Finance Speculation, Indeterminacy, and Unforeclosed Futures in James Tiptree, Jr.'s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”

Abstract

In this essay I argue that Tiptree's “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” disputes finance capitalism's considerable hold on the future through temporal and material indeterminacies that affirm the openness of the future. Pointing to speculative fiction's and finance capitalism's shared investment in speculation, this essay demonstrates that Tiptree's story stages the future as a contested site between capitalism and the reader. Specifically, I argue that the story is replete with indeterminacies that insist on both the uncertainty of the future and the possibility of imagining futures that are not cannibalized by capitalism, markets, and financial tools that bank on speculation. In conversation with feminist materialist theory, which highlights materiality's unruliness and uncontrollable capacities, I analyze the story's emphasis on material bodies and corporeality as generating strange, unthinkable possibilities for the future, particularly those that imagine a future not foreclosed by capitalism. Attending to both the prevalence of fleshy bodies as well as the story's time-travel conceit, I read these narrative elements as “tactical paradoxes” that destabilize the boundaries between the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible within a world structured by capitalism.