scholarly journals Bisexual erasure in queer sci-fi "utopias"

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Serafini
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Queer Representation

I discuss the paradoxes of queer representation in contemporary science fiction television by analyzing bisexual female protagonists of the CW's The 100 (2014–), BBC America's Orphan Black (2013–), and SyFy's Wynonna Earp (2016–). Queer female fans engage in femslash to make sense of the utopic intentions of executive producers who attempt to create better queer representation through labelless premises that de-emphasize queerness.

Biology and Manners

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Contemporary American Literature ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Us ◽  
Main Series ◽  
Current Concerns ◽  
The Red Queen

This volume is a new collection of scholarly essays on the US science fiction and fantasy writer Lois McMaster Bujold. The collection argues for the significant contributions Bujold’s works make to feminist and queer thought, disability studies, and fan studies. In addition, it suggests the importance of Bujold to contemporary American literature. The volume continues the establishment of Bujold as an important author of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. It argues that her corpus spans the distance between two full arcs of US feminism and has anticipated or responded to several of its current concerns in ways that invite or even require theoretical exploration. As well as papers on earlier work in the main series (the Vorkosigan Saga and the ‘Worlds of the Five Gods’ novels The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls), the collection also presents work on recent publications such as The Sharing Knife sequence; the ‘Penric and Desdemona’ novellas; and the recent Vorkosigan Saga novel Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. The collection deepens feminist research in Bujold studies by incorporating queer and disability studies perspectives; and includes historiographic retracing of scholarship on Bujold’s work.

“In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dallas Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Self ◽  
Intergenerational Transfer ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Sustainable Futures

Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller's film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land. In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.

The American Pastoral and the Conquest of Space

Terraforming ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 56-97
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Final Section ◽  
American South ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Moral Systems ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The American South

This chapter analyses the American Pastoral in the first terraforming boom of the 1950s. Referencing Ernest J. Yanarella’s discussion of terraforming in The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination, this chapter begins with the image of the pioneer farmer that attracted westward expansion and its obverse, the portrayal of dystopian societies where the promise of the pastoral is co-opted. This section recalls the “Garden of the Chattel” image of American colonialism, in which pastoral themes sublimate and so conceal the historic fact of slavery that underlay agricultural production in the American South. The final section considers the propensity to extend human moral systems to aliens and how the pastoral and elements of the sublime converge to offer counter-narratives highlighting the ecological devastation caused by the human expansion into space.

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