Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 37)

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies #37

by Wendy Gay Pearson (Editor), Veronica Hollinger (Editor), Helen Merrick (Contributor)

Disputes over the meaning and practice of sexuality have become increasingly central to cultural self-definition. It is hardly surprising, then, that science fiction, the province of new physical and psychological frontiers, has taken up the task of imagining a diverse range of queer and not-so-queer futures. Queer Universes is a landmark investigation into these contemporary and historical representations of gender and sexualities—including Wendy Gay Pearson’s award-winning essay on reading science fiction queerly, as well as essays discussing “sextrapolation” in New Wave science fiction, “stray penetration” in William Gibson’s cyberpunk works, the queering of nature in ecofeminist sci-fi, and the radical challenges posed to conventional science fiction in the work of important writers such as Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna Russ. In addition, this distinguished volume offers interviews with acclaimed science fiction writers and essays from scholars and science fiction giants alike.

“Timely, smart, and innovative, this vital collection ensures that our conception of science fiction is fuller and healthier.”—Science Fiction Studies

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Literary Criticism, Science Fiction Fantasy, Ebooks, Sexuality

297 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2008

Reviews

[Lit Bug (Foram) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The latter half of the review continued from the first half here - http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

The third section, ‘Disordering Desires’, opens with Veronica Hollinger’s ‘Something Like a Fiction’, which considers a range of sf stories, from the 1930s to the present, in which sexuality intersects with, is framed by, and/or incorporates the technological, especially as these intersections have been allegorized in the figure of the cyborg. In particular, Hollinger’s discussion valorizes Joanna Russ’s great lesbian-feminist satire The Female Man as ‘a novel about conjunctures, intersections, and sexual encounters that are monstrous, hybrid, perverse, and – above all – political’.


In ‘And How Many Souls Do You Have?’, Patricia Melzer investigates the way in which technologies of the body enable sexual alterities in the erotic sf anthologies edited by Cecilia Tan. Tan’s anthologies bring together a diverse collection of writers whose stories construct versions of the technobody in order to literalize the scenarios of sadomasochism, bondage and discipline, and a variety of other non-normative sexual practices. Melzer examines ‘how technology denaturalizes not only bodies (and thus gender), but also sexual desires and practices’.


The third essay in this section is Sylvie Bérard’s ‘BDSMSF(QF): Sadomasochistic Readings of Québécois Women’s Science Fiction’. Bérard’s contemplation of the polymorphous perversity of feminist sf writers – in this case, three contemporary Québec writers – concludes that, ‘as they write and expose their most intimate and extreme images and fantasies, these writers place themselves in the same state of vulnerability that they impose on their characters when they throw them onto the stage of a fictive BDSM performance’.6 Bérard develops her ideas about speculative sexualities at the intersections of embodiment and performance, representation and discourse.

‘Something Like a Fiction’: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and Technology
Veronica Hollinger

If gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is no access to this ‘sex’ except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy…
— Judith Butler, (Bodies That Matter)

The focus of this discussion is on pre-cyberpunk science fiction in order to examine some of sf’s earlier literalizations of our increasingly intimate relations with/in the cultures of technology, acknowledging the historical influence of earlier sf, especially queer/feminist sf, on cyberpunk and later science fictions about the subjects of technoculture.

The discussion first reads several science fictions that address, with varying degrees of directness, some of the crises faced by the subject of technoculture at the intersections of sex and technology. Then it focuses in some detail on Joanna Russ’s great postmodern-lesbian-feminist-utopian-satire, The Female Man (1975), reading it as representative of a queerly efficacious analysis and critique of some of the complexities of our (sexual) relations with technology.

The essay then moves ahead to deconstruct a rather more complex cyborg subjectivity dramatized in C. L. Moore’s well-known proto-feminist story, ‘No Woman Born’(1944). This is an origin story about a new technosubjectivity, an asexual hybrid of woman and machine who is also a consummate performer of ‘woman’, reflecting on how gender is constructed through heteronormative ideas of being a ‘woman’, of being capable to ‘desire’ someone sexually and through, again, what Butler calls “Gender Performance”.

it also reads Haraway’s essay ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985; rev. 1991) as a (theoretical) allegory of the post-human subject of technoculture who is at the same time the self-reflexive (techno)subject – at once agent and object – of cultural critique.

‘[on] this view, technology is not a destiny
but a scene of struggle’ – Feenberg on Haraway

‘And How Many Souls Do You Have?’: Technologies of Perverse Desire and Queer Sex in Science Fiction Erotica
Patricia Melzer

The science fiction erotica published by Cecilia Tan, and the ‘pleasure’ of researching queer science fiction pornography explores the pleasure politics of queer sexualities and perverse desire in queer science fiction erotica. This essay is an attempt informed by Samuel R. Delany’s observation in Silent Interviews that to assume that pornographic writing is purely functional, that is, task-oriented – aimed at evoking sexual arousal – is to relegate any aesthetic element to the status of mere excess. He concludes that ‘in any given manifestation the excess can still be profoundly, ideologically informative’ (‘Introduction’).

The essay shows how these stories illustrate the role technology plays in the reconfiguration of sexualities and genders in representations of transgender, disabled, and otherwise altered bodies, often depicted as ‘alien’. Tan’s books address various intersecting reading communities; they often include queer and/or transgender characters, all are hardcore erotica, most include S/M practices, and many are written within a science fiction setting.

Melzer reads them in a queer/transgender theoretical framework, thereby focusing on two narrative elements: prostheses that reshape bodies according to desire and cloning as a technology of autoeroticism that destabilizes sexual difference. A crucial point, she says, is what separates the sf erotica she has examined examined from mainstream (written) sf pornography is its use of technology to denaturalize bodies and its emphasis on queer sexual practices, especially queer S/M.

Her main interest lies in how technology denaturalizes not only bodies (and thus gender), but also sexual desires and practices.

In queer sf erotica, prostheses denaturalize desire through the technological enhancement of body parts where the ‘unnatural’ body is not only object (as often happens in pornography) but also subject of desire.

Cloning is another major technology used to queer desire in these stories. As the actual technology advances, human cloning increasingly evokes anxiety. Cloning, along with extra-uterine and bio-engineered reproduction, make up what Constance Ash calls the ‘edge-land of human evolution’.

Queer sf erotica approaches technology in a way quite different from Marxist and feminist critiques that focus on bodies alienated by technology and patriarchal technoscience. These paranoid rejections of post-human subjectivity in relation to technology neglect the bodies that already rely on technology to express desire. Instead of insisting on normative (‘natural’) bodies as measures for sexuality and desire, queer sf erotica celebrates bodies and sexualities that are enabled and enhanced through technology; these stories centralize sexual subjects and their ‘fine fucking machines’ as agents of change. In the queer cornucopia of unpredictable body-parts and sexual practices, the ‘taxonomy’ of heterosexual desire collapses and is replaced by an endless variety of categories, as the naturalized body is replaced by… well… accessories.

BDSMSF(QF): Sadomasochistic Readings of Québécois Women’s Science Fiction
Sylvie Bérard

Berard begins with how in ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, Susan Sontag links pornography to science fiction and explains how the Marquis de Sade envisions ‘the body as a machine and…the orgy as an inventory of the hopefully infinite possibilities of several machines in collaboration with each other.

The essay concentrates on several sadomasochistic sf fictions by Québécois women writers of the fantastic, leaving aside consideration of poetics or of sociological aspects of the links between sf and BDSM. Observing how and, more importantly, from which perspective sadomasochistic scenes develop in these fictions, it aims to show how the narrative analysis of these texts and perhaps of science fiction as a whole can benefit from such new conceptual input. Not only does science fiction have a lot to say about sexuality and sadomasochism, Berard contends, but BDSM as an analytical framework also has much to tell us about science fiction. She has chosen three contemporary sf narratives based on a BDSM dynamic. Each features, in the first place, someone (some instance) in charge whom we can call the Top; second, there is a compliant object, the Bottom; and, finally, there is a favourable situation, the Scene.

Although these narratives depict sadomasochistically inspired games in quite different fashions, they share an interesting and significant common thread: in all three texts, a Top inflicts pain on a Bottom in the context of a performance.

Sadomasochistic, or any kind of ‘perverse’ sexuality is about doing. Whereas ‘straight’ sex (whatever the preference of the people involved) is about having. Now, this is an obvious but crucial and fascinating difference. For, the notion of ‘having sex’ signifies at once that ‘sex’ is something one can own, and that it (sex) was there prior to the performance. The s/m sensualist, quite contrarily, in doing a scene makes sex in the performance.


The final section is ‘Embodying New Worlds’. The interview and two essays in this section concentrate on the impossibility of disentangling discourses of sexuality from those of race and gender in the imaginative effort to construct desirable futures. Nancy Johnston interviews Nalo Hopkinson, a Caribbean-Canadian sf writer whose novels, short stories, and edited anthologies have attracted much critical acclaim in the past decade. In their lively and provocative conversation, Hopkinson illuminates some of the ways in which, in Johnston’s words, she ‘employs myth, archetype, speculation, and potential technologies to imagine worlds where her characters can transform or transcend their bodies and invent futures where individuals are not alienated by race, colour, sex, gender, or class’. In the first of the two essays in this section, ‘Queering Nature’, Helen Merrick takes a step beyond the queering of human or even human– alien relationships to examine how queer ecofeminist theory provides a productive reading strategy for feminist sf texts in which ‘nature’ itself is denaturalized.

Concentrating on two novels by Amy Thomson, The Color of Distance (1995) and Through Alien Eyes (1999), Merrick re-visits ‘the loaded space of “the natural”’ in order to ‘consider how “queering nature” might further question normative notions of sexuality and gender’.


In the final essay of the collection, De Witt Douglas Kilgore asks, ‘Must any future order, whether on Mars or elsewhere, recapitulate a racialized heteronormativity? Can we imagine a peaceful and just society only as the outcome of a reproductive order that requires a firmly rooted hierarchy of racial and sexual identities?. He finds some answers in an examination of the utopian trope of ‘the coming race’ in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1993–97). Robinson’s fiction takes the reader back to queer theory’s challenge to read the racialization and gendering of bodies as inseparable from their sexualization, yet, at the same time, his trilogy moves towards a utopic vision of a future in which the painful limitations of the protagonists’ present produce future alterities that cannot be so easily controlled by discursive or ideological strategies. As Kilgore concludes, we do not find the future in Robinson’s trilogy; ‘instead we discover a text that invites us to dream of escaping from heteronormative whiteness’. And we get an inkling of how a queer futurity might be lived.

‘Happy That It’s Here’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson
Nancy Johnston

Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian author, has become in less than a decade a critically acclaimed novelist of speculative/science fiction and an original voice in the critical and political debates about speculative fiction, feminism, and afro-futurism.

The interview depicts the persistence of non-normative sexualities throughout Hopkinson’s works. Below are the most important two excerpts of the interview in Hopkinson’s own words:

“ When I write, I want to present as wide a spectrum as I can of the ways in which people can choose to behave sexually and in relationships, and I like representing those where possible as visible, acceptable behaviours. Because they should be, and because science fiction is about conceiving new possibilities.

Gay/straight/bisexual are all important to represent, but they aren’t the only possible axes along which to sort human sexual attraction.”

Queering Nature: Close Encounters with the Alien in Ecofeminist Science Fiction
Helen Merrick

[Q]ueering what counts as nature is my categorical imperative…
— Donna Haraway, ‘A Game of Cat’s Cradle’

‘Queering nature’ seems an appropriate theme for enquiries into sexuality in science fiction, especially from the perspective of feminist and queer theories. While it may not immediately suggest an overt comment on sexualities, it is inarguable that ‘nature’ as well as ‘culture’ is heavily implicated in our understandings and performances of sexuality.

Just as our constructions of sexuality (and the strictures of normative heterosexism) infuse every aspect of our culture/s, so too do sexualized assumptions underpin our constructions of ‘nature’. And further, the ways we think about ‘nature’ impact upon and constrain our notions of sexuality.

Wendy Pearson observes that science fiction has the potential to ‘interrogate the ways in which sexual subjectivities are created as effects of the system that sustains them’ (‘Alien Cryptographies’). I want to further her argument to suggest that the variety of discourses and ‘knowledges’ that have come to stand for (or take the place of) ‘nature’ are one such system.

A queer ecofeminist perspective, in contrast, argues that ‘the naturalization of heterosexuality has been historically accompanied by the heterosexualization of nature’ (Sandilands, ‘Unnatural Passions’); the very nature/culture relation itself, which is mapped as feminine/masculine, ‘becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality’ (Gaard, ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’).

As with queer theory, ‘gender’ is not situated in ecofeminist theories as the ‘privileged’ category of oppression. Rather, ecofeminism calls for a non-reductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole series of interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality, economics, globalism, and, of course, the environment. Both queer theory and ecofeminism have as political goal and analytical method the assumption that (gender) identity is not fixed, but is unstable, mutable, and fluid.

At the heart of a queer-ecofeminist reading, then, is a sustained attention to the ongoing reinscriptions of the nature/culture binary in our understandings of sexed and gendered subjectivities (and embodiments), particularly as regulated and constrained through the narratives of Western scientific discourse.

Unlike more traditional sf readings which parallel the human/alien with a gendered dichotomy, in these texts the problematics of difference and otherness are located around the dualism of human/non-human, thus suggesting the possibility of escaping the heterosexual bind.

Gender is not the most significant marker of the human–alien relation. Rather, the tensions in human–alien relations reflect the ‘purifying’ practices of scientific (and colonialist) discourses which contribute to the delineation of human from other.

To recognize and indeed valorize a non-hierarchical and non-colonizing way of thinking about ‘nature’.

I couldn’t help thinking of this funny, yet serious line in The Left Hand of Darkness while reading this essay - The King is pregnant!

Queering the Coming Race? A Utopian Historical Imperative
De Witt Douglas Kilgore

The essay talks about how Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Mars trilogy, although it is not Robinson’s primary intention to show us a queer future, suggests the conditions under which it could appear.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has suggested, ceasing to rely on ‘paranoid’ habits of reading, and instead searching for a ‘reparative’ mode that looks for hope in unexpected places (Sedgwick, Touching). Sedgwick argues that paranoia is a way of reading that seeks to reveal the oppressive truth behind even the most seemingly benign cultural expressions. It is a powerful critical strategy driven by the hope that revelation will expand the freedoms we enjoy.

Sedgwick notes, however, that ‘paranoia knows some things well and others poorly’ (Touching). One of the things that paranoia is not good at knowing is surprise. It tends, in other words, to be ahistorical, assuming that the future will be much like the past and that an oppressive past must produce an oppressive future. The ‘reparatively positioned reader’, on the other hand, may think it ‘realistic and necessary to experience surprise’ (Touching). This is nothing less than the rediscovery, in critical terms, of the future.

A reparative reading strategy thereby acknowledges oppressive pasts but recovers their utopian potential, allowing for the possibility of futures that are ‘pleasurable’ and ‘ameliorative’.

To queer a race means to shift not only what a body means in culture but also the kinds of acts it may perform in relation to others. This involves reconsidering other components of contemporary social hierarchy, including the allocation of rights and wrongs, winners and losers.

[Lit Bug (Foram) · Rating 4 out of 5]

SINCE THE REVIEW EXCEEDS THE WORD LIMIT, I WILL BE REVIEWING IT IN TWO PARTS, THE FIRST IN THIS EDITION, THE REST IN ANOTHER ONE LINKED BELOW. FOR THE MORE COMPREHENSIVE, SHORT REVIEW, DO NOT OPEN THE SPOILER TAGS. Nevertheless, you will have to look at both reviews for the comprehensive overview.

NOTE: A significant part of this review is copied directly from the text and altered and snipped to seamlessly merge into a short review, interspersed with my own observations and conclusions – hence, not every sentence is mine. The observations of these authors were too accurate and significantly phrased, they were too important to be left out – leaving less space for my own views, so I have stringed them together in a way they (hopefully) read lucidly, meaningfully, and better than I could have phrased them. The spoiler tags include somewhat more detailed exposition in my own words (mostly) of the concepts to which they are attached.END


Science fiction notoriously reflects contemporary realities back to us through the lens of a particular type of imagination, one associated with the future, with the potentials of technology, and with the important idea that life does not remain static.


A significant emphasis within queer theory involves exposing the ways in which ideas of the normal, particularly as expressed through heteronormativity, constrain people’s lives – and not just their sexual lives – in concert with the critique of heteronormativity, queer theory returns to Foucault to examine the ways in which heteronormativity is enforced to reshape the individual to fit statistical and discursive norms.


Finally, queer theory participates in a debate about the political efficacy of theory in general and, more particularly, about the degree to which critical investigation, subversive practices, and queer acts are able to have material consequences in the ‘real world’.

As Judith Butler has pointed out,

The task of all these movements [lesbian and gay, transgender, intersex, queer and feminist] seems to me to be about distinguishing among the norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself… What is important is to stop legislating for all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some. (Undoing Gender)


Queer theoretical approaches, alongside feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, and critical race theories, allow critics to make visible the naturalized epistemologies of sexuality, gender, and race that underwrite the most conservative sf, as well as to explain some of science fiction’s most striking attempts to defamiliarize and denaturalize taken-for-granted constructions of what it means to be, and to live, as a human.


This volume brings together an array of discussions about genders and sexualities by writer/scholars and scholar/readers with a broad range of expertise in the sf field. Their diverse readings are influenced not only by queer theory, but also by feminist theory, postcolonial theory, lesbian and gay studies, critical race studies, and a variety of other critical tools for interrogating the topic.


The essays are grouped into four sections. The first of these, ‘Queering the Scene’, centres around Pearson’s ‘Alien Cryptographies’, a careful mapping of some of the ways in which queer theoretical perspectives can intersect with a range of sf texts to produce new readings of science fiction that are both relevant and suggestive. The figure of the alien, not surprisingly, is at the centre of Pearson’s (re)-reading, which includes detailed analyses of two very different treatments of the alien/ queer as the figure who moves invisibly through the territories of heteronormativity: John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938) and Tom Reamy’s ‘Under the Hollywood Sign’ (1975). This section also presents an essay/dialogue by critically acclaimed writers Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, ‘War Machine, Time Machine’, in which they look backwards to recall their various discoveries of both science fiction and queer identities and forwards to their own trajectories as readers and writers of (sometimes transgressive) science fictions about genders and sexualities and subjectivities.

Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer
Wendy Gay Pearson

In this essay, Pearson chalks out what the concept Queer, in terms of theorization, implies – the question as to whether “Queer” is a biological, sexual phenomenon implying deviance from heterosexual standards or if it is an ideological positioning from which forced heterosexuality of texts can be subverted to reveal the deeply unnatural and constructed nature of our understandings of biological sex, the performative nature of gender roles, and the sociocultural institutions founded upon this ideology.

On the one hand, a queer reading can be a reading against the grain, where one looks at a text from what is clearly a subcultural position: often that involves reading the text through the cultural and historical milieu in which it is written; that milieu is not, however, understood in hegemonic terms, but rather through the historical and sociocultural perspectives afforded by the reader’s subculture.

On the other hand, a queer reading may set out either to reveal or to recuperate what is already in some sense a queer text, usually a product of a history in which writing as a gay man or as a lesbian was impossible or dangerous. Such queer readings also provide alternative understandings of texts that cannot be labelled gay or lesbian, since those subject positions were not available to their creators. Thus, for example, we queer certain, indeed many, Renaissance texts. This does not, however, imply that their authors are ‘queer’ or gay/lesbian or even homosexual, since those categories are all modern; it does imply, though, that we can recognize within the texts the traces of an alternative or dissident sexual subjectivity that may be revealed through close and careful reading within both a historical context and a theoretical framework.

This is especially important since the Interpretive Communities, as Stanley Fish puts it – i.e. a communal mode of interpreting unanimously a text differ from generation to generation. What one set of readers decipher today in a text might be very different from the interpretations of another set of readers a decade later. A very famous example is of the legendary James Tiptree, Jr. aka Alice Sheldon - Tiptree was praised for ‘his’ understanding of the male psyche and texts that, to us, are not only obviously but almost paradigmatically feminist were understood totally within the domain of a reading practice that rendered women invisible. - example of the ways in which queer theory can effect a re-reading – and not just of the text, but also, perhaps, of the heteronormative reading protocols that have constrained earlier readings.

Thus, it is one’s cultural, social and ideological positioning that determines the nature of our reading, the inferences we draw out of a text, rather than the text handing out meanings for readers to internalize.

A text’s subversive potential is not dependent upon its generic innovation, but on how it maps and motivates the antagonisms constituting the subject(s) of representation, and on how it transfigures and recathects the available forms of cultural expression. This rewriting is coextensive to the articulation of gay male identities-in-process as these deviant subjects confront culture and enter into representational agency within it. The most radical representational practices of deviant subjects not only challenge the official versions of their lives, but also transvalue the notion of deviance, and interrogate the mechanisms and meanings of representational practices – including their own.
— Earl Jackson, Jr, Strategies of Deviance

Queer sf provides spaces to go beyond simply writing gay men and lesbians into uninterrogated heteronormative visions of both present and future.

The second section, ‘Un/Doing History’, looks at some moments in the history of sf through the lens of contemporary critical approaches to sexuality. In ‘Sextrapolation in New Wave Science Fiction’, Rob Latham investigates the new emphasis on ‘adult’ narrative in sf of the 1960s and 1970s, opening with the challenge of the New Wave’s pre-eminent editor, Judith Merril, who contended in 1966 that it is ‘long past time for some of the same kind of hard-headed speculative thinking that science fiction contributed to space flight and atomics to be done in [the areas of] interpersonal psychology and sexology’. In ‘Towards a Queer Genealogy of SF’, Wendy Gay Pearson investigates the possibilities for constructing a queer genealogy of sf in order to unsettle ‘the empire of certainty’ (Greyson, Zero Patience) established by an enlightenment episteme which values particular forms of rationality, history, science and knowledge.

The third essay in this section, Guy Davidson’s ‘Sexuality and the Statistical Imaginary’, offers a detailed reading of Delany’s classic ‘ambiguous heterotopia’ Triton (a.k.a. Trouble on Triton, 1976) as ‘an exemplary postmodern document’ about the proliferation of sexual desires in the context of contemporary capitalism.

Finally, Graham J. Murphy proposes a queer reading of some well-known cyberpunk fiction, notably William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer (1984). Although cyberpunk has traditionally been read as an especially heteronormative and masculinist genre, Murphy argues – taking account of Judith Butler’s discussion about the ideological defensiveness of heteronormative penetration – that the ‘stray penetration’ recurrent in Gibson’s novels induces a heteronormative ‘systems crash’ in these exemplary cyberpunk fictions.

Sextrapolation in New Wave Science Fiction
Rob Latham

This essay analyzes references to sex, sexuality and taboos in New Wave Sf, especially the reservations of editors who freely wielded their blue-pencilled scissors to tame all explicit references. Campbell figures as a huge impediment in getting such stories published. According to Farmer, Campbell and Gold routinely rejected ‘controversial stories based on sex because they found them personally disgusting and disturbing’, but they were doing no more than reflecting the current state of the field: the average s-f reader doesn’t really want disturbing or thought-provoking stories, he wants entertainment.

Further, the essay tries to briefly anatomize three significant and at times overlapping ways in which sf’s new sexual openness was expressed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first of these – the feminist critique of normative gender roles and sexual relationships, whose key literary achievements include the short fiction of Alice Sheldon (a.k.a. James Tiptree, Jr) and Joanna Russ’s novel The Female Man (1975) – has received extensive coverage in the extant scholarship and thus requires little summary. What is stressed here is the way that feminist sf served as a kind of conscience for the New Wave movement, seeking to ensure that the genre’s newfound aesthetic freedoms would be used with some degree of moral accountability.

Towards a Queer Genealogy of SF
Wendy Gay Pearson

This essay examine show sf texts, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), position sexuality, in particular, as a lens through which to refract the potential to be recognized as human, the capacity for a livable life, and the possibility of asserting agency and subjectivity.


Genealogical critiques refuse to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. The task of this inquiry is to center on – and decenter – such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.

She states that making heterosexuality historically visible is difficult because, under its institutional pseudonyms, such as Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, and Population, heterosexuality has been permitted to masquerade so fully as History itself - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body’ – (Foucault, ‘Neitzsche’

Queer genealogies of sf, then, are engaged as much in a process of un/doing history as they are of un/doing gender.

If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition, then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well. But if the schemes of recognition that are available to us are those that ‘undo’ the person by conferring recognition, or ‘undo’ the person by withholding recognition, then recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced. That means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not. (Undoing Gender, Butler)

Sexuality and the Statistical Imaginary in Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton
Guy Davidson

Triton’s representation of a proliferative economy of urban erotic styles dovetails with the argument developed by a number of theorists that the formation of sexual minorities is entangled with the growth of consumer capitalism.

For instance, in his influential essay ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, John D’Emilio contends that the changes to traditional social arrangements wrought by capitalism – importantly, increasing urbanization and a new emphasis, for both men and women, on self-determination rather than responsibility to the family – have enabled the production and increase of homosexual individuals. By implication, this argument can be extended to the formation of other sexual minorities, such as s/m practitioners.

The work of D’Emilio and others pinpoints this shift in sexual identity formation at the turn of the twentieth century – the period of the early stages of commodity capitalism rather than its contemporary manifestation, that is, the period of modernity rather than postmodernity.

it is sexuality rather than gender or race (or indeed any other class of selfhood) that is in the modern era located as the deepest substratum of the personality – which is not, of course, to say that sexuality is always or even generally the most socially or politically significant permutation of identity.

Stray Penetration and Heteronormative Systems Crash: Queering Gibson
Graham J. Murphy

Nicola Nixon, in her influential feminist essay ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’(1992) - http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/... - argues that cyberpunk conceals ‘a complicity with ’80s conservatism’, a conservatism that can be interpreted as reinforcing traditional sexualities. In her essay ‘Feminist Cyberpunk’ (1995) - http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a... - Karen Cadora concludes that, with its focus on ‘the male-dominated fields of computers, science, and sf, masculinist cyberpunk is ripe for the homoerotic. Sadly, fierce queens and flaming queers are absent from the pages of traditional cyberpunk. Indeed, cyberpunk is characterized by its rather rampant heterosexuality’.

Veronica Hollinger observes that sf remains ‘an overwhelmingly straight discourse, not least because of the covert yet almost completely totalizing ideological hold heterosexuality has on our culture’s ability to imagine itself otherwise’.

The essay then offers a reading of Gibson’s Neuromancer sequence as what Pearson calls ‘proto-queer’ texts. The ‘proto-queer’ text is one that ‘although not queer itself, effects a kind of discursive challenge to the naturalized understanding of sexuality and its concomitant sociocultural surround’ (‘Alien Cryptographies’).

However, I partially disagree with the references to “cyborg envy” as described by critic Allucquère Rosanne Stone – “To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and cybernetic space like a garment, is to put on the female.” The matrix is envisioned as a female entity “penetrated” (deliberate pun) by the male cowboy hacker through the act of “jacking in” –yes, that’s right, but the idea of proto-queering it by the idea that a female cyborg entering the matrix can be interpreted as a queer reading of the text seems too ridiculous.

Find the latter half continued here - http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[Egor Breus · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing collection of essays, there's enough hot takes and new sf authors here to last you a lifetime.

[Mike Johnstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strong collection of essays that offer challenging readings and rereadings of classic and obscure SF works. Makes a convincing case for the analogues between SF and queer theory.

[boocia]

this was a really strong collection of essays, enjoyed it more than i expected. across the board i think all the writers/interviewers handled the nuances of overlaps, tensions, and differences between gay/lesbian discourses, trans discourses, and race discourses as opposed to handling them as a big bucket of subversions that could point to a flat futurity. i have read lazier essays that do this so this nuance just felt very safe and refreshing and good.

as w all these i probably only got like 30% of it, but my favorite takeaways

- the concept of foucaldian genealogy as opposed to the obsession/study of "single origin" or "root cause"; a more distributed mapping of history on the body ("Toward a Queer Genealogy of SF", Pearson)
- the reinvocation of Sedgewick's call for non-paranoid reading in the context of seeing / queerly reading science fictional texts was really cool and resonant, seeing their theory applied to a specific example was helpful ("Queering the Coming Race", Kilgore)
- throughout there was this line of thinking of like, "two lesbians in the background of a tv show isn't inherently queer fiction"; and also a line of thinking that is "a [straight?] man and a [straight?] woman having sex but the woman is by virtue of gengineering and raised on mars twice his size, dominant, and infused with tiger genes could make it queer" i think troubles and makes interesting how much queerness is not identitarian, but performative in an interesting way. it's about the dynamics of power and performance of gender than what "is"?
- loved the queer read on Who Goes There (we can't tell who is gay but if you're alone in a room w the gay one it'll turn you gay) ("Alien Cryptographies", Pearson)
- it was very helpful to get this historical context that the 50s/60s were a very UnSexy Time, that editors were explicitly filtering out work that addressed sex or sensuality in a way that created works with their own neuroses; and how new wave was a reaction to that specifically (Sextrapolation in New Wave Fiction, Latham)
- it really brought home the idea of "structure of feeling" when Kilgore did a close analysis of the Mars trilogy and cited how Robinson explicitly is trying to save utopian fiction in his work; this is just vibes but yeah, this book did make me transform my "structures of feeling" towards the world; before politics or argument or fact; it was an optimism and instinct to help people and make a better world. i think i understand this concept better from this essay and that's pretty sick

i added like two fiction books and two nonfiction books to my to-read list because of this series of essays, extremely worth!

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah now this one is definitely not written for people outside of academia. I will preface this with I know fucking nothing about gender studies and queer theory in the realm of academia. Like, I literally didn't know who Judith Butler was until like 4 months ago and had to google "Is Judith Butler lesbian". Some of the essays are more readable than others, but my god there are some that I am like huh what ok there buddy.

I also wanted just lgbt content, I didn't need to know about new wave sff being more full of sex--I already knew that. There is also another essay on queering William Gibson's books through the penetration theory which FUCKING hilarious to me. Like I legit did not academics analyze shit with this idea because it seems dumb as fuck to me. However, there are two essays that I feel are good reads if you can deal with academia. "War Machine, Time Machine" by Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge is the most readable thing in the whole book and is absolutely delightful. It is very much a personal essay. Sad to say that some of the stuff that Griffith and Eskridge experienced is still in the sff community (looking at the most recent fiasco with a particular old white man writer). The other "Towards a Queer Genealogy of SF" by Wendy Gay Pearson is also good but more unreadable. I would skip the first part with the genealogy theory and shit and dive right into the discussion of gender and sex in SFF, it gave me some new reading material to go find. I am not quite done with the book, I have like three essays left and one is on ecofeminism in sff through a queer lens. Just so u know, I am not a fan of ecofeminism bc it can get very wombyn and terfy.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides]

Maybe this will help me find it.