Deviant futures: queer temporality and the cultural politics of science fiction

2014-04-26Speculations about the future shape our experiences of the present. From the romance and anxiety of technological revolution, to capitalism's crises, to the threat of climate change, the extrapolative logics of science fiction are part of the texture of modernity. But they have never been singular stories. This dissertation analyzes alternative futures dreamed up by feminists, queers, and people of color in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain and America in order to inquire into historical and political narratives that the seemingly transparent terminology of the future has obscured. Speculations about the future of humanity often presume that biological continuity requires a society organized around heterosexual procreation. Relatedly, access to technological capital defines whether cultures and subjects are advancing toward a progressive future or left behind in the past. Recent turns toward racialization and time in queer scholarship have brought attention to these discourses; I bring these together, drawing also on the history of feminist critiques of gender and reproduction. In the growing body of queer theory that focuses on time, scholars have traced productive deviations in the present and its erotic interplay with the past. My work explores marginal fictional futures’ complex challenge to dominant narratives of history and futurity. ❧ The dissertation focuses primarily on two literary contexts where marginalized individuals developed critical discourses of deviant futures: British feminist speculations in the first half of the twentieth century and twentieth-century African American science fiction. I consider the work that imagining deviant futures has done both within the context of the historical moments that produce futurities and from the retrospective position of later readers who reframe the speculative practices of the past within their own present. An epilogue addresses the afterlife of these works’ ideas in contemporary digital media. Queer temporal theory’s challenge to traditional methodologies and periodizations gives me the tools to weave this archive of unfulfilled historical futures into an analysis of the gendered and racialized power structures embedded in the ways we think about time. In recent years, speculation has become a crucial theoretical framework within which philosophers and cultural critics have thought about the present and the possibilities of social change. My work offers necessary historical grounding to queer and ethnic studies’ adoption of this speculative turn. ❧ The first chapter, “Women and Children First: Feminist Visions of Reproduction, Utopia, and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century” focuses on utopian futures imagined by British feminists early in the twentieth century and forgotten soon afterward: primarily Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's 1885 New Amazonia and Susan Ertz’s ambiguous 1936 tale of the last woman on earth, Woman Alive, though I touch on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's more widely read Herland (1915). I explore the ways middle-class white feminists’ utopias directly addressed the violence of the apparently desirable racial future through their engagement with figurations of women’s independence as a danger to the future of the human race. Ambivalence coexists with unapologetic and unironic nationalist supremacy in many of these texts, making them difficult either to reclaim for feminism or to castigate as wholly complicit with racism and imperialism. I argue that this ambiguity tells us much about what it means to attempt to picture a different future with an imagination shaped by the problematic present. Returning to these texts brings the ambivalences of our present to light, as I show in this chapter’s closing discussion of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men. ❧ The second chapter, “Futureless Politics: Dystopian Renditions of Queer Sex, Gender and Reproduction in the Age of Fascism,” analyzes dystopias by British women writers between the First and Second World Wars. I work with Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night, cited by several recent critics of patriarchal and imperialist tendencies in queer studies, which merges a disturbing vision of nonsentient femininity with a homoerotic representation of fascism, and Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 Man’s World, which depicts patriarchal science as a form of totalitarianism. Closing with the afterlife of dystopian fascism in twenty-first-century popular film, this chapter considers feminist dystopia as a potential intervention into both historical and contemporary discussions of queerness and futurity. These unsettling fictions route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that trouble oppositions twenty-first century critical theory has tended to naturalize: between queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures. ❧ Drawing on black feminisms, queer of color critique, and the artistic movement of Afrofuturism, the third chapter, “A Now That Can Breed Futures: Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Capital, and Queer Possibility,” looks at the construction of black populations as threatening to the American future in the twentieth century. I trace figures of black female sexuality that emerge from the narrative foreclosures in W.E.B. Du Bois's 1920 “The Comet” and come to the fore in the queer radicalism of Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler's last novel Fledgling (2006), which demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy. The convergence of queer black feminism with science fiction emerges as a crucial national countergenealogy in the context of an alleged US postracialism and the unquestioned centrality of the nuclear family in the age of Obama. ❧ The fourth chapter, “It is not that I have no future: Gay Sex, Queer Worlds, and Samuel R. Delany’s Science Fiction” extends my queer analysis of feminist and racialized futurities to queer theory's primal scene of gay male public sex and the cultural practices that form around it. Linking the discourse of “world making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance with the idea of “world building” common in Marxist science fiction theory through their mutual engagement with Ernst Bloch, I analyze gay African American novelist and theorist Samuel R. Delany's science fictions Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). These novels imagine futures that center on queer sexual pleasure while paying close attention to racial and economic realities. I argue that they create queer worlds of theory and practice among readers in the process. ❧ I close with an epilogue, “How to Remix the Future,” that argues for the relevance of my research on temporal deviations to the contemporary digital media landscape. Focusing on the critical temporalities of remix videos that challenge the heteronormative construction of reproductive time and drawing on the example of the television series Battlestar: Galactica (2003-2009), this epilogue connects my research on speculative fictions’ histories with my related project on science fiction fans’ grassroots cultures of critical media production. ❧ While avoiding simplistic analogies or utopian claims for the political significance of either discourse, I contend throughout my dissertation that science fiction is (and has been, can be, should be) queer theory, and that queer theory is (and has been, can be, should be) science fiction. From the multiple convergences of both diverse forms emerge new ways of critiquing, imagining, and creating the past, present, and future