Science Fiction Worlding and Speculative Sex

Chapter 4 extends part 2’s analysis of queered and gendered black futurities to the realm of racialized queer masculinity, focusing on the work of Samuel R. Delany. His writing provides a bridge between the discourse of “world-making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance and the idea of “world-building” common in science fiction studies. Delany’s fiction shows how the narrative tactics of science fiction, a genre whose most popular literary and media versions have tended to proffer timelines reliant on unmitigated heterosexuality, can turn against assumptions that the future must be straight, or at least arrived at through heterosexual reproductive logics. In Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), speculative iterations of 1970s and 1980s public sex cultures use genre tropes to reimagine sexual and racial temporalities in response both to the histories of enslavement and to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Eugenics, and Queer Possibility

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.

The Future Stops Here

The first wormhole chapter uses a speculative engagement with Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men to link disparate times and spaces in the book: the history of no future shown by feminist, eugenic, imperial narratives in part 1 and the affirmative prospects for queer of color futures in part 2. The major studio film, filmed in London by the Mexican director, highlights the presence in twenty-first-century transnational popular culture of tropes from the fictional futures examined in the previous pages. Cuarón’s adaptation of the 1992 novel by P. D. James underlines the ways in which hopeful futurity is unevenly distributed along the same lines of race, gender, sexuality, capital, and globalization that determine who gets to be seen as fully human. The contradictions surrounding the character of Kee—a black woman pregnant with the first child to be born in decades whose representation in the film leaves much to be desired—become a point of possibility opening on to different worlds and futures.

Queer Deviations from the Future on Screen

As part 3 (It’s the Future, but It Looks like the Present: Queer Speculations on Media Time) turns to the cultural and technological reproduction of speculative futures imagined in audiovisual form, chapter 5 focuses on two speculative films whose genealogy in queer screen history is secure yet which rarely appear in canons of science fiction media: Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk dystopia Jubilee and Lizzie Borden’s 1983 lesbian political fantasy Born in Flames. It argues that that the construction of science fiction film as a heteronormative, capitalist genre defined by spectacular special effects obscures the work done by queer speculative independent film. Alternatively, Jarman and Borden project politicized futures into the people and locations of a present whose shifting temporal location refuses progressive teleologies. The films share an intense focus on media and communication even as they offer contrasting strategies for building futures out of a present moment saturated with representations of the end of the world. Jubilee brings the present to light as a dystopian future whose polite public face hides deep-seated violence; Born in Flames shows us how the politics of revolutionary transformation replicate the problems of the untransformed world through the failure to reckon with them.

Try This at Home

The second wormhole connects part 2’s chapters on black queer science fiction with the media cultures that part 3 analyzes through an exploration of sexual fantasy as a speculative world-making practice. This short and somewhat personal chapter reads a particularly queer and sexy scene from the science fiction TV show Sense8 (Netflix, 2015-2018), in which telepathically linked characters join sexually from disparate global locations. Sensate sex is a potent metaphor, the hybrid progeny of two sometimes-utopian fantasies: the queer world of public sex (where bodies come together, which anyone can join) and the science fiction of intimate technological connectivity (where physical and spatial boundaries lose their meaning). It functions here to map correspondences between the depictions of gendered spectatorship in Delany’s writings about male public sex cultures and the mostly female fan communities whose erotic fiction-writing practices form a speculative kind of sexual public.

Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and the Fascism of the Baby’s Face

Building on the insights of the previous chapter, the second chapter of part 1 turns to feminist dystopian fiction written by antifascist British women between the First and Second World Wars. Man’s World (1926) by Charlotte Haldane and Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin use divergent strategies to route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies, troubling oppositions twenty-first-century critical theory tends to naturalize: between heteronormativity and its others, queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures. Both novels revolve around the production of futurelessness—not just an undesirable world for some, but the notion that the future could end altogether. This negative speculation resonates with the queer project of articulating a politics that might not rely on reproduction: a futureless politics. At the same time, both Haldane and Burdekin insist that same-sex desire can all too easily appear as one of the various interlocking forces that set in place politically horrifying futures. This convergence of reproductive oppression with homoerotic nationalism calls forth concerns and conflicts in queer studies over the ways in which nonheterosexual bodies, communities, and politics have participated in the perpetuation of racial and colonial violence.

Utopian Interventions to the Reproduction of Empire

The first chapter of part 1 (A History of No Future: Feminism, Eugenics, and Reproductive Imaginaries), argues that distinctions between queer and straight time are not always uncomplicated or obvious. The chapter takes up feminist utopian fiction that revolves around the racial and national politics of reproduction, focusing on two little-read British novels—New Amazonia (1889) by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett and Woman Alive (1936) by Susan Ertz—while contextualizing the many utopian fictions published by white US- and UK-based women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Critiquing the tendency to associate reproducing bodies and reproductive labor with maintenance of the status quo, the chapter uncovers ambiguous queer possibilities within the futures imagined by middle-class white women reckoning with what it meant to be charged with the eugenic reproduction of modernity, Englishness, and empire. These speculative narratives highlight breaks and bends in normative time articulated through the intersection of class, colonial, and racial imaginaries with questions of gender and desire. They have much to tell us about how feminist politics of reproduction and gendered embodiment function at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race with mechanisms of white supremacy and state power.

How to Remix the Future

Chapter 6 moves from futures depicted on screen to the audiences who take them up and respond to them by highlighting grassroots cultures of video remix that have flourished since the early years of the digital age. The speculative modes of cultural production and reception among science fiction media’s feminist fans showcase queer possibilities that emerge from efforts to push back against the pressures of dominant media temporalities. Their creative methods are the focus of this chapter, which highlights a practice that has emerged from obscurity to some influence in the last ten years: the subcultural art form of fans making music video, or vidding. The chapter uses the term “critical fandom” to center the affective and political temporalities of creative fan works that reimagine the racialized and gendered economies of digital media production and consumption. It analyzes several fan videos in depth to develop a theory of the form, then turns to queer, feminist, decolonial engagements with the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009). Finally, the author’s own video remix practice is discussed as a way to incorporate the insights of this form into scholarly production.

Epilogue

Old Futures ends with a short epilogue that considers how the role of speculative futures in political discourse and popular culture have shifted over the period when the book was researched and written, from approximately 2007 to 2017.

Introduction

This chapter unpacks what is at stake in Old Futures’ identification of a queer cultural politics for speculative fiction, in terms of both of queer studies’ approaches to time and scholarship on futuristic cultural production. It offers a brief history of intersections between queerness and speculative temporality and their entanglement with gender and race, before describing the book’s archive and its framing of speculative fiction as a cultural logic that exceeds literary and media genre studies. The chapter also articulates the centrality of reproduction to the project, which crafts an alternative discourse around the dominant heteronormative temporalities that Lee Edelman influentially critiqued in his 2004 book, No Future. In queer studies, reproductive futurism has primarily been an object of critique. In contrast, Old Futures argue that there are many reproductive futurisms, often in conflict and contradiction with one another, whose complexities are unpacked throughout the book.