Old Futures : : Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility / / Alexis Lothian.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Lothian, Alexis,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Postmillennial Pop ; 10
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 40 black and white illustrations

Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction FoundationTraverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital mediaOld Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present. Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption.Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively redistribute the future.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: The Future’s Queer Histories -- Part I. A History of No Future: Feminism, Eugenics, and Reproductive Imaginaries -- 1. Utopian Interventions to the Reproduction of Empire -- 2. Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and the Fascism of the Baby’s Face -- Wormhole. The Future Stops Here: Countering the Human Project -- Part II. A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction -- 3. Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Eugenics, and Queer Possibility -- 4. Science Fiction Worlding and Speculative Sex -- Wormhole. Try This at Home: Networked Public Sexual Fantasy -- Part III. It’s the Future, but It Looks like the Present: Queer Speculations on Media Time -- 5. Queer Deviations from the Future on Screen -- 6. How to Remix the Future -- Epilogue: Queer Geek Politics after the Future -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author