queer geek theory

I have two main research areas: science fiction and fictional futures, and digital media and fandom. I approach both with a queer cultural studies methodology and close attention to issues of gender and race. My work on science fiction focuses on cultural production by marginalized creators––mainly women, queers, and people of color––in Britain and the US, from the early twentieth century to the present. My work on digital media has so far focused on the new artistic forms that are emerging from fan communities, particularly digital remix video (vidding), especially as these forms engage critical readings of media texts and are used to participate in social justice activism. I am interested in both documenting and utilizing fan vidders’ creative and critical techniques.

Below is an abstract of my dissertation, which should give an idea of how I’m academically engaging with time, the future, and science fiction. As I look ahead to the book that this will become, I am planning two additional chapters on film and television. My work on fandom and digital media has contributed enormously to my thinking here, though I have pursued that side of my interest largely through projects unrelated to my dissertation. I am developing a post-dissertation project, provisionally titled Geek Politics: Critical Fandom and the Online Production of Radical Critique, that will give a cohesive form to my growing body of work on digitality, media, and fandom. I hope to engage new scholarly forms in future projects, but I have greatly appreciated the depth and discipline involved in working on a fairly traditionally shaped dissertation.

Please do not share or quote without attribution to me, Alexis Lothian.

Deviant Futures: 
Queer Temporality and the Cultural Politics of Science Fiction

It is not that I have no future. Rather it fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. (Samuel R. Delany)

Speculations about the future shape our experiences of the present: from the romance and anxiety of technological revolution, to capitalism’s crises, to the threat of climate change. The extrapolative logics of science fiction are part of the texture of modernity––but they have never been singular stories. My dissertation analyzes alternative futures dreamed up by feminists, queers, and people of color in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain and America in order to inquire into historical and political narratives that the seemingly transparent terminology of the future has obscured. Imagining future worlds has too often meant reproducing histories of colonialism, racism, and heteronormativity; thinking the future in deviant ways has meant trying, if not always succeeding, to challenge these dynamics. In the growing body of queer theory that focuses on time, scholars have traced productive deviations in the present and its erotic interplay with the past. My work explores marginal fictional futures’ complex challenge to dominant narratives of history and futurity.

The dissertation focuses primarily on two contexts where marginalized individuals developed critical discourses of deviant futures: British feminist speculative fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, and twentieth-century African American science fiction. An epilogue addresses the afterlife of these works’ ideas in contemporary digital media. I consider the work that imagining deviant futures has done both within the context of the historical moments that produce futurities and from the retrospective position of later readers who reframe the speculative practices of the past within their own present. Queer temporal theory’s challenge to traditional methodologies and periodizations gives me the tools to weave this archive of unfulfilled historical futures into an analysis of the gendered and racialized power structures embedded in the ways we think about time.

The project works simultaneously as a partial shadow history of fictional futures, centering on oppositional and marginal works that tend to appear as footnotes at most both in science fiction’s genre taxonomies and in literary histories of modernity and postmodernity, and as an intervention into contemporary queer theories of temporality and futurity. Speculations about the future of humanity often presume that biological continuity requires a society organized around heterosexual procreation. Relatedly, access to technological capital defines whether cultures and subjects are advancing toward a progressive future or left behind in the past. Recent turns toward racialization and time in queer scholarship have brought attention to these discourses; I bring these together, drawing also on the history of feminist critiques of gender and reproduction. In recent years, speculation has become a crucial theoretical framework within which philosophers and cultural critics have thought about the present and the possibilities of social change. My dissertation offers necessary historical grounding to queer and ethnic studies’ adoption of this speculative turn.

My first chapter, “Women and Children First: Feminist Visions of Reproduction, Utopia, and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century” focuses on utopian futures imagined by British feminists early in the twentieth century and forgotten soon afterward: Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s 1885 New Amazonia and Susan Ertz’s ambiguous 1936 tale of the last woman on earth, Woman Alive, though I touch on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s more widely read Herland (1915). I explore the ways middle-class white feminists’ utopias directly addressed the violence of the apparently desirable racial future through their engagement with figurations of women’s independence as a danger to the future of the human race. Ambivalence coexists with unapologetic and unironic nationalist supremacy in many of these texts, making them difficult either to reclaim for feminism or to castigate as wholly complicit with racism and imperialism. I argue that this ambiguity tells us much about what it means to attempt to picture a different future with an imagination shaped by the problematic present. Returning to these texts brings the ambivalences of our present to light, as I show in this chapter’s closing discussion of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men.

My second chapter, “Futureless Politics: Dystopian Renditions of Queer Sex, Gender and Reproduction in the Age of Fascism,” analyzes dystopias by British women writers between the First and Second World Wars. I work with Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night, cited by several recent critics of patriarchal and imperialist tendencies in queer studies, which merges a disturbing vision of nonsentient femininity with a homoerotic representation of fascism, and Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 Man’s World, which depicts patriarchal science as a form of totalitarianism. Closing with the afterlife of dystopian fascism in twenty-first-century popular film via V for Vendetta (2005), my chapter considers feminist dystopia as a potential intervention into both historical and contemporary discussions of queerness and futurity. These unsettling fictions route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that trouble oppositions twenty-first century critical theory has tended to naturalize: between queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures.

Drawing on black feminisms, queer of color critique, and the artistic movement of Afrofuturism, my third chapter, “Breeding Black Futures: Reproductive Afrofuturism and Queer Possibility in the Emerging Canon of Black Science Fiction,” looks at the construction of black populations as threatening to the American future in the twentieth century. I trace figures of black female sexuality that emerge from the narrative foreclosures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet” and come to the fore in the queer radicalism of Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler’s last novel Fledgling (2006), which demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy. The convergence of queer black feminism with science fiction emerges as a crucial national countergenealogy given alleged US postracialism and the unquestioned centrality of the nuclear family in the age of Obama.

My fourth chapter, “Gay Sex and Narrative Futurity: Making Queer Worlds from Samuel R. Delany’s Science Fiction” extends my queer analysis of feminist and racialized futurities to queer theory’s primal scene of gay male public sex and the cultural practices that form around it. Linking the discourse of “world making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance with the idea of “world building” common in Marxist science fiction theory through their mutual engagement with Ernst Bloch, I analyze gay African American novelist and theorist Samuel R. Delany’s science fictions Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). These novels imagine futures that center on queer sexual pleasure while paying close attention to racial and economic realities. I argue that they create queer worlds of theory and practice among readers in the process.

I close with an epilogue on “Digital Remix and the Reconfiguration of Media Time” that argues for the relevance of my research on temporal deviations to the contemporary digital media landscape. Focusing on the critical temporalities of remix videos that challenge the heteronormative construction of reproductive time in the television series Battlestar: Galactica (2003), this epilogue connects my research on speculative fiction with my related project on science fiction fans’ grassroots media production and its challenge to capitalist logics of intellectual property.

While avoiding simplistic analogies or utopian claims for the political significance of either discourse, I contend throughout my dissertation that science fiction is (and has been, can be, should be) queer theory, and that queer theory is (and has been, can be, should be) science fiction. From the multiple convergences of both diverse forms emerge new ways of critiquing, imagining, and creating the past, present, and future.