Utopia/dystopia, race, gender, and new forms of humanism in women's science fiction

Abstract

This thesis intends to uncover new forms of humanism grounded in a critique of the systems that produce and reify race and gender, by staging a conversation between six works of contemporary science fiction (SF) and five acclaimed theorists in gender, queer, postcolonial, humanist, and cultural studies. I engage in a reading of Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium, Nicoletta Vallorani’s Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR, works from Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe series, Elia Barcelo’s Consecuencias Naturales, and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of short stories co-authored by Lola Robles and Maria Concepcion Regueiro, alongside the critical theory of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. I focus on Butler’s conception of subjects who ‘become’ through affective encounters, Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, Spivak and Gilroy’s respective notions of ‘planetarity,’ and Halberstam’s theory of a ‘queer art of failure.’ These theorisations, chosen for their congruence with key themes from my primary sources of SF, are employed to demonstrate what I view as the complementarity of academic and science fictional enquiries into new forms of humanism that arise through interrogations of systems of race and gender. This thesis contends that women’s utopian SF has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in the dissemination of nuanced debates regarding issues of race and gender to a wider public.