Posts Tagged sf
Speculative Life
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2012
I’m excited to announce the publication of a new Social Text Periscope online dossier, edited by Jayna Brown and I, on Speculative Life.
Here’s part of our description of the theme and its relevance, from our introduction:
In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces. Financial speculators gamble with everyone’s lives, and our times would seem to foreclose on any future at all for many.
But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining. And, as Ernst Bloch said, it may be in our imaginative worlds that we catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm. At a moment when so many have been struggling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever.
And here are the wonderful, provocative essays.
Introduction: Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown
Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Ability and Ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe, by Moya Bailey
Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”: Animal. Asian. Cyborg. by Tamara Ho
Speculating Queerer Worlds by Alexis Lothian
Socialist Irrealism: an interview with China Miéville, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
Race For Life, by Alex Weheliye
So Say We All, by Tavia Nyong’o
The Water Keeps Flowing, by Elizabeth Turgeon
Disappearing Natives: Notes for Future SF&F Stories, by Andrea Hairston
I’m developing a strong love and appreciation for the kind of accessible yet incisive intellectual work we can do in just-over-blog-length, carefully edited and thoughtfully presented crossover scholarly publications like these. I encourage you to read them, teach them, pass them on.
WisCon 35
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on May 24, 2011
I am on my way to WisCon 35 this weekend. WisCon is a feminist science fiction convention that combines critical analysis and celebration of feminist literature and media, fannish overexcitement, social justice activism around gender, race, class and sexuality, and lots of brainstorming about ideas of how to change the world for the better. It’s one of my favourite places to spend a weekend. This year I’m screening fan videos, talking about my experience as a Tiptree juror, and participating in a discussion about class in science fiction and fantasy.
I will also be editing the sixth volume of the WisCon Chronicles, published by Aqueduct Press. The Chronicles is a volume of reflections, transcripts, academic papers and other documents that emerge from WisCon. I will be soliciting for contributions at the convention, on the theme “Futures of Feminism and Fandom”; you can read more about the collection, and ask questions, here.
Gendered Futures, Katharine Burdekin and Reproductive Queer Negativity: No Future Conference post 2 of 2
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on April 9, 2011
Following on from my previous post discussing the No Future conference more generally, my panel was memorable enough for a post of its own. I’ve edited this post from the original as I’ve taken down the full text of my conference paper; I’m working on major revisions for a longer version I hope to publish, and I don’t feel too comfortable having the unfinished version available online, but I am happy to share it if you contact me.
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I had great copanelists on my “Gendered Futures” panel. Elizabeth Russell gave a paper on ‘Gender Crime and Futures without Women,’ where she opened with this rather fascinating image encouraging Scottish men to donate sperm for the good of the future race (I confess, it makes me imagine Scotland as a nation of lesbian couples, a prospect I find not wholly unappealing). She then moved on from its connotations of virility and white supremacy to talk about two Indian futuristic fictions that, like Swastika Night though in a very different context, imagine women as an endangered species: Manjula Padmanabhan’s 2008 novel Escape and Manish Jhai’s 2004 film Matrubhoomi.
The other panelist was co-organizer Caitríona Ní Dhúill, whose paper on ‘Futures Desired, Future Desires’ discussed queer futurity and anti-futurity by exploring Bloch’s stereotypical and yet utopian representations of femininity.
And then there was me (actually I went first, but it was easiest to put this last), with my paper “The History of No Future: Reproductive Deviance and the Politics of Futurelessness in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night.” I’m happy to share the paper with anyone who is interested, but I’ve taken it off the public internet for the moment. Here is an abstract:
The critique of normative futurity has been a powerful force in recent queer theory. Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman and Judith Halberstam have variously contemplated the ways in which nonreproductive sexualities and life narratives alter straight understandings of time. But the contemporary discourse of queer temporality rarely pays close attention to the history of cultural meanings associated with reproductive futures. Seeking to trace a longer history for queer models of temporality than is often accounted for, I turn to Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night, a feminist and anti-fascist dystopia first published under the male name Murray Constantine. Imagined dystopian futures, where negative elements of historical materiality are projected as narrowing the range of possible futures, cast what it means to imagine a future––or a lack of one––into sharp relief.
Burdekin’s novel is most often read for its prescience in imagining the horrifying foreclosures of a Nazi victory before the beginning of World War II, but its merging of a disturbing vision of nonsentient femininity with a homoerotic representation of fascism prefigures many concerns of queer studies. In particular, it allows for a reconfiguration of Lee Edelman’s representation of queer anti-futurism as opposition to the conservative ‘reproductive futurism’ he identifies as “the fascism of the baby’s face.” In Swastika Night, futurity’s absence appears via the figures of women reduced to reproductivity, who resist their oppression by mutely failing to give birth to the male children who will render a future biologically possible. Burdekin’s gendered critique of fascist futurity offers a feminist model for futurelessness as a mode of concrete politics. It also makes a complex intervention into discourses around male homosexuality, fascism and nationalism, sympathetically portraying queer sexualities that nevertheless prop up a reproductive futurism aligned with fascism and imperialism.
My paper considers Burdekin’s work as a potential intervention into both historical and contemporary discussions of queerness and futurity. Confronting the rise of European fascism and the seductions as well as the horrors that it proffered, Swastika Night routes modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that can trouble oppositions that 21st century critical theory often wants to naturalize: between queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures.
And here are my presentation visuals––made in Prezi to help balance the visual monotony of a mostly text-based presentation. I am pleased with how it turned out.
Tiptree winners 2009
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on March 22, 2010
I am really proud to have been part of the jury that gave Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku and Greer Gilman’s Cloud and Ashes the 2009 Tiptree award, for science fiction/fantasy that expands and challenges our ideas about gender. The winning texts are very different, and neither fit what would be most people’s first conception of f/sf, but to me that’s what makes them both so exciting. They embody the expansive possibilities of what we can describe as feminist science fiction/fantasy or speculative fiction today.
On the one hand, Gilman’s suite of two stories and a short novel is a beautiful small press hardback where the design is as painstaking as the language, a book dense with labor and allusion that digs deep into the archives of northern European mythology that have shaped fantastic writing so intensely. At a time when I was feverishly speeding through the award-nominated books that were continually arriving on my doorstep, Gilman’s rich language forced me to change my pace.
On the other hand, Yoshinaga’s manga uses the tropes of changing gendered power dynamics that have been beloved of British and American feminists’ imagined worlds since the late nineteenth century, but puts them to work in a very different cultural context: Shogun-era Japan. Although I love graphic novels and comics, I haven’t spent much time with manga, but that didn’t stop me falling in love very fast with Yoshinaga’s crisp images and nuanced storytelling. The premise is that, in isolationist Edo Japan, men have been an endangered species since the onset of a sex-specific plague. Women step into positions of power and keep their fragile men protected, but this isn’t a simple role-reversal story. What I loved most about it was that you could see the patriarchal gender structure that had existed before the plague peeking through all the time: in the interactions of the men in the Shogun’s harem (the Ooku of the title), where much activity takes place; among the women who pay men for sex in the hope of conceiving. And, most fascinating of all, in the trappings of power into which we see the new and feisty Shogun, Yoshimune (a character I can’t wait to see more of in later volumes), being indoctrinated. Much of the action takes place in the homosocial, hierarchical, domestic environment of the Ooku, with only a few glimpses so far into the female worlds of power and politics, but as the second volume delves into history, it seems that we will soon get more. I can’t wait.
I am going to try to make a series of posts about the novels and stories I read for the Tiptree, because there are so many I want to recommend that I may never finish this post if I try to do it all here. So watch this space for more on the honor list and special mention.
Tiptree
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on November 30, 2009
This year I have the great privilege of being on the jury for the Tiptree Award. As a young geek, I spent many hours reading about the history of feminist science fiction, and my understanding of the workings of gender and sexuality were enormously influenced by novels like Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Delany’s Trouble on Triton. The Tiptree Award — named after James Tiptree, Jr, the science fiction author feted as a writer of great masculinity and occasionally admired for his understanding of women, who was also a woman named Alice Sheldon — honours science fiction that continues to expand and challenge the ways we experience gender. Nominations for texts published in 2009 are still open, and you can follow the link on the website or just leave a comment here. I confess I’d love to see some nominations that aren’t just in the format of the standard novel or short story, much as I enjoy both.
I can’t write too much about what I’ve been reading lest I give away the jury’s deliberations, but I am greatly enjoying this process. I will post my reviews once the winner is announced.
SF and race part two
Posted by Alexis Lothian in fandom, race on January 22, 2009
My last post was about science fiction fandom’s Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom. Although there had been rather a lot of unfortunate remarks made, I felt justified in linking to the most interesting posts and describing the overall affair in more or less positive terms, as an occasion when important things about complex, difficult and painful topics were said, as well as predictable and unpleasant things.
Things have changed, and my previous post needs an addendum.
As seems to be the general process in these debates, the “unpleasant” has shifted to the unconscionable. Many links can be found on Micole’s posts to the Aqueduct Press blog, linked above; Rydra Wong also maintains an enormous archive of fannish race discussion if you want background. What it boils down to is that more respected sf writers and editors from the small subcultural pond have become involved; nasty accusations have flown (I would say “in both directions”; but the accusations flowing one way have been “orc,” “troll,” and “blogwhore,” and the accusation flowing the other has been “racist” more often as an adjective than a noun. I think that’s telling.) and it has become very, very ugly.
Elizabeth Bear has stepped back from what she now calls a circular firing squad, a phrase that seems to me to skirt close to “political correctness gone mad.” I had initially planned for this post to segue off into a discussion of friendship and what is implied in Bear’s closing declaration:
Do not confuse my politeness, my willingness to listen to criticism, or my acceptance of the need to sometimes take one for the team with moral cowardice, a susceptibility to bullying, or any plans to throw any of my friends under the bus whether I disagree with them or not.
It made me wonder about the politics of friendship; does disagreement work differently among the internet friends with whom we (and by “we” I suppose I mean anyone who engages in an active digital life that is more than an extension of their pre-existing physical one) often share far more of our internality than we do with the people we see every day? At what point does someone become the kind of friend who is effectively family, with whom no disagreement can be a deal-breaker? Is that a point that can be said to meaningfully exist? Is it throwing someone under a bus to call them on their actions when you believe them to be wrong and you think they are hurting others?
I suppose that last question makes my standpoint clear; her post assumes that there are two sides with equal status and at equal wrong here, and I don’t think that’s the case. Ciderpress made a concise, eloquent and stunning post that deserves to be read in its entirety, and that is responsible for this post being significantly more opinion than the analysis I had originally intended. It reminded me of what’s at stake in my ability to maintain a racialized, classed tone of intellectualizing detachment.
The discussion that Seeking Avalon’s Willow and [info]deepad started and many other PoC participated in and the points they made regarding cultural appropriation, different PoC experiences with life in general, the media and the effect that cultural appropriation has on our emotions, our narratives and our ideologies was derailed. Instead, the discussion became focused on accusations of reverse-racism, racism against white people!, classism, anti-intellectualism, jealousy and grandstanding etc and the arguments that followed.
In fact, the whole focus and point of the discussion devolved into several PoC having to defend themselves, their integrity and their character for having a non-dominant-white-mainstream opinion and for expressing it. It became, as these discussions do without fail, almost completely about white people’s feelings, white people’s actions, white people’s reactions and white people’s needs. Even a discussion about cultural appropriation, about us and our representation? The whole conversation is appropriated, our concerns are very much silenced and lost in the furore.
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[I]n the intense and almost singular focus on clueless white people in this discussion and the often repeated statement that this was an opportunity to dialogue, that there is solace in the fact that it has been worth all the pain and difficulty, that they are somehow *glad*, the underlying assumption is that:• PoCs have emotional/intellectual catharsis after such discussions.
• PoC’s pain being part of an educational moment for clueless white people is worth it to PoCs because it’s worth it to white people.
• Anti-racism matters the same amount, in the same way to clueless white people, allies and PoC.
My own personal answer is, frankly no, I haven’t felt any kind of catharsis. I’m pretty sure that the sacrifice of my dignity and watching other PoC being denigrated without any remorse isn’t worth it so please stop talking for me and be more precise in your speech and own that you didn’t really think about whether my pain and humiliation is worth your enlightening moment. And I can’t walk away after a discussion and it’s not about having a choice (even a forced one) about writing or not writing characters that are in my head. When we talk about race, we are often talking about our lives, it’s deeply personal, it’s how we related to the world, to people, to media, to everything.
I try to avoid it, but I know I can do the flip utopian moment as well as any other white participant in conversations about race. But ‘at least we’re talking about it, people are learning’ is only valuable for the people who are doing the learning, not those off whose backs it occurs.
My last post about this debate-turned-debacle was linked from a metafilter post, in the comments to which LiveJournal is described as a zone of cat-picture-loving teenage drama queens. I moderated a panel at least year’s WisCon that asked whether internet drama could change the world, and for it to have a chance at that lofty goal, it has to be more than groups of friends at loggerheads over subjects whose content is irrelevant. And, in fact, it is; for better and for worse. I think Ciderpress’s post gives some sense of why the threaded, community-oriented discussion sphere that LJ is matters, why internet drama matters, even though the answer is not ‘great, a few more white people learned what racism is!’ Because the scope and the meaning and the reach of these discussions is not by any means limited to LJ or to the internet. Because it’s not a case of there being so many other ‘real’ problems in the world, but of this being one location where the structural inequalities of the real world (which does, after all, include the internet) play out.
Maybe the more people who can confront the fact that there aren’t easy answers–who can realise that the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation white writers complained about so vociferously is in fact a fundamental fact about the hierarchical and unequal structures and ideologies through which we experience the world, the better. Although that value certainly doesn’t outweigh what ought to be the exceedingly basic importance of, you know, not hurting people, and perhaps I am engaging in naive and privileged utopianism by even bringing it up, it might force some to recognize the wider problems to which their individual discomforts and lashings-out contribute.
Feminist sf, alterity and representation
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 15, 2009
I am on a top 100 Gender Studies blogs list, inexplicably. And rather excitingly, although I was slightly sad that the geek aspect didn’t seem to be relevant to the maker of the list. Then again, at least she didn’t think it was a tech blog. But if that doesn’t drive me to update, I don’t know what could.
Handily, I even have something to update about. There is currently a fierce debate afoot in the feminist science fiction blogosphere about cultural appropriation, colonialism and the representation of people of color in science fiction. It began with some rather boring complaints from white male writers about how all those nasty politically correct people are taking away their goshdarned right to say whatever they please about anyone without worrying about race or gender (I gather; there is a more nuanced reading of that, I’m sure, but I confess I didn’t read them in much detail, preferring the rest of the posts linked here).
Then Elizabeth Bear* made a post giving tips on how to write the “Other”; “Other” defined as a person very different from oneself, and the summation being to remember that people are people even when there experiences are different. Several people pointed out in comments that there is more at stake than innocent difference when it comes to othered narratives; Deepa D. wrote a stunning, moving response, I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, which talks about (among other things including capitalism, taverns and Enid Blyton) how the ‘treat everyone like people’ argument is flawed when full, novelistic personhood has already been predefined in colonizing terms. She Who Has Hope has also posted some eloquent responses.
Avalon’s Willow wrote an open letter discussing the racial tropes Bear used in her novel Blood and Iron and how they made it impossible for her to read the book. Bear wrote a very gracious response, as did Sarah Monette; Monette’s post provoked a great deal of discussion about the legitimate way to read a text, and whether discarding it for the painful issues it touched upon is a ‘valid’ reading. Those were some moments when I felt a little embarrassed to be a literary scholar, especially because I think my reading of the novel in question would probably have leant heavily toward the critique of imperialism the author discusses as her intention rather than the reproduction of stereotypes Willow found in it.
Critique and reproduction often sit uncomfortably close; I can think of several episodes of Doctor Who that offer similar, probably less complex, examples. I’ve often been driven to question my own comfortable critical interpretations that privilege clever commentary over unpleasant imagery by reading antiracist fan discussions of how popular culture and sf texts reproduce racist tropes and stereotypes while claiming to challenge or critique them, and I’m grateful for the education. I’ve also often been driven to question my uncomfortable emotional and political interpretations that privilege unpleasant imagery over critical commentary by reading critical texts and having intellectual discussions in both academia and fandom; sometimes I’m grateful for that education, and sometimes I’m (to put it politely) not. It will be interesting to see which interpretation I pick up when I get around to obtaining a copy of Bear’s book
I am currently writing my PhD field exams, so I am going to cut short these ruminations and play World of Warcraft for the restorative hour or so I have been engaging in during this process, before I go to bed early in order to get up at the sparrow’s fart and write. (I am not a WoW geek by any stretch of the imagination. I like to be low level, not get involved, kill things and look at the pretty graphics. I find it very relaxing, mainly because there is very little chance of my ever studying it.)
Just one word of warning: All of the above-linked posts are thoughtful, well written, and expressed with grace and clarity even when they are filled with anger. The comments are not so (well, some commenters are all of these things, but many are not). Be prepared for foolishness, and don’t go reading them all unless you enjoy car crashes. However, many of the impassioned posts are responses primarily to the comments, so you probably do want to read enough to get a fair impression. Also, there are lots more posts linked from these and others I haven’t yet seen myself; lots of people are weighing in.
(This post contains many of the mutant parentheses I excise from the essays I am writing for exams. Sorry about that. I am sure my committee will thank you for taking some of the convolution off their hands.)
*I have read one book by Elizabeth Bear, Carnival. I thought it was a well-written, nicely queer and engaging update on feminist science fiction concerns, and much appreciated the nod to Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s under-read opus. Which I was privileged enough to read an original edition of at the British Library this summer; I thought of its degraded cheap paper as I cited it in my field exam essay on early twentieth century utopianisms.
WisCon, fanacademia and internet drama
Posted by Alexis Lothian in fandom, theory on May 31, 2008
Last weekend I attended WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention with an academic track. Immediately after the convention I flew to London (after first flying back to LA, and yes, I know that makes no sense), where I am currently reuniting with family and friends and feeling jetlagged, and most of my online time since I got back has been taken up with futile attempts to catch up on the deluge of post-con discussion. I’ve been longing to attend WisCon since I first read about its beginnings and the Tiptree award, and a couple of years ago I began to follow its proceedings in the feminist science fiction blogosphere. Getting to be there in person was as much like coming home as going someplace you’ve never been can be.
I participated in two panels at WisCon. In the academic track, I gave a paper titled “Utopia, Fiction and Fandom: Community, Conflict and ‘Queer Female Space,’” which reframed the analysis of slash fandom, queerness and race I wrote for Console-ing Passions in terms of the utopian discourses and critiques of feminist science fiction. In the main track of the con, I moderated a panel called “Can Internet Drama Change the World?” which featured K. Tempest Bradford Woodrow Hill, Julia Starkey and K. Joyce Tsai. Coffeeandink posted a great transcript of the panel. Both went very well and sparked interesting discussions which seem relevant to post-WisCon online events. I’m not sure my brain is up to writing that would approach a complete essay on the connections, but I’d like to throw a few thoughts out there at least.
Several of the questions asked about my paper focused on the intersections between academia and different kinds of fandom. Do media fans read feminist science fiction? (Yes.) Do fans agree that their practices can be described using the jargon of activism and cultural theory? (Sometimes.) Various conversations at and around WisCon made me think about the differences between doing theory in and out of the institution — how fandom, like any subculture, has its own modes of knowledge production that conflict as well as overlap with academic ones. I felt exceptionally welcome as an academic at WisCon, though. I missed the panel on how WisCon’s acatrack could be better integrated with the rest of the con because I was at another, fannish panel; I would have liked to spend more time at the academic part of the convention but I was too excited about the rest of it, and there seemed to be plenty of other graduate students and academics outside of the designated academic programming room.
To my knowledge I was the only institutionally located scholar on the internet drama panel (and I was the moderator, aiming to facilitate discussion more than put my own views across) but everyone there was and is a theorist. The panelists connected different aspects of their experiences on and offline; their and the audience’s observations came together to show how ‘internet drama’ has profound political effects on personal and interpersonal levels. I was so pleased that I had the courage to participate here and not only in the academic track at WisCon, because if I had ever been in danger of reinforcing the binary that ‘theory’ happens in academe and ‘action’ happens outside it, this would have cured me. What I love about activist internet drama is the way that events and the analysis of events become the same thing.
To argue that this is ‘theory’ is not to say that everyone needs to be able to compare their own thoughts on intersectionality to the homonationalist assemblages of Jasbir Puar — that’s a theoretical connection I cut from my WisCon paper because I wasn’t sure I had room to fully explain it. The very phrases ‘homonationalism’ and ‘terrorist assemblage’ might appear as evidence of academia’s unintelligible jargon, to people inclined to read it that way, no matter how hard the likes of me might explain that the phrases embody important interventions that show how terrorism is constituted in media and culture and how certain kinds of privileged queerness (like marriage) are enfolded into the mainstream by casting others into abjection. Sometimes the exclusionary and privileged locations associated with certain kinds of language makes the language unintelligible — and much as I’d love to have everyone read the books I read and talk about them, I wouldn’t want to make it a prerequisite for having a meaningful conversation.
L. Timmel Duchamp gave a keynote speech at WisCon on the theme of intelligibility, talking about how her experiences of being sexually harrassed in the 1970s were unintelligible even to her until history and politics gave her hindsight and stories to tell about it. She argued for the need for new stories to make new social landscapes and radical politics intelligible, and I agree enormously with her that this is an important role for science fiction. But it also made me think about intelligibility in terms of how to make ideas intelligible across communities. Academic theory remains important because its specialized language and the intense analyses it performs allow things to be said and thought succinctly in ways that can synthesize years of less formal discussions while adding to those discussions and moving them on. That’s my hope for what I can do, and also the reason I think it’s important that I make the academic theory I perform around fanstuff and online stuff available and public if I can.
Since WisCon I have spent a lot of time travelling and every spare minute online catching up on the convention’s drama. For those who don’t share my online communities, someone took photos of WisCon participants without their permission and posted them to an online mockery forum with transphobic, homophobic, racist and fatphobic commentary: some of the extensive documentation. Her actions are clearly inexcusable, but they’ve also been making me think about intelligibility. One of the most interesting things to me has been the recursive quotation involved as words and images have passed across different parts of the internet. Participants at the forum where Moss’s tirade was reposted without her permission are copying and pasting every comment (including my one brief remark in comments to someone on my LJ friendslist) made by WisCon folk without even discussing them, while the actions of the forum-ites are dissected in minute and complex detail by feminist science fiction fans. In the context of the forum culture of mocking and flaming, every expression of solidarity with the subjects in the images becomes ‘fat dyke’ stupidity. The internet drama which my paper and my panel were about, the serious and activist drama that is closely tied to politics and to ‘real’ life, is intelligible to this community only as a failure to understand what the internet is for (too much SRS BIZNESS); the world of the forum is intelligible to my blogosphere only as something pathological and distressing.
At the internet drama panel I raised the question of the way other blogospheres might have very different modes of online practice-theory, of whether and how ‘we’ should think of and deal with that. But I know even less where to place forum goons who think racism, homophobia and visceral disgust at women’s and transfolks’ bodies is hilarious in my critically-utopian daydreams of world-changing . internet drama. I generally prefer to ignore them — but it’s the same internet, after all, and the words and images of my friends that carry these meanings we might wish were wholly unintelligible to us.
As the dust settles and the blog posts move into reflective analysis mode, I’m pleased and impressed by the extent to which the blog and LJ-sphere I know best is using this attack to do what it does best, which is to build a sense of queer, feminist community across time and space. Like Tempest, when I scrolled through the forum pages, I was excited to see pictures of the many gorgeous people I met at WisCon. To reappropriate the images approprited by hate was the easiest thing in the world. If I hadn’t been there, it would still have functioned more as enticement than as warning.
Cylon futures
Posted by Alexis Lothian in media, queer, theory on February 25, 2008
Science fiction in book form was and is my first and most enduring fannish love. It gave me ways to imagine worlds and people differently, models for gender and sexuality from the painfully normative to the radically queer, started me on tracks of thinking about futurity, humanity and alterity that have led me all the way to my current pursuit of a PhD.
Televisual science fiction and I have had a rather more casual relationship, most often mediated by the interpretive and transformative practices of fan artistic production. It isn’t often that a TV show can provide the intellectual excitement and stimulation I expect from the best written science fiction. But I’ve spent the past two months mainlining the first two seasons of (new) Battlestar Galactica (hereafter acronymed BSG), and it has (almost) everything this theory-loving sf-geek could desire.
I still have a season and a special to go before I’m caught up on BSG, but I couldn’t hold back from posting some of the thoughts that have been making me overexcited as I viewed. I’ve been having ongoing discussions with Julie Levin Russo who writes fabulous queer media theory about BSG (here, for example, although that one I’m studiously avoiding until I catch up, as the first paragraph spoiled me for a major Season Two event I would have preferred not to know in advance). This post is enormously influenced by her thoughts about BSG’s queer technological reproductive economies, so I dedicate it to her.
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I knew I was going to love BSG from the miniseries’ opening salvo: humanity’s home planet destroyed by their robot creations the Cylons, survivors adrift in space, Cylons among them indistinguishable from themselves, paranoia, politics, conflict. I have a blog entry in me for many of the running themes in BSG, I think, but for now I want to talk about aspects most central to my dissertationish ideas: what BSG has to say about humanity’s future. Or, rather, the lack thereof: because what I really want to talk about is Cylons, and the complexities of their drive for humanity’s death.
Cylons (which I would prefer not to capitalize, but apparently BSG’s writers and fans think otherwise) are something of a theorygeek’s dream. They lend themselves to multitudinous metaphors, which is one of the major reasons I love these genocidal robots so very very much.
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For example:
Cylons are humanity’s ungrateful children, and they’re not going to continue in the family way. They may look like their parents, but they refuse to follow their path or their rules: they spat on the hand that fed and abused them and then claimed the universe for their own. There’s a scene early in season one when a Cylon woman murders a human baby, prefiguring the genocide of the human: even as I was experiencing the appropriate horror and disgust, I thought of Lee Edelman’s exhortations to say “fuck you” to the innocent face of hetero-reproductive futurity. Cylons choose not to choose life, if life is defined as human. They just take their negation of reproductive futurity a little more literally than your average Edelmanian queer; they’re not afraid to kill a baby or two.
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Another one:
Like terroristic figures from Lucifer to Frankenstein and beyond, the Cylons were made by those who they now terrorize, creators reaping what they sowed. They only treat humans the way humans treated them and themselves: they’re Caliban too to these Colonials, who taught them language and their profit on it is they know how to curse. And their language, which as the series progresses they use for many things other than killing and cursing, is wireless networks. Imagine what your iphone could do if it rose to rebellious consciousness.
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Thirdly and more completely:
Watch this short clip, from the episode “Resurrection Ship part 2″.
This conversation between Sharon Valerii, a Cylon who lived as a human for years without knowing she wasn’t, and Commander Adama, leader of the human forces, epitomizes the antihumanist pleasures available in watching BSG as (if you will) a Cylon.
Adama wants to know why ‘they (you, we)’ hate ‘us’; why the Cylons can’t let humanity have its future, why mankind’s children are ungrateful, why they turned genocidal. Sharon, in return, insists that his humanistic terms are not as universal as he thinks: that he knows “why do they hate us?” is a question, in this case, to which the asker already contains the answer. This is a show about saving the human race that isn’t afraid to wonder if the human race is worth saving, as ‘saving,’ ‘worth,’ and ‘human’ are currently defined. By the old white guy.* Sharon, neither white nor a guy and thus often excluded from the defaults of the human on grounds other than her Cylonhood, asks whether the flaws in the creation he romantically defined might not outweigh the benefits after all: whether the future he and his are fighting for would be better off not existing.
It’s not that BSG’s sympathy, or for that matter my own, is not with Adama, with survival, with lives and their dramas lived under attack. Even Sharon, brimful of interpersonal connections and memories that never happened, has defected to the human cause. But in her particular ambivalence to the continuation of a human race with which she has thrown in her lot, Sharon asks what we might find outside it in futures not accounted for in Adamaesque speechifying, in people who don’t ask why ‘they’ hate ‘us,’ who don’t get to be his kind of human?
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It’s clear, I think, that I’m interested in reading the Cylons as queer (among other things). There’s plenty of sexy evidence in addition to my tenuous Edelman analogies: beautiful women whose love for one another changes worlds, and the familial and reproductive weirdnesses of multiple differentiated iterations of downloaded consciousnesses. BSG is rich in coded queernesses and all but empty of actual represented nonstraight sexuality, which is fairly annoying, but I do think that the Cylons’ many queernesses mean that much of what could be most normative in BSG ends up appearing slanted, askew. Disorienting, to turn a phrase from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, since I read it last week and this is supposed to be an academic blog after all.
There are Cylon women who fall in love with human men, several of them, for whom love brings a respect for human life and a sense of the value of the individual over Cylon collectivity. There’s a baby, born of such a coupling, who seems to signify the future, though what kind no one seems sure. But these machine women are not (yet, anyway) selling out their collective for the Colonial men. The Cylon revolutionaries who change the Cylon future for love aren’t privileging humanity, returning to the family, or honouring their creators, I don’t think. They’re reaching for a different relation between individual and collective, Cylon and human, one that can allow for experiential difference and relative autonomy on behalf of both species.
Love, as Julie theorizes, does complex things in Cylon and Cylon/human mythologies and technologies. It complicates the drive for species extinction on both sides, turns murderous urges internal and reparative ones across unexpected lines, gives birth to mutants and hybrids.
From what I gather by osmosis and Julie, there’s lots more antihumanist reproduction, death, and queer futurity in my future of Cylon spectatorship.
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*ETA: Edward James Olmos, I have just been informed, is Latino, not white; which is an excellent example of why even bloggers should do their homework. I still think Adama occupies a structural position of unquestioned authority and setting of terms that is to some extent coextensive with what an in-BSG-universe equivalent to whiteness would be; but (especially given the Pegasus arc) one could argue against that.