The Portrayal of Hegemony and Patriarchy in Louise O’ Neill’s Only Ever Yours

This study analyzes patriarchal hegemony portrayed in a dystopian world where young girls are hegemonized to fulfill patriarchal interests written by Louise O’ Neill, Only Ever Yours. As a counter to utopian writing, dystopian literature emerged as a subgenre of speculative fiction. The objectives of this study are to elucidate the kinds of patriarchal structures and media operated in portraying patriarchal hegemony in the novel. This study employs Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory along with the concept of patriarchy by Sylvia Walby. This study is literary criticism as the researcher interprets and analyzes the literary work. It employs a sociological approach for the analysis and Sylvia Walby’s six structures of patriarchy theory along with Gramsci’s theory. The data are taken from the words, phrases, and sentences in Only Ever Yours published in 2015. The researcher took the data by identifying, classifying and analyzing the data by elucidating the data with the theories. The result of this study shows that there are three patriarchal structures portrayed in the novel which are patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal state, and patriarchal culture. On the other hand, patriarchal hegemony is portrayed through the medium of television.

Critical Future Studies and Age: attending to future imaginings of age and ageing

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine newfutures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

Nnedi Okorafor: Trajectories of an African Futurism

This article presents an analysis of the new category of Africanfuturism coined by the Nigerian American writer (or Naijamerican, as she defines herself) Nnedi Okorafor in 2019, after years of questions about the limits that the category of Afrofuturism has put over the receptions of her works. Okorafor felt the urgency to open this new horizon to better insist on the importance of stories and narratives profoundly rooted in the African continent, thus abandoning the Western models and canons of science fiction and creating new ways of looking towards the far future. Through the analysis of Okorafor’s novels (Who Fears Death?, Lagoon and Binti), interviews and posts on her blog, the article explores the potentialities of Okorafor’s speculative fiction to deal with technologies, traditions, cultures, social transformations, and how these issues inform a future Africa that could possibly be an entirely new world, in which the concept of ‘West’ and ‘colonialism’ do not have any meaning.

Speculative Fiction, Sociology, and Surveillance Studies: Towards a Methodology of the Surveillance Imaginary

Utopian theorists often speak about the merits of reading utopian fiction in order to reimagine and rebuild a better world, but dystopian fiction is often overlooked. This is, in my view, misguided because dystopian fiction, like utopian fiction, diagnoses issues with the present, inspires activism and resistance, and, in the twenty-first century, often presents ideas of how to effect positive change through collective activism. As speculative literary genres concerned with world-building, utopian and dystopian fiction have inherent sociological concerns. These texts can therefore be utilised by sociologists and other researchers beyond the arts and humanities. Speculative fiction is important to the field of surveillance studies not only because surveillance is a major theme in these literary texts but also because their formal properties provide us with the language, imagery, and feelings associated with being under surveillance. Twenty-first-century utopian and dystopian fiction has not been thoroughly examined by surveillance scholars. Analysis of utopian and dystopian fiction in this field has also focused on texts set in, and written by authors from, the global north. Considering the plethora of dystopian novels in and beyond the global north published in recent years that discuss surveillance, the neglect of the study of these texts to date is an oversight.

Ten-Four

This story is an appropriation/erasure of George Orwell’s 1984, remixing some of its original text with concepts from popular fiction and academic literature, including my published work. These concepts include: lateral surveillance; pandemic policing; data capitalism; predictive policing; and posthuman. The story contributes to the diverse, expanding field of cultural production known as “speculative fiction… a mode of thought-experimenting” (Oziewicz 2017). Rather than trying to predict the future, speculative fiction “unsettles the present” with what-if questions that allow us to “develop alternative social imaginaries and open up new perspectives” and “spaces of debate” (Dunne and Raby 2013: chapters 88, 189, 3).

Survey of the Story Elements of Isekai Manga

This paper presents a survey of the story elements in isekai (other world) manga. The large number of available isekai manga series allows the use of a survey to investigate patterns in story elements. These patterns can be used to generate hypotheses about relationships between story elements, authors’ intent, and readers’ interests. The paper begins with a review of the characteristics of isekai manga stories and places the stories into existing speculative fiction ontologies. A brief history of isekai manga and their relationships to roleplaying computer and tabletop games is provided. Finally, descriptions of the survey framework, instrument and results are presented. The survey includes data on 746 manga series identified as isekai manga by publishers or fans. The series are divided into four types (portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal). A detailed survey was performed on the 427 series identified as “portal-quest” stories (the most common type of isekai stories). The survey results are captured in a database of story elements that is organized based on plot points dictated by the form of the portal-quest stories. The survey found that the majority of the manga series are inspired by first-person shônen and otome computer games. The characteristics of the stories vary with the gender and age of the protagonists (here taken as surrogates for the gender and age of the stories’ target audiences) and this variation allows the generation of hypotheses on the motivations and interests of the different reader demographics and how they are satisfied by the stories.