Marvelous Stank Matter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Alternative Models ◽  
Western Model ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Sexual Cultures

This chapter reviews the importance of sacred subjectivity to various black sexual cultures. In its proposal of nonmonogamy as an alternative practice for funk's genealogy of affection, relationality, and sexuality between human and nonhuman beings, the chapter addresses M. Jacqui Alexander's question about sacred subjectivity. Using queer legal theory, debates about the marriage crisis in black communities, and cultural depictions of nonmonogamy in the science fiction of Octavia Butler and the erotica of Fiona Zedde, the chapter reveals how funk attends to alternative models of family and community to challenge the heteropatriarchal recolonization that happens with capitalism and the Western model of family.

scholarly journals (Nothing But) Futures

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
David Kupferman
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Educational Research ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Educational Futures ◽  
Research And Policy

The year after the journal ACCESS originally launched, Octavia Butler (1983) published a short story titled “Speech Sounds” in the science fiction monthly Asimov’s Science Fiction. The story takes place in the aftermath of a pandemic that seemingly has one of multiple effects: one either loses the ability to speak coherently, or one loses the ability to read and write (but not both). In this paper, I will discuss how this story has utility as an example of future studies. Futures studies is an attempt to game out multiple futures by using our present-day anxieties, institutions, and value systems to consider what is probable, what is possible, and what is preferable. Through future studies, I am looking for a new way for thinking about theory so that we can engage in imagining any number of educational futures, one that takes the scaffolding of futures studies and both looks to science fiction as its object of inquiry and reads educational research and policy as science fiction writing.

Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton: Black Women Writers and Science Fiction

2003 ◽  
Vol 92 (6) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Jerome Hampton ◽  
Wanda M. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Octavia Butler

scholarly journals Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Hunt Botting
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Last Man

I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal—or men-dominant—dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also projected the ways that patriarchal and authoritarian forms of populism could shape the cultural circumstances that can turn a local outbreak of a new and deadly contagious disease, like COVID-19, into a politically chaotic and economically devastating global plague. Modern feminist political science fiction born of Shelley's great pandemic novel The Last Man (1826) is seemingly clairvoyant not because of any supernatural powers of the authors but rather because of their studied attention to the wisdom of plague literature, the lessons of epidemic history, and the political dynamics of patriarchy and populism.

Fictions of Immanence: Gender-Fluidity in the Science Fiction of Angela Carter and Octavia Butler

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Delphi Carstens
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Angela Carter ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
Transgender Studies ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This paper reads Deleuze-Guattarian and new materialist theories alongside two landmark works of speculative science fiction by Angela Carter and Octavia Butler that queer normative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. These theoretical and fictional explorations argue that subjectivity should be reconceptualised as immanent rather than fixed. Utilising uncanny affective registers, they attempt to push rigid ideas about gender/sex toward more fluid configurations that affirm a heterogeneity of lived experiences, situating subjectivity along lines of becoming. To execute such moves, Deleuze and Guattari propose a kind of experimental and experiential rupturing process; a mechanism for accessing what is immanent to everyday experience, rather than governmental. This is particularly useful for exploring transgender and other minoritarian subjectivities. By invoking breaks or ruptures from habituated ways of thinking and feeling, as these philosophers suggest, writers, artists and theorists might succeed in creating points of emergence around which new configurations and relations of gender-fluid identities might coalesce. I will investigate how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Carter and Butler, who wrote before the emergence of transgender studies during the 1990s, paved the way for nomadic conceptions of sexuality, gender and lived contradiction.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Health ◽  
Black People ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Body ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Cultural Centers ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Sexual Cultures

This concluding chapter focuses on Herukhuti's explanation of why he founded the Black Funk Center. His states that black people can and do create revolutionary sexual cultures that can become the foundation for centers of sexual health, well-being, and decolonization. Black communities need more sexual cultural centers like Black Funk, but since sexuality and eroticism tend to be ignored, there are few political ideologies or organizations that see such centers as a part of black revolutionary movements. By exploring spaces and sites where narratives and performances of the body provocatively intersect with expressions of interior movement, the chapter argues that the need for such centers has already been articulated elsewhere—in profane sites of memory.

Flowers of Time

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Payne
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Pastoral Poetry ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Postapocalyptic Literature ◽  
Historical Moment

The literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction — stories set after civilization's destruction — is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Traveling from antiquity to the present, this book reveals how postapocalyptic fiction differs from other genres — pastoral poetry, science fiction, and the maroon narrative — that also explore human capabilities beyond the constraints of civilization. The book places postapocalyptic fiction into conversation with such theorists as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Carl Schmitt, illustrating how the genre functions as political theory in fictional form. It shows that rather than argue for a particular way of life, postapocalyptic literature reveals what it would be like to inhabit that life. It considers the genre's appeal in our own historical moment, contending that this fiction is the pastoral of our time. Whereas the pastoralist and the maroon could escape to real-world hills and fashion their own versions of freedom, on a fully owned and occupied Earth, only an apocalyptic event can create a space where such freedoms are feasible once again. The book looks at how fictional narratives set after the world's devastation represent new conditions and possibilities for life and humanity.

Synthesizers As Social Protest in Early-1970s Funk

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Griffin Woodworth
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Acoustic Instruments ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
Social Empowerment ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

The advent of the synthesizer brought a new timbral palette for artists to explore. Early synthesizers sought to imitate acoustic instruments, but over time they developed their own unique timbral qualities used in 1970s funk and progressive rock. Occupying the Freudian uncanny, synthesized sounds are just distinguishable enough from those of acoustic instruments to inspire discomfort or create an otherworldly, science-fiction sound. This chapter argues that African-American funk musicians of the 1970s used synthesizers in the spirit of black social empowerment movements, which advocated for the reclamation of technology to be used in the defense of black communities. Artists such as Stevie Wonder and Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell utilized the synthesizer to articulate social protest against the plight of inner-city black Americans. To explore these issues, the chapter analyzes “Chocolate City” and “Living for the City” from lyrical, structural, and timbral perspectives.

scholarly journals Subject (in) Trouble: Humans, Robots, and Legal Imagination

Laws ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Legal Subjectivity ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right

The legal conception and interpretation of the subject of law have long been challenged by different theoretical backgrounds: from the feminist critiques of the patriarchal nature of law and its subjects to the Marxist critiques of its capitalist ideological nature and the anti-racist critiques of its colonial nature. These perspectives are, in turn, challenged by anarchist, queer, and crip conceptions that, while compelling a critical return to the subject, the structure and the law also serve as an inspiration for arguments that deplete the structures and render them hostages of the sovereignty of the subject’ self-fiction. Identity Wars (a possible epithet for this political and epistemological battle to establish meaning through which power is exercised) have, for their part, been challenged by a renewed axiological consensus, here introduced by posthuman critical theory: species hierarchy and anthropocentric exceptionalism. As concepts and matter, questioning human exceptionalism has created new legal issues: from ecosexual weddings with the sea, the sun, or a horse; to human rights of animals; to granting legal personhood to nature; to human rights of machines, inter alia the right to (or not to) consent. Part of a wider movement on legal theory, which extends the notion of legal subjectivity to non-human agents, the subject is increasingly in trouble. From Science Fiction to hyperrealist materialism, this paper intends to signal some of the normative problems introduced, firstly, by the sovereignty of the subject’s self-fiction; and, secondly, by the anthropomorphization of high-tech robotics.

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