin queen” is to wait
“the coming of Ergamenes [i.e., Reuel Briggs] to inaugurate a dynasty of kings” (Hopkins 561).
Hopkins challenges readers to see through the contrast between the high-sounding royal title or
the pageant of “Amazon[s] in silver mail” (Hopkins 567–68) surrounding Candace and the far
less impressive reality of her traditionally reproductive role in the novel.
A few more examples of the masculinist power structure of Telassar may suffice. While the
male sages on the council are members for life, the Queen’s term is limited to fifteen years,
possibly the presumed expiration date of the beauty that is supposed to seduce Reuel. Similarly,
men can become sages if they “pass a severe examination by the court as to education, fitness
and ability” (Hopkins 561), whereas the only qualifications required for the queen and the
women in her entourage seem to be youth, beauty, and “chastity” (569). Pursuing the twofold
interventionist goal of fostering pride in Blackness and critiquing sexism, Hopkins celebrates
Candace’s dark-skinned beauty and noble grace, but at the same time highlights how her beauty
is not a source of independent power but rather finalized to the seduction of Reuel, who
succumbs to her charms promptly.3
Traditional gender roles emerge emphatically during the first meeting between Queen
Candace and Reuel. Candace’s behavior with the hero includes the “gesture of dissent” with
which she refuses to sit next to him and chooses instead the “cushions at his feet” (Hopkins
568). Hopkins’s portrayal of the beautiful queen’s voluntary “submission . . . to [her] lord”
(569) is so obvious as to emerge as a rather transparent parody of male erotic fantasies. Hopkins
censures the normalization of gender inequality through a mock-heroic tone that reminds one
of George Schuyler’s later satiric SF novel Black No More (1931).
Hopkins does not spare interpretive clues to facilitate a critical appreciation of her parodic
dissection of sexism. The objectification of women that characterizes the story of Dianthe
takes a satirically literal turn in Telassar. Prime minister Ai speaks proudly of their advanced
scientific ability “to preserve the bodies of our most beautiful women” (Hopkins 562) with
the same process used to preserve natural flowers for the “decorations of the hall” (561). Reuel
himself pays Candace a puzzling compliment by describing her as a “superb . . . animated
statue” (568). The very similarity of body and voice between Candace and Dianthe points to
the interchangeability of women that also in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) justifies
Julian West’s switch from Edith Sr. to Edith Jr.
Among the warnings and the related calls to resistance that Hopkins issues in Of One Blood,
there is also a metaliterary one regarding the masculinism ingrained in the very dynamics of
literary genre. Hopkins uses a wide variety of popular themes and genres: SF, lost-civilization
novels, utopia, passing, mesmerism. By drawing attention to such variety and incorporating
those genres far from seamlessly, she foregrounds how they fail to offer a safe, let alone new,
space for women characters. In the case of Dianthe, even her death does not represent a
martyrdom to be celebrated à la Harper’s Minnie, but rather the outcome of her failed attempt
at a revenge that will be successfully meted out by male characters. Similarly, at the end of the
novel Queen Candace and Aunt Hannah quickly disappear in the African background among
the “loyal subjects” to whom Reuel “spends his days in teaching . . . all that he has learned in
years of contact with modern culture” (621).
This metanarrative critique of the masculinism ingrained in novelistic conventions takes
center stage in Lillian B. Horace’s Five Generations Hence (1916), where it accompanies the
author’s introduction of an unprecedented heroine. Grace Noble is a “brooding” (Horace 22),
solitary African American female genius who devises a project of voluntary emigration that, in
328
five generations, will solve the problem of racial oppression in the United States and in Africa.
In describing her exceptional heroine, Horace offers important variations on Black feminist
concerns that characterize also Harper and Hopkins. Problematizing explicitly the traditional
narrative focus on women’s beauty that Hopkins parodies in Of One Blood, Horace describes
her heroine’s face as “if not decidedly plain, certainly not pretty” (19). She foregrounds, instead,
how Grace Noble’s “countenance” reflects the “lofty passions of her highly sensitive nature” and
praises the “mystic darkness” of her eyes as the mirror of the “wonderful personality . . . that
flashed from their somber depths” (20).
Orphaned, Grace Noble supports herself by joining the ranks of militant female teacher-
activists like Harper’s Minnie, and at the beginning of the novel “we find her after seven years of
single combat with life and the world . . . that gave to her . . . a passionate desire to do something
for her people” (Horace 21). To this work that Horace, like Harper, describes in martial tones,
Grace Noble brings the power of her multifaceted cultural genius. She is a “thoroughly cultured
scholar” with an exceptionally “clear idea of the classics” (21). She possesses “literary talent” (21)
and deploys her research skills “to study the various conditions of her people and their relations
toward the white race” (23) in ways that qualify her as a leader and a “Moses” (21).4
If the traumatic origin story of the heroine (who is born of formerly enslaved parents that
during Reconstruction fought to defend their family against White supremacist violence) is
described as “most commonplace” (Horace 20), her own life holds the potential for her people’s
deliverance from those evils. The means of deliverance reside in the dual liberation, through
education and economic self-help, of Blacks in the African diaspora from racist oppression and
of women from racialized sexism. Like Hopkins, Horace infuses her back-to-Africa project
with a revision of traditional gender roles. However, instead of resorting to the indirect critique
afforded by parody, Horace articulates a feminist version of emigrationism.
The novel follows Grace Noble as she fights against mighty external and internal enemies.
Driven almost beyond the power of endurance by her awareness that “after more than fourteen
generations of oppression . . . prejudice [is still] above, below, and all around us” (Horace 48),
she has a vision. The vision transports her through time and space to five generations hence and
a new Africa where she sees “a black people . . . tilling the soil with a song of real joy upon their
lips” (49). She beholds “a civilization, . . . beautifully paved streets, handsome homes . . . , and
men and women of color . . . commercially engaged one with the other” (49).
Grace Noble’s literary genius enables her to write books that transform this vision into
a political project that inspires others, including her friend Violet Gray, who teaches as a
missionary in Africa and comes to see herself as “the advance guard of a mighty nation” (Horace
52). Grace Noble’s books become “widely read and appreciated” (70), liberating her from the
financial necessity of teaching and making her the first Black woman character in American
fiction to succeed as professional writer.
However, the full potential of Grace Noble’s mission of transnational liberation is threatened not
only by the forces of White supremacy inside and outside the United States, but also by her own
insecurity about her role as a woman intellectual and leader. Her debilitating self-doubt is rooted
in prevailing sexist definitions of womanhood and romantic love that present female attractiveness
as based on youth and racialized standards of beauty, construe femininity as incompatible with
remarkable intellectual endowments, and conflate “love” with voluntary female subjugation. In
order to stop being a “slave . . . to her [unrequited] love” (Horace 61) for the younger, educated
farmer Lemuel Graves, Grace Noble has to learn to overcome these internalized subordinate gender
roles. The personal threatens to inhibit the full growth of Grace Noble’s genius and to interfere
with the “colossal task” (52) of transnational liberation. It emerges as inescapably political both in
the narrative life of the heroine and in the real-life reading experience of Horace’s readers, who are
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M. Giulia Fabi
systematically exposed to the author’s criticism of sexist uses of language and the
deconstruction of romantic narrative conventions.5
The happy ending of the novel, for instance, becomes possible after Grace Noble learns to accept
her own accomplishments. Her “genius is needed . . . to point the way” (Horace 95) to both
women and men. She enables her underprivileged friend Pearlia to acquire an education and helps
Lemuel Graves to free himself from peonage and emigrate to Africa with his family. Horace also
grants her professional heroine a happy private life. At an age when Hopkins’s Queen Candace
would have been obliged to find a younger successor to the throne, Grace Noble becomes the
protagonist of a love story that is passionate but does not require the suppression of her identity.
The real happy ending of the novel does not coincide with the heroine’s marriage, though
it is described as ideally egalitarian. Rather, it occurs when Grace Noble comes to believe
fully in the possibility of women “realizing the dream of [their] lives” (Horace 95) also outside
the traditional mandates of heterosexual marriage and biological motherhood. The end of the
novel introduces a new generation of female professionals, like her own friend and “successful
teacher” Pearlia (94), and of women, like Grace Noble’s own biological daughters, who will
grow up with role models such as single, fulfilled teacher-activist Violet Gray.
The formal and thematic continuities that run through these early works outline the origins of
the African American feminist tradition of speculative fiction. They represent a powerful legacy
for contemporary writers, as well as for scholars. In Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a
Movement (2019), Isiah Lavender III has argued “the value of Afrofuturism as a reading practice”
(5) that can be deployed with African American literary works and genres from the “deeper past”
(3). At the same time, reversing the “transhistorical feedback loop” (6) that Lavender hypothesizes
may also be worthwhile. Thick “historicist reframings” (McCaskill and Gebhard 12) and the
empowering sense of an established tradition may yield renewed approaches to the early works we
already know and to the ones that ongoing archival research is unearthing, enabling a return to
twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afrofuturism with compelling critical questions.
Notes
1 See Du Bois, ch. 15; Anderson, ch. 1; Butchart, ch. 2.
2 On Edmonia Highgate, see Butchart, ch. 2, and Gardner, ch. 6.
3 Hopkins compares both Dianthe and Candace to Venus. Brown notices insightfully how in this
reference “Hopkins inserts an innovative corrective history” that evokes Sarah Bartman, the Venus
Hottentot: “the encounters that Hopkins stages between Briggs and Lusk do call to mind that awful
history of encounter, hyper-sexualization, racial objectification, and punishing isolation” (396–97).
4 The comparison with “Moses” connects Grace Noble most famously with Harriet Tubman. Horace
links Grace also to “the Maid of Orleans” (Horace 25), Joan of Arc.
5 See, for instance, Horace’s insistence on using the gender-neutral term “individual” instead of “man”
(17, 20).
Bibliography
Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. University of North Carolina Press,
1988.
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. 1888. Bantam, 1983.
Brown, Lois. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. University of North Carolina
Press, 2008.
Butchart, Ronald E. Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–
1876. University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
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Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. Oxford
Delany, Martin R. Blake; or, The Huts of America, edited by Floyd J. Miller. Beacon Press, 1970.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction. Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935.
Dworkin, Ira, ed. Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline Hopkins. Rutgers
Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture.
Oxford University Press, 2015.
[Harper], Frances Ellen Watkins. “The Triumph of Freedom: A Dream.” The Anglo-African Magazine, vol.
2, no. 1, 1860, pp. 21–23.
Harper, Frances E. W. “Zombi, or Fancy Sketches. Number IV.” The Anglo-African Magazine, vol. 2, no.
2, 1860, pp. 33–37.
Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. Beacon Press, 1987.
Harper, Frances E. W. Minnie’s Sacrifice. 1869. Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph:
Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, edited by Frances Smith Foster. Beacon Press, 1994,
pp. 1–92.
Hopkins, Pauline E. Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self. 1902–1903. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins.
Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 441–621.
Horace, Lillian B. Jones, “Five Generations Hence.” Recovering Five Generations Hence: The Life and
Writing of Lillian Jones Horace, edited by Karen Kossie-Chernyshev. Texas A&M University Press, 2013,
pp. 11–102.
Lavender, Isiah III. Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. Ohio State University Press,
2019.
McCaskill, Barbara, and Caroline Gebhard, eds. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and
Culture, 1877–1919. New York University Press, 2006.
Tal, Kali. “’That Just Kills Me’: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction,” Social Text 71, vol. 20, no. 2, 2002,
pp. 65–91.
Yaszek, Lisa. “The Bannekerade: Genius, Madness and Magic in Black Science Fiction.” Black and Brown
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2014, pp. 15–30.
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46
GENDERING DOMES
BETWEEN PULP ERA
AND NEW WAVE
Szilvia Gellai
Dome Cultures in Science Fiction

Domed cities are among the most prevalent tropes and icons in science fiction (SF). Their
cultural-historical roots go back to the nineteenth century, when the old dream of transparency
was combined with the new building materials of glass and iron to create sociopolitical utopias
and dystopias of technological futures (Schneider). In particular, the Crystal Palace, built for
the first World’s Fair in London in 1851, had a lasting impact on Western imaginations. This
monument to the colonial power of the British Empire conflated greenhouse architecture and
modernist commodity aesthetics, enthralling visitors all over Europe and inspiring authors to
speculate about domed futures.
Against this background, the idea of domed cities first appeared in the scientific romances of
the glass-obsessed late Victorian era. The best known example in this context is H. G. Wells’s
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) that depicts a technically advanced but politically corrupt, socially
divided, unjust, and above all static world under a glass dome. However, transparent architectures
quickly found their way into the imaginary worlds of the French, German, and especially
Russian traditions, as well. In Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s socialist-utopian vision What Is to Be
Done? (1863), the Crystal Palace serves as community palace for the new man—and a liberated
and equal woman. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) is a polemical response
to Chernyshevsky’s vision and completely undoes the former’s progressive Fourierian gender
constellations. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) later follows in the same dystopian direction,
providing the central influence for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that reduces the
motif of the glass dome to a snow globe and exchanges the surveillance apparatus of the glass
houses of We for telescreens that equally render private homes transparent.
Between the 1940s and 1980s glass domes experienced an incredible boom, especially in
Anglo-American countries. Enthusiasm and criticism, fascination and anxiety charged these
discourses with a dynamic polarity from the very beginning. Transparent domes continued to
create spaces for exploring experimental sociopolitical orders, for confronting the technological
vision of the future with socialist ideals, for depicting a welfare state’s drift into total anarchy,
or for socialism’s rise to a totalitarian surveillance state. During the Pulp Era, spectacular glass
domes arched over the sunken realm of Atlantis, enveloped arctic Martian cities, housed turtle-
men on the other side of the moon, protected New York from a plague of winged snakes,
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Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave
or sheltered the last survivors of planetary doom. In SF cover art, domed cities developed
into a full-fledged icon after World War II. Stories of the Golden Age speculated about the
conquest of the ocean floors, polar regions, or distant planets where humankind would find
new living spaces, precious resources, aliens, and endless adventures. Domes were still used as a
means of protection that could be adapted to many different scenarios, ranging from protective
shields against nuclear attacks to climate shells in inhospitable environments. In the 1960s
and 1970s, other themes moved into the foreground. SF domes were now instrumental in
bringing attention to social problems such as population growth, pollution, decaying cities,
racial conflicts, or gender inequality.
After the end of the 1980s, the use of the trope waned, fostered by the advent of cyberspace,
which strongly inspired new spatial utopias. However, the comeback of “dome cultures” (Díaz)
around 2000 emphasizes their close connection with some of the Cold War era’s pivotal discourses:
Cybernetic control fantasies of urban planning have merged with smart city concepts, privately
funded space programs have taken the space race to a new level, and the pressing questions of
the environmental age are being renegotiated in the context of anthropogenic climate change.
Despite their rich, multilayered history and current relevance, dome cultures in SF—in
contrast to those in the fine arts (Díaz; Borries)—have received surprisingly little scholarly
attention (Pak 143–58; Abbott 45–69; Gellai “Domed Cities”). This chapter will examine the
heyday of SF dome cultures (1940–1980) in terms of gender relations in order to reconstruct
various genealogies, primarily in the Anglo-American and German-speaking traditions. In this
context, it is crucial to place a significant emphasis on the issue of gender differences. First,
due to the intimate connection between the imagination of domed cities and the history of
colonialism, focusing on the depiction of gender contributes to the ongoing project of feminist
retellings of established narratives. Second, beyond the genre of SF, transparent walls, bell jars,
and glass enclosures have been used as veritable poetological metaphors for establishing “spaces
of one’s own” (to modify a term borrowed from Virginia Woolf) in women’s writing between
the late 1920s and the early 1960s (Gellai Glass Scenographies). Therefore, the question arises
whether and to what extent a close analysis of the SF tradition can corroborate this finding.
The history of SF dome cultures can be traced on different levels and on a large array of
interwoven paths. Rather than providing a long and necessarily incomplete list of fictional
works that make use of the trope, this chapter maps the underlying historical discourses that
have been profoundly shaping the dome cultures in SF and it also traces threads of resistance
to troubling gender relations and colonial legacies. In particular, I will focus on the interfaces
that SF establishes between “the three levels of technoculture”: namely, “the imaginary, the
symbolic/discursive, and the technological/material” levels (Harrasser 825). According to these
interfaces, visual culture and architecture are, along with literary discourses, the most relevant
media for this type of analysis. The passages between different media in the following examples
correspond to shifting paradigms in gender constellations. The mechanisms of inclusion and
exclusion and the definition of and the dealing with boundaries are always crucial in domed
settings, as they determine the role of privileged agents and minorities. At the same time,
these mechanisms do not simply define spaces, but also spaces of time that allow for the
reinterpretation of utopias as dystopias and vice versa.
Hostile Environments and “Spaces of One’s Own”

When looking at mainstream SF narratives and images of the midcentury, glass domes are often
hostile, hermetic environments, especially for women, and manifest themselves in different
scales. One example of this is Monroe Schere’s novelette “Rosie Lived in a Bubble” (1954),
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Figure 46.1 Monroe Schere’s Novelette “Rosie Lived in a Bubble”

Source: Future Science Fiction, August 1954, pp. 65. Illustrated by Paul Orban.
334
Figure 46.2 “The Girl in the Glass Sphere”

Source: House of Mystery, no. 72, March 1958. Cover art by Ruben Moreira.
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Szilvia Gellai
Figure 46.3 Women inside of glass skulls

Source: Space Science Fiction, February 1953. Cover art by Alex Ebel.
336
which is set in a post-apocalyptic world with a small town in a bubble generated by a humanoid
alien to protect the last humans on Earth. The bubble, however, also reflects on inherent
limitations by focusing on the mindset and actions of two young women from the town as they
compete for a man’s attention. In Isaac Asimov’s short story “Living Space” (1956), massive
overpopulation leads humankind to venture out to parallel worlds, each world providing just
one house under a glass dome. This solution implies that women are expected to stay at home
alone in the solitude of an otherwise uninhabited planet. Ruben Moreira’s comic strip “Girl in
the Glass Sphere” (1958) takes up the famous Loreley myth. A millionaire’s beautiful wife is only
allowed to enter the public sphere in a soundproof glass-enclosed wheelchair because of her
deadly, seductive voice. Ironically, the husband himself is protected by the “lucky” circumstance
of being deaf. A cover by Alex Ebel for Space Science Fiction (February 1953) presents women
as voluptuous naked blondes sitting inside of glass skull formations with masculine faces that
rise, rock-like, out of the surface of a dead planet. Ranging in dimension from the dome of a
skull to a small town, all these enclosures objectify women in different ways: as fertile vessels,
furnishings, femmes fatales, or “brainchildren” of men. However, this pattern does not go
unchallenged in women’s writing.
Judith Merril, for instance, radically reverses this paradigm. Her novella “Daughters of Earth”
(1952) depicts women as autonomous subjects who occupy key positions in politics while men
are presented as vulnerable and not fit for survival as they die under the debris of collapsing
glass domes. Merril chooses a female protagonist who chronicles generations of space-traveling
women. They live in artificial environments and push the frontiers of colonial expansion from
one planet to the next. With each new generation—namely, with each new rocket launch—
the same speech on humanity’s dream of conquering the stars is re-implanted into everyone’s
memory and consciousness. However, the novella does not affirm this dream as strongly as it
may initially seem. The acoustic distortion of the repeated phrases and the depiction of faces
petrified with fear, along with the continual shifts in focalization within the narrative, create the
uncanny impression of infinite movements that cannot be broken.
By now a classic, the Austrian novel The Wall (Die Wand, 1963) by Marlen Haushofer
attempts to break through the archetypal cycles of time by understanding both humankind
and its time as something finite and passing. Far from being exclusively divisive, The Wall
connects Europe with the US and the tradition of the Heimat novel with SF. The novel
is set in an idyllic Austrian valley, which quickly becomes an eerie place as an invisible
and impenetrable wall descends around it overnight. A widow in her mid-forties who was
spending her vacation in a hunting lodge finds herself isolated, apparently the last person
to survive an unspecified and soundless catastrophe. Outside the wall, every living thing
is frozen in time. Initially, the nameless woman’s only companions are a dog, a cow, and
a cat, and the novel presents itself as a report that she started to write after two and a half
years in isolation. During this time, her relationship to the world and herself have changed
entirely. Clocks, radios, and cars lose all practical significance, while farmer’s calendars
provide relevant information. To survive, she must manage her resources wisely, cultivate
the land, grow vegetables, hunt (reluctantly), and appropriate routines from which women
traditionally were often excluded. At the same time, she bears responsibility for the animals
and cares for them as her new family. Through these new interspecies companionships,
fixed gender roles are being questioned and renegotiated.
As Miriam Kanne writes, the category of gender in Haushofer’s novel encompasses both
the masculine and the feminine and the human and the animal, recasting them as amorphous alloys.
While the heroine oscillates between the stereotypical poles of the male and female genders on
a performative level, she equally fluctuates between categories of the human and the animal
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on an anthropological level (Kanne 125, 127). While the wall itself brings many restrictions to
her, it ultimately also offers new degrees of freedom and a safe space beyond the patriarchal and
anthropocentric order. Haushofer thus situates a SF trope in her specific locale and historical
context, and by doing so, fundamentally reinterprets it.
Whether or not to consider The Wall as SF is a question that is still widely discussed in
research. According to a biography, Haushofer had a penchant for SF and possessed an extensive
collection of the contemporary series Utopia and Terra. Among them supposedly was “a story
entitled Die gläserne Kuppel [The Glass Dome]” by an unknown author about a small community
“surviving a kind of ice age under the protection of a huge dome of glass” (Strigl 248). There
is indeed one novel in the aforementioned German magazines that fits this description, albeit
with a different title: Fred MacIsaac’s The Hothouse World, first published in 1931 and reprinted
in Utopia 1955 with a huge glass dome on the cover. In this novel, MacIsaac enthuses about
building up a new society from scratch, picking up elements strongly reminiscent of Wells’s When
the Sleeper Wakes.
From Climate Capsules to Spaceship Earth

MacIsaac’s novel reveals a vital cultural-historical path underlying the dome cultures
of the twentieth century. The title refers to a building type of the nineteenth century,
namely the glasshouse. By uncoupling the interior from the exterior, this type of building
simulates a homelike environment for displaced living beings. Glasshouses do not simply
contain nature, but rather cultivate an engineered nature by sheltering plants, animals, and
organisms that are often foreign to the surrounding climate and therefore require specific
conditions to survive. These conditions must be produced by scientific and technological
means. Glasshouses can therefore be considered machines for the manipulation of space
and time, suspending both the natural rhythm of the seasons and the natural origin of
the species (Ruelfs and Werber 261). In other words, glasshouses are media and, as such,
deeply interwoven with the history of colonization, evoking a whole series of practices
such as collecting, selecting, classifying, breeding, and exhibiting a culture solely driven by
economic considerations.
To a different degree, these practices also come to the foreground when negotiating SF
domes in various media. The trope repeatedly embeds itself in stories of loss, in worlds where
the unrestricted availability of what was once taken for granted (air, food, nature, energy) is no
longer a reality. The domed worlds in SF are often archives, museums, reserves, time capsules,
or incubators. However, the cultural-historical trajectory of the glasshouse is not only linked to
colonial pasts or the notion of artificial climates. It also points to the possibility of placing people
into spaces with altered conditions, thereby reshaping their entire being. This idea has vast
anthropological, socio-, and biopolitical connotations which became virulent in the nineteenth
and extended heavily far into the twentieth century (Gellai “Leben” 64).
One significant example of this is Douglas Trumbull’s movie Silent Running (1972), which
links the historical glasshouse with a specific type of dome in which several pivotal contemporary
discourses crystallize: Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. Significantly, the domes in
Silent Running do not arch over urban landscapes, but rather shelter Earth’s last forests. Trumbull’s
scenario takes its inspiration from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), presenting a dystopian
twentieth century in which poisonous chemicals and plagues have wiped out all nonhuman
life on Earth. “Nature” exists only in enormous greenhouses aboard spacecrafts, waiting for
Earth to become fertile again. Over the years, however, this conservatory mission is abandoned
for economic reasons. The botanist who has cultivated the gardens for years with monastic
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devotion resists their destruction by force, kills the crew, and hijacks the spaceship. Trumbull’s
domes were modeled after the Climatron in St. Louis, the first greenhouse built according to
Fuller’s design in 1960.
The metaphor of the “Spaceship Earth” that Fuller used in his Operating Manual for Spaceship
Earth (1969) created a new awareness for the depleting resources of the planet and became “the
core of a mythology” in the 1960s and 1970s (Höhler 16). In Silent Running, the very design
of the domes reinforces the connection between the microcosm of the “green” spacecraft and
the macrocosm of Spaceship Earth. Since the domes are floating in space, somewhere between
Earth and the port of a foreign planet, the movie undercuts the typical colonial paradigm
prevalent in extraterrestrial exploration narratives. Yet the one-sided gender constellation
chosen in Silent Running highlights the limitations of the film’s progressive ecological statement.
All of the characters are male. Small robots that the protagonist reprograms according to his
needs assume the role of the Other. In the final scene, the last garden is cultivated by the last one
of these robots. The nonhuman actors of the story—nature and technology—therefore seem
to have bonded together, but the reality they jointly create can only survive if human beings
remain outside.
The Biopolitics of Dome Scenarios in SF

As Sabine Höhler argues, the cyborg metaphor of Spaceship Earth drew its discursive and
modeling power from its hybrid character, connecting the organic with the technical and the
fragile biosphere of Earth with solutions of space travel. In a similar vein, it synthesized the
contrasting perspectives of environmentalists and technocrats. While Silent Running interweaves
the images, discourses, and architectures of domes and glasshouses in SF, it is important to also
not overlook the fact that the geodesic paradigm itself already represents a new technological
level: Under these domes, the media and the concepts of the emerging systems sciences and
cybernetics, “which assessed the earth as a self-contained and self-maintained ecosystem,” prevail
(Höhler 54). Thinking about environments in terms of systems theory (i.e., assuming a closed
system with a distinct boundary), it is not surprising that it soon became simultaneously visualized
as a geometric figure and as a transparent container. It is no coincidence that domes, especially
Fuller’s, became a household icon of SF, architecture, and urban planning. Technological
control and spatial containment seemed to provide solutions to pressing problems of the time,
including environmental pollution and population growth. Several dome novels and films in
SF present worlds where supposedly everything can be planned and controlled—essentially
social laboratories—and where consequently all factors that are potentially unpredictable
(nature, weather, death) or otherwise unwanted (for instance, the poor or ethnic minorities)
are excluded. Another aspect is the almost omnipotent nature of control mechanisms that are
put in place, including those that subject the interior of the domes to constant surveillance
and exercise cybernetic control. Among the best-known futuristic novels about a domed New
York City are John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Ben Bova’s City of Darkness (1976), and
Frederik Pohl’s The Years of the City (1984). Michael Bishop’s Catacomb Years (1979) unfolds
the urban scenario beneath a bubble around Atlanta. The films Zardoz (dir. John Boorman,
1974) and Logan’s Run (dir. Michael Anderson, 1976) picture smaller communities in a post-
apocalyptic twenty-third century.
Despite these differences, some patterns reoccur. Narratives of climate-regulating and
sanitizing domed cities often orbit around societies in fatal isolation and segregation. The final
escape from confinement, the dismantling or destruction of the symbol and means of separation
recurs as the vanishing point of the plots. Even though overpopulation, genetic profiles, aging,
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and reproduction are subject to computer-based control in dome worlds, sexual permissiveness,
artificial breeding, and alternative communities are also often part of their biopolitics. As in
Marge Piercy’s influential novel Woman at the Edge of Time (1976), such measures may well
appear in a utopian framework and go along with more progressive gender models. Interestingly,
the desire of dome dwellers to break free from the enclosure often leads to a return to traditional
ways of life, such as the institutions of marriage, (nuclear) family, or traditional gender roles,
which are naturalized and propagated through the rhetoric of freedom.
The SF dome films of the 1970s mark a temporary climax in a development that can be
traced in literature from the early 1930s onwards. The protagonist in MacIsaac’s Hothouse World
already poses the question of why the domes that may have been necessary for survival in the
past are still needed in the present. What has been forgotten are the reasons that made the
barriers necessary in the first place. This amnestic state is particularly apparent in Catacomb Years.
Yet instead of a (self-)critical re-evaluation of the situation, the self-contained system of domes
often leads to a hardening of the frontiers between inside and outside. Ironically, the boundary
that must be overcome is sometimes not even where the narratives suggest it is (i.e., between
human and nature or between human and machine). The racially based, conservative shift in
Logan’s Run is the best example for that. Here, the artificial intelligence that must be fought
manifests itself not only in the supercomputer, operating radical biopolitics under the domes,
but also in a semi-human robot who blocks the way back to traditional American ideals. The
only Black actor in the film is hidden within the shiny box of the robot and appears only in the
form of a voice (Nama 24–27). In this type of fiction, people of color seem to neither occupy
a place in the present nor in the past or the future.
Conservative shifts and fantasies of return often involve a vital, gender-coded connotation
of domes. As Frederick Kreuziger points out, SF cities symbolize “the desire to close in on
the self, to return to the womb. The . . . domed city is a womb in which humankind is
nourished and protected against the onslaughts of change and the terrors of history” (63).
While the imagination of returning to the womb is sometimes found literally in SF (like in
Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s space utopia Andymon, 1982), others take issue with the
naturalizing effect of such imagery. In Katherine MacLean’s “The Missing Man” (1971),
the underwater domes of Brooklyn and New Jersey become the target of teenage terrorists
rebelling against the forced sterilization of women. However, the architectures surrounded by
water are depicted as pulsating, techno-organic bubbles, as giant amniotic sacs whose violent
bursting fills TV viewers with glorious horror. Once more, the myth of motherhood and the
natural reproduction pattern is put into a different perspective, both in technical as well as in
critical terms.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” (1969) subverts the link to the womb by superimposing
a posthuman figure onto the trope. The short story explores the psychosocial relationships
of a traumatized clone. Initially, ten clones arrive on the planet Libra to provide engineering
assistance in uranium mining. The staff of the domed mission base consists of two men who
have lived alone on Libra for two years. Remarkably, the planet is envisioned as a female
character who is very much alive under a deformed surface. The five female and five male
clones, bred from the cells of a genius, form a self-possessed, self-reliant swarm-like collective.
These clones confront the two men with the terrible “strangeness of the stranger” (121). Both
the ontological status of the posthuman (as superhuman, hybrid beings) and its specific epistemic
status (as an assembled intelligence) are considered strange in this context and provoke questions
that touch on the prime cultural taboos of human society. For example, the predicament of
what constitutes intercourse among these clones is thrown at the reader as follows: “Incest is
it, or masturbation?” (131). Another topic of interest is whether the female clones are available
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for exogamous partnerships. The unspoken question that remains is whether the exchange of
women as a pillar of male kinships and the obligatory heterosexuality it guarantees still represent
foundational values. The infertility of the women negates this option, as does the fact that the
alliance of clones encompasses familial, erotic, social, and professional spheres alike. The planet
as deus ex machina, however, radically changes the plot. In an earthquake, nine of the ten clones
perish in the mine shafts. The surviving clone suddenly turns into an individual. At the peak of
his solitude, he is “sitting inside the great half-egg of the dome [of the mission base] like a fly
in amber” (140). Deprived of the protective sphere of his community, he recognizes humans as
communication partners. A slow change is looming, at the end of which an encounter between
posthumans and humans seems possible. Furthermore, the short story not only points at the
possibility of gay love in future (post-)human relationships, but it also provides space for a planet
of her own.
In summary, it can be stated that in SF dome cultures, the colonial perspective is intertwined
with an androcentric one, well into the New Wave. Even the environmentally critical dystopia
of Silent Running perpetuates this perspective. The first breaks in this pattern appear in Merril’s
texts and with the very tangible gender-specific resistance in The Wall, which appropriated
MacIsaac’s (and Wells’s) motif in a subversive way. MacLean and Le Guin torpedoed the
prevailing connotations and colonial patterns of domed cities by subverting the myth of
motherhood. Haushofer’s and Le Guin’s stories stand out from the lineage because of their
posthuman figurations under domes. Rather than creating transparent spaces just for women,
these SF narratives set up scenarios that allow for the possibility of desirable encounters and
forms of companionship between humans and nonhuman others as well. In the years following
these publications, the icon of the geodesic dome recurs in the decaying architectures of the
Sprawl in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), thus laying an important stepstone for the
revival of SF dome tales after the 1990s. By populating their worlds with hybrid agents that
“stay with the trouble” (Haraway), writers like Misha Nogha (Red Spider White Web, 1990) and
Kathleen Ann Goonan (Nanotech Quartet, 1994–2002) started to breathe new life into the
trope. In doing so, they reveal that many of the transparent dystopias of our day grew out the
uncanny ruins of the dome cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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47
RESTORATIVE NOSTALGIA
AND HISTORICAL
AMNESIA IN THE
HANDMAID’S TALE PROTESTS
Kam Meakin
Protests have become particularly infused with visual popular cultural references over the
last few decades. Although a utopian sensibility can be identified in many protest framings
(Occupy’s “Another World is Possible” and Extinction Rebellion’s “Build Back Better” are
two striking examples), the increasing visibility of dystopian film has lent itself to a broad
dissemination of dystopian imagery in protest. The potent Anonymous mask, widely used since
2011’s Occupy protests, was first featured in V for Vendetta; The Hunger Games three-finger salute
has become a particularly powerful element of anti-corruption protests in Thailand since 2015
spreading across southeast Asia. However, in more recent years, nothing compares to the global
popularity of protesters dressing as Handmaids, modeled after Hulu’s adaptation by Bruce Miller
of Margaret Atwood’s famous 1985 dystopian novel. Although utopian ideologies and imagery
have been celebrated for their role in helping to organize and propel activists forward (Pötz),
the role of the dystopia in configuring and motivating social movement organizing has gone
relatively unexamined in sociological research and utopian studies literature.
Often these dystopian-inspired protest symbols draw on temporal reflections, vividly
representing a sense of fear and anxiety about certain contemporary political trends. Reflections
on where the present may lead without intervention is a key feature within The Handmaid’s
Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale depicts the creation of a totalitarian religious regime called The
Republic of Gilead following an ecological disaster that has led to growing infertility. The
narrative follows Offred—Of Fred—who has been identified as fertile and therefore designated
a “handmaid” whose only purpose is to become pregnant for her wealthy “Commander.”
According to Christine St. Peter, Atwood convincingly depicts how a rarity of viable ovaries
could lead to ideological forces becoming all-powerful to seize white women’s bodies as
the nation’s “reproductive resources” (St. Peter 364). The Hulu-adapted first season of The
Handmaid’s Tale has been considered incredibly timely, quickly becoming popular and receiving
13 Emmy nominations. Karen Crawley describes how the show’s “graphic and stylised violence
appears to powerfully actualize feminist fantasies about the violence incipient in patriarchy in
this particular political moment” (338). Following the release of the show, a variety of women’s
and human rights activists have publicly adopted the robes of handmaids in Canada, Ireland, the
United Kingdom (UK), Poland, Argentina and across the United States (US).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-52 343

Kam Meakin
Bringing together reflections on the manner in which dystopian fiction allows different
audiences to conceptualize time, the chapter begins with the questions: how has The Handmaid’s
Tale television show been used by activists in relation to political temporality? What narrative
temporalities are being challenged? And what temporalities are being replicated that may prove
exclusionary to other groups, past, present and future? To respond to these questions, I start
with the allegorical potential of the dystopian narrative found within Hulu’s adaptation and how
this has been taken up by various activists. This section focuses on how the narratives in the
show and protests suggest essential action in the present to prevent an encroaching dystopian
future. Next, I identify possible limitations to these protest framings. Although Hulu’s feminist
dystopia has motivated what Ildney Cavalcanti characterizes as a “feminist counter-cultural
sphere,” I argue that this functions more as an anti-utopian dystopia than a utopian or critical
dystopia (Moylan, “Scraps”). These protests, in spite of their desire to prevent a particular future
and denial of an implicit improvement with time, are constricted by what can be identified as
a white feminist present. Utilizing interview narratives of those involved in the Handmaids
protests in the UK against Trump from 2018–19, and those who are activists and fans of the
show, the latter section reflects upon the specific impact of these protest framings in their
temporal attachments to a white liberal feminist present.
Methodology
Participants for this project were approached based on their interest in speculative fiction and
for their involvement in protest. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2019
with 17 participants, with approval from the Cross Schools Research Ethics Committee at the
University of Sussex. Interviews ranged in length from 1–3 hours. Participants were primarily
white, British and women, although there were several people who were not originally from
the UK. The average age of participants was approximately 35. Almost all participants identified
their politics and/or interest in fiction as feminist. Utilizing John Creswell’s constant comparative
method, transcripts were coded using emergent themes from the participants’ comments on the
series and protests. All participant names have been replaced with pseudonyms.
Affective and Preventative Function of Critical Dystopias

A common thread in dystopian fiction follows a dissident uprising that threatens to transform
a darkly established order. Tom Moylan outlines a clear counter-narrative to most dystopian
worlds in which characters, and the reader, undergo a process of transformation; the “dystopian
citizen” moves from “apparent contentment into an experience of alienation” (“Scraps” 148).
Although most dystopias follow this formula, some dystopias have been characterized as critical
dystopias, which also feature utopian components as a fundamental change to the status quo
becomes possible. The critical dystopia was first defined by Lyman Tower Sargent who describes
it as a text that self-reflexively challenges the present, offering not only an astute critique, but also
an exploration of “oppositional spaces and possibilities from which the next round of political
activism can derive imaginative sustenance and inspiration” (Sargent cited in “Scraps”: xv).
The inspiration for feminist politics found in the novel and TV show has meant that The
Handmaid’s Tale has been regularly recognized as a critical dystopia (Baccolini; Holladay and
Classen). Ildney Cavalcanti reflects specifically upon the self-reflexive work of the critical
dystopia in providing “inspiration for a feminist counter-public sphere” that can become a
ground for political mobilization in the present (197). Other scholars have considered the
speculative potential in conceptualizing and enacting materially utopian ways of relating
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Nostalgia, Historical Amnesia in The Handmaid’s Tale Protests
to each other in their everyday encounters, deviating from, yet relating to and impacting,
mainstream society in their processes of social transformation. Davina Cooper, while
focusing on the potential of utopia in its ability to stimulate “desire and hope in order
to inspire and motivate change,” also describes how the dystopia can “stimulate action in
order to resist or halt what is feared to be emerging” (31). Although Atwood’s novel and
subsequent adaptation reflect on certain timeframes and contexts, many audiences in the
UK have been able to connect the dystopian television show to their own experiences and
political context.
Many Handmaid and non-Handmaid activists alike describe how the TV show produced a
negative affective response that motivated them to engage more with feminist politics. Participants
describe feeling “worried,” “scared,” “emotional” and “alarmed” when discussing the show. Fear
is often thought of as a demotivating emotion, but scholars like Katerina Bantinaki argue that
fear experienced in a fictional context can help audiences to “understand and learn to master
our responses to fear” (390). Recent work by Holladay and Classen on audiences of the Hulu
adaptation argue that reactions of anxiety, fear and anger ground participants’ reading of the
series and allow them to critically interrogate their own contemporary political environment
through the lens of Gilead (478). These affective responses from participants appeared to all be
related to an impending political shift that may negatively affect them.
Activist Amara,1 who dressed as a handmaid during a protest, commented during our
interview that the show revealed how “quick things [can] change.” Matilda, a fan of the show,
similarly described how she could see
so many parallels and echoes to real life. It almost is a bit of a punch in the stomach to
make you realize there are a lot of really alarming things happening. . . . I can actually
envision our world slipping into something really apocalyptic.
Victoria, another handmaid protester, described how “the show traced through, how they got
to such an extreme point in their society but very logically, knowing that it was all so easily
achievable.” These responses demonstrate how the television show helped participants to reflect
on the potential for future change. This realization that political change will not always move
in politically progressive directions both denies the teleological progress of neoliberal narratives
and provides incentive to protest.
Many participants comment that, although the show often produced negative affect, they
ultimately found the narratives “motivating,” “empowering” and “moving.” The relationship
between affect and action is rarely simple (Ahmed), but for many of these participants, the
negative emotional reaction was a catalyst for action—it literally “moved” them to action. The
role of affect in motivating action, as Deborah Gould outlines, relates to a question of political
imaginaries and an understanding of “the world and sense of what might be possible and how
to get there” (3). For these participants, the show produced a negative affective response and a
sense of political possibility. Matilda describes a “complex feeling” of finding the show “scary,
alarming, entertaining” but also “motivating. It motivates me to keep up with issues . . . around
reproductive rights for instance and just general women’s issues.” Lisa, a fan of the show, points
to the depiction of women and their relationships to each other as particularly empowering.
The show made her think “this is what people are doing on the ground now. It just reinforced
the idea of, we are able to help each other.” For Amara, the Handmaid costume represents
“resistance” as handmaids “find ways to resist.” For those taking part in protests as handmaids,
primarily to challenge Trump during his state visit(s) to the UK, like-minded women were able
to meet and engage with political issues.
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“This Is How It Starts”: Anti-Utopia and Restorative Nostalgia

There is plenty of evidence of the affective, and effective, nature of the show which has led to greater
audience political engagement. However, the show frequently simplifies its message to indicate an
attachment to the past (our liberal present) as a better time than this dystopian future. The sense of a
utopian present is particularly reflected in the adaptation’s use of flashbacks to present our idealized
contemporary moment, updating Atwood’s novel to include references to Uber and Tinder. Bea, a
fan of the show, describes how she became increasingly annoyed that “the previous world was being
played and presented as somehow utopian.” She elaborates: “[In flashbacks] the social dynamics
between classes, between races, between poor people, and rich people, was any of that going on? . . .
The only class issues you get really are created in the dystopian world.” Bea identifies this as holding
“no explanatory power” towards how the dystopian world came to fruition.
This sensibility can be identified, not as critically dystopian, but as anti-utopian in denying
there is any alternative to the liberal status quo. In spite of its dissident potential, utopian studies
scholars such as Tom Moylan suggest that the rise of the dystopia in the mid-late twentieth
century can be seen as a sign of the failure of a utopian imagination which functions to urge
uneasy readers to “settle for what is and cease their frustrating dreams of a better life” (“Demand”
9). This anti-utopian dystopian tendency, outlined by Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, can
be read as warnings that only “serve to revalidate the present as the lesser evil, and to promote a
‘decision’ for no change” (27). This simplistic binary positioning of the show—Handmaids past
(our present) as liberal good vs. Handmaids present (our future) as fascist bad—denies complex
connections between the two and any alternatives outside of liberalism or fascism.
This is then replicated by the protest framing. Placards during the Women’s March protests
and Anti-Trump protests in the UK in 2018 and 2019 proclaimed that “The Handmaid’s Tale
is not an instruction manual” and “This is how it starts” referring to the influx of regressive
leaders and policies which have resulted in, or are leading to, similar Gilead-esque forms of
control and oppression. Much like the show, protest slogans such as these position liberalism
on a moral high ground, suggesting a binary constitution of liberalism and totalitarianism in
which totalitarianism functions as an abstract universalist signifier. This binary, as Slavoj Žižek
points out, serves to situate political actors as one or the other, liberal or fascist, and works
to further justify liberal dominance, as only this is considered capable of defeating fascism.
This liberal/fascist—present/future—binary is related to a particular sense of temporality and
political direction of travel that was supported by many of the handmaid participants.
Handmaid Victoria describes that the jolt of political motivation can be attributed to the rise
of Trump and “disaster capitalism.” She describes these recent events in relation to a recent past
with a nostalgic lens replicated by these protests. She says: “We can imagine ourselves in a state . . .
ten years ago, we would have laughed and [thought] it’s ridiculous, of course not, we’re far more
sensible.” This idea of politics usually being “sensible” holds onto a nostalgic understanding of
the recent past of liberal politics as being under threat. A group of handmaids—Ichika, Olivia
and Francesca—similarly discussed their use of “This is how it starts” placards in response to
Trump and his policies—“what Trump stands for, what he represents, and what his beliefs are.”
They discussed the direction they wanted their newly formed group to take as they planned to
expand their scope beyond Trump and highlight “human rights issues in general,” “whether it’s
women’s rights, race rights, things like that.” They discussed how they were also going to go to
an anti-Boris Johnson march with similar slogans. Certain political leaders are identified here as
nefarious and threatening, but only as far they do not adhere to the liberal rights framework that
needs to be preserved. This framing similarly focuses on a sense that “rights” are under threat
and need to be protected, avoiding any broader critique of liberal hegemony.
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Figure 47.1 Handmaids against Trump, London 2019

Source: Photograph by the author.
This liberal messaging can be recognized as emulating what Svetlana Boym has described
as restorative nostalgia. Boym outlines that nostos—the desire to return home—functions very
strongly within restorative nostalgia. She states that this form of nostalgia is “the promise to
rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting
us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding” (xvi). Boym describes how nostalgia
inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical
upheavals. This nostalgia, then, often has a utopian dimension that is no longer directed toward
the future. In an era considered increasingly dystopian, nostalgia for the recent past, pre-
Trump and pre-Brexit, is embodied in these protests clinging to an image of liberal fairness
that is seemingly absent in today’s politics. This restorative nostalgic lens also disallows a more
productive remembering and connections to a greater diversity of reproductive and parenting
experiences.
The Historical Amnesia of White Feminism

Whilst Atwood’s book outlines the physical expulsion of people of color and acknowledges
the existence of racial hierarchies, the TV show reflects a colorblind world in which racial
designations would have somehow dissipated during a period of extreme political turmoil.
These “post-racial optics” allow the television show to erase a possible interrogation of white
supremacy as a logical part of a post-apocalyptic scenario in the US (Gibney and Askeland).
Thus, the television serialization plays into what Fredric Jameson has termed “historical
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Kam Meakin
amnesia” as “the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary
social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past” (125). Not only
are racial differences denied, the show also evokes yet disavows certain racialized histories.
The specter of historical slavery, as Crawley suggests, hovers in the background to provide a
“fantastic space of engagement for its target audience of white liberal feminists, because it allows
an affect of detachment . . . removing any connection to problematic aspects of our history
or present” (344–45). Whilst reproducing certain familiar narratives, the show is unwilling to
consider strikingly similar historical instances of reproductive control that have largely been
inflicted on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC).
Protests in which women dress like Handmaids, with their faces covered, respond to the
show, and suggest a common experience of all women—across race, religion, class and sexuality
lines—to replicate this utopian idea of universal sisterhood. This is, however, disingenuous and
silences those whose experiences differ from white, straight women constituting a form of what
Matilda identifies as a “white feminist vibe.” Razia Aziz, writing in the early 1990s, defines
white feminism as “any feminism which comes from a white perspective, and universalizes
it” (Aziz 296). Terese Jonsson specifies that white feminism is not “any feminism espoused by
white feminists, but rather an articulation of feminist politics which is inattentive to histories of
colonization and racism” (1014). The idea that Atwood’s fictional dystopian narrative has only
recently become a reality denies histories of colonialism and slavery and creates a white feminist
narrative universalizing the experiences of white women.
Many non-handmaid organizers, including Simone, commented on this disavowal of
racialized histories in both the novel and television show. Simone describes The Handmaid’s Tale
as a fantasy of
What if all of these terrible things which historically have happened, that continue to
happen, to women of color, also happened to middle-class white women? Wouldn’t
that be really terrible? “No,” is the answer. That’s a ridiculous way of framing things.
She then talks about an interview she watched with Atwood in which Atwood discusses the
inclusion of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the show, departing from the novel’s narrative.
In Simone’s words:
[Atwood said] “People wouldn’t have even believed it if they’d had FGM in the books
at the start.” It’s like, some people would have believed it, wouldn’t they? Some people
are very intimately connected to it. . . . I think you’re really betraying who you’re
writing for there and what the purpose of your work is.
Lisa was similarly critical of Atwood’s framing for white audiences and recalls a different
interview with Atwood. According to Lisa, when questioned about possible connections
between the narrative of the novel and what was happening, or had happened, to Indigenous
people in Canada, Atwood denied any connection. Lisa describes, “It’s almost like she just isn’t
aware of that.” Many participants similarly describe how the show “glosses over any potential
issues with race in this weird post-racial world which does not reflect American society or what
it would be” (Matilda). For Bea, the show presents an “old-fashioned view of women’s politics
[in which] women are all oppressed in the same way” and Simone succinctly describes the
depiction of a “fantasy of gender being the true united force.” Instead of a dystopia, scholars like
Sophie Lewis suggests that the show itself functions as a kind of utopia, relying on the idea that
a universal feminist solidarity would automatically flourish in the worst of all possible worlds.
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Conclusion: Alternative Uses?

It is not my aim here to suggest that the recent fight against Trump and reproductive infringements
are not valid feminist causes, but to recognize multiple forms of oppression alongside the control
of mainly white women’s reproductivity. While mainstream liberal feminist discourse about
reproductive rights stresses a narrative of choice and autonomy, BIPOC experiences have often
been marked by the systematic and institutionalized denial of reproductive freedom. Instead of
challenging the capitalism, white supremacy and colonialism of the past and present that is evident
outside of Trump’s ascent, the narratives of these protests are situated in a restorative, reformist and
ahistorical stasis. Such protests ignore certain events from the past, in which similar instances of
reproductive control were afflicted on Black and Indigenous people, and are unable to imagine a
utopian future, outside of the liberal society they are trying to prevent from being destroyed. This
denial of past events and lost affiliation with a radically different utopia of the future limits the
capacity of these protests to imagine utopian alternatives, and ultimately disables them from fully
challenging broader structures of capital, racialization and reproductive control.
Note
1 Amara is a pseudonym. All first names thereafter refer to participants by their pseudonyms.
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48
TRACING SECOND-WAVE
FEMINISM THROUGH
WOMEN IN THE DUNE SERIES
Kara Kennedy
Frank Herbert’s Dune series (1965–1985) presents a rare opportunity to study how the
representation of women in science fiction (SF) changed across a period of unprecedented
cultural and societal upheaval in the United States. While many SF stories either excluded or
marginalized women through stereotypical caricatures, this series featured influential, agential
women from the beginning whose abilities and skills only expanded across the decades. But
because they held traditional roles such as concubines, spouses, and mothers, and storylines
initially revolved around male protagonists, the female characters in the Dune series have often
been overlooked in critical narratives of the genre and feminist SF. In actuality, the series wrestles
with similar concerns as second-wave feminist theorists and activists, just like the stories now
considered to be in the vanguard of feminist SF circa the 1970s. These include debates over
women’s capabilities and strengths, and tensions between the individual and the collective in
conceptions of sisterhood. By tracing key threads of second-wave feminism and conceptions of
agency, as well as changes in roles and narrative focus, this chapter shows that the Dune series is
a beneficial case study for analyzing changing representations of women in SF.
The term ‘agency’ is not one that appears very often in feminist writings during the second
wave, yet it is a concept around which most of them circle, and it offers a useful theoretical lens
for the examination of female characters in fiction. By demanding control over reproduction,
sexuality, careers, education, and other aspects of living, feminists asserted a right to agency,
which can be defined as self-determination and autonomy over one’s body and life. The term
‘second wave’ signals a continuation and extension of what earlier generations of feminists had
fought for, including but not limited to the right to vote and reproductive control. Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (translated 1953) opened the door to a reconsideration of womanhood
as a societal construct, rather than a biological given. Giving voice to the anxieties of educated,
middle-class housewives who felt trapped in the bounds of domesticity, Betty Friedan in The
Feminine Mystique (1963) identified “the problem that has no name” and insisted that women
were capable human beings whose roles as wives and mothers should not completely define
them. Such texts set the stage for a resurgence of women’s activism by highlighting sexist norms
and inspiring many women to question what was considered normal.
Serialized in Astounding magazine in 1963–1965 and published as a novel in 1965, Dune
provided female characters with an extraordinarily high degree of agency (Kennedy). Largely
through the character of the Lady Jessica, a woman of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood who was
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-53 351

Kara Kennedy
educated in one of its schools, we see a wide range of abilities that provide Bene Gesserit
women with self-determination and autonomy. These stem from their perception of minute
details and prana-bindu training, an Eastern-inspired discipline which gives them precise control
over the muscles and nerves of the body and leads to a corresponding control of the mind as
well. Having command of her body gives Jessica enough control over reproduction to choose
when to conceive and what sex the fetus will be. Her decision to disobey her Bene Gesserit
orders and bear a son causes massive upheaval in the universe; then she bears a daughter who
also causes a disruption in the balance of power. In combat, Jessica is well-trained and strategic
and shown outmaneuvering an armed leader of the fierce desert-dwelling Fremen. This saves
her life both in the immediate moment and in the future, for his realization of her fighting skills
convinces him that she is valuable as a potential trainer of his people, even though she is an
outsider. Jessica is also skilled in the Voice, a type of vocal trick with calculated tones and pitches
that the Bene Gesserit utilize to command others. This represents a powerful skill of persuasion
women have in their arsenal to protect themselves and accomplish desired tasks. Related to this
is their ability to Truthsay, which makes them a type of human lie detector. Truthsaying strikes
fear into the hearts of powerful men such as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, for they know they
are answerable to a woman. Indeed, the Baron’s desire to avoid being caught by the Emperor’s
Truthsayer, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, leads to one of the most significant events
in Dune, whereby Jessica and her son, Paul Atreides, avoid outright execution in the Baron’s
presence and manage to escape from his guards. Once among the Fremen, Jessica demonstrates
yet another ability: that of surviving the spice agony, in which she ingests a poisonous drink
and must chemically neutralize the poison. This action then opens up a psychic connection
with female ancestors and elevates her to the status of Reverend Mother. All of these abilities
comprise important facets of the Bene Gesserit’s bodily autonomy and provide them with a
large degree of control over themselves and their environment.
The representation of the Bene Gesserit anticipated key elements of the women’s liberation
movement, when women agitated for more bodily agency and self-determination in addition
to equal rights and an end to discrimination. There were vigorous debates centered on the
female body, ranging from how women presented themselves to whether they should reproduce
and with whom they should have sexual intercourse. For example, Shulamith Firestone’s The
Dialectic of Sex (1970) proposed that outsourcing reproduction via new technologies would
liberate women from the pains and sexist treatment related to pregnancy and motherhood.
Then, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976) celebrated these as strengths that women should
embrace. Sexuality also emerged as a critical topic of debate, as women reimagined how to define
it outside of a male-dominated or procreative framework and how to address the possibilities
enabled by new forms of birth control. Dune does not show women in the same roles as men,
nor does it prevent them from being criticized as ‘witches’ by men fearful of their powerful
abilities. It retains traditional male-female sexual pairings and features pregnant women and
mothers. However, it does depict the Bene Gesserit as fully in control of reproduction through
natural means and equipped with a range of skills that allow them to confidently move through
their universe and shape the future. In this sense, Dune speculates on a world where women have
the kind of bodily control that many real-world women longed for.
Speculation about unknown futures and changes to human societies was supposed to be a
hallmark of the SF genre. Yet as a growing number of feminist authors and readers of the late
1960s and early 1970s began bringing a new feminist lens to bear on literature, many found
it lacking. Some critics openly wondered why there were so few well-known women writers,
so few agential female characters, and so few stories centered on women’s experiences. In
1972, SF author and critic Joanna Russ praised SF as offering a way to imagine new worlds
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Tracing Second-Wave Feminism Through Women in the Dune Series
where gender was not so limiting a factor; however, she also criticized SF stories for replicating
stereotypical views, such as that “masculinity equals power and femininity equals powerlessness”
(Russ, “Image” 83; “What”). Similarly, SF author and critic Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in 1975
that women in SF tended to be portrayed as “squeaking dolls . . . or old-maid scientists . . .
or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes” (Le Guin 83). Both women
challenged the genre to do better, and proved it was possible by experimenting with gender in
their own SF narratives.
Having sparked debates about women’s place in society and literature, the second-wave
feminist movement thus also had an impact on what had traditionally been considered a male-
dominated genre, and SF critics now point to the 1970s as a key period for the production
of feminist SF. Feminist SF “embraced the political ‘sexual revolution,’ uncovered the genre’s
ingrained sexism, and challenged male supremacy throughout time and space” (Jones 485). It
took advantage of the shift that had begun in the 1960s toward stories which were more radical,
more explicit with sexual references, and more focused on ‘inner,’ psychological space than
outer space—a period of change known as the New Wave (Merrick 103). Taking up the call for
more varied representations of women, some authors experimented with depicting all-woman
societies; alternative forms of reproduction and motherhood; diverse expressions of sexuality, the
overthrow of oppressive conditions on women; and special abilities only accessible by women.
Bodily autonomy was a central topic in these stories, although they played with different roles
and technologies as well. For example, Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979) contrasts
the hill women who live in all-women communities and can reproduce without men, and the
men who live in cities with their technology and weapons. It is “built around the concept of
sisterhood” and a sense of bonding that allows women the freedom to develop powers that stem
from their subconscious, including mental telepathy, levitation, and flying (Freibert 79–80).
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) depicts a genderless society where children are
born in pods and people share caring duties. This novel became “extremely influential in the
1970s feminist movement as both theory and sf,” showing the two-way conversation occurring
between SF and second-wave feminism (Donawerth 218). Although there is no one defining
feature of these stories that makes them feminist, they address the problematic nature of male-
dominated societies and women’s place in those societies and, in most cases, they depict capable,
agential women who are far from the cardboard stereotypes that critics had denounced in SF.
Although not recognized as feminist SF at the time, Dune had already introduced several
of these features in its storyline in 1965. The all-female Bene Gesserit order flips the male-
dominated Catholic Church and Jesuit order on their heads. Women use the guise of religion to
run missionary projects and educate women for positions of high status among noble families.
Their training program empowers women with a wide range of skills, as Jessica demonstrates.
The Bene Gesserit take a practical view of reproduction and use their bodily control of
conception to bear children as part of a secret breeding program aimed at the creation of a
powerful superman they plan to control from behind the scenes.
The Dune sequels then offered the opportunity for Herbert to expand the scope of
women’s abilities and roles and the amount of narrative focus women receive. In the first
book, having women exert agency within traditional roles such as concubine, spouse,
mother, and religious leader fits with the medieval, feudal-type setting in which advanced
technology has been banned in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad, a war against computers
and thinking machines. The story centers on Paul’s journey—a teenage boy coming of
age—although Jessica plays a large role. After being absent in Dune Messiah (1969), Jessica
returns as an influential leader in Children of Dune (1976) who ensures that her grandchildren
are indeed human. Reverend Mother Mohiam appears as a high-ranking advisor to the
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Kara Kennedy
Emperor in Dune alongside her position in the Bene Gesserit hierarchy, and Princess Irulan
appears as the promised spouse to Paul in his ascent to her father’s throne, but both women
take on a more independent role as conspirators against Paul’s regime in Dune Messiah and
help alter the course of history. Jessica’s precocious daughter, Alia, becomes one of Paul’s
advisors as well as a type of goddess/priestess, and Paul’s daughter, Ghanima, collaborates
with her twin brother, Leto II, to secure their place in the Atreides dynasty. After Paul’s
blinding and retreat from power, it is Leto II who takes the reins and becomes emperor
rather than Ghanima, and he dominates the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune (1981). But
he also practically invites a woman named Siona to rebel against him and bring about the
Golden Path. Thus, by showing the downfall of these prescient male characters, Herbert
leaves space for their successors to be women.
In the final two books, Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the emphasis
on the male-dominated feudal hierarchy has been replaced with a focus on the Bene Gesserit
and their engagement with two rival groups: the male Bene Tleilaxu and the female Honored
Matres. The Bene Gesserit are shown being in charge of their own planet, Chapterhouse, and
operating through a kind of democracy, with Proctors acting as juries and the Council of the
Sisterhood determining the organization’s direction. One of Siona’s descendants, Sheeana, holds
the unique ability to command the great sandworms, and she develops into a key Bene Gesserit
figure. There is finally a female Mentat, a type of human computer, who serves as an advisor
to the Reverend Mother Superior, and Bene Gesserit fighters who engage in full-scale military
battles. There are prominent male characters such as Miles Teg and Duncan Idaho, but they
operate within the spheres of the women around them. In some ways these Bene Gesserit have
more control over their environment and life path than the earlier male protagonists, since they
avoid the trap of prescience and have the freedom to choose their destiny and shape the way
the universe is heading.
These later books include some changes in the representation of women’s agency and bodily
abilities. There are more details about how women’s psychic access to their female ancestors
works, and women are also shown being able to “Share” memories with each other without
requiring the spice agony ordeal. It is revealed that the Bene Gesserit can not only go into
hibernation by stilling their breath, as Jessica does, but also regulate their body temperature and
circadian rhythms, which helps them adjust to different weather and planetary conditions. In
several scenes of combat, they are shown succeeding against their enemies, namely the Bene
Tleilaxu and Honored Matres, who are also highly trained fighters. These narratives thus feature
an expansion of women’s roles and agency that is still plausible based on the descriptions of the
Bene Gesserit’s abilities and skills in the earlier books.
But the key area in which agency is expanded is sexuality. Although heterosexuality is still
assumed and it is not implied that women would be interested in other women except as part of
a youthful phase, sexuality becomes much more explicit and a point of leverage that the Bene
Gesserit use to control certain men. Their rivals, the Honored Matres, also use sexuality as a
source of control, although they are cast as evil characters who use it to enslave men and entire
planets. In this regard, women’s ability to exert sexual agency is a focus of these later narratives
in a way that was only hinted at earlier. The expansion of sexual agency in the Dune series,
in particular, tracks with the heightened interest in explorations of what sexuality meant for
women in the 1970s and 1980s, both in the real world and in SF, though the series noticeably
avoids engaging with non-heterosexual expressions of sexual interest. Rather than suggesting
that women avoid traditional heterosexual pairings, the series speculates on how women might
broaden their knowledge and practice of sex in order to harness it more precisely to accomplish
their goals.
354
The marked shift to focus on the Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres as communities of
women in the final books can be seen to resemble the narrative strategy of some feminist SF
writers in their emphasis on women’s point of view. Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and Suzy
McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978) are illustrative examples that noticeably prioritize female
voices and experiences, as well as show that women are not a monolithic group. Russ’s text
centers on the perspectives of four female characters—Jeannine, Joanna, Janet, and Jae—who
represent different personalities and hold different roles. Charnas’s text revolves around one
woman survivor’s entry into the all-women societies of the free fems and Riding Women
after having escaped from a world where she was enslaved by men. Each group has its own
worldview, customs, and communication styles, giving space to a variety of relationships and
conflicts among women. In the Dune series, the conflicts between the Bene Gesserit and the
Honored Matres place the narrative focus on these groups of women and engage the reader’s
interest in which of them will ultimately survive. Women’s voices and perspectives are thus
centered in a way that shows the progression of women from being significant supporting
characters in the earlier books to the clear protagonists and antagonists of the closing part of
the saga.
Yet, it is important to note the depiction of a continual tension Bene Gesserit women face
between exerting agency toward their individual goals and desires and exerting agency toward
the larger organization’s directives. For example, Jessica’s motives behind her decision to bear
a son are complex, involving her wish to please her partner, Duke Leto, and accede to the
feudal order’s privileging of male heirs, but also her selfish desire to bear the long-awaited
male Bene Gesserit, the Kwisatz Haderach, which would move toward accomplishment of the
organization’s goals. Reverend Mother Mohiam’s personal affection for Jessica causes her to
overlook Jessica’s disobedience and even recommend that Jessica continue to secretly train Paul
in the Bene Gesserit Way. Princess Irulan also appears to be a more complex character than
simply the spouse in name only of Paul, and she secures the autonomy to choose how Paul will
be remembered through her various history writings. In the later books, when the Sisterhood
and its operations become more of a focus, there is another mother, Janet Roxborough-Teg,
who balances her desire to protect her son by giving him certain secret Bene Gesserit training
with her directive to raise a future military commander for the Bene Gesserit. Other Bene
Gesserit are shown having to reconcile their loyalty to the organization and its superiors with
their personal desires, which are sometimes considered heretical. The existence of tension
between personal and organizational goals reflects an awareness that this is an ongoing struggle,
but not something that must necessarily erase individuality or remove all choice among an
organization’s members.
Such tension is significant as one that also appeared throughout second-wave feminism.
Despite the general consensus that women had the right to agency and choice over their bodies
and lives, tensions arose over the concepts of personal politics and sisterhood and how much
control women’s liberation groups should have in terms of policing their members’ behaviors.
For some women, the idea that “the personal is political” prompted them to “embrace an
asceticism that sacrificed personal needs and desires to political imperatives” (Echols 17).
But there were also times when women balked at being pressured to set aside their personal
priorities or desires. For instance, some feminists saw a woman’s interest in children as a sign of
her collaboration with an oppressive system and encouraged celibacy as a way of taking back
control (Echols 160). There was also sometimes pressure to disavow sexual activity with men
or even give up sons. The concept of the collective clashed with the individualism that was so
closely tied with an American upbringing; not everyone agreed that each woman should have
to make sacrifices in the name of the greater good of the sisterhood. In the Dune series, by
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Kara Kennedy
refusing to depict women’s groups as homogenous, Herbert is able to create dramatic tension
but also realistically portray the conflicts and struggles that women face while trying to organize
themselves toward a larger purpose.
In light of the critiques by SF critics such as Russ and Le Guin about women either being
absent or only appearing in limited capacities, the Dune series’ depiction of the women of the
Bene Gesserit presents a noticeable exception to the hitherto oft-stereotypical characterization
of women in SF. Indeed, having initially established the strengths of the Bene Gesserit in Dune,
Herbert is able to further develop them throughout the series. This allows readers to see them
in a wider variety of roles and to develop a greater understanding of women’s capabilities as
individuals and as members of an all-women order.
The genre of SF experienced many changes over the twentieth century, in part due to the
significant social upheaval in the postwar US that saw numerous civil rights movements and
countercultural trends impact popular culture. These shifts are often traced across a variety
of authors and works, but the Dune series offers the rare opportunity to see changes in one
universe with related characters authored by one writer across a publication span of two decades.
Focusing on the representation of women in particular, it is evident that they begin with a high
degree of agency, albeit in traditional roles, and take on a broader array of abilities and roles
and garner more narrative focus by the close of the series. Through engaging with issues raised
by second-wave feminists at large and within the SF genre, the series is able to speculate on
women’s capabilities as individuals and as part of a collective and thus can be utilized as a unique
case study in the exploration of developments in feminist SF in the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949 [French]/1953 [English] (Transl. and Ed. H. M. Parshley).
Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Charnas, Suzy McKee. Motherlines. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978.
Donawerth, Jane. “Feminisms.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew
M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2011, pp. 241–224.
Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975. University of Minnesota Press,
1989.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Paladin, 1972.
Freibert, Lucy M. “World Views in Utopian Novels by Women.” Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations,
edited by Marleen S. Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, University Press of America, 1983, pp. 67–84.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Gollancz, 1971.
Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. 1979. Alyson Publications, 1984.
Herbert, Frank. Chapterhouse: Dune. 1985. Berkley, 1987.
Herbert, Frank. Children of Dune. 1976. Berkley, 1987.
Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965. Berkley, 1984.
Herbert, Frank. Dune Messiah. 1975. Berkley, 1987.
Herbert, Frank. God Emperor of Dune. 1981. Berkley, 1987.
Herbert, Frank. Heretics of Dune. 1984. Berkley, 1987.
Jones, Gwyneth. “Feminist SF.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew
M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2011, pp. 484–488.
Kennedy, Kara. Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe: Tracing Women’s Liberation through Science Fiction.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “American SF and the Other.” 1975. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and
Science Fiction, edited by Susan Wood and Ursula K. Le Guin, The Women’s Press, 1989, pp. 83–85.
Merrick, Helen. “Fiction, 194–1979.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould,
Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint. Routledge, 2011, pp. 102–111.
Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
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Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1976. W. W. Norton & Company,
1986.
Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. 1975. The Women’s Press Limited, 1985.
Russ, Joanna. “The Image of Women in Science Fiction.” 1972. Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist
Perspectives, edited by Susan Koppelman Cornillon, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973,
pp. 79– 94.
Russ, Joanna. “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write.” Images of Women in Fiction:
Feminist Perspectives, edited by Susan Koppelman Cornillon, Bowling Green University Popular Press,
1973, pp. 3–20.
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49
COMPLICATING THE SUPER
MEN
Evolving Masculinities in US-American
Science Fiction
Michael Pitts
Understanding gender paradigm shifts in science fiction (SF) necessitates a close analysis of
the evolution of masculinities over time in the genre. In twentieth-century US-American SF,
scholars such as Robin Roberts, Justine Larbalestier, and Brian Attebery point to a progression
away from the patriarchal gender roles of earlier periods and towards new understandings
of gender in contemporary texts. Scholarship at the intersection of gender and SF notes
the frequent marginalization and one-dimensional representation of women throughout the
pulp era and subsequent golden age. Similarly, these texts are found to contain many male
characters that are simplified, flat caricatures of traditional masculinity. Yet, a close reading
of early and mid-twentieth-century SF reveals conflicting presentations of masculinity. This
analysis focuses on an influential subgenre pivotal to the transformation of manhood in
twentieth-century US-American SF: the super men narratives of the 1930s–1950s. These
narratives, which include but are certainly not limited to the titular DC comics’ Superman
character, are distinct in their focus on a male protagonist or antagonist gifted with incredible
psychic or physical abilities. In the stories, a powerful superhuman man or the male character
opposing him act as exemplars of masculinity. Of the four patterns Raewyn Connell identifies
in the contemporary Western gender order—hegemony, subordination, complicity, and
marginalization—the men idealized in these texts, the super men or their opponents, perform
hegemonic masculinities (77). In this way, their race (White), sexuality (heterosexual), and
gender (cis) comply with the idealized masculinity of twentieth-century US society. Yet,
there is conflict among the super men stories. While these super men or their opponents
are unified by their performances of hegemonic masculinity, they vary in their levels of one
pivotal, traditionally masculine characteristic: interests in consolidating power and control
over others. These novels present conflicting framings of the patriarchal Übermensch as
ideally or problematically masculine.
In discussing connections between SF and masculinity, this chapter draws upon the research
of Todd Reeser and his conception of the gendered nation. Reeser posits that “masculinity can
be thought of both as created by institutions and as creating them, and the process of the
construction of masculinity as a constant back-and-forth movement between masculinity and
institutions” (20). According to Reeser, images, myths, discourses, and practices construct and
reinforce patriarchal conceptions of manhood (21). Entertainment platforms such as television,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-54 358

Complicating the Super Men
for example, are capable of constructing new masculinities while also revealing current forms
widely accepted in the gendered society.
This chapter posits that SF acts as such a site where the masculinities of the gendered nation
are reinforced or challenged and alternatives to these gender scripts may be presented. Marc E.
Shaw and Elwood Watson comment on the malleability of gender and the impact of myriad
social forces upon it: “masculinity is not a solid, immovable construction. An individual does
not guard one definitive gender position: from moment to moment, forces redictate, replace,
and reimagine its reconstructing” (3). This chapter illuminates the constant reconceptualization
of masculinity in popular SF from three decades of the twentieth century.
The gradual emergence of SF in the twentieth century as an immensely popular and
profitable genre, made in part so by its portrayals of masculinity, indicates how SF can be a
powerful social force capable of reconfiguring popular understandings of gender. This impact
can be measured, for example, in connection with the events of September 11, 2001, which
are widely viewed as pivotal to the recent resurgence of patriarchal masculinities. A month
after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Peggy Noonan illustrated the power of SF to
shape understandings of masculinity in an article for the Wall Street Journal. Demonstrating
the influence of super men narratives on popular conceptions of manhood, Noonan heralded
President George W. Bush’s response to the terrorist attacks as a welcomed return to traditional
masculinities. She half expected him to “tear open his shirt and reveal a big ‘S’ on his chest.”
Equating Bush with the patriarchal, masculine ideal of earlier super men narratives and the
Superman comic book hero specifically, Noonan demonstrates the power of SF to shape popular
understandings of masculinity.
Similarly, the 2021 announcement by DC Comics that Jon Kent, the son of Superman who
adopts the mantles of both Superboy and, later, Superman, is bisexual sparked political reactions
that reveal heteronormative anxieties surrounding super men fiction and gender. In a 2021 Tweet,
Wendy Rodgers, a member of the Arizona State Senate, voiced homophobic fears concerning
the perceived reshaping of masculinities within American popular culture: “Hollywood is
trying to make Superman gay and he is not. Just rename the new version Thooperman so we
can all know the difference and avoid seeing it” (@WendyRogersAZ). Intentionally misspelling
the title character’s name in reference to stereotypes of gay men possessing lisps that signal their
non-normative sexualities and masculinities, Rodgers exemplifies anxieties related to the power
of super men narratives to shape popular conceptions of masculinity. A close textual analysis of
such super men narratives illuminates a constant struggle to reshape or control masculinities and
the power of SF to chart new futures for manhood.
The Competing Masculinities of the Super Men

In presenting some conceptions of manliness as ideal and others as problematically “uncivilized,”
super men narratives underscore the conflict of masculinities within SF between 1933 and
1956. During this time, serving the needs of a predominantly straight, White, male audience
was a mainstay of SF and therefore combined “wish-fulfillment fantasy with the scientific
rationale of Darwinian evolution” (Attebery 76). Many of these narratives were shaped by
John W. Campbell, whose tenure as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction is often cited as a
demarcation of the Golden Era of SF. An editor who favored stories of such super men who
possessed incredible psychic and physical powers, Campbell had a profound influence upon
writers venturing into this trending subgenre. As Brian Attebery points out, Campbell’s letters
to magazine contributors such as Poul Anderson, Henry Kuttner, and Isaac Asimov underscore
the editor’s influential requests, which were often quite specific, for super men narratives and
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characters (62). Dually influenced by J.B. Rhine’s ESP tests, which took place from the early
1930s to the late 1940s, these texts present super men as possessing psychic abilities, including
intuition, telepathy, and precognition. Such abilities contribute to their roles as exemplars of
traditional masculinity. Representing the next stage of human evolution when so equipped,
the super men shaped the gendered society, either positively or negatively, as a result of their
hypermasculine interests in power and control.
Focused on super men, who are marked by masculinities framed either as normal or aberrant,
narratives such as A.E. van Vogt’s “The Changeling” (1944) grant the male readers to whom
they are marketed an opportunity to align themselves with an idealized male character, either
the Übermensch or the protagonist opposing him.1 These texts may be located on a spectrum
of masculinities ranging from those marked by their hyper-patriarchal interests in consolidating
power and control over others to those that, while patriarchal, oppose in significant ways such
interests in power and control. Each of these texts, however, maintains that ideal masculinity,
traditional or radical, is predicated on Whiteness, heterosexuality, and essentialist understandings
of gender. These texts, when organized across such a spectrum, illustrate a conflict of masculinity
within Golden Age SF.
Occupying the hyper-patriarchal side of this spectrum is, among other texts, A.E. van Vogt’s
“The Changeling,” which represents the persistent trend across the super men narratives of
positively framing otherwise problematic White, straight, cisgender masculinities that stabilize
the patriarchally gendered nation. In an imagined future United States, a masculine subset of
women threatens patriarchal allocations of power through their use of a drug, the Equalizer.
Though it is not clear exactly what augmentations the drug induces, the text hints at its effects
as enhancing the physical and mental strength of its female users, who seek as a result to elect
a female president. The story contrasts two men, President Jefferson Dayles, who manipulates
these “equalized” women to gain their support, and Lesley Craig. Craig is a super man due
to his “toti-potency,” meaning his body’s ability to repair or replace damaged cells. Positively
framed in the narrative as an ideal alternative to Dayles, Craig views the president’s manipulation
as dangerous not because it disempowers women, but because he believes that engaging with
such “unnatural” cognitively and physically enhanced women threatens the patriarchy. The text
concludes with a truce between Dayles and Craig. Craig defends a group of men who murdered
pro-matriarchy female activists during a protest. He pledges in exchange for the protection of
these men to aid in suspending democracy and extending Dayles’s presidency until there is a
revival of so-called societal morality. Such morality, while not overtly grounded in any specified
religious dogma, is marked by traditional US conservative gender scripts. “The Changeling”
presents as natural and desirable the authoritarian control by a patriarchal, White, straight super
man embodied in Craig. Super men narratives situated at this hyper-patriarchal end of the
spectrum are characterized by a positive framing of hegemonic male characters who reinforce
the patriarchally gendered nation.
Further along this continuum of super men masculinities are texts such as E.E. Smith’s
First Lensman (1950) and Frank Robinson’s The Power (1956), which present benevolent,
straight, cisgender, White super men as central to stabilizing the traditionally gendered society.2
E.E. Smith’s First Lensman, for example, presents the eponymous patriarchs, who possess the
aforementioned identity markers of hegemonic masculinity, as honest, brave, and worthy of
powerful technology gifted by a benevolent alien race. Equipped with these tools that transform
them into super men, they expose and stamp out societal corruption. As Aaron Santesso
emphasizes, Smith’s super men are one of three fascist strands within the novel—the others being
the themes of utopia and invasion—and the fascist aspects of these characters are inextricably
linked to their framing as benevolent patriarchs pivotal to the improved society (149).
360
Similarly emphasizing super men masculinities as pivotal to the gendered nation, The Power
more overtly emphasizes the desired race of the benevolent patriarch, a factor capable of predicting
whether a male performs masculinities classified as civilized or uncivilized. Robinson’s novel
follows two super men unified by their psychic abilities and contrasted crucially by their racial
identities. Framed as the benevolent patriarch, the protagonist, Tanner, traces his familial lineage
to English and Italian roots. The antagonist, Adam Hart, on the other hand, is a Romani man
whose violence is presented by Robinson as a product of miscegenation. The text implies that
Hart’s patriarchal attitude and murderous violence are the result of him being “the gypsy boy from
Brockton, the far-superior offspring of mixed parentage” who is made powerful and dangerous by
his diverse racial background (221). As the novel explains, Hart, the problematic super man, was
produced through the combination of the genetic mixing of “The Santuccis on his mother’s side
and the Tanners on his father’s. English and Italian” (221). The result of this miscegenation is “the
one case where two and two had made five,” but a key byproduct of this racial combination is,
the novel implies, Hart’s deadly violence (221). Robinson’s novel overtly stresses the importance
of race to the idealized hegemonic man. Despite this unique emphasis upon race in Robinson’s
novel, The Power and First Lensman are united by their presentation of benevolent, hegemonic
patriarchs as pivotal to the protection of the traditionally gendered nation.
Departing from the trends of civilized or uncivilized patriarchal masculinities are those
comparatively progressive super men texts that foreshadow contemporary interests in reshaping
masculinities. Though these narratives remain focused on hegemonic male characters possessing
normative gender identities, sexualities, and racial makeups, they reframe as negative traditionally
masculine attributes such as emotional detachment and interests in power and control. Stanley
G. Weinbaum’s The New Adam (1939), for example, is radical in that, as Brian Attebery points
out, it presents as weaknesses the traditionally masculine traits of the super man such as a stony
indifference to pain and a willingness to manipulate others for personal gain (76). Similarly
concerned with the toxic products of patriarchal manhood, Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You
Think (1948) follows a nascent super man who recognizes, but does not cease, his problematic,
gradual adoption of violent masculinities. Rejecting the racist logic of Robinson’s novel, Darker
Than You Think does not tie the toxicity of the super man to his racial identity. Instead, it
presents such negative performances of manhood to the choices of men, in this case those of
a White protagonist seduced by traditionally masculine interests in power and control. At its
introduction, the novel presents the protagonist, Will Barbee, in a positive light. He is framed
as a brave and ethical newspaperman seeking to discover the truth behind the mysterious death
of an ethnologist who claimed to have made a significant discovery while on an expedition to
Mongolia. By the novel’s end, however, Barbee, seduced by the superhuman power to take on
animal form and traditionally masculine interests in accruing power, adopts a predatory view of
his ungifted human counterparts.
Williamson’s novel is radical in that it both frames the super man and his masculinities
as problematic and, by focusing on a protagonist who is initially unaware of his capacity for
violence, it underscores the potential for men to succumb to the temptations of patriarchal
conceptions of manhood. Other texts such as Philip K. Dick’s “The Golden Man” (1954) take
a lighter approach, lampooning idealized performances of manhood by presenting a comically
hollowed-out masculinity performed by a super man who is absurdly muscular and unintelligent.
Among such super men texts that bridge the gap between earlier patriarchal works and
foreshadow later “new” men of contemporary feminist utopias, the most crucial is Jack
Williamson’s Dragon’s Island (1951). In a way similar to Darker Than You Think, Dragon’s Island
interrogates patriarchal masculinities, but considers how such gender scripts may be overcome
and replaced by an egalitarian alternative that values differences along identity markers, namely
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those of race. Dragon’s Island envisions a world in which superhumans are hunted and murdered
due to their categorization as “not-men” (124). The novel illustrates conflicts within the
subgenre surrounding masculinity and identity by directly challenging the racist underpinnings
of other super men texts. More specifically, it frames superhuman qualities as the positive
product of genetic engineering and racial mixing. The superhuman protagonist, Dane Belfast,
for example, develops superhuman abilities as a result of his complex genetic makeup. He is
part Chinese, Javanese, Filipino, White, Russian, and Colonial-Dutch, and his ally, Nan, is
part Cherokee. The protagonist, Dane, opposes two patriarchal antagonists, John Gillian and
Vic Van Doon, who, in a defamiliarized presentation of racism, track and murder so-called
“mutants.”3 In contrast to these characters, Dane seeks not to consolidate power over his human
counterparts, but to engineer a peace treaty between these racial groups. This effort is grounded
in a more progressive, though still problematic, masculinity. Though this disinterest in control
over others marks a significant development in the masculinities of the super men stories,
patriarchal ideals attached to manhood remain present in the text. Most notably, the novel
both showcases the strengths and agency of Dane’s female partner, Nan, and problematically
presents the protagonist’s condescendingly sexist attitude towards her, whom he describes as,
though “still a girl,” possessing “unknown gifts” (220). Despite these significant, patriarchal
attitudes within the novel, Dragon’s Island signals a shift within the super men subgenre towards a
reconsideration of traditional masculinities. Though problematic, it partially breaks in significant
ways from the patriarchal masculinities of earlier super men narratives. By concluding with a
meaningful compromise between men and super men and presenting such a truce as pivotal to
the proliferation of alternative masculinities and the betterment of society, Williamson illustrates
the conflict of masculinities embedded in super men narratives and the possibilities SF allows for
rethinking conceptions of manhood.
This conflict of masculinities is likewise observable in the perhaps most well-known
superhuman male character of the twentieth century, the aforementioned DC Comics hero,
Superman. The themes of superhuman abilities and masculinity were first presented in “The
Reign of the Superman” (1933), a short story written by Jerry Siegel and illustrated by Joe
Schuster, the creative team that would later develop the comic book character. In this early
work, Siegel focuses not upon the alien superhero from Krypton, but instead upon Bill
Dunn, an average human man down on his luck. Drugged by the evil Professor Smalley,
Dunn develops telepathic abilities but, enchanted with his newfound powers, utilizes them
in the traditionally masculine pursuit of power and control, aiming ultimately at the lofty
goal of world domination. The story ends with Dunn who realizes that the powers are
temporary and returns to his previous life on the bread lines. Through this character, the text
presents a cautionary tale about the seductive, traditionally masculine temptations introduced
by superhuman abilities.
With the latter development of the Superman character, who first debuted in Action Comics
#1 (1938), Siegel inverted their earlier narrative, focusing upon a protagonist who wields
superhuman abilities only for good. In addition, though exemplifying traditionally masculine
attributes such as bravery and strength, he is notably disinterested in the consolidation of power
and control over others. He therefore acts as an influential exemplar of new masculinities.
Originally developed as Jewish, as is evidenced by his Hebrew-influenced name Kal-El and his
dark hair, Superman opposed fascism, fought Nazis, and condemned the Ku Klux Klan in early
issues of the comic and on radio programs. Both the early, war era issues of the Superman comic
and the “The Reign of the Superman,” the story that inspired them, are therefore early examples
of progressive portrayals of masculinity in this niche of SF. These progressive qualities of the
Superman comics act as a foundation upon which the recent, aforementioned introduction of a
362
bisexual Superman logically rest. The vociferous responses to that announcement illuminate the
centrality of the super men stories to discussions concerning masculinity.
As these analyses illustrate, complexity and variation mark the masculinities of the super men
subgenre. Though sexism permeates these narratives, there exist key differences in the ways their
straight male characters view masculinity, power, and control. While each text reinforces the
traditional gender order, those such as “The Changeling” positively frame violent acts meant to
stabilize it. Other texts, on other hand, such as First Lensman and The Power, advocate for a less
aggressive, benevolent patriarch to protect society from corruption. Comparatively progressive
texts such as The New Adam, Darker Than You Think, “The Golden Man,” Dragon’s Island, “The
Reign of the Super Man,” and the Superman comics further emphasize the non-monolithic
nature of the super men tradition. While ultimately reinforcing the cisgender patriarchy, these
texts address challenges to traditional conceptions of gender and sex. The subgenre therefore
illustrates the instability of masculinities and the possibilities SF allows for rethinking gender.
These texts in many ways foreshadowed the project of feminist writers who sought to challenge
the norms of SF through their imagining of feminist-oriented masculinities.
Conflicts over masculinity are a constant feature of twentieth-century SF and such texts
represent a pivotal site where traditional and alternative masculinities are considered. Tracing
masculinities within SF illuminates the instability of gender and the possibility of utilizing such
narratives to impact current conceptions of manhood. As outlined by Brian Attebery, SF texts
such as A.E. van Vogt’s Slan (1946) hail their readers, including editors, in the Althusserian
sense, “not merely to invite identification with” the protagonists of these narratives “but to
construct a particular identity for the science-fiction fan” (66). As this chapter emphasizes, SF is
marked by a constant conflict of masculinities. There is an important potential for SF texts, in
positing possible futures, to positively shape popular understandings of manhood.
Notes
1 A.E. van Vogt (1912–2000) was a Canadian American writer whose key contributions to Golden Age
SF are noted for their complexity and fragmented style. His novels include Slan (1941), which was
awarded the Retro-Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016, and were key to the development of the super
men subgenre.
2 E.E. “Doc” Smith (1890–1965) was an American writer noted for his influential role in the development
of the space opera subgenre of SF. His Lensman(1948–1954) series, a runner-up for the 1966 Hugo
Award for Best All-Time Series, was pivotal to the proliferation of the super men archetype. A pioneer
of the techno-thriller SF subgenre, American author Frank Robinson (1926–2014) wrote, in addition
to The Power, The Glass Inferno (1974), which he co-wrote with Thomas N. Scortia. Additionally,
Robinson worked as a speechwriter for Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public
office in California.
3 As theorized by Victor Shklovsky, to defamiliarize means to alter conceptual forms while the nature
of such concepts remains stable. This distortion of forms prompts the observer to consider it outside
its usual cultural environment. Williamson presents racism in his novels, but in a defamiliarized way,
meaning that he alters a conceptual form (race) to include groups produced by genetic engineering,
the so-called “mutants” or “not-men,” while the nature of this concept (a socially constructed identity
cited in justifications of inequality) remains stable (Shklovsky 13).
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Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and
Marion J. Reis. University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 3–24.
Shuster, Joe and Jerry Siegel. “The Reign of the Superman.” Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future
Civilization, vol. 1, no. 3, 1933, pp. 1–9.
Smith, E.E. First Lensman. Fantasy Press, 1950.
Smith, E.E. Triplanetary. Fantasy Press, 1948.
van Vogt, A. E. Slan. Arkham House, 1946.
van Vogt, A. E. “The Changeling.” Astounding Science Fiction, vol. 33, no. 2, 1944, pp. 7–66.
Weinbaum, Stanley G. The New Adam. Ziff-Davis, 1939.
Williamson, Jack. Darker Than You Think. Fantasy Press, 1948.
Williamson, Jack. Dragon’s Island. Simon & Schuster, 1951.
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50
BETWEEN THE STOVE
AND EMANCIPATION—
CONSERVATIVE WOMEN
AND ANTI-UTOPIAN
IMAGINATIONS IN EARLY
GERMAN SCIENCE FICTION
LITERATURE
Katharina Scheerer
From its beginnings in the nineteenth century, science fiction (SF) has been a genre supposedly
dominated by male authors and readers. In the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, Herbert
George Wells and Jules Verne dominated the genre early on. However, from the beginning,
female authors have also speculated about the future and developed technological ideas in
texts that today can be called science or speculative fiction. One very prominent example is
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Women writers have done so from a variety of political
perspectives, ranging from more conservative visions to revolutionary socialist and communist
futures. Both have employed (anti-)utopian and dystopian visions to make their case for their
own respective ideal societies. In this chapter, I will first give an insight into early German SF in
general followed by information about the women’s movement and important activists around
1900. I will then analyze two texts by female authors Ellen Key (1849–1926) and Therese
Haupt (1864–1938) that link the success of the women’s movement to the development of an
anti-utopian world. These are: “Woman 100 Years From Now” (Die Frau in 100 Jahren) and
“Woman After Five Hundred Years” (Die Frau nach fünfhundert Jahren), respectively.
Kurd Laßwitz and His Images From the Future

In the German-speaking world, Kurd Laßwitz, among others in the nineteenth century,
published science or speculative fiction on a large scale (Innerhofer 29–84). In his famous
Images From the Future (Bilder aus der Zukunft, 1878), Laßwitz introduces many ideas that
have evolved into motifs that still shape the SF genre today. Technological innovations such
as flying cars are present as well as societal changes like the development of a universal
language and overpopulation and its consequences. Laßwitz also portrays terraforming and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-55 365

Katharina Scheerer
climate engineering in his texts, which were often referred to as “technical novel[s] of the
future” in Germany around 1900 (Innerhofer 11). In spite of all the technological and societal
changes Laßwitz imagined, relationships between men and women mostly follow stereotypical,
heteronormative ideas of love and serve topoi such as the damsel in distress or the starcrossed
lovers. The physiognomy of men and women does not differ from extratextual reality, and
non-binary genders do not play a significant role. In Against the Law of the World (Gegen das
Weltgesetz, 1879), the possible evolution of a third gender is posited, but the appearance of this
gender is located in a distant future.
The ideas developed by Laßwitz profoundly influenced other German writers, for
example, German nationalist Hans Dominik and Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Friedrich Mader,
who also wrote stories about travel to outer space, technological innovations or on how to
communicate with extra-terrestrial entities. Most of these stories were published in books
and periodicals for young adults, especially boys, that not only contained fiction but also
articles about the latest innovations in the sciences or important historical events. While the
majority of the fictional texts was written by White, heterosexual men, several women also
wrote SF. Not surprisingly, women writing in German often engaged with the impulses and
tropes of SF to focus on the so-called “Women’s Question” (Frauenfrage) among other topics.
Such texts range from more conservative dystopias and anti-utopias that might be called
antifeminist today and reinforce existing stereotypes to feminist utopias in which women
establish their own peaceful society.
Fight for Your Rights: The “Women’s Question” in Germany

Around 1900
The term “Women’s Question” subsumed the various efforts, initiated mainly by women, to
improve the position of women in society. These included demands for equal pay, improved
access to the labor market, and political participation, especially the right to vote. Until 1908,
women in Germany were not allowed to join political parties or attend meetings with political
content; in 1918 they finally gained the right to vote. The spectrum of the activists’ demands
and convictions was broad. Socialists such as Clara Zetkin and Louise Otto-Peters subordinated
the aspirations of the women’s movement to Marxist-socialist ambitions and held that a truly
free and equal life was possible only by liberating the worker—and thus also the woman—from
capitalist constraints. They tied the “Women’s Question” to the “Social Question,” another
important movement around 1900 that focused on improving conditions for the working class
(Zetkin 3–11).
Author and first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Bertha von Suttner, was also part of
the women’s movement and moreover contributed to early German SF with her novel The Age
of the Machine. Lectures from the Future (Das Maschinenzeitalter. Zukunftsvorlesungen, 1889). In
Maschinenzeitalter, a narrator placed sometime in the future looks back on the time around 1900
in lectures addressing specific topics. Besides politics and religion, the narrator focuses on the
role of women and critically points out cases of gender inequality, such as the fact that women
were regarded as a subcategory of men. The narrator argues that the meaning of the German
word “human,” if used in the singular, only referred to male humans, thereby marking woman
as inferior and denying them the rights and privileges that came with being regarded human in
a humanist sense. An equivalent word for female humans had yet to be implemented to make
women equal members of society (91).
Another prominent figure of the women’s movement was Hedwig Dohm, one of the
first German theorists of feminism, who focused her work on gaining the right to vote and
366
Between the Stove and Emancipation
on redefining the role of the mother. In The Mothers (Die Mütter 1903), Dohm argues that
maternal love is not a natural instinct but is instilled and cultivated when women have no
other occupation. For mothers to be able to continue to pursue their careers, she suggests
that housework and child rearing be done by institutions. This contrasts with the ideas put
forward by Swedish reformist Ellen Key, who also wanted to institutionalize the upbringing of
children but justified this by stating that many mothers were unable to take sufficient care of
their children. Key was an influential figure in the European women’s movement at the turn
of the century who traveled throughout Europe lecturing and promoting her books in which
she spoke about the role of women, especially mothers, in society. As a child, Key was taught
by a German teacher and later, as a writer, she maintained relationships with German public
and political figures such as Rainer Maria Rilke (Eckel). As part of the conservative wing of
the women’s movement, she advocated that women take on more responsibilities in society,
but only in roles that required their supposedly “natural” nurturing and maternal talents, such
as parenting, and opposed women working in the arts or sciences. In The Century of the Child
(Das Jahrhundert des Kindes, 1911), Key describes the “Women’s Question” as a “selfish end
in itself ” (77).
In 1902, Dohm confronts and challenges Key and other public figures that oppose the women’s
movement in the essay The Antifeminists (Die Antifeministen). Dohm defines antifeminist beliefs
as those that justify socially constructed gender inequalities with a “natural” lack of capabilities
in women, claim that childcare and work outside the home are incompatible, and fear that
female emancipation leads to a masculinization of women as well as to a feminization of men.
All these beliefs play a role in the texts I discuss here. While much has been written on Otto-
Peters, Zetkin, and von Suttner (though less on the latter’s SF), I wish to portray here the ways
in which conservative women writers also employed the genre as it is important to understand
the discourses by both men and women that helped to reinforce existing gender roles and
stereotypes rather than work towards emancipation. To this end, I analyze stories by Ellen Key
and Therese Haupt and focus on how these texts employ SF’s generic possibilities to discuss
gender roles.
In what follows, I demonstrate that these stories employ anti-utopia rather than utopia
to address the “Women’s Question” and thus subvert or reinforce prevailing heteronormative
gender stereotypes. My use of the term anti-utopia follows Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition as
“a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space
that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of
some particular eutopia” (10). As problematic as Sargent’s emphasis on the author’s intention is,
it is especially the last part that proves useful to describe how the texts discussed function. They
do not simply portray a dystopian world, that is “a non-existent society described in considerable
detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (10), but imply
a critique of utopian visions made by the women’s movement.
A World Not Worth Loving: Ellen Key’s “Woman 100 Years

From Now”
Key’s “Woman 100 Years From Now” (Die Frau in 100 Jahren) was published in 1910 in the
anthology The World 100 Years From Now (Die Welt in 100 Jahren) edited by German journalist
Arthur Brehmer. In her story, Key develops an anti-utopian technocratic future in which,
according to the logic of the text, attributes such as hospitality, love, humanity, and care are
absent—all attributes traditionally associated with the construct of a mother.
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Katharina Scheerer
Key’s story sketches Earth in 2009, in which the women’s movement has widely achieved
its goals. In this futuristic world, which draws heavily upon ideas developed in Laßwitz’s Images
From the Future, most parts of the Earth have been destroyed by the consequences of war and
industrialization, leading people to build their summer homes underwater and to expel prisoners
to Mars. Children are no longer the result of a heteronormative romantic relationship between
a man and a woman but are “produced” (117) by people who volunteer for this “job” (117).
Doctors decide which men and women are suitable to parent a child. Immediately after birth,
children are placed in children’s homes where they are educated until they are 30 years old.
Although the text introduces many technological innovations, one “problem” (118)
remains unresolved: the need for human bodies for reproduction. The text claims that this is
the one thing that prevents the “Women’s Question” from being solved, as it would relieve
women of the burden of having to bear a child. At this point, the cynical and satirical mode
that the text employs becomes abundantly clear, marking all technological achievements that
are supposed to make life easier for women as anti-utopian alterations drawing the dynamism
out of life. The text does so by establishing two semantically opposed fields. On the one
hand, it portrays a world that resembles a comparatively better and therefore utopian version
of the real world around 1900, where children are born out of loving relationships and
into hospitable, maternal homes, and on the other hand, it forecasts the standardized and
technologized world 100 years in the future, where everything from procreation to food to
people’s clothing is decided top-down by a technocratic government. In this world marked
as anti-utopian, men and women have almost merged into one being and can hardly be
told apart. In this future all that is traditionally the domain of the feminine has disappeared.
Most importantly, the meaning of the word “home,” traditionally the woman’s domain, has
now shifted to signify “sleeping place” instead (119). This shift is of immense significance to
the analysis of the text as the meanings of the word “home” are much broader than just its
practical use to describe the place where one sleeps. In Germany, the home was traditionally
feminine, the private family sphere, where the political outside world was coded as masculine.
To this end, home was firmly connected to the sentiment of being protected and shielded in
the place one calls their “home.” Reducing these semantics to refer only to the functional use
indicates that the described world lacks compassion and meaningful interpersonal relations.
Everything that used to provide comfort or joy, like religion or luxury foods, is banned for
the sake of increasing efficiency in different areas of life, and as a product of one imagined
solution to the “Women’s Question.”
Additional characteristics of the world reinforce this impression; creativity and individuality
are considered unfavorable human traits that society shall be cured of through forced vaccination.
In 2009, just before this vaccination was supposed to be executed, young students overthrow the
current government, ban all parliaments, shut down the children’s homes, and detain mothers to
force them to spend time with their children. The revolution is followed by a period of chaos
and uproar before, in the year 2100, an equilibrium is restored that makes life worth living and,
above all, worth loving again (122). This equilibrium is strongly reminiscent of the utopian
version of the world around 1900. Although the text is called “Woman 100 Years From Now,”
it not only changes the role of women in society 100 years after 1910, but also transforms the
entire organization of society. By claiming that both the women’s and the workers’ movements—
another substantial movement around 1900 that raised awareness of miserable factory working
conditions—will have reached their goals 100 years in the future, one assumes that the text is
going to describe a more perfect vision of a future world. Instead, we are presented with a satire
in which the outcome of the women’s and worker’s movements resulted in an anti-utopian
world state lacking individuality, creativity, and humanity. All these attributes are presented as
368
indispensable to a life worth living. In doing so, Key employs the SF genre to extrapolate in a
reverse manner what would happen if the women’s movement were to succeed.
Feminine Men and Smart Women: Therese Haupt’s “Woman After

Five Hundred Years”
Another text that depicts the future rather bleakly if the women’s movement were successful is
Therese Haupt’s “Woman After Five Hundred Years” (Die Frau nach fünfhundert Jahren) from
1899. The text was published in the journal Library of Entertainment and Knowledge (Bibliothek
der Unterhaltung und des Wissens), a magazine delivered in book form that included fictional
stories and factional articles from different fields of knowledge. Haupt was mainly known
for her children’s plays such as How Little Else Went to Look for the Christ Child (Wie Klein-
Else das Christkind suchen ging, 1897) and The Screaming Boy and the Laughing Princess (Der
Schreihansel und das Lachprinzesschen, 1899).
Apart from the story I discuss, no other publications by Haupt regarding the women’s
movement have been found. In “Woman After Five Hundred Years” or the “Cheerful Story
of the Future,” as it is described in the subtitle, the protagonist, a woman and mother of two
children, as well as the wife of a doctor, writes a lecture she intends to deliver at a meeting of
her women’s club. Her plan, however, is crossed by a series of events that not only hinder her
from finalizing the talk but also prompt the conclusion that her participation in the women’s
movement prevents her from fulfilling her roles as a mother (in the sense of the contemporary
understanding of stereotypical ideals of motherhood).
The first sentence already establishes a contrast between the protagonist’s assumed role as an
attractive wife and the intellectual work in which she is immersed. The reader is introduced
to a doctor’s wife, who is busy writing a paper for a meeting of her women’s club on the
subject of women after 500 years. She doesn’t get very far, though, as her work is repeatedly
disrupted by her children, first by her daughter Erna, who comes to her hurt and crying.
Although the child’s appearance is described as fragile and vulnerable her mother instantly
dismisses Erna as she has more urgent things to do. By juxtaposing the child’s vulnerability with
the mother’s harsh response, which breaks the prevailing gender stereotype of the caring and
devoted mother, the text shows that it is impossible to be both a “good” mother according to
society’s definition and a politically active and self-confident woman. This argument is further
developed when Marga’s son enters the study and requests that she fix his torn jacket. Angered
by this renewed disruption, she merely hands him money to buy a new coat instead of repairing
it. The story portrays the protagonist as a woman who neglects her children to pursue her
political aspirations, clearly marking her as the dysfunctional element that disrupts the otherwise
functioning patriarchal system.
Later, her husband enters the room and tries to convince Marga not to participate in the
women’s movement and take better care of her family. They engage in an extensive discussion
about several of the women’s movement’s demands, such as equal pay for men and women.
Marga’s husband makes fun of her and her views throughout the discussion, calling her childish.
He tries to naturalize inequalities like the gender pay gap by justifying it with a presumed
biological less-ableness of women (132). When he cannot persuade her, he suggests hypnotizing
her so that she can experience what the world would look like in 500 years if the women’s
movement succeeded with its demands.
Under hypnosis, the space coded as real within the narrative is left behind and a second,
imaginative space is opened up, the regularities of which deviate strongly from the “real” world.
During hypnosis, Marga sees herself as a successful and highly decorated doctor. However, her
369
Katharina Scheerer
physical appearance differs quite a lot from the beginning of the story. Good looks contravene
intelligence, at least for women:
Marga herself was dressed in normal gray clothes. . . . If one did not see her face,
one could not guess whether a male or female figure was hidden in those ugly gray
folds. Thin, gray-blond short hair lay around the high forehead, crisscrossed with deep
thinking wrinkles. (135)
Her husband now goes by the nickname “Darling” and has transformed into a person the text
describes using mainly feminine attributes. Not only has Dr. Ebner been given a diminutive
nickname, but his looks too oppose contemporary norms of male attire and cause his appearance
to seem somewhat ridiculous. In this futuristic world, which once more draws heavily upon
Laßwitz’s Images From the Future, the roles have shifted: Men now maintain the submissive
role in a relationship, while women have assumed the dominant position. Instead of gender
equality, the patriarchy has turned into a matriarchy, and men are entirely dependent socially
and economically on women’s goodwill.
In the following, Darling and Dr. Marga engage in a conversation that strongly resembles
the conversation the doctor’s wife Marga and her husband had before she was hypnotized, just
that this time roles have shifted. Darling tries to make a case for the mental abilities of men,
referring to “grand” men like Goethe. Arguments which Dr. Marga rejects by stating that
Goethe most likely got his inspirations from his mother and that an examination of Faust with
“Ypsilon-Rays” had led to the discovery that Goethe himself did not understand most of what
he wrote. All other supposed achievements made by men are undermined and dismissed in
similar ways. The humorous tone of the story becomes particularly clear at this point. Haupt
draws on a contemporary scientific discovery, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays
in 1895, and uses it in a slightly altered form (Y in place of X) for her comic punchline. Like
the X-rays, the Ypsilon rays also make previously imperceptible things visible and thus call the
prevailing world view into question.
Soon after the conversation, Dr. Marga leaves the room to attend to a patient in New Zealand.
Darling begins to reflect on the state of his marriage and on the fact that, in his opinion, Dr.
Marga’s appearance has become relatively old and worn out. In this anti-utopian version of the
future, marriage is a timed partnership rather than a lifelong commitment. Especially men seem
to lose interest in their female partners after being with them for a while. Although this loss of
interest is partially motivated by Dr. Marga not taking care of her outer appearance, changing
partners frequently is regarded a somewhat “natural” urge men experience. At the same time
Darling finds that women do not seem to feel that urge thereby naturalizing male and female
stereotypes. Darling’s thoughts wander to a younger and more cheerful woman he met a few
days ago when he had a minor traffic accident and as fate would have it, this woman enters his
home a short time later, for she has an appointment with Dr. Marga. However, Dr. Marga is not
yet back from New Zealand yet and since Darling and the stranger feel drawn to each other they
decide that it is time for Darling to leave Dr. Marga and be with the new and younger woman
instead. When Dr. Marga returns, they inform her that Darling will leave her and that their
children will henceforth attend a special institution that raises and educates them as Dr. Marga
will not be able to invest the time necessary for proper childcare tending to her work. At long
last, Dr. Marga sits at her desk all by herself, immersed in her career, and cries out in peals of
laughter that now, for the first time, she is truly free to do her job.
Back in the present, the doctor’s wife Marga slowly awakens from hypnosis screaming in
agony at what she has experienced. She is overjoyed to find herself surrounded by her loving
370
family and, of course, “cured” of any political or personal ambitions to participate in the fight
for women’s equality. She concludes that her talk was “silly stuff” (171). The order of the
patriarchal world is restored. Once again, according to the logic of the text, utopia was closer
than expected.
In summary, both Key’s “Woman 100 Years From Now” and Haupt’s “Woman After Five
Hundred Years” pretend to fulfill the demands of the women’s movement and extrapolate them
into the future to show how meeting these demands will inevitably lead to a dysfunctional
and anti-utopian society. In neither text is equality achieved. Instead, the reader is solemnly
presented with a society where women have become domineering matriarchs, and normative
concepts of gendered bodily characteristics as well as clothing no longer hold—a scenario
both texts mark as unfavorable. Moreover, Haupt takes great pains in her text to emphasize
the inequalities that men suffer in this anti-utopian future and characterize them as intolerable.
The tragic irony that women around 1900 experienced the same inequalities without this being
problematized to any particular degree plays no role in the text.
“Woman 100 Years From Now” and “Woman After Five Hundred Years” thus join
dominant discourses in popular science around 1900. In widely read essays and books like
psychiatrist Paul Möbius’s On Woman’s Physiological Mental Deficiency (Über den physiologischen
Schwachsinn des Weibes) and philosopher Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (Geschlecht
und Character) the mental and bodily less-ableness of women is argued for on evolutionary
and biological grounds, justifying the exclusion of women from higher education or from
certain professions. At the same time in periodicals like Mother and Child (Mutter und Kind)
or The Housewife’s Newspaper (Das Blatt der Hausfrau) the role of housewife and mother is
discussed in a pseudo-scientific manner—mostly by men. Like Möbius and Weininger, the
authors of many contemporary articles draw on presupposed biological and evolutionary
“facts” about the female body and abilities to justify misogynistic structures (Masseran 73–95).
In the popular media, many articles and short stories in journals such as the ones discussed,
employed the power and validity of scientific research to reinforce the claim that women
were only capable of being wives and mothers. The SF genre was particularly suited to this
concern, as it allowed authors to speculate how society would change should the women’s
movement succeed. By depicting this future as the result of a positive outcome of the
“Women’s Question,” the worlds developed in both texts can be referred to as anti-utopian.
In both stories, the order of the primary world is restored after having been temporarily
replaced by an alternative order, thus affirming prevalent societal norms and marking the
claims made by the women’s movement as dangerous endeavors.
Bibliography
Dohm, Hedwig. Die Antifeministen. Ein Buch der Verteidigung [The Antifeminists. A Book of Defence].
Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1902.
Dohm, Hedwig. Die Mütter. Ein Beitrag zur Erziehungsfrage. S. Fischer, 1903.
Eckel, Winfried and Fülleborn, Ulrich. “Rilke, Rainer Maria.” Verfasser-Datenbank. De Gruyter, 2012.
degruyter.com/database/VDBO/entry/vdbo.killy.5423/html.
Haupt, Therese. “Die Frau nach fünfhundert Jahren. Eine heitere Zukunftsgeschichte” [“Woman After
Five Hundred Years. A Cheerful Story of the Future”]. Bibliothek der Unterhaltung und des Wissens, vol.
5, 1899, pp. 125–171.
Innerhofer, Roland. Deutsche Science Fiction zwischen 1870–1914. Rekonstruktion und Analyse der Anfänge
einer Gattung. Böhlau, 1996.
Key, Ellen. Das Jahrhundert des Kindes [The Century of the Child]. S. Fischer, 1902 [1911].
Key, Ellen. “Die Frau in 100 Jahren.” Die Welt in 100 Jahren [“Women 100 Years From Now.” The World
100 Years From Now], edited by Arthur Brehmer. Verlangsanstalt Buntdruck, 1910, pp. 117–124.
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Laßwitz, Kurd. Bilder aus der Zukunft. Zwei Erzählungen aus dem vierundzwanzigsten und neununddreißigsten
Jahrhundert [Images From the Future. Two Tales From the Twenty-fourth and Thirty-ninth Century]. S.
Schottenlaender, 1879.
Laßwitz, Kurd. “Gegen das Weltgesetz.” Bilder aus der Zukunft. Zwei Erzählungen aus dem vierundzwanzigsten
und neununddreißigsten Jahrhundert [“Against the Law of the World.” Images From the Future. Two Tales from
the 24th and 39th Century]. S. Schottenlaender, 1879.
Masseran, Anne. “Grenzziehungsprozesse zwischen wissenschaftlichem Wissen und Volkswissen: Das
Beispiel des‚wissenschaftlichen‘Erziehung der Frau in der populärwissenschaftlichen Literatur.” Literatur-
und Wissen(schaften) 1890–1935, edited by Christine Maillard and Michael Titzmann, Metzler, 2002,
pp. 73–95.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994,
pp. 1–37.
von Suttner, Bertha. Das Maschinenzeitalter. Zukunftsvorlesungen [The Age of the Machine. Lectures from the
Future]. E. Pierson, 1899.
Zetkin, Clara. Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften. vol. I, Dietz 1957, pp. 3–11.
372
51
“MISTRESS OF A WORLD”
Margaret Cavendish, Gender and SF in Early
Modern England
E Mariah Spencer
“Rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me
none, I have made One of my own.”
—Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
The Blazing World (1666) is a place where dimensions bleed and passages exist between worlds.
Written by the English author and natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle (1623–1673), this “ur science fictional space” (Brataas 50) is groundbreaking. Alan
Moore and Kevin O’Neill pay homage to Cavendish when they bring her utopian masterpiece
to life in their graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (2012). Their
dazzling use of 3-D art portrays a world that Moore suggests contains “every fictional world
and every fictional character that has ever existed” (Amacker). Indeed, The Blazing World
marks a turning point in the long history of science fiction (SF) as Cavendish uses her fictional
worldbuilding to offer critical commentary on her present moment. To do so, she boldly inverts
the patriarchal violence of seventeenth-century England by creating a storyworld in which
powerful female characters demonstrate intellectual and political competence.1
While best known for The Blazing World, Cavendish also wrote a dozen other books in
multiple editions. One of the most prolific authors of the seventeenth century, Cavendish is
widely considered the first English woman to openly pursue print publication. Defying gender
norms, she wrote on secular subjects such as atomic theory, the plurality of worlds, systems
of education, and natural philosophy. She also experimented with nearly every literary genre
then available, including poetry, essay, romance, drama, philosophical treatise, and letter.
Defying categorization, The Blazing World blends multiple genres to demonstrate the complex
philosophical ideas introduced in its sister-text, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666).
Cavendish was not the only author exploring scientific concepts through fiction. There are
several early modern texts that show generic characteristics of early SF. For example, Johannes
Kepler, the famous astronomer, wrote Somnium (1634) to explore his serious work within a
creative context. Like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), which imagines a utopian society
based on scientific principles, Kepler’s Somnium imagines a world on the moon, which he
explores using scientific knowledge. Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) presents
a route to the lunar surface using a special engine drawn by migratory swans. Godwin draws
on Kepler’s Somnium for many of his astronomical details. He also references Copernicus by
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-56 373

E Mariah Spencer
name and describes the weightlessness of space. In many ways, Godwin’s text serves as an
imaginative halfway point between Kepler’s and Cavendish’s. Based on a limited knowledge
of migratory birds, rather than magic, Godwin develops a world separate from earth, with a
utopian society and interesting characters. However, his work does not approach the level of
detail and development that Cavendish includes in her scientific utopia.
The Blazing World opens as a traditional romance might: “A merchant travelling into a foreign
country, fell extremely in love with a young Lady.”2 The merchant then kidnaps her and takes
her away in his ship. Fortunately for the unnamed Lady, this is where the traditional storyline
ends. Instead of rape or imprisonment, the gods intervene, blowing the merchant’s ship far to
the north and through a portal to another world. The Lady’s virtue shields her from the extreme
cold, while all the men die. Unlike many utopian narratives, the framing of this story stakes no
claim on verisimilitude. As the ship enters a new alien world, the Lady is rescued by kind and
intelligent Bear-men. And so, it is only after the swift and deadly punishment of her would-be
rapists that the Lady’s true adventure begins. In this way, Cavendish marks entry into the Blazing
World with divine justice for those who would commit violence against a virtuous woman.
As the Lady’s adventure progresses, she encounters a society “where science and philosophy
reign supreme” (Kroger and Anderson 19). The various animal-human hybrids of the Blazing
World transport the Lady to their capital city of Paradise, where the imperial race dwells. In
a scene described as “almost steampunk” (19), Cavendish’s Beast-men use “a certain engine,
which would draw in a great quantity of air, and shoot forth wind with a great force” (Blazing
World 11) to propel their ships to the imperial city. In portraying these intelligent hybrids
positively, Cavendish creates a world that questions contemporary man’s supremacy over nature.
Instead, she offers a plurality of proto-anthropocene/theriophilic worlds that anticipate many
subsequent dystopian and SF stories (Hanlon 53; Sarasohn 164; Wolloch 244).
When the Lady arrives in Paradise, beautiful and brilliant (having learned their language
during the voyage), the Emperor thinks her a goddess. When she denies divinity, he offers her
marriage, which she accepts.3 In this way, the unnamed Lady shifts from a powerless victim to
the Empress of a new world. The Emperor shares with her his absolute power, and defers to
his new wife in matters of education, religion, and war. And so, Cavendish offers the novum, or
“strange newness” (Suvin 4), of a female ruler, who inverts the patriarchal hegemony of the real
world. By creating this compelling storyworld, Cavendish criticizes the status quo—particularly
mankind’s domination of women and the natural world—while simultaneously teaching readers
to imagine its alternative.4
In this newly imagined space, the Empress uses her absolute power to change the religion and
governance of the Blazing World.5 She also divides her Beast-men into learned societies. Her
Bear-men become experimental philosophers; her Spider-men, mathematicians; her Worm-
men, natural philosophers; and her Giants, architects. Rather than describe her new world
according to the lifestyles and employment of these various inhabitants—like Thomas More
does in Utopia (1516)—the Empress meets with her virtuosi, asking a series of increasingly
complex philosophical questions.6 Their discourse demonstrates the Empress’s intelligence,
while offering the reader a clear view of Cavendish’s created storyworld. The sun, moon,
and stars are gemstones that burn with their own natural heat. There are immaterial spirits
that interact with the physical world. The imperial race has achieved near immortality via the
philosopher’s stone. Matter is alive, intelligent, and self-moving. All life has value.7
The Ape-men chemists describe the philosopher’s stone. They explain that ingesting the
gum made from a particular rock will provoke a purgative metamorphosis that restores youth.
In the process, the subject vomits phlegm of various colors and tastes, as well as experiencing
diarrhea and excessive bleeding. This process culminates in making “the body break out into a
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“Mistress of a World”
thick scab” (Cavendish, Blazing World 41–2), before the hair, teeth, and nails fall off. The patient
eventually sheds the scab “like an armour” (42) and emerges as soft-skinned as a young insect.
The remainder of this nine-month restorative period is spent convalescing in specially prepared
bandages. In this way, Cavendish emasculates the Emperor and his family with her vivid
portrayal of a violent and decidedly unpleasant process of alien restoration that implicitly draws
into question the humanity of the imperial race.8
The final group with whom the Empress meets are the immaterial spirits, who take on ultra-
refined bodies of air to interact with the physical world. By including these spirits, Cavendish
appears to contradict her own belief that immaterial spirits “are not things about which we can
theorize or speak or think.”9 However, the inclusion of these spirits allows the Empress to ask
esoteric questions regarding the metaphysics of the Blazing World, including the nature of the
soul. Once the Empress’s curiosity is satisfied, she decides to write her own cabbala. She thus
moves rapidly from knowledge collection to knowledge creation, inverting the conventional
process by which learned men produce knowledge.
To write her cabbala, the Empress desires a scribe. She requests the soul of a famous ancient
philosopher. However, the spirits demur, suggesting that these ancient philosophers “would
never have the patience to be scribes” (Cavendish, Blazing World 67). The Empress then requests
the soul of a famous modern philosopher. Again, the spirits demur, arguing that these modern
philosophers “would scorn to be scribes to a woman” (68). When the spirits finally suggest the
Duchess of Newcastle, the Empress enthusiastically agrees. In this way, Cavendish becomes a
meta-fictional character in her own story, while critiquing the misogynistic tendencies of past
and present philosophers. The Empress greets the Duchess’s soul “with a spiritual kiss” (68)
that signals the beginning of a friendship so intimate that they become platonic lovers (70).
These platonic lovers brainstorm the Empress’s cabbala, discarding one idea after another until
the Duchess suggests she “make a poetical or romancical Cabbala,” in which she can “use
metaphors, allegories, [or] similitudes” (69) and then interpret them however she pleased. Here
and in other places “Cavendish offers the act of creation as an act of empowerment” (Mi-Young
Park 122), encouraging the Empress to discard previous epistemological paradigms to create
knowledge that is all her own. She also underscores the inherent value of creativity, which
Maura Smyth has since suggested “made it possible for more women writers to reimagine their
worlds” (149).
As their friendship/love grows, the Duchess reveals her extreme ambition to the Empress.
She too wishes to be the ruler of a world. So, they summon the spirits to find out how this can
be accomplished. Cavendish then offers a “vision of world-making without world-conquering”
(Kile 128) that contrasts sharply with the conventional masculine model found in contemporary
works such as The Man in the Moone.10 The Empress asks the spirits if other worlds exist.
They confirm that there are innumerable worlds.11 However, they discourage military conquest
because “conquerers seldom enjoy their conquest, for they being more feared than loved, most
commonly come to an untimely end.”12 As an alternative, the spirits direct the women to
create immaterial worlds within their minds. They then teach the women how to use their
imaginations, and in doing so, offer an explicitly nonviolent means of conquest. After a series of
failed creations based on others’ philosophies, the Duchess adopts her own theory of intelligent,
self-moving matter. Once this is in place, her imagined world functions perfectly.
After the Duchess’s ambition has been satisfied, the Empress decides that she would like
to visit her platonic lover’s world. The two women then astral project into the world of the
Duchess, where they travel through Sherwood Forest to Welbeck Abbey and Bolsover Castle to
view the ancestral homes of the Duke of Newcastle, Cavendish’s husband. While doing so, they
observe the Duke training his horses and working at swordplay. Afraid that he will overexert
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E Mariah Spencer
himself and without considering the consequences, the Duchess’s soul enters the Duke’s body.
Startled, the Empress’s soul follows, leaving the Duke with three spirits inhabiting his body.
In this way, Cavendish inverts the gender of violent penetration, showing these two women
forcefully entering the body of the Duke. Once inside the Duke, they indulge in a spiritual
menage a trois.
Cavendish describes the experience of penetrating her husband with the Empress
as a “platonic seraglio” (or harem), in which the three souls enjoy conversation and other
entertainments while entangled (Blazing World 81). The Duchess even considers feeling jealous,
but then realizes “no adultery could be committed amongst Platonic lovers” (81). This scene
has since been interpreted as a satire on the vogue of platonic love, which was often used to
shield erotic or sexual relationships. It has also been read as one of the many expressions of
queer desire in Cavendish’s corpus. While recent interpretations vary widely (from polyamory
to asexuality), Michael David Robinson argues, “A nonsexual seraglio is an absurd idea, only
slightly less absurd than, say, a nonsexual brothel” (147).
Before the Duchess and Empress exit the Duke’s body, he asks them to intercede on his
behalf with Fortune, whose enmity he has earned through a lifelong devotion to Honesty and
Prudence (Cavendish, Blazing World 82). Back in the Blazing World, the women summon
the personified entities of Prudence and Honesty, with Fortune and her arbiters, Rashness
and Folly. Truth resides over the mediation as they negotiate for peace between Fortune and
the Duke. This highly allegorical scene concludes without a settlement, despite the Duchess’s
insistence that her husband “would never slight, scorn or disrespect any of the female sex”
(84). With this allegory, Cavendish offers yet another counterpoint to the hypermasculine
violence of her day. Contrary to The Prince (1532; trans. 1640), in which Niccolo Machiavelli
writes, “Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-
use her” (ch. 25),13 Cavendish offers a model of masculinity that respects women. Cavendish
also critiques Machiavelli’s metaphor by dedicating The Worlds Olio (1655) directly to Fortune
(Suzuki 10), writing, “I believe she is a powerfull Princess” (The Worlds preface). Eleven years
later, Cavendish again addresses Fortune, telling her female readers in The Blazing World that
“rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have
made One of my own” (preface). In these instances, Cavendish circumnavigates Fortune, while
offering alternatives to the violence of Machiavelli.
In part two of The Blazing World, which Cavendish describes in her preface as “merely fancy,
or (as I may call it) fantastical” (Blazing World 6; emphasis in the original), the Empress learns her
homeworld is at war. She brainstorms with her husband how to help her former sovereign. He
suggests that she use spirits to construct an army. However, without material bodies the spirits
are unable to battle physical enemies. He then proposes the spirits might reanimate corpses. The
Empress considers the idea of a zombie army (an early example of this novum), but ultimately
declines because of inevitable decay (90–91). The Emperor, having offered his best idea, then
suggests that the Empress seek the advice of the Duchess of Newcastle. Here and in other
places throughout The Blazing World, Cavendish shows powerful men deferring to the superior
intelligence and competence of women.
The Duchess and the Empress form a battle plan using the advanced technology of submarines
(suggested by the Duchess and designed by the Giants) and the strategic use of fire-stone, a
type of rock that burns when wet. The Fish-men rediscover the passage between worlds and
use it to transport the Empress and her army to her homeworld. To accompany the Empress,
the Duchess’s soul enters her lover’s body and travels inside her. The two women enjoy this
intimate time together, while the Fish-men pull their ships through the narrow passage. When
they arrive in her old world, the Empress presents herself in a spectacle of fire that carefully
376
conceals her terrestrial origins. Unaware of the fire-stones, submarines, and Fish-men, the
warring nations believe her a goddess. The Empress proclaims support for her former sovereign,
the King of Efsi, and demands his enemies swear absolute allegiance. They refuse, so the Fish-
men release their fire-stone and burn the enemy’s entire fleet. The Empress then proceeds
with extreme violence to burn countless towns and villages.14 With this wholesale destruction,
“which struck such a fright and terror into all the neighbouring cities, nations and kingdoms”
(BW 99–100), the Empress forces fealty to the King of Efsi.
After another spectacular display of otherworldly power, the Empress and her army
disappear below the waves. In this fantastical last section of The Blazing World, Cavendish not
only demonstrates the martial prowess of women—a theme she explores in several other texts,
including Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656) and the play in two parts, Bell in Campo (1662)—
but she also takes the trope of violence to its furthest extreme. In doing so, she offers an implicit
critique regarding the dangers of mechanical devices used for violent means. Tessie Prakas
writes, “The very scale of the destruction renders it almost impossible for her readers not to
be horrified by the capacities of these instruments, and indeed by the imperviousness of the
Empress as she orders this holocaust” (133). In this way, Cavendish problematizes warfare and
violence.
Throughout this complex work of early SF, Cavendish repeatedly decries violence. She
offers swift punishment to her Lady’s would-be rapists in the opening scene. She challenges the
prevailing dominance of mankind over nature in the blending of her Beast-men hybrids. She
emasculates the imperial race with her grotesque description of the philosopher’s stone. She
sets up the Emperor and the Duke as powerful men who prefer to reason with and defer to
women rather than commit violence against them. She suggests the creation and exploration of
immaterial worlds as a desirable alternative to violent conquest. And she has her Empress wield
vengeful destruction on her former homeworld to demonstrate and problematize the extreme
consequences of warfare. In this way, Cavendish’s imagined worlds serve as a warning to her
readers. Violence against women is wrong. Violence against nature is violence against humanity.
Seek nonviolent resolutions whenever possible.
The fact that Cavendish was driven to become “Authoress of a whole world” (Blazing
World 109) to escape the gendered violence of early modern England, underscores the very
real difficulties women faced in the seventeenth century. Unlike the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century women writers who needed rooms of their own (Woolf 4), an early woman
writer such as Cavendish needed a whole world. The cognitive estrangement inherent in a
world without misogyny sets this text apart as an early work of SF even without a series of
innovative nova such as multiple alien worlds, intelligent Beast-men, heavenly bodies made of
gemstones, putrefaction as a route to immortality, submarines, zombie armies, fire-stones, and
immaterial spirits. However, this text contains all these things and more, which is likely why
Moore and O’Neill chose the Blazing World as “the ur-science fictional space” in which all
their literary characters could, in the words of Prospero, “Blaze forever in a blazing world!”
(League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).
Notes
1 The violence referred to throughout this chapter is both physical and psychological in nature. According
to The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights (1632) women had no legal voice in the seventeenth century
and were “understood either married or to be married and their desires subject to their husbands” (6).
2 Cavendish 7. Quotes from The Blazing World are drawn from the reprinting of that text in full as “The
Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World” in Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings, edited
by Susan James.
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E Mariah Spencer
3 Cavendish does not entertain the possibility that the Lady could refuse this marriage proposal.
4 Prakas 137; Smyth 129. In this way, Cavendish anticipates the work of women like Bertha von Suttner
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman who “used entertainment for idealistic purposes” (Baker 75).
5 The Faber Book of Utopias (1999) lists The Blazing World as the first female-authored work of this nature.
The next is New Amazonia (1889) by Elizabeth Burgoynne Corbett. Around the turn of the twentieth
century, female-authored utopian and SF texts become more common, with Gilman’s Herland (1915)
being especially famous.
6 The scientific nature of these questions and their not-so-subtle parody of the Royal Society (England’s
oldest scientific society) single The Blazing World out as science fictional, rather than simply utopian.
7 In this regard, Cavendish can be described as a speculative feminist whose belief in radical equality, vital
materialism, and her skepticism of “technofixes” (Haraway 3) anticipate Donna Haraway’s Making Kin
in the Chthulucene (2016).
8 Alternately, this scene can be read as an inversion of the violence women suffer during childbirth
(Leslie 19).
9 Cunning 62. This fantastical portrayal of astral projection may also denote Cavendish’s skepticism
regarding the existence of immaterial spirits.
10 Cavendish does not indicate familiarity with Godwin’s work. Instead, she identifies Lucian of Samasota
and Cyrano de Bergerac as her creative analogs (6).
11 BW 71. Note that while Cavendish imagines a multiverse, she only explores three terrestrial worlds:
the Blazing World, the Empress’s homeworld, and the Duchess’s homeworld. Planet Earth does not
physically connect to either of the other worlds, which necessitates the Duchess’s astral projection.
12 Blazing World 71. Here Cavendish directly contradicts Machiavelli when he writes, “It is much safer to
be feared than loved” (ch. 17).
13 Machiavelli wrote The Prince at a time when rape laws in England still emphasized a crime against a
man. It was not until the 1540s that rape gained its dual meaning “as intercourse with a woman over
the age of 10 against her will” (Burrow 71). Issues of patrimonial lineage made the control of female
sexuality a central concern and this concern persisted in England throughout the seventeenth century.
14 Unlike the rapacious, self-serving violence of men, Cavendish instead offers a “feminine” violence that
is (presumably) predicated upon justice for her former sovereign.
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Amacker, Kurt. “Opening the Black Dossier: The Alan Moore Interview, Part One and Two.” Mania:
Beyond Entertainment, 7 November 2007. https://archive.ph/jLcda.
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pp. 49–66.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulhucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
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52
A RIDDLE ABOUT A STICK
FIGURE
Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity,
and Misrecognition
in Adam Roberts’s Bête
The Sphinx asks, “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at
noon, and three in the evening?”1
The Crip answers, “Me. I crawled out of bed in the morning, proved that
ambulatory wheelchair users exist at noon, and shifted to my cane before going to
bed again.”
Introduction
How do the forms of riddles and stories shape our imaginings of the future? As a White, disabled
poet/educator/scholar who gets around with three legs (two legs and a long green cane) in what
is hopefully the late morning of my life, I will start in my past to answer that question. One day
at recess on my elementary school playground, a riddle arrived. The Gifted & Talented (G&T)
students, a collection of many boys and some girls in first through fifth grade, had just bussed
back from their separate lessons. That day those lessons included a riddle they wanted to try out
on the rest of us. They gathered on the monkey bars at some height my body could not reach
as they asked their question. A G&T sphinx asked, “What walks on four legs at the start of the
day, two legs at lunch, and three by bedtime?” One of us answered from the ground: “A bear.
He’s walking around on all fours in the morning, playing on his hind legs at lunch, injured in
the late afternoon, and down to three legs when it’s time to sleep.” More rambling responses
followed to the laughter of the knowing kids on monkey bars. Eventually, the boy/sphinx who
asked the question stopped the rambling with a single word, “Man.” He looked down on his
peers with pride; he both knew and was the riddle’s answer.
My grandfather used a walker then; did that make him six-legged in the evening? And how
exactly did evening come to mean old age? How many legs ought women to have at any given
time of day? At the time, I was still navigating the negations of phrases like “big girls tie their
shoes” and “good girls walk heel-toe.” I could do neither of these, and so had to navigate what
it meant to not be “big,” “good,” or “girl” by these logics. Later in life, when I realized using a
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-57 380

A Riddle About a Stick Figure
cane would prevent more injuries than wearing my ankle foot orthotics, I would think back to
the riddle and wonder if I had reached old age at 27 and if I had become “man” yet. The riddle
in this case was a question with a predetermined, yet concealed, answer clutched by kids on
monkey bars. Some recognized the riddle as a trick, a way to put others on the wrong side of a
“gotcha!” to be ridiculed for being out-of-the-know. Others, like myself, seized on the riddle
as an opportunity for open-ended imaginings until the one-word answer foreclosed them. For
a moment, we made the transformative realization that humans are, in fact, animals. Our own
misrecognition, not the riddle’s one-word answer, led us there.
How Does a Riddle Stand?

British science fiction (SF) author Adam Roberts, in his work The Riddles of the Hobbit (2013),
offers this read of riddles: “A ‘riddle’ (from rædan, to counsel, advise or teach), like a kenning,
is a mode of knowing. Riddles are about giving the commonplace a conceptual shake to enable
us to see it anew” (60). His research into the form of the riddle informs what happened on the
playground: the riddle offered multiple ways of knowing and becoming that were cut short with
the utterance “man.” Some ways of knowing and becoming were twisted in the speculation of
the riddle before this cutting, allowing bears to slip into and grandparents to slip out of “man”
for a moment. Our misrecognition of time and legs extended our thinking about the human
and animal world, but what did it do to our notions of disability?
In David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s transformative book, Narrative Prosthesis (2000),
they turn to Oedipus and the Sphinx to analyze the materiality of metaphor. As they analyze
Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, they argue that “Oedipus’s physical difference [a limp] secures
key components of the plot” while “his disability serves as the source of little substantive
commentary in the course of the drama itself ” (62). Oedipus’s difference is the result of having
his ankles pierced and tethered as a baby by his father, when Oedipus was prophesied to kill him.
Describing the material potency of the story, they note Oedipus never would have been able
to answer the Sphinx’s riddle without his limp; at the same time his limp is largely unremarked
upon by anyone after it is introduced. This passage holds onto two key elements of narrative
prosthesis as concept. First, that disability is everywhere as an easy way for literature to approach
the material world, and secondly that disability is rarely discussed beyond the metaphorical level.
For Mitchell and Snyder, “the ability of disabled characters to allow authors the metaphorical
‘play’ between macro and micro registers of meaning-making establishes the role of the body in
literature as a liminal point in the representational process” (62). In literature, the body becomes
a site of simple interpretation at the level of the individual, while offering potential to rethink
broad cultural conversations around difference.
While the discussion of the Sphinx’s riddle shook up my notions of human-animal relations
(which as a person with shaky hands I can get behind), it failed to question tropes of disability
and temporality. In the riddle’s construction, disability is assumed in the evening (and only
the evening) of a human life. To be disabled in the morning or afternoon disrupts the linear
flow of the Sphinx’s riddle in ways that would discomfort nondisabled riddlers. Feminist Queer
Crip (2013) author Alison Kafer writes about the paradox of crip temporality: “the presence
of disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the
present to be desirable” (2). Kafer addresses speculated futures and their erasure of disability
from the world. Such formations imply that the only desirable futures are those that cure
or exile disability. Instead of casting out disability or relegating it to old age, Bête returns to
the Sphinx’s riddle to structure a narrative that shakes up notions of disability, gender, and
human-animal relations.
381
Throughout Bête, Roberts draws attention to language—language as a dangerous toy, as

code, and as a crucial interface between humans and bêtes. It is the language of the riddle, in
particular a riddle whose answer is “man,” on which a gendered analysis of the book turns. While
Roberts uses the Sphinx’s riddle as a wink to the audience—to be smart, to reference Western
philosophy, to make penis jokes about a three-legged man—it also maintains the presence and
hold of “man” as Roberts moves towards a posthuman world through his imagining of human-
animal hybridity. This misrecognition obscures the elision of disability and women from the
hybrid future. It is men who find themselves transforming into the posthuman while women
are left behind.
Adam Roberts’s Bête, which upends the timeline of the Sphinx’s riddle, leaves a gap in which
to speculate on crip futures. In the epigraph of this paper, the riddle appears as it is posed to
Oedipus by the Sphinx—with its assumed answer being the linear experience of a man passing
through expected mobilities between birth and death (crawling, walking, cane-using). Roberts’s
timeline reimagines the Sphinx’s riddle to structure another linear story of change. It is as easy as
two, three, four, as his central character transitions from legs, to legs and cane, to four fox paws.
The gap to be filled, however, is the crip understanding that these mobilities can exist outside
of linear orders and manifest in any series across a single day.
Sami Schalk reimagines bodymind potentialities as part of a Black feminist practice in her
work Bodyminds Reimagined (2018). Schalk notes that “speculative fiction can defamiliarize (dis)
ability, race, and gender in ways that are intellectually and politically productive” (23). Schalk’s
argument, built through an analysis of works by Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and other Black
women writers of speculative fiction, is that these stories directly impact future worlds by
re-orienting and altering practices of imagining Black, queer, and disabled people in the future.
Schalk emphasizes the importance of being attentive to the multiple potential worlds created
in the act of intersectional speculation, especially in fiction, that “these discourses, systems, and
identities impact our experiences of reality and how a lack of recognition for differing realities
has more punitive and dangerous results for some populations than others” (62). The variety
of imagining otherwise shakes up the use of disability and gender, offering deep and nuanced
engagements with multiple ways of being in the world. Roberts’s work aligns itself along one
axis of questioning—human and animal—without lingering with necessary conversations
around whom has been historically excluded from the category of human.
Cripping the Sphinx’s riddle disrupts linear time, moving into complex temporalities that
make way for imagined crip futures. In her work, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique,” Jina
B. Kim argues for critical crip methodologies, which “orient the field [disability studies] to
its ‘mode of analysis rather than its objects of study,’ shifting disability from noun—an identity
one can occupy—to verb: a critical methodology” (Kim). It is this verb form of crip, which
is essential to reading Bête. These crip methodologies must be placed alongside Roberts’s
understanding of how SF functions. He defines this in terms of Samuel Delany, as “ ‘a vast play
of codic conventions,’ a shared game of signification that readers can apply to texts at the level of
the sentence as much as the level of the text, to social performance and semiotic engagement”
(Roberts History of Science Fiction 2). Extending Roberts’s logic, which draws on Delany, it is my
job as a reader to engage in this codic play to queer and crip Roberts’s own work.
I use “queer” and “crip” in this piece as verbs, aimed at upsetting and questioning normative
assumptions of gender, sexuality, and disability. In Crip Times (2018), Robert McRuer describes
how crip theorists use these terms:
“to crip” like “to queer” gets at processes that unsettle, or processes that make
strange or twisted. Cripping also exposes the ways in which able-bodiedness and
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able-mindedness get naturalized and the ways that bodies, minds, and impairments
that should be at the absolute center of a space or issue or discussion get purged from
that space or issue or discussion. (23)
Drawing comparisons across unsettling practices around gender and sexuality, McRuer
extends this practice to unsettle assumptions about bodies and how they move into the future.
To queer and crip leans into the misrecognition an unanswered riddles offers, thickening the
moment with other potential futures to stretch towards the as-yet-to-be.
The Sphinx’s riddle is the structuring device of Bête. It is divided into three parts. Part I is
“Two Legs in the Morning”; Part II is “Three Legs in the Afternoon”; Part III is “Four Legs
in the Evening.” While Roberts’s re-formation of the Sphinx’s riddle upends expectations
by ending with four legs, it also keeps the framing linear, a progress narrative: the creature
in his riddle keeps adding limbs from two to three to four. The section structure reflects the
mobility of the book’s main character and narrator, a farmer named Graham Penhaligon.
When we meet him in Part I, he gets around walking on two legs. In Part II, after acquiring
an injury, Graham picks up a walking stick and refers to himself as “old geezer. Three-legged
man” (Bête 228). In Part III, Graham is dead and not dead, his memories and the memories
of other now-dead animals alive and moving on four legs “inside the hard, hot body of a
[female] fox” (311). With this progression, Roberts moves through the body of the disabled
man to the future: a hyperable human-animal hybrid. Disability is a hinge to move the reader
from Part I to Part III and to move from “man” to “a new more crowded way of living” (311).
The resulting way of life might offer crip futurity or it might write off disability in favor of
hyperable futures.
Bête imagines a world impacted by the introduction of artificial intelligence into animal
bodyminds. Graham begins the book as a farmer who decides, like many farmers do, to kill
a cow. However, as this is SF, the cow is not exactly the animal we know at present. The cow
(referred to as a “canny animal”2 or bête) has been injected with artificial intelligence by animal
rights activists. Graham decides that he can never know for sure whether or not it is the cow
talking or the animal rights activists through the cow. For the sake of his livelihood, he assumes
the latter and pulls the trigger.
Instead of allowing him to retain his livelihood, this decision to kill a bête causes Graham to
lose his farm and take up a wandering lifestyle as a butcher/drifter who walks and eventually
limps the English countryside.3 While he wanders, the world around him navigates the
complexities of recognizing the hybrid animal/AI creatures as close to, or at least deserving
the same rights as, people. In his navigations, Graham stumbles into two situations that offer
possibilities for imagining crip futures: he falls in love with a terminally ill woman and after her
death becomes injured and permanently(?) disabled.
Leaning on Anne
The prosthetic on which Graham’s development leans most heavily is not one of wood. Instead,
the story uses a sick woman as a prosthetic device. Early in the first act of the book, Graham
wanders into a hotel and after an initial characteristically grumpy interaction, falls in love with
its owner, Anne. Anne becomes a prop for Graham both through her status as a person to have
sex with as well as her terminal status—she becomes a sexual interest long enough to motivate
Graham without staying on the page long enough to become a full character. Anne is especially
close with Cincinnatus, a canny cat. The plot leans on the trinity of Anne, Cincinnatus, Graham.
Anne loves Cincinnatus emotionally and intellectually while she loves Graham erotically, and it is
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the deeper experience of Anne that Graham later seeks to recover by unifying his consciousness
with Cincinnatus. Graham abandons human society because of Anne’s death, assuming he can
never connect with another person in the world of bêtes, to wander alone in the woods. In this
wandering, Graham is disabled by canny animals as he refuses to act as a liaison4 between bêtes
and humans. Finally, canny-animal-killer Graham abandons his personal humanity to become
a hybrid human/bête, fueled by his desire to possess Cincinnatus’s experiences with Anne.
However, for all her significance to Graham, Anne’s significance to the plot comes only from
her deaths, little ones and the big one.
Anne’s love, life, disability, and death act as a prop upon which Graham can swing from
rugged individualist surviving in the woods to animal advocate seeking to join the hivemind
of a bête. It is through his desire to connect with Anne posthumously that Graham embarks
on the main action of the novel. While Anne is a central figure, she exists so only in service
to Graham—first as a sexual object and then as an abstract ideal to be pursued. As a disabled
woman, Anne becomes a disposable step towards a future where a disabled man can transform
into a hybrid human/animal/AI.
Graham is an everyman, meant to show the audience that anyone, even a slaughterer by trade,
can stretch into the future of human-animal hybridity. Graham himself makes the case for why
older men are the most difficult to drag into the future—“it’s the late middle-aged, and especially
the men, who find it hardest to adjust . . . to a whole new logic” (Bête 30). While the text wants
to show that even the most skeptical can adjust to human-animal hybridity, its method for doing
so reinforces historical violence and privileges White Western masculinity. Its use of the codic
convention of the everyman to show us that anyone can destabilize the human/animal divide once
again shows the White Western man stepping on White women for his own transformation. By its
conclusion, it doesn’t bring the women it steps on into the future except as memories.
The women of the story are few, including Graham’s wife Rose, his daughter Jen, and
his love Anne. Rose’s presence in the story is almost a caricature of the unhappy wife—she
is disappointed in Graham for all their decades of marriage and appears only briefly and
antagonistically. Having both a daughter and a son and a book with the subsections “what my
daughter told me” and “what my son told me,” one might expect space in the book to be evenly
split between the two characters. In keeping with our narrator’s sexism, Graham’s visit with his
daughter is a reconnaissance mission to grumble about her two sets of twins and to learn more
about what Graham’s son is doing working for bêtes.
Despite the book having a chapter titled “Anne,” the conversations within center on Graham
and bêtes. Most of these conversations take place between the male cat Cincinnatus and Graham
while Anne sleeps. This convenient sleep has a specific requirement: “ ‘make me come a second
time and I’ll fall dead asleep for eight full hours. It’s the guaranteed effect double-orgasm has
on me.’ This struck me as a testable hypothesis” (Bête 52). For Graham, intimacy becomes an
experiment in control, a testable hypothesis for opening eight hours of plot development.
Somehow, his relationship with Anne becomes his greatest intimacy in life despite their limited
conversations.5 As Anne sleeps, Graham banters with Cincinnatus about the lives of bêtes, his
possible collaboration, and his resentment that while he loves Anne beyond measure, she loves
Cincinnatus more than anyone else.
Anne’s literal death, the result of cancer, potentially offers other perspectives on the lived
experience of terminal cancer, as Anne continues to desire physical intimacy with Graham,
despite the toll it takes on her body.6 Anne seeks intimacy through the use of special medical
devices (a sheath) and through open conversation with Graham about what is pleasurable and
what hurts; Graham’s narrative collapses this into tragedy. He recalls, “her internal cavities
collapsed, and the last few times we made love we had to use a specially designed medical
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sheath. That was exactly as heartbreaking as it sounds” (Bête 108). When Anne explains that
his fondling of her breasts is painful, he (figuratively) self-flagellates and disrupts her pleasure
through his sullenness (103). Instead of cherishing Anne’s choice to continue intimacy with
him through a prosthetic, Graham mourns and pities her, stripping the potential connection
of their crip intimacy by perceiving the prosthetic as a distancing device rather than a
connective one.
At the end of all things, the subsequent mirroring of Graham’s and Anne’s deaths demonstrates
the gulf at the core of the riddle in Bête: each death and transformation serve Graham alone.
After Anne dies, Graham cares for her corpse:“I brought up a bowl of soapwater and a sponge
and I washed her naked corpse” (88). This vignette is a tender closing to a relationship that,
from Anne’s perspective, was mostly physical. For Graham, this is a ritual that demonstrates the
extent of his love for Anne, a love that drives him through the rest of the events in the book.
When he is about to end his own life by transforming into a human-animal hybrid through the
consumption of Cincinnatus’s AI chip to receive his memories of Anne, he mirrors this ritual:
“I tidied up my miniature shambles, and washed myself ” (237). The closing of these human
lives serves Graham in his move beyond being a two legged human and a three-legged cane user
into a four-legged being that is human, vixen, cat, memories, and an unbounded, multi-bodied
future. Roberts uses Graham’s experience of disability to move him from able-bodied, two-
legged man to interdependent, four-legged fox/Graham/Cincinnatus/AI. Graham’s narrative
ends with his incorporation into a “we” with a vixen, the “four legs at night” to which his
modified Sphinx’s riddle alludes. It is the man Graham, using a stick and a woman as props, that
becomes the unified, multigendered human-animal. These experiences of disability offer the
hint of a possibility for imagining queer, crip futures, through the intersecting chimeric being,
an interdependent network of bodies and minds. However, the way in which Bête gets there,
centering man’s independence and strength in the wilderness while using disability and women
as props, curtails interdependent feminist, queer, crip potentialities.
Conclusion
Bête offers much philosophically and ideologically despite its formulaic limitations. While
using disability as a hinge, both in the book’s chapter-by-chapter framing and Graham’s
experience, Roberts re-uses and re-implements practices of engaging with disability that
curtail nuanced engagement and instead move through experiences of disability without
giving them depth. In his desire to teach readers about the possibilities opened up through
processes of misrecognition (un)contained in riddles, Roberts provides a neatly packaged (and
thereby un-misrecognizable) understanding of what misrecognition is and does. While he
offers an interesting portrayal of human-animal/AI relations, he limits the potential for crip
and queer futurities in his work.
The overtly didactic closing of Bête ties the matter of the riddle up neatly in a way that is
easy to recognize:
The riddle always turns on misrecognition. That’s the whole point of the riddle. . . .
There is no recognition; there is only misrecognition. That’s the truth of the riddle;
that’s what the riddle says with its content as much with its form. (309–10)
The omniscient Graham/Cincinnatus/AI/Vixen speaks directly across time and the fictive
wall to the reader. As aware of its own content and form as it is, Bête warrants being read
simultaneously for its content (radical crip futures) as well as its form (with its patriarchal ideals
385
and practices limiting disability narratives). It is through accepting Roberts’s recognition of the
riddle that the reader is supposed to approach epiphany in the relationship between human
and animal: “You have misrecognized the end and it’s not the end at all” (311). This blunt
conjuration of the world after humanity—the animal/human/technology hybrid—forecloses
the variety of futures it seemingly values.
While Roberts relies on representations of disability as a hinge to move to his conclusion,
he skips over the lived disabled experience that might gum up that hinge in more compelling
ways. In their work, The Matter of Disability (2019), David Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon
Snyder emphasize how disability disrupts singular notions of disabled futures, emphasizing how
“the alternative modes of becoming that even the most severe impairments offer involve the
promise of an alternative agency that reshapes the world and opens it up to other modes of
(nonnormative) being” (9). Graham’s path through disability doesn’t attend to Anne’s agency
or even his own, as his story moves swiftly from three legs to four in a masculine push towards
the more-than-human.
Adam Roberts’s Bête falls short of demonstrating a feminist, crip futurity that cherishes
variety, despite attempts to do so through the figure of the man/AI/vixen hybrid. Its
riddling form reifies Western, masculinist thinking as it leans on, without acknowledging,
women, disability, and disabled women. Bête’s methods are too linear, too straight. They
tie too neat a bow on the riddle of “Man” and his relations to non-human animals. While
Bête hints at possibilities of queer, crip futures through its concluding cat/AI/human/vixen
hybrid, its methods foreclose alternative worlds by leaning on and skipping over disabled
women.
Notes
1 The sphinx is a figure from the Greek myth of Oedipus, a hybrid creature with the face of a woman,
the body of a lion, and the wings of a falcon. The myth of Oedipus (whose name literally means
“swollen foot”) is at the root of much of Western discourse, from psychoanalysis to philosophy drawing
from Sophocles. His story is a tragic limp through prophecy where few acknowledge his disability,
despite its existence as a marker of his fate.
2 Bête and canny animal are used to refer to animals that have been implanted with AI chips. For
more information on Roberts’s engagement with Derrida’s work on “bêtise” and its human-centered
conflation of “animal” with “stupidity” see Liza B. Bauer’s “ ‘Four Legs in the Evening’: Postanimal
Narration in Adam Roberts’s Bête.”
3 Bêtes are protected by law by the time Graham decides to kill the cow.
4 The logic of this liaison status lies in that Graham is the least likely human, due to his status as a minor
celebrity who killed a canny cow, to be on the side of bêtes in a negotiation.
5 Their conversations are so few that Anne does not learn about Graham’s daughter until after Anne’s
diagnosis, though she does know he has a son who works with bêtes.
6 A trope of disability representation is the desexualization of disabled and terminally ill characters.
Bibliography
Bauer, Liza B. “ ‘Four Legs in the Evening’: Postanimal Narration in Adam Roberts’s Bête.” SubStance, vol.
50, No. 3, 2021, pp. 53–73. doi:10.1353/sub.2021.0028.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.
Kim, Jina B. “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?’ ” Lateral, vol.
6, no. 1, 2017. doi:10.25158/16.1.14.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Times Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. New York University Press, 2018.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse.
University of Michigan P, 2000.
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Mitchell, David T., et al. The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect. University of Michigan
P, 2019.
Roberts, Adam. Bête. Gollancz, 2014.
Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016.
Roberts, Adam. The Riddles of the Hobbit. Palgrave Macmillan. 2013.
Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke
University Press. 2018.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex (Transl. Roger David Dawe). Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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53
THE RISE OF FEMALE SF
WRITERS IN CHINA IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Mengtian Sun
Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Zhao Haihong, Cheng Jingbo, Ling Chen, Chi Hui, Tang Fei, Qian
Lifang, Wang Kanyu, Wu Shuang, Nian Yu, and Chen Qian.1 For readers of Chinese SF, these
are not unfamiliar names. They are only a few of the large number of female SF writers who
have become active in China since the turn of the twenty-first century. Although female writers
make up almost half of the Chinese SF field, studies of their works remain largely neglected in
the recent boom of Chinese SF criticism. Critics of Chinese SF have largely focused on a few
male writers, such as Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, Han Song, and Wang Jinkang. There are several
exceptions, such as Zhang Yihong and Wang Weiying’s “Mutual Reflections of Realism and
Romanticism: Ling Chen’s SF World,” Tang Shijia’s “Recent Chinese SF Novels under the
Perspective of Feminism” and Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker’s “An Ideal Chinese Society?
Future China from the Perspective of Female SF Writer Hao Jingfang.” Still overall, very few
papers exist that examine the works of female writers closely. This chapter intends to further
fill this gap by thinking about the following questions: Could these texts provide a way-out
for the notoriously stereotypical representation of women in SF written by male writers in
China? What are the struggles and challenges that these authors face? This chapter answers these
questions by examining some representative texts by these female writers and comparing them
to several texts by male writers in China.
Chinese Female Writers in Perspective

While certainly many select early texts by women from the Anglophone world mentioned
elsewhere in this volume can be labeled feminist (e.g., Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy [1892] and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland [1915]), the subgenre Feminist SF coincided with the
emergence of a comparatively larger number of female writers during the New Wave in the
1960s and 1970s. The case is different in China. Since the advent of SF in China during the
late Qing period (around 1890 to 1912),2 this genre has been largely dominated by men. The
twenty-first century is the first time in the history of Chinese SF when a large number of female
writers have been both prolific and influential. Nonetheless, it would be a serious mistake to
equate, in any sense, this phenomenon to the rise of female writers during the New Wave in the
West or to try to understand the former via the latter. For one thing, Feminist SF first appeared
much earlier in China—during the late Qing period. As the concepts of equality, democracy,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082934-58 388

Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century
and freedom were introduced to late Qing China, feminist thoughts underwent the most rapid
development as well. Many influential scholars and politicians developed strategies for the
achievement of gender equality in late Qing China. For example, Liang Qichao, an outstanding
activist, educator, and scholar at that time, published countless articles about women’s rights
beginning in 1896.3 Because of the emergence of feminist thoughts in late Qing China, many
SF novels back then questioned conventional gender norms, such as foot-binding and women’s
education (or the lack of it). Some of these Feminist SF short stories and novels include Duxiaozi
Haitian’s The Stone of Nüwa (女娲石, 1904–05), Qun Zhi’s The World of Women (女子世界,
1905), Siqi Zhai’s The Rights of Women (女子权, 1907), and New Chinese Heroines (中国新女豪,
1907), among others. Compared to these earlier feminist SF texts, SF written by contemporary
Chinese women writers is surprisingly less revolutionary, in that gender issues are almost never
the central topic in them, unlike feminist SF during the New Wave in the US. One possible
reason is that gender equality is widely considered by many Chinese to be an almost finished
project in contemporary China, unlike Late Qing China or the US in the 1960s and 1970s,
although that is far from true.
Chinese SF: Largely by Men, About Men and for Men

Although contemporary Chinese women writers have not produced novel-length feminist
works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’s The Female
Man (1975), they still constitute a challenge to the Chinese SF field that is dominated by male
writers. One issue with a primarily male SF canon is that SF becomes largely stories by men,
about men, and for men: written by men, with male narrators and main characters, presenting
a world and everyone in it seen from a male perspective. As a result, women are oftentimes
reduced to mere embodiments of patriarchal gender stereotypes.
Take Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy (Three Body Problem 2008, Dark Forest 2008, and
Death’s End 2010) for an example. There are a few female characters in this trilogy, such as Ye
Wenjie, Zhuang Yan, Zhizi, Cheng Xin, Ai AA, and Shanshan Huizi. Considering the scope
of the story, the number of female characters is still disproportionately smaller than male ones.
What is more important, these female characters are either portrayed in an extremely gender
stereotypical way and/or negatively portrayed. For example, Zhuang Yan was described as “an
angel who has come from his [Luo Ji] dream” (Liu, Dark Forest, 144, emphasis added). The
words used to describe her are either “pure,” “innocent,” “naïve,” or “childlike,” “innocent
kindness” (146); “innocent smile” (147); “innocent eyes” (180); “pureness of her eyes” (151,
186); “her naïve look” (147); “her naïve eyes” (158); “she asked naively” (69); “she hopped like
a child” (160); “she said, like a child” (143); “her childlike facial expression and eyes” (145);
“her childlike soft voice” (172). She is the embodiment of the “perfect woman”—“naïve” and
“childlike”—imagined by Luo Ji, a main male character in the novel.
Coincidentally, Xiao Mi, the main female character in Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide (荒潮
2019), another major contemporary Chinese SF novel, is very similar to Zhuang Yan. She is also
a shaonv (young girl), with a “childlike and naive” face (Chen 14). Although the age of Zhuang
Yan is not specified in Dark Forest, she is described as being a “shaonv” in several places (149,
156, 161, 171). Compared to Zhuang Yan, Xiao Mi embodies more potential for challenging
and disrupting patriarchal gender norms, especially when she becomes the cyborg Xiao Mi I,
who is powerful, strong, and almost omniscient. However, this version of Xiao Mi is portrayed
to be an “aberrant” existence that needs to be eradicated (and was eradicated at the end).
Scholar Xi Liu provides a more thorough analysis of Xiao Mi in her paper. Liu demonstrates
how the novel criticizes the oppression and violence of men against women and how this can
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Mengtian Sun
be magnified by the development of technology as exemplified in the character of Xiao Mi.

However, she also points out insightfully that the real female human Xiao Mi is still largely a
two-dimensional “flat character” who “remains a representation of the gender stereotype of
woman as weak and delicate” (Xi Liu 221).
Zhuang Yan and Xiao Mi represent one major type of female character—the “innocent
girl”—in contemporary Chinese SF. Whereas they are usually portrayed in a very positive
light (and often the object of desire for male narrators), many other female characters who are
depicted as more mature and/or powerful are usually cast in a negative light. Let us return to
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy. Among the several main female characters in the trilogy, quite
a few of them are not “innocent girls.” They are knowledgeable and smart; several are scientists
who play key roles in the stories. However, they are all portrayed negatively, to different extents.
For example, Ye Wenjie, a scientist in Astrophysics, is the one who makes contact with the
Trisolarans and invites them to invade Earth. Shanshan Huizi, a top scientist in neuroscience,
also turns out to have been trying to sabotage humanity’s attempts at preventing the Trisolaran
invasion. Cheng Xin, an expert in space engineering and the successor to Luo Ji (male), who has
successfully held off the Trisolaran invasion with a mutually destructive system, fails to use the
system to deter the Trisolarans from invading Earth. Lastly, Zhizi, the Trisolaran representative
on Earth, and one of the most sinister characters in the trilogy, also appears in the form of
a woman. Almost all of these female characters who are clever and powerful are portrayed
negatively and given the role of “troublemakers.”
Rectifying Gender Misrepresentation

As can be seen, the few existing female protagonists in contemporary Chinese SF are either
“innocent girls” or “troublemakers.” However, female writers in China have made contributions
to correct this kind of gender misrepresentation. This has been noticed by some SF critics.
For example, Tang Shijia summarizes three characteristics of works by contemporary female
Chinese SF writers, including the focus on living things (especially animals and plants) instead
of machines, on emotions and feelings instead of technological extrapolations, on fantastical
elements, and a higher literary quality (212). She also notices that these female writers often
create female characters that are more “three-dimensional” compared to their male counterparts
(212). However, Tang did not pursue this idea further. In what follows, I demonstrate how these
female writers provide a more nuanced representation of women in contemporary Chinese SF
with several representative texts.
The most important contribution to SF made by these female writers simply is portraying
comparatively more female characters. Although there are also female characters in SF by male
writers, the number is much smaller. However, in titles by female authors, not only is there a
large number of female characters, they also usually occupy a central position in the stories—
for example, Yezhi in “The Rainforest” (雨林) by Chi Hui, Rosamond in “The Tomb of
Fireflies” (萤火虫之墓) and the bride in “The Rain in Erostrate” (艾罗斯特拉特的雨) by
Cheng Jingbo, Liu Yun in “Tian Sun” (天隼) and Ruo Tong in “Dawn at Mercury” (水星的黎
明) by Ling Chen, Xiao Qian in “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” (百鬼夜行街) and Xia
Di in “The Dream of Eternal Summer” (永夏之梦) by Xia Jia to name just a few.
Many of these female characters defy patriarchal gender norms and display qualities, such as
confidence, ambition, defiance, boldness, and adventurousness, that are considered masculine
traits in traditional Chinese culture. This is best exemplified in the writings of the author
Ling Chen. For example, Liu Yun in her “Tian Sun” (天隼) is a confident, capable, and
ambitious woman who aspires to become the best astronaut. In her diary she writes: “I will
390
go to space. . . But I don’t need you [the fiancé who is already an astronaut] taking care of
me, I will do even better than you” (2). At the end of the story, she does become one of the
best astronauts. Ruo Tong in Ling’s “Dawn at Mercury” (水星的黎明) is smart, bold, and
adventurous. To experience another kind of life, she gives up the comfortable life as a piano
tuner and becomes a spaceship engineer and racer. Not only has she won the first prize in
the airship design competition, but she is also determined to win the championship at the
Space Airship Race. Although every other racer followed the route recommended by the race
committee, she is bold and adventures to take another shorter, but risker route. Even though she
was disqualified for entering certain forbidden areas, she became the first person ever to watch
the dawn at Mercury.
Female writers not only provide many women characters who defy patriarchal gender
norms in SF, they also employ more female narrators. This technique enables the portrayal
of “three-dimensional” female characters. In SF that is dominated by male narrators, readers
do not see “real” women. What they see are merely the reflections of these women through
the gaze of the male narrators. Thus, in a way, women in these texts are doubly removed
from reality—they are fantasies that exist only on the lips and in the eyes of male narrators
who are mere phantoms created by male writers. However, in the stories by contemporary
Chinese female writers who often deploy female narrators, women no longer exist merely as
the other, to be described and defined by men; they have taken control and become owners
of the story. This seems like a mere authorial artistic choice, but using female narrators to
tell stories creates enormous reverberations throughout the text. In the stories surveyed, for
instance, there are fewer descriptions of women’s appearance, compared to those written
by male writers. More ink is used to describe what actions these women take and what
drives them. Thus, readers are provided deeper insight into the minds of women characters,
resulting in “three-dimensional” figures.
Another contribution of these female writers is that the power relation between the
genders in their works often challenges and even reverses those in conventional male-
dominated SF. For example, Zhuang Yan, the “perfect woman” in Liu’s Three-Body
Trilogy, is always compared to a child when interacting with Luo Ji, who later becomes
her husband. In the relationship, Zhuang Yan is an innocent child and Luo Ji is “her
castle” who protects her from worldly harm (Liu, Dark Forest, 143). Such a power dynamic
is consciously challenged by female SF writers. In Ling Chen’s “Cheers, Friend” (干杯
吧，朋友), it is men who are described as childlike and the stereotype of “the damsel
in distress” is reversed. The story is set in the far future on an abandoned Earth, which
has been heavily polluted and destroyed by humanity. Sirius, the main male character,
is an interstellar scholar interested in Earth studies. One day, as he and a team of other
scholars are investigating Earth, they hear the sound of singing coming from a cave: “Such a
beautiful voice must come from a beautiful maiden. The weapons that we have brought are
enough to kill a herd of mammoths, so we naturally must save the damsel in distress” (107).
However, what looks like another addition to the classic story of heroic masculinity turns
out to be a caricature of it. As they move further inside the dark cave, the singing voice
suddenly disappears, and they are attacked by a giant monster. As Sirius is trying to escape,
he catches sight of a woman sitting calmly inside the cave. He runs towards her, crying
out for help. She looks at him (although she is blind): “[she] measuring me with her mind,
instead of her eyes; I was bewildered and anxious like a child before her” (108, emphasis
added). The woman starts singing again and the beasts all settle down and go back to their
caves. As it turns out, it is she who saved him; it is he who is childlike; she is not a “damsel
in distress,” and these men are not heroic saviors.
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Mengtian Sun
Challenges Facing Chinese Women SF Writers

Despite the various contributions by contemporary Chinese female SF writers, the general
Chinese public’s reception and scholarly criticism of their works are still hindered by gender
stereotypes. For example, in many interviews and news articles introducing these female
writers, they are often referred to as “meinv kehuan zuojia” (hottie women SF writers). It
is understandable that reporters and reviewers find it necessary to emphasize their identity as
women writers, considering the genre of SF is still largely dominated by male writers in China.
Nonetheless, the label “meinv” reduces women to the status of sexual object and insults the
significant contributions that they have made as writers. Even though not all articles label them
“meinv kehuan zuojia,” most critics interpret their works with vague words that are commonly
associated with femininity. For example, Xia Jia’s “The Bottle to Contain the Fairy” (关妖精
的瓶子) was described as “having the xiaoqingxin [brisk and fresh quality] unique to a young
girl” (You). Elsewhere, her writing is described as “filled with lingdong [ethereal and brisk] and
tenderness unique to women” (Wang 10). Similarly, Ling Chen’s works are also described by
Wu Yan, a famous SF critic in China, as “containing both forward thinking and the tenderness
unique of women” on the back cover of her book Leave Earth.
One recurrent word that appears in almost every interview, review, news article, and even
some academic papers, is the word “xini.” Its meaning is extremely hard to pin down and there
is no exact corresponding translation of this expression in English. It can mean fine, smooth,
delicate, attentive to detail, subtle, among others, depending on the context. This word in
Chinese is often used to indicate a feminine feature. In almost all the articles on Chinese
women writers, their works are described as being “xini,” with no one ever explaining what
exactly “xini” means in relation to narrative writing. For example, one article, “Ling Chen: The
Perfect Combination of Realism and Romance,” mentions that Ling Chen (meaning “before
dawn”) chose this as her pen name because her real name is too feminine. It is obvious that
Ling Chen does not want her work to be perceived based on her gender. However, the article
goes on to do exactly that: “Although Ling Chen wants to hide her feminine identity, her xini
quality cannot be hidden. Readers can feel the soft tenderness in her works that is like water.”
On the back cover of Ling Chen’s book Leave Earth, several reviewers used the mysterious
word “xini” to describe her works: “Ling Chen’s SF is both xini and vast” (by Han Song);
“Ling Chen’s SF is xini and contains the flavors of life” (by Yao Haijun). Similarly other female
writers have also been described as being “xini.” For example, “As one of the few female SF
writers, Zhao Haihong, with her xini and rich emotions, is a master at romance” (Zhang Jing).
Nian Yu, another female SF writer, is described as “having a passion to use a xini writing style
that is unique to women to portray stories of a vast worldview” (Zhang Jing). Even though
it is obvious that the word “xini” is intended as a compliment for these women, this kind of
interpretation of their works reduces them to mere embodiments of femininity.
It seems no matter what contribution, what innovation, what revolution contemporary
Chinese female SF writers showcase in their works, readers end up only seeing femininity
in them. This might be the reason why many contemporary Chinese female writers do not
like being identified as “female” writers. For example, Xia Jia dislikes being labeled a “hottie
women writer” (You); Zhao Haihong has been hailed as “the Princess of Chinese SF,” but she
hates this title, saying that “even in dreams, I don’t want to be a princess; characters like Mulan
are much more suitable for me” (Zhang Jing). On the other hand, there are also writers who
consciously identify themselves as “female writers” and devote themselves to the telling of
“women’s stories.” For example, Cheng Jingbo states in an interview that although there are no
essential differences between the genders, gender is still a powerful social sign that filters and
392
influences our interaction with ourselves, others, and the society; she considers it her duty to
show in her work how women experience the world (Xue).
Conclusion
No matter what attitude they take—either rejecting or welcoming the label of “female writer,”
women have been making tremendous contributions to the rejuvenation and renovation of
contemporary Chinese SF, especially in correcting gender misrepresentation. As demonstrated
in the analysis of stories by Ling Chen, she provides readers images of “real” women instead of
“innocent girls” or “troublemakers.” They are the rebels who sabotage the patriarchal machine
that processes subjects into binary phantoms—“man” and “woman”—and tries to dispose of
those “defect” products, though in vain (because everyone is a “defect”). Without doubt, it is
not just women’s duty to question and overthrow patriarchal gender norms; some male writers
have also realized the lack of exploration of gender issues in contemporary Chinese SF and are
willing to make changes (Chen, “Feminist Writing in SF”). Although both Feminist SF writing
and scholarly criticism in China are still rare compared to the Anglophone world, there is reason
to believe that the future is bright.
Notes
1 All Chinese names that appear in this chapter follow the Chinese convention, with the given/first
name following the family name.
2 The Future of New China (新中国未来记, 1902) by Liang Qichao, a famous scholar and political
reformer, is widely considered to be the first Chinese SF novel.
3 Some of these articles include “Discussions on the Reforms: on Women’s Studies” (变法通议: 论女
学, 1896), “Getting Rid of Foot Binding” (戒缠足会叙, 1896), “Against Marrying Young” (禁早婚
议, 1902), “Human Rights and Women’s Rights” (人权与女权, 1922) (Meng and Sun, 1).
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INDEX
100, The (television show) 79 – 80, 84 “Amor Vincit Foeminam” (Russ) 180
2064: Read Only Memories (video game) 213 Amy-Chinn, Dee 234
Ancillary Justice (Leckie) 72, 76 – 77, 147 – 148
Aaron, Michele 235 – 236 “And Be Merry . . .” (MacLean) 321
Achebe, Chinua 244 Anders, Charlie Jane 15, 25, 67, 69 – 70
Ackerman, Erin M. Pryor 202 Anderson, Edith 138, 141 – 143
Adam, Alison 242 – 243 Anderson, James 326 – 327
Adams, Rachel 242, 244 – 245 Anderson, Michael 339
Addams, Jane 322 Anderson, Poul 359
Adventures in Time and Space anthology 5 Anderson, Susan Janice 6
Æon Flux (Kusama) 170 “Android Kill for Me” (Wilhelm) 319
Afro-Future Females anthology 7, 24, 302 Andymon (Steinmüller and Steinmüller) 340
Afrofuturism 68, 277 – 281, 325, 330 AngeLINK series (Morehouse) 170
Against a Dark Background (Banks) 91 Anhut, Anjin 211
Against the Law of the World (Gegen das animal studies 65 – 70
Weltgesetz, Laßwitz) 366 anime: entry into US markets during 1980s of
Age of the Machine. Lectures from the Future, The 283; fan art on social media and 287 – 289;
(Das Maschinenzeitalter, von Suttner) 366 futanari (androgynous characters) in 286 – 288;
Ahmed, Sarah 235, 239, 345 hentai genre (tentacle erotica) and 208, 270,
Alas, Babylon (Frank) 82 283 – 288; Orientalist gaze and 284; queer
Alderman, Naomi 304, 306 – 309 speculation and 285 – 286, 288 – 289; shōjo
Aldiss, Brian 23 (young female time traveler) in 208, 293 – 298
Algebraist, The (Banks) 87 – 93 Antebi, Susan 386
Algoso, Theresa 286 Anthony, Piers 155
“Alien Cryptographies” (Pearson) 49 – 50 Antifeminists, The (Die Antifeministen, Dohm) 367
Aliens and Others (Wolmark) 24 Apocalypse 101 (television show) 82
Allan, Kathryn 24, 97 Apocalypse Preppers (television show) 85
“All Hail the Trans Cyborg” (Reddit thread) 125 Aqueduct Press 8
All Systems Red (Martha Wells) 95, 97, 145 Archaeologies of the Future (Jameson) 183
Al-Maria, Sophia 25, 110 – 111 ArchAndroid, The (Monáe) 276
Al Qadiri, Fatima 110 Archangel Protocol (Morehouse) 170
Altered Carbon (Morgan) 89, 225 Archangels of Funk (Hairston) 16
Altermundos anthology 7 Archive of Our Own 215
Amazons! anthology 23 Ares, Silvia G. Kurlat 8
Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Singh) 163 Arnason, Eleanor 67, 255 – 256, 258 – 260
“American SF and the Other” (Le Guin) 6 – 7 Arnold, Jack 272
Amin, Kadji 301 Artificial Condition (Martha Wells) 98 – 99
395
Index
artificial intelligence (AI): African women Baudelaire, Charles 200

interacting with feminized forms of 241 – 246; Baumgardner, Jennifer 8
The Algebraist and 92 – 93; disability studies and BBBP scheme (Save Daughters, Educate
97; feminist epistemology and 242; Murderbot Daughters; India) 161
Diaries series and 95, 97 – 99; sentient artificial BCE (Al-Maria) 110 – 111
intelligence and 250 – 252; slavery and 241; Bear, Elizabeth 122, 170
Wayfarers series and 313 Beast with a Million Eyes, The (Kramarsky) 270
Artificial Knowing (Adam) 242 Beauvoir, Simone de 303, 351
Ashby, Madeline 170 “Beet Harvest Festival, The” (Gloger) 139 – 140
Asimov, Isaac 3, 102, 337, 359 Bell, Andrea L. 6
Assassin’s Creed franchise (video games) 212 Bellamy, Edward 292 – 293, 328
Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (Cavendish) 377 Bell in Campo (Cavendish) 377
Attebery, Brian: on asexuality in The Left Hand of Bending the Landscape anthology 6
Darkness 74 – 75; Decoding Gender in Science Fiction Bengal Renaissance 162
and 24, 87, 302; on gendering of men 87; on Best of Science Fiction anthologies, The 5
The Left Hand of Darkness and gender 146; on Bête (Roberts) 381 – 386
masculinity in superhero stories 358 – 359, 361, Bewitched (television show) 295
363; queer non-sequitur and 256, 258 Beyoncé 279
Attebery, Stina 226 Beyond Gender Collective 41 – 47, 108
Atwood, Margaret: Alderman and 306; on Beyond the Gender Binary anthology 6, 50
factual basis for hierarchy and inequality in The Biden, Jill 304
Handmaid’s Tale 35, 306 – 307, 308; on female Binti series (Okorafor) 68 – 69
genital mutilation in television adaptation of biomythography (Lorde) 103
The Handmaid’s Tale 348; see also Handmaid’s Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century
Tale, The (Atwood novel) Speculative Fiction (Vint) 24
Audition, The (Monáe) 277 Bioware (video game company) 212 – 215
Aurora: Beyond Equality anthology 6 BIPOC people: anti-Asian stereotypes and 284;
autism: feminism and 97; gender presentation Asian diaspora science fiction writers and 18;
and 97 – 98; LGBTQ+ people and 96; literary Black feminism and 103, 197 – 198, 200, 203,
criticism and 97; Murderbot Diaries series and 305, 325 – 330; Black womanist science fiction
96 – 98; queer science fiction and 54 – 55; social heroines and 102, 104 – 107; Black women’s
standards and 96; Steven Universe and 157; sexual desire and 122, 197 – 202; cyberpunk
Wayfarers series and 312 and 120, 229; hostility and discrimination
Autonomous (Newitz) 120 – 121, 125 – 129, 171 against 3 – 4, 122, 168, 284; increasing visibility
“Aye, and Gomorrah” (Delany) 51, 72, 75 – 76 in science fiction of 3, 121 – 122; Indigenous-
Aziz, Razia 348 led environmental restoration and 132;
intersectionality and 157, 276; postapocalyptic
Bacon, Francis 373 science fiction’s exclusions of 83; science
Bacon, Simon 8 fiction anthologies featuring 6 – 7, 24;
Badami, Mary Kenny 7, 24 subjectivity and 119, 122; transatlantic slave
Badu, Erykah 278 – 279 trade 102, 106, 201
Bagatell, Nancy 97 Birns, Nicholas 186
Bahl, Erin Kathleen 297 “Birth of a Gardner, The” (Bleier) 323
Bahng, Aimee 69 – 70 Birthstones (Gotlieb) 36 – 38
“Ballad of Lost C’Mell” (Smith) 198 Bishop, Michael 339
Ballard, J.G. 33 Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading
Banerjee, Suparno 162 Pornography, The (Nash) 197, 203
Banks, Iain M. 87 – 88, 90 – 93, 180 “Black Feminist Statement, A” (Combahee River
Bantinaki, Katerina 345 Collective) 103
“Barbie Murders, The” (Valery) 178 Black Man (Morgan) 89, 91
Barclay, Bridget 8 Black Mirror (television show) 222
Barr, Marleen S. 7, 24, 169, 302 Black No More (Schuyler) 328
Barron, Lee 234, 236 – 238 Blade Runner (film by Ridley Scott): Batty’s speech
Barrowman, John 234, 236 on ephemerality of life in 119; cyberpunk
Bartini, Francesca T. 7 fashion and 225 – 226; Dirty Computer and 276,
Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, The 279 – 280; misogyny in 169, 173; soundtrack of
(Larbalestier) 24, 302 279; When Fox Is a Thousand and 184
396
Index
Blade Runner 2019 (Green, Johnson and Guinaldo) Burning World, The (Ballard) 33
172 Burrows, David 108
Blade Runner 2029 (Green, Johnson and Guinaldo) Bush, George W. 359
172 – 173 Bush Warbler’s Home, The (Japanese traditional
Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve) 170, 173 story) 296
Blake, Linnie 234, 236 – 237 Butler, Judith 65, 72 – 73, 178, 256, 258
Blake; or, The Huts of America (Delany) 325 – 326 Butler, Octavia E.: animal studies and 67; Black
Blazing World, The (Cavendish): animal studies women’s sexual desire in the works of 122,
and 65; Cavendish as metafictional character in 197 – 198, 201 – 202; cyberpunk and 169; “femi-
375 – 376; dimension travel in 3, 375 – 376; Empress queer commons” and 69; influence on other
leadership style and 302, 374 – 377; inversion of writers of 15, 109, 112
gender in 376 – 377; opening of 374, 377 Buy Me a Gun (Comprame un Revolver,
Bleier, Ruth 323 Hernández Cardó) 269, 273 – 274
Bloch, Ernst 131 Byrne-Smith, Dan 108
Bloodchild (Butler) 108
Bodies of Tomorrow, The (Vint) 183 Cadora, Karen 168
Bodyminds Reimagined (Schalk) 24, 382 – 383 Campbell, John W. 4, 359
Bogstadt, Janice 8, 302 Canavan, Gerry 322
Bogue, Ronald 202 Canticle for Leibowitz, A (Miller) 82
“Bonehouse” (Kehrli) 52 – 53 Captain Kirk see under Star Trek: The Original Series
Booker, M. Keith 33 – 34, 160 (television show)
Book of the City of Ladies, The (de Pizan) 112 Carbé, Emmanuela 6
Booth, Austin 7 Carmen Dog (Emshwiller) 65, 67
“Bottle to Contain the Fairy, The” (Xia Jia) 392 Carr, Terry 5
Boucher, Anthony 5 Carrier Bag Music series 110
Bourke, Liz 98 Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, The (Le Guin)
Bova, Ben 339 110 – 111
Bown, Alfie 211 Carson, Rachel 34, 338
Boym, Svetlana 347 Carter, Raphael 168
Brackett, Leigh 81 – 82 Catacomb Years (Bishop) 339 – 340
Brathwaite-Shirley, Danielle 25, 110, 113 – 114 Cavalcanti, Ildney 344
Brave New World (Huxley) 273 Cave, Stephen 246
Brehmer, Arthur 367 Cavendish, Margaret: as first English woman
Bride of Frankenstein (Whale) 265 – 266 to pursue publication of her work 373; as
This Bridge Called My Back anthology 44 metafictional character in The Blazing World
Broken Angels (Netflix series) 89 375 – 376; on women and animals 65, 70; see
Broken Earth trilogy (Jemisin) 4, 38, 311 also The Blazing World (Cavendish)
Brooks, Daphne A. 279 Centenal Cycle (Older) 229
brown, adrienne maree 106 Century of the Child, The (Key) 367
Brown, Barbara 146, 149 Chalker, Jack L. 155
Brown, Helen Gurley 219, 223n1 Chambers, Becky see Wayfarers series (Chambers)
Brown, John 325 Chandrasekera, Vajra 51 – 52
Brown, Lois 327, 330n3 Chang, Edmond 249
Bruin-Molé, Megen de 221 “Changeling, The” (van Vogt) 360, 363
Brunner, John 339 Chapterhouse: Dune (Herbert) 354
Buck, Doris Pitkin 323 Charnas, Suzy McKee 66, 304, 355
“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come out Tonight” (Le “Cheerful Story of the Future” (Haupt) 369
Guin) 66 “Cheers, Friend” (Ling Chen) 391
Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Le Guin) Cheng, Kai 133
65 – 66 Cheng Jingbo 388, 390, 392
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (television show) 234 Chen Qian 388
Bujold, Lois McMaster 283 Chen Qiufan 388 – 390
Bunker, Lisa 52 – 53 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 332
Buran, Sumeyra 7 Cherryh, C. J. 15, 23
Burke, Kenneth 256, 259 Chicken Run (film) 260
Burn, Andrew 213 Chi Hui: on China’s restrictions on individual self-
“Burning Chrome” (Gibson) 167 determination 191; critical engagement with
397
Index
traditional Chinese gender norms in science Critical Essays on Angela Carter (Tucker) 8
fiction of 190 – 195, 390; feminist utopia in the Crone, Bridget 111 – 112
works of 194; redistribution of reproductive Cruising Utopia (Muñoz) 276 – 277
responsibilities in the works of 192, 195 Crystal Palace (London) 332
Children of Dune (Herbert) 353 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan 297
children’s science fiction 153 – 158 Culture series (Banks) 91
Chimera (Rosenblum) 168 Curse of Frankenstein, The (Fisher) 266 – 267
China Mountain Zhang (McHugh) 168 cyberpunk: as allegory for transgender 171;
Chinese science fiction: Communist regime’s BIPOC people and 120, 229; comic books and
promise of gender equality and 195; female 171 – 172; corporate global economy and 226,
characters defying patriarchal norms 229; fashion and 209, 226 – 232; feminist-queer
in 390 – 391, 393; marriage markets in cyberpunk and 167 – 173; LGBTQ+ people and
contemporary China and 193; traditional 120, 229, 231; male gaze and 225 – 232; mind
Chinese gender roles and 120, 190 – 195, alteration and 167, 226; Mirrorshades and 167;
389 – 390; women writers in 190 – 195, 388 – 393 origins of 167; white male apocalyptic folklore
Chi-Yun Shin 284 and 80; women authors and 120
Chng, Joyce 11 – 12, 14 – 18 Cyberpunk 2077 (video game) 214, 249
Chrono Trigger (video game) 212 Cybersexualities anthology 7
Chude-Sokei, Louis 241, 245 Cyborg Feminism anthology 7
“Cindi” (Monáe) 277 “Cyborg Manifesto, A” (Haraway) 42, 126
City of Darkness (Bova) 339
Clarke, Adele 31 Dahlquist, Joel 285
Clarke, Hannah Abigail 305 Dangerous Visions anthologies 5, 51
Clarke, Mae 264 Dark Continent series (Shani) 111 – 112
Clements, Jonathan 283 Darker Than You Think (Williamson) 361, 363
Cleto, Sara 297 Dark Forest (Liu Cixin) 389, 391
climate change science fiction 33 – 34 Dark Matter anthology 6
Closed and Common Orbit, A (Chambers) 313 “Daughters of Earth” (Merrill) 337
Cloudpunk (video game) 213 Daughters of Earth anthology 8
collaborative worldbuilding 109 – 114 Daughters of the Future anthology 7
collective close reading 42, 44, 46 David, Marlo 279
Colony, The (television show) 79 – 80, 82, 84 – 85 Davies, Russell T. 234, 236
Combahee River Collective 103 Davin, Eric 302
“Come on Wagon!” (Henderson) 320 Dawn (Butler) 201 – 203
“Coming Apart” (Walker) 102 “Dawn at Mercury” (Ling Chen) 390 – 391
Companions, The (Tepper) 67 Day After Tomorrow, The (Folsom) 33
Company Town (Ashby) 170 Death’s Problem (Liu Cixin) 389
Confucius 190, 192, 194 – 195 de Bruyn, Günter 139
Conklin, Groff 5 Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (Attebery) 24,
Connell, Raewyn 87 – 88, 93, 358 87, 302
Connor, Jay 129 Deep, The (Solomon) 15, 108
Cooley, Kevin 157 Defiance (television show) 79
Cooper, Brittney 305 – 306 De Ford, Miriam Allen 322
Cooper, Davina 345 Delany, Martin 325 – 326
Cornelius, Michael G. 8 Delany, Samuel R.: asexuality and 72, 75 – 77; on
Cortiel, Jeanne 135 feminist cyberpunk 167 – 168, 226 – 227; New
Cosmo and the Robot (Pinkney) 154 Wave science fiction and 50 – 51; queer identity
Cosmos Latinos anthology 6 of 23, 51; queer science fiction and 25, 51 – 52;
Couvreu, André 180 on reading words as science fiction 114; on
Covid-19 pandemic 45 science fiction’s presentation of “significant
Cox-Palmer-White, Emily 211 distortions of the present” 131; subjunctivity
Crawley, Karen 343, 348 and 257
“Crazy Classic Life” (Monáe) 279 – 281 Del Toro, Guillermo 269, 272
Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold) 272 De Rosso, Ezequiel 8
Creed, Barbara 288 Derrida, Jacques 190, 195
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 6, 24, 121, 156, 276 Desire in the Age of Robots and AI (Gibson) 245
Crip Times (McRuer) 382 – 383 Deus Ex video games 211
398
Index
Dexter’s Laboratory (television show) 154 Eason, K. 150

Dhaenens, Frederik 234, 237 Ebel, Alex 336, 337
Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone) 352 ecocriticism: Birthstones and 36 – 38; Ecofeminism
Diamond, Irene 38 in Dialog anthology and 8; The Fifth Season and
Dick, Philip K. 80, 97, 361 38 – 40; The Handmaid’s Tale and 35 – 36; The
Dihal, Kanta 246 Obilisk Gate and 39; O Master Caliban! and 37
Dillon, Grace 6 Edelman, Lee 31, 122, 131 – 132
Dillon, Sarah 246 Edwards, Kit 111
Dirty Computer (Monáe) 170, 208, 276, 279 – 281 Electric Lady, The (Monáe) 276, 278
disability in science fiction: artificial intelligence and Ellison, Harlan 5
97; Bête and 381 – 386; crip methodologies and El-Mohtar, Amal 305 – 306
382 – 383; gender and 97 – 98; intersectionality Eloquent Rage (Cooper) 305 – 306
and 157 – 158, 382; prosthesis and 381, 383, 385; Emshwiller, Carol 25, 65, 67
science fiction literary criticism and 24; Sphinx’s Encyclopedia of Amazons, The 23
riddle and 380 – 383, 385; Steven Universe and Enlightenment, The 185
157 – 158; see also autism Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick) 65
Disability in Science Fiction anthology 24, 97 “Eruption” (Goh) 13
Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color Erwin, Elizabeth 7
(Sanchez-Taylor) 24 Escalante, Amat 269 – 271
“Django Jane” (Monáe) 280 – 281 Escape (Padmanabhan) 164
Doan, Petra L. 129 Escapology (Warom) 170, 231
Dohm, Hedwig 366 – 367 Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, The (Gumbs) 104
dome cultures: biopolitics and 339 – 341; Crystal Ethnographies of the Videogame (Thornham) 215
Palace and 332; glasshouses and 338; as “Evidence” (Gumbs) 25, 102, 104 – 106
hermetic environments for women 333, 334, eXistenZ (Cronenberg) 169
335, 336, 337; Pulp Era and 332 – 333; science Exit Strategy (Martha Wells) 99
fiction films of 1970s and 339 – 340; urban extra-sensory perception (ESP) 319 – 320, 360
planning fantasies and 333 Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years (Rhine) 320
Dominik, Hans 366
Donawerth, Jane 8, 24, 38, 302 Factora, James 218
Doomsday Castle (television show) 79, 82 Fallen London (video game) 213
Doomsday Preppers (television show) 79, 82 – 84 Falling in Love with Hominids (Hopkinson)
Dorman, Nerine 6 198 – 199, 202, 203
Dorsey, Candas Jane 168 Falling Skies (television show) 79 – 80, 84
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 332 Fallout 2 (video game) 212
Dowdall, Lisa 201 Fallout 4 (video game) 214
Dowsett, Gary W. 207 Family Tree, The (Tepper) 67
Dragon Pearl (Lee) 153 – 156, 158 Far Cry 6 (video game) 212
Dragon’s Island (Williamson) 361 – 363 Farghaly, Nadine 8
“Dream of Eternal Summer, The” (Xia Jia) 390 Far Out anthology 6
Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (Hokusai) 270 Faszer-McMahon, Debra 8
Drew, Kimberly 18 “Fate of the Poseidonia, The” (Harris) 319
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson) 273 Fausto-Sterling, Anne 180
Drowned World, The (Ballard) 33 Fayad, Mona 149
Dr. Who (television show) 234 – 236 Fear the Walking Dead (television show) 79
Duchamp, L. Timmel 8 Federmayer, Éva 202
Dune series (Herbert): Chapterhouse: Dune and Feersum Endjinn (Banks) 91
354; Children of Dune and 353; Dune Messiah Felix Yz (Bunker) 52
and 353 – 354; film (1984) based on 111; God Female Man, The (Russ): cyberpunk and 167 – 168,
Emperor of Dune and 354; Heretics of Dune and 226 – 227; feminist superhero in 304; queer
354; women leaders in 302, 351 – 354; women’s eroticism and 135; queer non-sequitur and
sexuality in 352, 354 255 – 260; queer utopianism and 134 – 135;
Dunn, Eli 157 second-wave feminism and 355; separatist
Dunwich Horror, The (Haller) 270 utopias imagined in 66, 134
Duval, Jeanne 200 Female Masculinity (Halberstam) 222
Duxiaozi Haitian 389 “Female Orations” (Cavendish) 65
Dworkin, Ira 327 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 219, 351
399
Index
feminism: Afro-feminism and 246; animal studies Frankenstein’s Daughters (Donawerth) 24

and 65 – 70; autism and 97; Black feminism Frankisstein: A Love Story (Winterson) 268
and 103, 197 – 198, 200, 203, 305, 325 – 330; “Freedom of the Race” (McCaffrey) 321
climate change science fiction and 33 – 34; Freire, Mozart 171
clothing and 225 – 232; cyborg feminism and “Frequency of Compassion, The” (Wolfmoor) 55
7, 42; ecological feminism and 30; feminist Friedan, Betty 219, 303, 351
epistemology and 242; feminist science fiction Friend, Beverly 24
super heroes and 304 – 309; The Handmaid’s Fuller, Richard Buckminster 338 – 339
Tale (television series) and 25 – 30, 32, 345; futanari (androgynous characters in anime)
intersectionality and 6, 156 – 158; lesbianism 286 – 288
and 28; motherhood and 34, 36; patriarchy Future Females anthology 7, 24, 302
and 87 – 88, 91 – 93; personal agency and 32; Future Impermanent Workshop (Beyond Gender
science fiction art and 108 – 114; science fiction Collective) 44
literary criticism and 6 – 8, 23 – 24; second- Future is Female! anthology, The 6
wave feminism and 28, 67, 351 – 356; theories
of temporality and 112; white feminism and Galactic Suburbia (Yaszek) 24
348 – 349 Galaxy and the Ground Within, The (Chambers)
“Feminist Critique of Science Fiction, A” 180, 312, 314 – 315
(Badami) 7, 24 Galaxy Quest (Parisot) 221 – 222
Feminist Queer Crip (Kaper) 381 Gamergate controversy (2014) 3
Feminist Science Fiction: Imagining Gender in gaming see video games
Contemporary Italian Culture (anthology) Garber, Eric 7
7 – 8, 302 Garcia, Eric 97
Feminist Utopias anthology 8 gaze, the: colonial gaze and 185, 200; gender
FEMSPEC (journal) 24 identity and 127; “Kirk’s gaze” and 219 – 220;
Fernbach, Amanda 91, 93 male gaze and 215, 219 – 220, 225 – 232, 293,
Fifth Element, The (Besson) 170, 225 295, 304, 391; Orientalist gaze and 185, 284;
Fifth Season, The (Jesmin) 38 – 40 white gaze and 184
Fine, Cordelia 177, 179 Gearheart, Sally Miller 66, 353
Finnerman, Gerry 219 gender: autism and 97 – 98; Autonomous and 120,
Firestone, Shulamith 352 125 – 129; cyborgs and 120, 126; discrimination
First Lensman (Smith) 360 – 361 and 17; European cultures and 13; fluidity
Fisher, Terrence 266 and 13, 74, 120, 177 – 179, 359; the gaze and
Five Generations Hence (Horace) 328 – 329 fixing of 127; German Democratic Republic
Flanagan, Mary 7 science fiction and 139 – 143; Indian science
Folsom, Allan 33 fiction and 120 – 121, 161 – 166; pronouns and
Foote, Bud 153, 158 98, 121, 125 – 126; science fiction video games
Forecast: Disaster (television show) 82 and 210 – 216; sex and 146 – 147, 149, 177;
Fortunate Fall (Carter) 168 somatechnics and 126; subjectivity and 120,
Foucault, Michel 176, 316 122; trans people and 120, 124 – 129, 175 – 181;
Foundation series (Asimov) 102 violence and 13
Frank, Marietta 154 Gender, Power and Reversal in Contemporary Anglo-
Frank, Pat 82 American and French Feminist Science Fiction
Frankel, Valerie E. 7 (Bogstadt) 8, 302
Frankenstein (Shelley): artificial reproduction plot Gender and Environment in Science Fiction
in 262; dramatic and film adaptations of 209, anthology 8
264 – 267; feminist science fiction art and 108; Gendered Cyborg anthology, The 7
Genesis creation myth and 262 – 263, 265; Gendered Future anthology 7
homoerotic readings of 265 – 266; influence on Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and
science fiction authors of 267 – 268, 365; mad Science Fiction anthology 7
science archetype and 3, 265; morbidity of “Gender Transformation” (“Geschlechtertausch,”
Frankenstein’s desire in 263 – 264; narcissism of de Bruyn) 139
Victor Frankenstein in 263; Western patriarchal Gender Trouble (Butler) 65
ideology and 262 – 263 Geraci, Robert 244, 249
Frankenstein (Whale, film from 1941) 264 – 266 German Democratic Republic (GDR): gender
Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster! (Milner) transformation in science fiction stories in
264 – 265 139 – 143; matriarchy in science fiction stories
400
Index
in 140 – 141; patriarchal norms in 138 – 139, “Habit of Waste, A” (Hopkinson) 199

141 – 143, 180; socialism’s equalizing promises Hackers (film) 168
in 139 – 140; tightly controlled communication Haibane Renmei (Japanese anime series) 296
in 138 Hairston, Andrea 11 – 18
Gernsback, Hugo 207 Haiven, Max 30
Gibson, Rebecca 245 Halberstam, Jack: on cultural ratification of
Gibson, William: cyberpunk and 167 – 168, 171, masculinity 222; on low theory 257; on
226; disability studies and literary criticism neoliberal integration of queer subjects 59 – 60,
of 97; fashion in the works of 226 – 227, 63; queer non-sequitur and 256, 259 – 260;
229 – 231 on queer subcultures and alternative
Gil, Joamette 17 temporalities 185
Gilbert, Sandra 263 Hammack, Phillip L. 11
Gillis, Stacy 227 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood novel): anti-
Gill-Peterson, Jules 177 queerness in 30; Atwood on factual basis
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 15, 388 for patriarchy in 35, 306 – 307, 308; coerced
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 47 reproduction in 35, 310 – 311, 343; ecocriticism
Ginn, Sherry 8 and 35 – 36; fascist and patriarchal regime in
“Girl in the Glass Sphere, The” (Moreira) 30, 34 – 35, 311, 343; feminism and 36; relative
335, 337 inattention to issues of race in 29 – 31; violence
Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The (Toki wo against women in 30 – 31
Kakeru Shojo, Hosoda) 292, 297 Handmaid’s Tale, The (television series): aerial
“Girl Who Was Plugged In, The” (Tiptree) 168 shots in 26 – 27; “After” episode of 27; coerced
Gjelsvik, Anne 7 reproduction in 26, 28 – 32; dystopianism and
Glass Houses (Mixon) 168 26, 344 – 348; ecocritism and 31 – 32; female
Gleick, James 292 genital mutilation in 348; feminism and 25 – 30,
Glitch Feminism (Russell) 112 32, 345; “God Bless This Child” episode of
Glittership series 50 27; “Heroic” episode of 29; indigenous logics
Gloger, Gotthold 139 – 140 and 30 – 31; intersectionality and 27 – 29;
Głowacka, Maria 302 “Night” episode of 28; protests inspired by 4,
God Emperor of Dune (Herbert) 354 27, 343 – 348; queer characters in 28, 30; queer
Godwin, Francis 373 – 374 radicalism and 30 – 32; relative inattention to
Gofette, Jérôme 179 race in 28 – 30, 32, 347 – 348; revenge fantasies
Goh, Jaymee 8, 11 – 18 and 29 – 30; “Unfit” episode of 29; violence
Golden Globe, The (Varley) 178 against women and 26 – 31
“Golden Man, The” (Dick) 361, 363 Hanna, Kathleen 225 – 226
“Good Message from Valeska in 73 Stanzas” Han Song 388, 392
(“Gute Botschaft der Valeska in 73 Strophen,” Hao Jingfang 388
Morgner) 142 – 143 Haraway, Donna: anthologies edited by 31; cyborg
Goodwin, Barbara 346 feminism and 7, 42, 126 – 127, 278; on cyborgs
Goonan, Kathleen Ann 341 and the blurring of lines between physical
Gordon, Joan 7, 302 and non-physical 249; on kinship making and
Gore Capitalism (Valencia) 269, 273 kinship networks 44 – 47, 68; on patriarchy’s
Gothic Remixed (Bruin-Molé) 221 “narcissistic technophilia” 263
Gotlieb, Phyllis 36 – 38 Harbors of the Sun, The (Martha Wells) 95 – 96
Goto, Hiromi 122, 135 – 136 Harper, Frances E. W. 325 – 329, 388
Gould, Deborah 345 Harris, Clare Winger 3, 23, 319
Grantham, Michael 88, 93 Harrison, Harry 33
Green, Michael 172 Hashimoto, Kazuma 214
Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction Hassler-Forest, Dan 109
and Fantasy 8 Hastings, A. Waller 153
Griffith, Nicola 8 Haupt, Theresa 369 – 371
Grillmayr, Julia 170 Haushofer, Marlen 337 – 338
Gubar, Susan 263 Haver, William 49
Guinaldo, Andres 172 Hawaii 16 – 17
Gulf Futurism 110 He, She, and It (aka Body of Glass, Piercy) 168,
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline 25, 102, 104 – 106 227, 267 – 268
Guran, Paula 6 Healy, Raymond J. 5
401
Index
“Heat Death of Human Arrogance” (Téllez) “I Like That” (Monáe) 281

54 – 55 “Image of Women in Science Fiction, The”
Heaven Will Be Mine (visual novel) 213 (Russ) 6
Heinlein, Robert 102 Images From the Future (Bilder aus der Zukunft,
Heinze, Ulrich 292 Laßwitz) 365, 368, 370
Helmer, Der-Shing 17 Imarisha, Walidah 102
Hench (Walschot) 305 Imperial Radch trilogy (Leckie) 72, 76,
Henderson, Zenna 320 145, 147
hentai (anime tentacle erotica genre) 208, 270, In a Queer Time and Place (Halberstam) 59 – 60
283 – 288 Indian science fiction: gender bias in Indian
Herbert, Frank see Dune series (Herbert) culture and 120 – 121, 161 – 166; Kalpavigyan
Heretics of Dune (Herbert) 354 and 161, 166; Muslim women in India and
Herland (Gilman) 15, 388 161 – 162; queer science fiction and 53
hermaphrodites (androgyny) 73 – 74, 121, 146, Infomocracy (Older) 229 – 231
180 – 181, 286 Ingraham, Laura 124 – 125, 129
Hernández Cardó, Julio 269, 273 – 274 Ink (Vourvoulias) 305
Hewlett, Jamie 171 Inseminoid (Warren) 270
Higgins, David M. 171 – 172 intersectionality: BIPOC people and 157, 276;
Highgate, Edmonia 326 disability and 157 – 158, 382; feminism and
Hild, Eva 9 6, 156 – 158; The Handmaid’s Tale and 27 – 29;
Hills, Matt 235 – 236 introduction of the concept of 6, 24, 121, 156;
Hirsch, Marianne 186 Matrix movie series and 25; science fiction for
Hoard, Christian 278 children and 153 – 158
Höhler, Sabine 339 intersex people 15 – 16, 18, 54, 58, 73 – 74, 177,
Hokusai 270 180, 213, 286
Holden, Rebecca J. 8 In the Chinks of the World Machine (Lefanu) 24
Holland-Cunz, Barbara 8 Into Darkness Peering anthology 24
Hollinger, Veronica 7, 75, 151, 302 “Into the 28th Century” (Lorraine) 320, 322
“Homecalling” (Merril) 320 Into the Badlands (television show) 79, 84
Hopkins, Pauline 3, 325, 327 – 330 Invisible Man, The (H.G. Wells) 265
Hopkinson, Nalo: anthologies edited by 6, 62; Iola Leroy (Harper) 327, 388
Black women’s sexual desire in the works of Ireland, Andrew 235
122, 197 – 202; cyberpunk fashion in the works Isaka, Maki 286
of 228 – 229, 231, 232 “Is Gender Necessary?” (Le Guin) 145 – 146
Horace, Lillian B. 325, 328 – 330 Island of Doctor Moreau, The (H.G. Wells) 265
Horáková, Erin 220 – 223 Island of Lost Girls, The (Padmanabhan) 164
Hosoda Mamoru 297 Iung, Matthew 171 – 172
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat 161 – 165 Izumi, Suzuki 293
Hothouse World, The (MacIsaac) 338, 340
Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead (Pugh) 172 Jade Empire (film) 213
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (Tiptree) 304 Jagose, Annamarie 49
Hovenden, Fiona 7 Jakobs, Karl-Heinz 140 – 141
“How Captain Kirk Helped Me Define Jameson, Fredric 70 – 71, 183, 292, 347 – 348
Masculinity” (Factora) 218 Janaína Overdrive (Freire) 171
How Little Else Went to Look for the Christ Child Janes, Linda 7
(Wie Klein-Else das Christkind suchen ging, Jemisin, N.K. 4, 38 – 39, 170, 311
Haupt) 369 Jen, Gish 305
Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayo) 296 Jeremiah (television show) 79 – 80, 82
How to Survive the End of the World (television Jericho (television show) 79 – 84
show) 82 Johnny Mnemonic (Gibson novel) 167, 226
Hughes, Kiku 17 Johnny Mnemonic (Longo film) 169
Hu Jintao 194 Johnson, Alaya Dawn 305
“Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight, A” (Xia) 390 Johnson, Boris 346
Hunger Games, The (film series) 343 Johnson, Mike 172
Hutcheon, Linda 221 Jones, Esther 24
Huxley, Aldous 273 Jonsson, Terese 348
Hwarhath Stories (Arnason) 67 Jurado, Cristina 7
402
Index
Kabo, Raphael 43 – 44 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier,

Kafer, Alison 381 The (Moore and O’Neill) 373, 377
Kaguya Hime (folklore tale) 3 Leave Earth (Wu Yan) 392
Kalpavigyan (Indian speculative fiction genre) Leckie, Ann 25, 72, 76 – 77, 97, 145, 147 – 148
161, 166 Lee, Eeleen 18
Kang, Nancy 136 Lee, Yoon Ha 121, 145, 148, 153 – 156
Kanne, Miriam 337 – 338 Lefanu, Sarah 24, 80
Kappa Child, The (Goto) 135 – 136 Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin): asexuality
Karloff, Boris 264 – 266 and 73 – 75; on descriptive nature of science
Keetley, Dawn 7 fiction 125; feminist science fiction art and
Kehrli, Keffy R. M. 50, 52 – 53 108, 110 – 111; gender and pronouns in 121,
Kelly, James Patrick 168 145 – 149, 180, 310
Kepler, Johannes 373 – 374 Le Guin, Ursula K.: animal studies and 65 – 67;
Ketz, Victoria L. 8 asexuality and 72 – 77; on “baboon patriarchy”
Key, Ellen 367 – 369, 371 in science fiction 6 – 7; climate change science
Khan, Sami Ahmed 163 fiction and 33; on depictions of women in
Kidd, Virginia 6 science fiction 23, 353, 356; on descriptive
Kim, Jina B. 382 nature of science fiction 125; on “the effective
Kincaid, Paul 46 action of a crew” 43; feminist science fiction art
King, Betty 302 and 108 – 111; genderless society envisioned by
Kirkup, Gill 7 145 – 146, 149, 310; influence on other writers
Kirsch, Sarah 7 of 15, 110 – 111, 310 – 311; on psychosocial
Knight, Damon 5 relationships between clones 340 – 341;
Knights of the Old Republic (Star Wars film) 213 redistribution of reproductive responsibilities in
Kolmerton, Carol 8, 302 the works of 192; Ring of Swords introduction
Kreuziger, Frederick 340 by 260; see also specific works
Krulos, Tea 83 Lemberg, R. B. 15, 55
Kurlat Ares, Silvia G. 8 Leonard, Elisabeth 24
Kuttner, Henry 5, 359 Leong, Sloane 17
Le Visionaire anthology 6
“Lab Coat” (Bleier) 323 Levitas, Ruth 44
La Blue Girl (Japanese television series) Lewis, Sophie 45, 108 – 109, 112, 114, 348
286 – 287 LGBTQ+ people: animal studies perspectives and
Laboratory of Her Own anthology, A 8 68 – 69; autism and 96; Butler’s “heterosexual
Lady Geek Girl 218 matrix” and the invisibility of 73; Communist
Lai, Larissa: anticolonial resistance in the works cultures and 16; cyberpunk and 120, 229, 231;
of 185 – 186, 188; cyberpunk and 171; Othered deadnaming and 121, 212, 251; hostility and
bodies in the works of 183 – 184, 188; queer discrimination against 3 – 4, 11, 120, 168, 179;
utopianism and 122, 132 – 134, 137; same-sex increasing visibility in science fiction of 3, 23,
desire in the works of 183 – 189 122; neoliberal systems of power and 59 – 60,
Lai, Paul 186 62; Polynesian cultures and 14; postapocalyptic
Lanchester, Elsa 266 science fiction’s exclusion of 83; pronouns and
“L’Androgyne” (Couvreu) 180 69, 76; science fiction anthologies featuring 6,
Lang, Fritz 276 – 278 17; sexual desire in science fiction depicting
Language of the Night anthology 23 183 – 189; subjectivity and 119 – 120, 122; see
Laqueur, Thomas 177 also nonbinary people; queer science fiction
Larbalestier, Justine 8, 24, 45, 73, 160, 302, 358 Li, Sinjin 43
“Last Generation, The” (Allen De Ford) 322 Liang Qichao 389
Last Jedi, The (film) 215 Life and Adventures of Troubadour Beatrice as
Last Man on Earth, The (television show) 79 Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura, The (Leben
Last Ship, The (television show) 79 – 81 und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach
LaThrop, Ashleigh 29 Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura; Morgner) 142
Latimer, Heather 188 “Like a Bolt out of the Blue” (Kirsch) 142
Lavender III, Isiah 228, 330 Like a Bolt out of the Blue anthology (Blitz aus
Lavigne, Carlen 168, 170 heiterem Himmel) 121, 138 – 143
Lawnmower Man, The (Leonard) 169 Liliʻuokalani (queen of Hawaii) 16 – 17
Lawrence, Chris 211 Lilith’s Brood trilogy (Butler) 67, 201 – 203
403
Index
Limburg, Joanne 97 Master of Poisons (Hairston) 13

Liner Notes for the Revolution (Brooks) 279 Matrix movie series (Wachowskis): as apocalyptic
Ling Chen 388, 390 – 393 science fiction 80, 84; cyberpunk fashion
Liu Cixin 388 – 391 in 226; intersectionality and 25; The Matrix
“Living Space” (Asimov) 337 (first film of series) and 58, 63, 80; The Matrix
Löchel, Rolf 302 Resurrections and 25, 57 – 60, 62 – 63, 120, 171;
Logan’s Run (Anderson) 339 – 340 The Matrix: Revolutions and 58, 62, 169; Neo
Long, Mark C. 259 and Trinity’s relationship in 58 – 59, 63, 169;
Long Tomorrow, The (Brackett) 81 – 82 as queer science fiction 25, 57 – 63, 120, 171;
Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, The (Chambers) setting of 58; as transgender allegory 171;
311 – 312, 315 unplugging from The Matrix and 57 – 58,
Looking Backward (Bellamy) 292, 328 60 – 61; war between humans and machines in
Lorde, Audre 28, 62, 103 – 104 58, 60; Western myths challenged by 4, 62 – 63
Lordi, Emily 278 Matter of Disability, The (Mitchell, Antebi, and
Lorraine, Lilith 3, 320, 322 Snyder) 386
Lothian, Alexis 24, 207 – 208 McCaffrey, Anne 321
Love After the End anthology 6 McCarthy, Helen 283
Lovecraft, H.P. 270 – 272 McClelland, Marc 284
Loving Allness (multiplayer game) 43, 47n1 McComas, J. Francis 5
Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle) 81 McElroy, Ruth 234
Luckett, Moya 219 McGrath, James 96 – 97
McHugh, Maureen 168
MacFarlane, Alex Dally 6 McIntrye, Vonda N. 6
Machiavelli, Niccolo 376 McRuer, Robert 382 – 383
Machineries of Empire series (Lee) 148 – 149, 151n2 Meanwhile, Elsewhere anthology 50
“(Learning About) Machine Sex” (Dorsey) 168 Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative
MacIsaac, Fred 338, 340 – 341 Fiction (Jones) 24
MacLean, Katherine 320 – 321, 340 – 341 “Meditation” (Schneider) 140
MacNutt, Toby 51 Meeker, Natania 24
Mader, Wilhelm Friedrich 366 Meet the Preppers (television show) 82
Mad Max (Miller) 274 Melzer, Patricia 168
Madwoman in the Attic, The (Gilbert and Gubar) 263 Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, The
Maeda, Toshio 285 – 286 (Roszak) 267
Mahotsukai Sally (Sally the Witch, anime series) 295 Mendelsohn, Farah 8
“Make Me Feel” (Monáe) 281 Merla-Watson, Cathryn Josefina 7
Make Room! Make Room! (Harrison) 33 Merrick, Helen 8, 80, 160
Making Kin Not Population collection 31 Merril, Judith 5, 318, 320 – 323, 337, 341
Makoto, Shinkai 292, 297 “Message in a Bottle” (Hopkinson) 198 – 199
male gaze see under gaze, the Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Suvin) 49
Maltry, Karola 7 #MeToo movement 304
Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women anthology, Metropolis (Lang) 276 – 278
The 6 “Metropolis” (Monáe song) 277
Mandelo, Brit 6 Metropolis Suite I (Monáe album) 276 – 281
Mandelo, Lee 50, 135 Mexican cinema 269 – 274
Man in the Moone, The (Godwin) 373 – 374 Meyerowitz, Joanne 177
Manovich, Lev 24 Mhlambi, Sabelo 242
Mansfield, Nick 119 Mickey, Sam 8
Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu) 161 – 162 Midnight Robber (Hopkinson) 228 – 229
“Many Moons” (Monáe) 277 – 278, 281 Millennial Women anthology 6
Mao Zedong 120, 190 Miller, Bruce 343
Margulis, Lynn 13 Miller, George 274
Mari, Kotani 293 Miller, Libby 225
Marks, Laura 250 Miller, Walter A. 82
Marshall, Emily Zobel 228 Milner, H. M. 264
Martin, Alan C. 171 Milton, John 262 – 263
Masculinities Studies 87 – 88 Minnie’s Sacrifice (Harper) 326 – 329
Mass Effect (video game series) 212, 214 – 215 Minter, Rocha 269, 273
404
Index
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology 167 Murray, Samantha 126

“Missing Man, The” (MacLean) 340 Musiol, Hanna 46
Mitchell, David 381, 386 “My Soul Is Wolf ” (Chng) 14
Mixon, Laura J. 168
Mizejewski, Linda 8 Nanda, Aparajita 202
Möbius, Paul 371 Napier, Susan 293 – 294, 296
modding 208, 211, 214 – 215 Narayan, Shweta 52 – 53
Modesta, Viktoria 170 Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder) 381
Molina-Gavilán, Yolanda 6 Nash, Jennifer C. 197 – 198, 200 – 201, 203
“Moments of Light” (MacNutt) 51 Nathanson, Paul 124 – 125
Monáe, Janelle: Afrofuturism in the works of Nazism 308, 319
277 – 281; Cindi Mayweather character’s Needham, Gary 234, 237 – 238
relationship with 277 – 279; cyberpunk and 170; Neimanis, Astrida 187
intersectionality and 278 – 279; queer Black “Nest of Insects” (Chi Hui) 190 – 195
identity of 276; queer futurity and 276; on title Net, The (Winkler) 169
of “Q.U.E.E.N.” (Monáe) 278 Network Effect (Martha Wells) 95, 99, 100n1
Mona Lisa Overdrive (Gibson) 167, 171 Neuromancer (Gibson) 167, 226 – 227, 341
Monetti, Rich 218 New Adam, The (Weinbaum) 361, 363
Money, John 177 New Atlantis (Bacon) 373
Monster from the Ocean Floor (Ordung) 270 New Chinese Heroines (Siqi Zhai) 389
Monstrous-Feminine, The (Creed) 288 New Dimensions anthologies 5
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (comic book Newitz, Annalee 120 – 121, 125 – 129, 171, 288
series) 154 Newman-Stille, Derek 9
Moore, Alan 373, 377 News from Nowhere (Morris) 292
Moore, C.L. (“Lewis Padgett”) 5, 319 – 320 A New Species (Roberts) 24
Moore, Kaitlin 211 New Suns series 25
Moore, Mandy Elizabeth 157 – 158 “Newton’s Sleep” (Le Guin) 33
Moraga, Cherríe 44 New Wave science fiction 5 – 6, 353, 388 – 389
More, Thomas 374 Ng, Jeanette 4
Morehouse, Lyda 170 Nian Yu 388, 392
Moreira, Ruben 335, 337 Nicols, Nichelle 219 – 220
Morgan, Cheryl Myfanwy 180 NieR: Automata (video game) 211 – 213
Morgan, Richard K. 87 – 91, 93 Nilges, Mathias 81 – 82
Morgner, Irmtraud 142 – 143 Ninefox Gambit (Lee) 121, 145, 156
Moriarty, Chris 170 “Nine Lives” (Le Guin) 340 – 341
Morris, Robyn 184 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 332
Morris, William 292 – 293 Nixon, Nicola 168, 227
Morrison, Ryan J. 97 Nogha, Misha 341
Motherlines (Charnas) 66, 304, 355 nonbinary people 16, 17, 49, 51, 55, 67, 77, 83,
“Mother of Invention” (Okorafor) 241 – 246 119 – 120, 121, 145, 149, 155 – 156, 176, 179 – 180;
Mothers, The (Die Mütter, Dohm) 367 androgyny and 146, 149; Butler’s “heterosexual
Motion of Light on Water, The (Delany) 51, 75 matrix” and the invisibility of 73; as characters in
Motoko, Arai 293 science fiction 12, 49; clearly sexed bodies and
Moylan, Tom 132, 344, 346 149; futanari and 286 – 288; gender categories and
Muhammad, Zarina 113 124 – 129; increasing visibility of 15; legislation
Mullis, Steve 98 regarding healthcare for 179; pronouns and 76,
Mulvey, Laura 220, 225, 250 121, 145 – 146; sex changing in science fiction and
Münch, Detlef 6 121, 175 – 179, 181
Muñoz, José Esteban 122, 131 – 134, 136, 276 – 277 non-sequitur 255 – 260
Murderbot Diaries series (Martha Wells): artificial Noonan, Peggy 359
intelligences in 95, 97 – 99; autism and 96 – 98; Notes from Underground (Dostoyevsky) 332
corporate crimes investigated in 95; cyborg’s “No Woman Born” (Moore) 319 – 320
self-emancipation in 95, 97; emotions and nuclear holocaust 33 – 34, 81 – 82, 322
98 – 99, 150; gender presentation and 97 – 98;
pronouns in 98, 119, 121, 145, 149 – 151; space Obilisk Gate, The (Jemisin) 39
opera genre and 97 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
Murphy, Sean 172 (Cavendish) 373
405
Index
Occupy protests 343 The Left Hand of Darkness and gender 146, 148;
Octavia’s Brood anthology 102, 106, 109 queer science fiction and 49 – 50
O’Dwyer, Sinéad 17 Pelosi, Nancy 304
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 381 Pennington, John 146
Of Love and Other Monsters (Singh) 163 – 164 Percy Jackson series (Riordan) 154
Of One Blood (Hopkins) 3, 327 – 329 “Peripeteia” (Singh) 163
Of Woman Born (Rich) 34, 352 Phillips, Layli 102
O’Keefe, Georgia 9 Phung, Malissa 186
Okorafor, Nnedi: African women interacting “Picnic on Nearside” (Varley) 176, 178
with feminized artificial intelligence in the Piercy, Marge: autism and literary criticism
works of 241 – 246; Afrofuturism and 68; of 97; cyberpunk and 168, 227 – 228, 232,
animal studies and 67 – 70; cyberpunk and 267 – 268; influence on other writers of 112;
170; templates for ethical relationality in neo-pronouns and 121; redistribution of
works of 208 reproductive responsibilities in the works of
Older, Malka 229 – 232 192, 195; separatist utopias imagined by 66,
Old Futures (Lothain) 24 340, 353
Olguin, B.V. 7 Pine, Chris 220 – 221
O Master Caliban! (Gotlieb) 37 Pinkey, Brian 154
Once Were Warriors (film) 90 Pizan, Christine de 112
O’Neill, Kevin 373, 377 PlayStation Dreamworld, The (Brown) 211
“Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The” (Le Pohl, Frederik 339
Guin) 44, 311 Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The
On Joanna Russ (Mendelsohn) 8 Walking Dead (anthology), The 7
Onnis, Ramona 7 – 8, 302 Possession (Zulawski) 271
“On the Origins of Genre” (Kincaid) 46 postapocalyptic science fiction: global disasters
On Woman’s Physiological Mental Deficiency and 80; LGBTQ+ and BIPOC as excluded
(Möbius) 371 figures in 83; “nightmares model” and 80 – 81;
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller) 339 nuclear frontier stories and 81 – 82; popularity
Ophiuchi Hotline, The (Varley) 178 – 179 in mainstream media of 83; prepper reality
“Options” (Varley) 175, 178 television shows and 82 – 85; rebirth narratives
Orbaugh, Sharalyn 295 and 81; white supremacy and hypermasculinity
Orbit series (Knight) 5 as hallmarks of 80 – 85
Orquiola, John 223 Power, The (Alderman) 304, 306 – 309
Orwell, George 332 Power, The (Robinson) 361, 363
O’Sullivan, Simon 108 “Power to Yield” (Takács) 12
Ottens, Nick 219 Prakas, Tessie 377
Otto-Peters, Louise 366 prepper reality-television shows 25, 79, 81 – 85
Our Blessed Rebel Queen (Mizejewski and Zuk) 8 Press X to Make Sandwich: A Complete Guide to
Our Fatal Magic anthology 111 – 112 Gender Design in Games (Anhut) 211
Outer Wilds (video game) 213 Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (Peake) 264
Outlander’s Sassenachs anthology 7 Prey (video game) 212
“Out of the Void” (Stone) 319 – 320 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 376
Overwatch (video game) 212 Prism Stalker (Leong) 17
“Project Nursemaid” (Merril) 321
Padgett, Steven 6 Promise of Happiness, The (Ahmed) 235
Padmanabhan, Manjula 161, 164 – 166 pronouns: Ancillary Justice and 147 – 148;
Páez, Leonardo 207 Autonomous and 126 – 127; The Left Hand
Page, Elliot 18, 121 of Darkness and 121, 145 – 149, 180, 310;
Paleo, Lyn 7 Machineries of Empire and 148; Murderbot Diaries
Palladino, Anna Chiara 7 – 8, 302 and 98, 119, 121, 145, 149 – 151; neo-pronouns
Parable series (Butler) 111 – 112 and 121; The Red Strings Club and 250; trans
Parker, Lehua 11 – 19 people and 150; Wayfarers series and 312
Partners in Wonder (Davin) 302 “Prototype” (Modesta) 170
Peake, Richard Brinsley 264 Puar, Jasbir K. 30, 42
Pearl, Monica B. 103 Pua’s Kiss (Parker) 13 – 14
Pearson, Wendy Gay: anthologies edited by 7; Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Madoka Magica,
asexuality and 74; on Autonomous 170 – 171; on anime series) 292, 294 – 298
406
Index
Pugh, Steve 172 Revolution (television show) 79 – 80, 82

Pugno, Laura 302 Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shojo Kakumei Utena,
Puppygate voting controversies (2015–2016) 3 – 5 anime series) 294, 296
“Pynk” (Monáe) 281 Rhine, J. B. 320, 360
“Rhizomatic Diplomacy” (Chandrasekera) 52
Qian Lifang 388 Rice, Carla 156 – 157
“Quedlinburg” (Jakobs) 140 – 141 Rich, Adrienne 34, 352
“Q.U.E.E.N.” (Monáe) 278 – 281 Richards, Amy 8, 158
Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam) 256, 260 Richardson, Trevor 213
Queer as Folk (television show) 236 Riddles of the Hobbit, The (Roberts) 381
queer science fiction: alternative temporalities Rieder, John 46, 79 – 80, 183
and 185, 208; anthologies of 50; anticolonial Rights of Women, The (Siqi Zhai) 389
resistance and 185 – 186, 188; asexuality and Ring of Swords (Arnason) 67, 255 – 256, 258, 260
72 – 77; autism and 54 – 55; eroticism and Riordan, Rick 154 – 156, 158
135; explicit queerness and 52 – 55; Lightspeed Riot Grrrl movement 225 – 226
Magazine special issue (2015) devoted to 50; Ritual of the Moon (video game) 213
Matrix movie series and 25, 57 – 63, 120, 171; Roberts, Adam 108, 381; see also Bête (Roberts)
non-sequitur and 255 – 260; oblique queerness Roberts, Jude 91
and 51 – 52; typologies of 49 – 50; unhappiness Roberts, Robin 24, 358
and 234 – 239; university education and 49; Robinson, Frank 361
utopian insurgency and 131 – 137; young adult Robinson, Kim Stanley 33
fiction and 52 – 53 Robinson, Michael David 376
Queer Universes anthology 7, 302 Roble, Lola 7
“Quis Custodiet?” (St. Clair) 323 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (film) 266
Qun Zhi 389 Rocky Jones: Space Ranger (television show) 207
Rogers, Wendy 359
RaceFail’09 flame war 3, 122 Rogue Protocol (Martha Wells) 98
“Rachel” (Lai) 184 Ron, Gili 1, 9, 21, 117, 205, 299
Radical Botany (Szbari and Meeker) 24 Rosenblum, Mary 168
Raimo, Veronica 302 “Rosie Lived in a Bubble” (Schere) 333, 334, 337
“Rainforest, The” (Chi Hui) 390 Roszak, Theodore 267
“Rain in Erostrate, The” (Cheng Jingbo) 390 “Rotohouse, The” (St. Clair) 322
Rajchman, John 132 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 153
Raksura series (Martha Wells) 95 – 96 Ruberg, Bonnie 211 – 212, 249
Randall, Marta 5 Rucker, Rudy 167
Record of a Spaceborn Few (Chambers) 314 “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue” (Singh) 163
Red Strings Club, The (video game): Russ, Joanna: cyberpunk and 167 – 168, 226 – 227;
cyberpunk world of 248; first scene of on didactic functions of science fiction 257;
252; game mechanics of 248 – 250; gender feminist superheroes in the works of 304, 307;
conceptualizations challenged in 208, 250 – 252; on the image of women in science fiction 6,
haptic perception and 250, 252; players’ role in 352 – 353, 356; on male fear of role reversal
252 – 253; pronouns in 250; sentient artificial 180; on male science fiction authors’ depiction
intelligence in 250 – 252 of women 143; queer identity of 23; queer
Redwood and Wildfire (Hairston) 14 non-sequitur in the works of 255 – 260; queer
Reeser, Todd 358 – 359 utopianism and 122, 134 – 135; second-wave
“Regression Test, The” (Talabi) 241 – 244, 246 feminism and 355; separatist utopias imagined
Reid, Robin Anne 8, 302 by 66; see also specific works
“Reign of the Superman, The” (Shuster and Russell, Legacy 112
Siegel) 362 – 363 Ryan, Jeri 220
Reiko, Hikawa 293
Reimer, Sharlee 185 Sad Sack (Al-Maria) 110
Reload anthology 7 “Sailing the Antarsa” (Singh) 163
Remender, Rick 172 Sailor Moon (Bishojo Senshi Sera Mun; anime
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (video game) 212 series) 294
Resident Evil VIII: Village (video game) 212 Saitō Tamaki 284
Resisters, The (Jen) 305 Salmonson, Jessica Amanda 23
Revenge of the Creature (Arnold) 272 Salt Fish Girl (Lai) 122, 184 – 189
407
Index
Salt Roads, The (Hopkinson) 198 – 201, 203 Sheldon, Rebekah 31

Sanchez-Taylor, Joy 24 Shelley, Mary 23, 263, 267 – 268; see also
Sands, Karen 154 Frankenstein (Shelley)
Santesso, Aaron 360 Shen, Lien Fan 293, 298
Sargent, Lyman Tower 344, 367 Shi, Eve 18
Sargent, Pamela 5 – 6, 23 Shimizu, Celine Parreñas 284
Sargisson, Lucy 44 Shiner, Lewis 167, 226
Sarkeesian, Anita 212 Shinkai, Makoto 292, 297
Scapegracers, The (Clarke) 305 Shirley, John 167, 228
Schalk, Sami 24, 382 “Shobies’ Story, The” (Le Guin) 41 – 47
Schere, Monroe 333, 334, 337 shōjo (young female time traveler in anime) 208,
Schneider, Rolf 140 293 – 298
Schneider-Vielsäcker, Frederike 388 Shrinking Vanita (Padmanabhan) 165
Schnelbach, Leah 99 Siegel, Jerry 362
Schubart, Rikke 7 Silent Running (Trumbull) 338 – 339, 341
Schuyler, George 328 Silent Spring (Carlson) 34, 338
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics Silverberg, Robert 5
(Hassler-Forest) 109 Singh, Sneha 161
Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, Singh, Vandana 121, 161 – 166
and Octavia E. Butler (anthology) 8 Sin Wai Kin 25, 110 – 111
Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System Sippell, Kelly Ann 121
(Rieder) 46 Siqi Zhai 389
Science Fiction in Latin America anthology 8 Sirius: A Romance of Love and Discord (Stapledon)
Science in the Capital Trilogy (Robinson) 33 267, 391
Scott, Colin 155 Sisters of the Revolution anthology 6
Scott, Conrad 171 Sisters of Tomorrow (Yaszek and Sharp) 302
Scott, Melissa 168, 180 Six Moon Dance (Tepper) 67
Scott, Ridley 169, 172, 226, 276; see also Blade Slan (van Vogt) 363
Runner (film by Ridley Scott) “Smile on the Face, The” (Hopkinson) 199
Screaming Boy and the Laughing Princess, The Smith, Cordwainer 198
(Der Schreihansel und das Lachprinzesschen, Smith, E. E. 302, 360 – 361
Haupt) 369 Smith-Sherwood, Dawn 8
“Screwed” (Monáe) 280 Smut Peddler anthologies 17
Second Sex, The (Beauvoir) 351 Smyth, Maura 375
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 65 – 66, 237 – 238 Snow Crash (Richardson) 229
Seized by the Left Hand (DG Galleries Exhibition) 110 Snyder, Sharon 381, 386
“Self-Experiment: Appendix to a Report” (Wolf) Soejano, Stephanie 18
141, 143 Solomon, Rivers 15, 54
September 11 terrorist attacks (2001) 359 So Long Been Dreaming anthology 6
Serial Experiments Lain (anime series) 296 somatechnics 126
Seveneves (Stephenson) 311 Somnium (Kepler) 373 – 374
Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Character, Sontag, Susan 256 – 258
Weininger) 371 Sophocles 381
Sex and the Single Girl (Brown) 219, 223n1 sorites paradox 246n1
Sex Is Out of This World, The (edited volume) 8 Space Pirate Sara (television show) 287 – 288
Shadow Man, The (Scott) 180 Sphinx’s riddle 380 – 383, 385
Shani, Tai 110 – 113 Spillers, Hortense 44, 113
Shape of Water, The (La forma del agua, del Toro) Spinelli, Manuela 7 – 8, 302
269, 272 Spirited Away (anime series) 296
Sharp, Patrick B. 302, 318 Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner) 339
Sharpe, Christina 114 Stapledon, Olaf 267
Shatner, William 218, 220 – 222 Stardew Valley (video games) 214 – 215
Shaw, Debra Benita 318 Starfang trilogy (Chng) 14
Shaw, Marc E. 359 Star Trek (Abrams film) 220
Shawl, Nisi 8, 15 Star Trek: Discovery (television show) 17 – 18, 223
SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE (Shirley) 113 Star Trek into Darkness (Abrams film) 220
Sheldon, Raccoona 45 Star Trek: Lower Decks (animation series) 223
408
Index
Star Trek: The Original Series (television show): Talabi, Wole 208, 241 – 244, 246
“Bread and Circuses” episode and 220; Tale of Genji, The (Japanese traditional story) 296
“The Cage” episode and 218, 223; Captain TallBear, Kim 31
Kirk misogynist parodies and 209, 221 – 223; Tang Fei 388
Captain Kirk’s sex life in 220 – 221; “Charlie X Tang Shijia 388, 390
episode” and 218; “Elaan of Troyius” episode Tank Girl (Hewlett and Martin) 171 – 172
and 220; “Gaussian Girl” camera technique Tatsumi, Takayumi 7
and 219 – 220; “The Menagerie” episodes in Taylor, Keith 346
223; miniskirt costumes and the male gaze in Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction
219 – 221; “Orion Slave Girl” episode and 223; anthology 7
“The Paradise Syndrome” episode and 220; Tekinbas, Katie Salen 214 – 215
Uhuru’s role as communications officer on 319; Téllez, M. 54 – 55
“Wink of an Eye” episode and 220 Tepper, Sheri S. 67
Star Trek: Voyager (television show) 220 Terra Incognita anthology 6
Star Wars (film) 80, 84, 155, 213 “That Only a Mother” (Merril) 322
St. Clair, Margaret 322 – 323 Theory of Parody, A (Hutcheon) 221
Steel Beach (Varley) 178 Thin Air (Morgan) 87 – 90, 93
Steinmüller, Angela and Karlheinz 340 Thomas, Anne-Marie 160
Stephenson, Neal 229, 311 Thomas, Emily 149 – 150
Sterling, Bruce 167, 226 Thomas, Sheree 6
Stevenson, Robert Louis 273 Thornham, Helen 215
Steven Universe (television show) 25, 153 – 154, Three-Body Trilogy (Liu Cixin) 389 – 391
156 – 158 “Tian Sun” (Ling Chen) 390 – 391
Stingl, Alexander I. 316 Tidwell, Christy 8
Stinson, Susan 15 Tiger Flu, The (Lai) 133 – 134, 171, 184
Stockton, Kathryn Bond 154 Time Machine, The (H.G. Wells) 292
Stone, Kara 213 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Delany) 75
Stone, Katie 108 – 109, 111 Time’s Up movement 304
Stone, Leslie F. 3, 5, 318 – 320 Tiptree, Jr., James (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) 168, 304
Stone of Nüwa, The (Duxiaozi Haitian) 190, 389 To Boldly Go anthology 8
Stotts, Taneka 17 Tokyo Ghost (Remender and Murphy) 172
St. Peter, Christine 343 “Tomb of Fireflies, The” (Jingbo Cheng) 390
Strange Days (Bigelow) 169 Torchwood (television show): “Captain Jack
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) 102 Harness” episode and 237 – 239; “Children
Sturgeon, Theodore 180 – 181 of Earth” series 235 – 237; “Kiss Kiss, Bang
Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Bang” episode and 237; queer unhappiness and
Haraway (Mansfield) 119 235 – 239
Sugar, Rebecca 25, 121, 154, 156 – 158 Total Recall (film) 225
Sullivan, Nikki 126 “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique” (Kim) 382
“Sultana’s Dream” (Hossain) 161 – 162, 165 “Towards Queer Television Theory” (Aaron)
Sunless Sea (video game) 213 235 – 236
Suoranta, Esko 226 To Write Like a Woman anthology 23
Supergirl 304 Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (Salter and
superman stories: alternative masculinities in Blodgett) 220
361 – 363; early science fiction era (1933–1956) Transcendent anthologies (2016–2019) 6, 50
and 359 – 360; Jon Kent’s bisexual identity and transmedia worldbuilding 109 – 110
359, 362 – 363; patriarchal masculinity in 358, transgender people 4, 6, 11, 12 – 14, 16 – 18,
360 – 361, 363; September 11 terrorist attacks 23, 52 – 53, 59 – 63, 68 – 69, 74, 76, 83, 110,
(2001) and 359; Superman of DC Comics and 112 – 114, 119 – 121, 124 – 129, 139, 145 – 146,
362; white supremacy and 361 – 362 148, 155 – 156, 158, 171, 175 – 181, 209,
Suvin, Darko 49 – 50, 129, 153, 157, 374 212 – 214, 231 – 232, 251 – 252, 266, 268, 283,
Swyers, Holly 149 – 150 286 – 289; as allegory 124 – 129, 171, 175 – 181;
Synners (Cadigan) 168 as cyborg 124 – 129; as identity in the Matrix
Szabari, Antonia 24 films 59 – 63, 171; pronouns and (see nonbinary
people); questions of gender and 125 – 129,
Takács, Bogi 11 – 18, 50 174 – 181; in relation to sex changing 176 – 181
Takayama, Hideki 285 tentacle porn and 285 – 286, 288
409
Index
transtemporalities 301, 303 Vint, Sherryl 7, 183 – 184

Traviss, Karen 67 “Virgin Territory” (Friend) 24
Tremeer, Eleanor 218 Vital, André Vasques 157
“Triumph of Freedom: A Dream, The” Vogt, A. E. van 360, 363
(Harper) 325 von Suttner, Bertha 366 – 367
TRON (Lisberger) 169 Vourvoulias, Sabrina 305
TRON: Legacy (Kosinski) 170
Trouble and Her Friends (Scott) 168 Wachowski, Lana and Lilly: on making The
Trouble the Saints (Johnson) 305 Matrix: Resurrections 60 – 61; on The Matrix
Trumbull, Douglas 338 – 339 trilogy as trans allegory 59; on queerness and
Trump, Donald 26, 79, 83 – 85, 230, 344 – 347, 349 neoliberal systems of power 62; trans identity
Tucker, Lindsey 8 and 59, 63, 171; see also Matrix movie series
Turnbull, Donald G. 3 (Wachowskis)
Wakeling, Emily 293
Ulster, Laurie 218 Walker, Alice 102
Ultraviolet (Wimmer) 170 Walking Dead, The (television show) 7, 79 – 82, 84
Umbrella Academy, The (television show) 18 Walking the Clouds anthology 6
Unfair Cities conference (2019) 45 – 46 Wall, The (Die Wand, Haushofer) 337 – 338, 341
Universe series (Carr) 5 Walschot, Natalie Zina 305
Unkindness of Ghosts, An (Solomon) 15, 54 Wanderground, The (Miller Gearhart) 66, 353
Untamed, The (La region salvaje, Escalante) Wang Jinkang 388
269 – 272, 274 Wang Kanyu 388
Uranian Worlds (annotated bibliography) 7 Wang Weiying 388
Urashima Taro folktale 292 – 293 War of the Worlds, The (H.G. Wells) 79, 207
Urbanski, Heather 80 Warom, Ren 170, 231 – 232
Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend (anime series) Warren, Elizabeth 304
283, 285 – 288 Warren, Karen 34
“USS Callister” (Black Mirror episode) 222 Warren, Norman 270
Utopia (More) 374 Waste Tide, The (Chen Qiufan) 389 – 390
Utopian and Science Fiction by Women anthology Watch Dogs 2 (video game) 212
8, 302 Water into Wine (Chng) 12
Utopias Geschlechter: Gender in deutschsprachiger Watson, Elwood 359
Science Fiction von Frauen (Löchel) 302 Wayfarers series (Chambers): artificial intelligence
in 313; autism and 312; genders in 180,
Vakoch, Douglas A. 8 311 – 316; pronouns in 312; space emigration
Valencia, Sayak 269, 272 – 274 and interplanetary alliance in 310
Vallorani, Nicoletta 302 We (Zamyatin) 332
VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff 6 WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT
van Veen, Tobias C. 277 – 278 ARE NOT (Brathwaite-Shirley) 113 – 114
van Vogt, A.E. 360, 363 We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne, Emiliano
Varley, John 121, 175 – 179, 181 Rocha Minter) 269, 273
Vázquez, Lucía Gloria 250 Weinbaum, Batya 24
Venus Plus X (Sturgeon) 180 – 181 Weinbaum, Stanley G. 361
Verne, Jules 292 – 293, 365 Weininger, Otto 371
V for Vendetta (film) 257, 343 Wells, H.G.: alien invasion in the works of 207;
Victories Greater Than Death (Anders) 69 – 70 dome cultures in the works of 332, 338, 341;
Videodrome (Cronenberg) 169 influence on other writers of 365; mad scientist
video games: character-player relationships archetype in the works of 265; time travel in
in 213; haptic perception and 250, 252; the works of 292 – 293
hypersexualization of female protagonists in 212, Wells, Martha 95 – 97; see also specific works
214 – 215; men as majority of protagonists in 212; Wess’Harr Wars series (Traviss) 67
modding and 208, 211, 214 – 215; non-normative Whale, James 264 – 266
sexualities and 208, 210 – 216; sex workers in 212; What Diantha Did (Gilman) 15
speculative genders and 211; toxic masculinity “What Do You Mean: Science Fiction?”
and 210; transhumanist design ethic and 249; (Merril) 318
Vigilant, Lee 285; see also specific games What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky) 332
Villeneuve, Denis 170, 172 When Fox Is a Thousand (Lai) 184
410
Index
“When It Changed” (Russ) 135 Women of Ice and Fire anthology 7 – 8
When the Sleeper Wakes (H.G. Wells) 332, 338 Women of Other Worlds collection 8
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root anthology 6, 62 Women of the Future (King) 302
Whitehead, Joshua 6 Women of Wonder anthology 6, 23
white supremacy: apocalyptic science fiction and Women Science Fiction Prose in Poland
80 – 85; superman stories and 361 – 362 (Głowacka) 302
Whitney, Grace Lee 219 Women’s March protests 346
Whyte, Kyle Powys 132 Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction anthology 8
“Wife’s Story, The” (Le Guin) 66 Wonder Woman 304
Wilde, Jenée 234 Wong, Rita 184 – 185
Wilhelm, Kate 319 Wood, Jordan 249
Williams, Dmitri 249 Woodward, Kathryn 7
Williams, Rebecca 234 “World of the Three, The” (Narayan) 53
Williams, Serena and Vanessa 305 World of Women, The (Qun Zhi) 389
Williamson, Jack 361 – 362 Wu, Naomi 17
Wilson, Elizabeth 225 Wuest, Ruth 228
Wilson, G. Willow 15 Wu Shuang 388
Wilson, Sharon R 8 Wu Yan 392
Winterson, Jeanette 268
WisCon Chronicles Series 8 Xena: Warrior Princess (television show) 17
Wittenberg, David 292 Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler) 108, 198
Woken Furies (Morgan) 89 Xia Jia 388, 390, 392
Wolf, Christa 141, 143 Xi Liu 389 – 390
Wolf, Naomi 306
Wolf among Us, The (video game) 252 Yang, Neon 18
Wolfmoor, Merc Fenn 55 Yap, Isabel 170
Wolmark, Jenny 7, 24, 183 Yaszek, Lisa 6, 34, 168, 170, 302, 318
“Woman 100 Years From Now” (“Die Frau in Years of the City, The (Pohl) 339
100 Jahren,” Key) 367 – 369, 371 Yergeau, Melanie 96
“Woman After Five Hundred Years” (“Die Frau “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of
nach fünfhundert Jahren,” Haupt) 369 – 371 Light” (Sheldon) 45
“Womanist” (Walker) 102 – 103 Your Name (Kimi no Na wa, Makoto) 292, 297
Woman of the Future, The 100 Years Ago anthology “Yours for Always or Never” (Anderson) 141 – 142
(Münch) 6 Yumi, Matsuo 293
Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) 66, 108, 112,
121, 195, 340, 353 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde) 103
Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, The (Singh) zamis (woman-centered communities) 102,
121, 163 104 – 107
Women and Video Game Modding collection 214 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 332
women authors in science fiction: anthologies Zardoz (Boorman) 339
featuring 5 – 8; Chinese science fiction and Zetkin, Clara 303, 366 – 367
190 – 195, 388 – 393; conservative women Zhang Yihong 388
authors’ anti-utopian visions and 367 – 371; Zhao Haihong 388, 392
domestic science and 321 – 322; environmental Zimmerman, Eric 214 – 215
science and 322 – 323; hostility and Žižek, Slavoj 346
discrimination against 3 – 4; increasing visibility Z Nation (television show) 79 – 80
of 3, 5, 23 – 24; radio plays and 319 – 320; Zolciak, Olivia 158
reproductive science and 320 – 321; satirization “Zombi, or Fancy Sketches” (Harper) 325
of men’s technology and 318 – 319; science “Zombi and the Negro Kingdom” (Harper)
fiction magazines and 318 – 323; “Women’s 325 – 326
Question” and 366 – 368 Zuk, Tanya D. 8
Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy collection 302 Zulawski, Andrzej 271
411

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“Science fiction has been questioning gender norms since before there was science fiction

Edited by Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry,

ISBN: 978-0-367-53701-2 (hbk)

List of Figures xiii

1 Introduction: A Brief History of Gender, Science Fiction, and the

2 Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction 11

4 Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaid’s Tale26

5 Beyond Survival: Climate Change and Reproduction in The

6 Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many 41

8 Renovating the System: The Matrix Resurrections

9 Buffalo Gals and Talking Jellyfish: Feminisms and Animal Studies

10 Asexual and Genderless Futures 72

11 Making the End Times Great Again: Postapocalypses, Preppers,

12 Decoding Masculinity in 21st-Century Science

14 The Womanist Speculative Archetype in Alexis Pauline

15 Feminist Science Fiction Art 108

17 “All Hail the Trans Cyborg”: Autonomous as an Analogy of

18 Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, and Utopian Insurgency 131

19 Like “A Bolt out of the Blue”: Stories of Gender Transformation

20 New Pronouns and New Uses: Gender Variance and Language in

22 Speculations Against Gender Discrimination: A Study of Indian SF’s

23 Feminist-Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunk’s Hetero-Masculinism 167

24 Trans Without Trans?: Gender Identity and the Relationship Between

25 Unruly Bodies: Corporeality, Technocracy, and Same-Sex Desire in

26 Good Wives and Mothers in the Universe: Explorations of

27 Goddesses, Broods, and Hominids: Sexual Pleasure and Desire in the

29 Representation and Performance of Gender in Speculative Video

30 Parodying Captain Kirk Through the ‘Drift’ in Cultural Memory 218

31 Subverting, Re-fashioning, or Re-inscribing the Power of the Male

32 Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappiness 234

33 Afro-Feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction 241

34 Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club248

35 The Queer Non Sequitur 255

37 Meet My Alien Sex Fiend: Iterations of Otherness in Recent

38 A Young, Black, Queer Woman in Metropolis: Janelle Monáe

39 Trans/Pacific Entanglements: Japanese Tentacle Porn in American

40 Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime: The Time-Traveling Girl 292

42 Naomi Alderman’s The Power and New Feminist Science Fiction

43 Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia 310

44 Science? Fiction? SF by Anglo-American Women in the Magazines 318

45 Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction 325

46 Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave 332

47 Restorative Nostalgia and Historical Amnesia in The Handmaid’s

48 Tracing Second-Wave Feminism Through Women in the Dune Series 351

49 Complicating the Super Men: Evolving Masculinities in

50 Between the Stove and Emancipation—Conservative Women

51 “Mistress of a World”: Margaret Cavendish, Gender and SF in Early

52 A Riddle About a Stick Figure: Narrative Prosthesis, Futurity,

53 The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century 388

1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022) 1

Carol Anne Costabile-Heming is Professor of German in the Department of World Lan-

Jane Donawerth is award-winning Professor Emerita of the University of Maryland, US,

Nedine Moonsamy is Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa,

Debaditya Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Manikchak College, affiliated with

Agnieszka Podruczna, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice,

Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at

Figure 1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022)

Introduction: The Long History of Gender and Genre

Defining the Debate Over Gender and Genre: A Brief History

List of Figures xiii

2 Author Roundtable on Gender in Science Fiction 11

4 Feminism, Violence, and the Anthropocene in The Handmaid’s Tale26

6 Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many 41

10 Asexual and Genderless Futures 72

15 Feminist Science Fiction Art 108

18 Queer Science Fiction, Queer Relationality, and Utopian Insurgency 131

23 Feminist-Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunk’s Hetero-Masculinism 167

30 Parodying Captain Kirk Through the ‘Drift’ in Cultural Memory 218

32 Queer Affect: Torchwood, Television and (Queer) Unhappiness 234

33 Afro-Feminist Intimacies: Women and AI in African Short Fiction 241

34 Gender Representation and Identity in The Red Strings Club248

35 The Queer Non Sequitur 255

40 Gendering Through Time in Japanese Anime: The Time-Traveling Girl 292

43 Gender Euphoria in Space Utopia 310

44 Science? Fiction? SF by Anglo-American Women in the Magazines 318

45 Early Black Feminist SF and Future Fiction 325

46 Gendering Domes Between Pulp Era and New Wave 332

48 Tracing Second-Wave Feminism Through Women in the Dune Series 351

53 The Rise of Female SF Writers in China in the Twenty-First Century 388

1.1 Gili Ron, “Untitled #1” (2022) 1

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