Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Eugenics, and Queer Possibility

Old Futures ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 99-128
Author(s):  
Alexis Lothian
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Central Term

Part 2 (A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction) turns to black diasporic speculative imagining as it has been used to create futures for those rendered futureless by global white supremacy. Chapter 3 focuses on how speculative fiction, racialized reproduction, and queer possibility converge to articulate processes that breed futures, and how these connections underlie the emergence in the 2000s of a canon of literary black science fiction. It introduces pleasure as a central term, tracing figurations of a radical future for black female sexuality that emerge from narrative foreclosures in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet” and following their trail into the queer speculations of two black feminist vampire novels: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). Du Bois’s text highlights the persistence of reproductive Afrofuturisms that have sometimes overlapped with eugenic discourses. Gomez and Butler pick up this thread to demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy, using the figure of the vampire to envision a decolonial lesbian future and a speculative reconsideration of eugenic science respectively.

Not a moment too soon: A juncture of BDSM and race

Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072097930
Author(s):  
Ariane Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
The Core ◽  
Racialized Sexuality ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship

This piece reflects on the contemporary scholarly juncture of bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism (BDSM) and race. After a period largely marked by the invisibility and marginalization of racialized sexuality in the study of kink, scholars have recently taken up race, specifically blackness, as central not periphery to the study of BDSM. Intervening in and building upon a black feminist tradition that has historically exhibited an ambivalent relationship to topics of BDSM, pornography, and sex work in the context of black female sexuality specifically as well as an investment in politics of respectability, this work illuminates the racialized erotics of pleasure and power at the core of sexuality.

Design Ideation Through Speculative Fiction: Foundational Principles and Exploratory Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 143 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maulik C. Kotecha ◽  
Ting-Ju Chen ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams ◽  
Vinayak Krishnamurthy
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Divergent Thinking ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Design Ideation

Abstract The objective of this study is to position speculative fiction as a broader framework to stimulate, facilitate, and study engineering design ideation. For this, we first present a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature on how fiction, especially science fiction, has played a role in design and decision-making. To further strengthen the need for speculative fiction for idea stimulation, we further prototype and study a prototype workflow that utilizes excerpts from speculative fiction books as textual stimuli for design ideation. Through a qualitative study of this workflow, we gain insights into the effect of textual stimuli from science fiction narratives on design concepts. Our study reveals that the texts consisting of the terms from the design statement or closely related to the problem boost the idea generation process. We further discover that less directly related stimuli may encourage out-of-the-box and divergent thinking. Using the insights gained from our study, we pose critical questions to initiate speculative fiction-based design ideation as a new research direction in engineering design. Subsequently, we discuss current research directions and domains necessary to take the technical, technological, and methodological steps needed for future research on design methodologies based on speculative fictional inspiration. Finally, we present a practical case to demonstrate how an engineering design workflow could be operationalized by investigating a concrete example of the design of automotive user interfaces (automotive-UI) through the lens of speculative fiction.

“Fearfully and wonderfully made”: Black Caribbean women and the decolonization of thick Black female bodies

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamille Gentles-Peart
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Caribbean Women ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Female Bodies

Black feminists promote decolonization as a strategy to recuperate Black women’s dignity and humanity from racist colonialist ideologies. In order to fully explore Black women’s emancipation, Black feminists have to explicitly consider how Black women break away from the ways in which thick Black female bodies have been defined by dominant white colonial cultures, and how Black women of different ethnicities engage in their own recovery of voluptuous Black female bodies. In this paper, I use a Black feminist intersectional lens to explore the ways in which Black Caribbean women recuperate thick Black female bodies from colonialist and racist ideologies. Specifically, using focus groups, I examine how these women participate in what I refer to as emancipatory thick body politics, discourses that challenge and resist the dehumanization of thick Black female bodies. Findings indicate that Black Caribbean women actively participate in decolonizing thick Black female bodies by forming sisterhood communities with other Black Caribbean women, re-defining womanhood, and engaging in transgressive interpretations of Christian doctrine.

scholarly journals Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM ENDERSBY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Many

AbstractBetween 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

The “Batty” Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Janell Hobson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Disability Theory

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

She's Gotta Have it: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felly Nkweto Simmonds
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Black Female

Black. Queer. Southern. Women.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Patrick Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Black Queer

Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History reveals how identity is made through race, gender, sexuality, class, and region. In particular, it centers the life stories of more than seventy Black, queer women from the U.S. South. With their lives and experiences as the focus, E. Patrick Johnson recasts a singular narrative of the South and illustrates the plurality of Black queer women’s identities. He also puts the complexity of Black female sexuality on display, drawing out multiple themes—childhood and adolescence; mother-daughter relationships; gender performances; religion and spirituality; sexual desires; dating and intimacy; and creative and political work. The interdisciplinary work blends oral history and performance ethnography methods to emphasize the rich tapestry of these women’s lives and give texture to their narratives. The book is divided into two parts. Part one, “G.R.I.T.S.: Stories of Growing Up Black, Female, and Queer,” is comprised of seven chapters and organized thematically, pulling out portions of women’s narratives that speak to each subject. Part two, “My Soul Looks Back and Wonders: Stories of Perseverance and Hope,” is comprised of six chapters, each of which delves into an individual woman’s narrative. Taken together, the sections reflect Johnson’s careful attention to the tension between history and biography; the structural and the interpersonal; the collective and the individual.

scholarly journals Azealia Banks's “212”: Black Female Identity and the White Gaze in Contemporary Hip-Hop

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES MCNALLY
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Black Female Identity ◽  
White Gaze

AbstractAzealia Banks's 2011 hit single “212” established her as one of hip-hop's rising stars, with critics highlighting the song's provocative lyrics and Banks's ability as an MC as standout qualities. Banks would later receive attention for her public dispute with white rapper Iggy Azalea, whom she accused of exploiting black musical culture. This article integrates an analysis of “212” with a discussion of Banks's recent public rhetoric in order to examine the ways in which Banks rearticulates the figure of the black female rapper and criticizes white fascination with black female sexuality and black cultural forms. I conclude by situating this discussion within the broader context of contemporary “post-racial” politics, in which the political elements of hip-hop and the systemic racial inequalities they address have become increasingly marginalized in favor of “color-blind” conceptions of United States society and popular culture.

scholarly journals In Conversation with Fikile Nxumalo: Refiguring Onto-Epistemic Attunements for Im/possible Science Pedagogies

2021 ◽  
pp. 321-330
Author(s):  
Fikile Nxumalo ◽  
Maria F. G. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Science Education ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
Educational Spaces

AbstractThis chapter elucidates critical concepts of place in relation to Black-feminist and more-than-human geographies in the context of early childhood education. This conversation helps get at pressing political contexts for science education that are often excluded in white educational spaces. Our conversation with Dr. Nxumalo offers practical starting points for researchers interested in playing with the messy intersections of materiality, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, Indigenous knowledges, and more-than-human kin.

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