Queer and trans theory
Smith, Smin and Delany, Avery and Ahmed, Ibtisam and Taylor, Josephine and Myerson, Sasha and Stone, Katie and Rossi, Eleonora and Dillon, Tom (2024) Queer and trans theory. In: The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Routledge, pp. 448-456. ISBN 9781003140269
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In this chapter, we follow Donna Haraway’s assertion that ‘science fiction is political theory’ to read Rivers Solomon’s SF novel The Deep (2019) as and alongside contemporary queer and trans theory. We argue that queer science fiction is not simple escapism, but a tool for refashioning the self and the present. Queer and trans writers and artists are not fleeing from the world as much as they are reshaping it by crafting science-fictional worlds which defy the stultifying norms of hetero- and cis-normativity. These re-imaginings of the self and communities are intertwined with the embodied reality of queer experience, and Solomon’s novel exemplifies sf’s ability to grapple with the various facts and fictions used to police queer and trans lives, such as the purported primacy of biological sex and kinship.
Articulated in three interconnected sections, our chapter first uses Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of ‘temporal drag’ to find a purposeful re-writing and mythmaking in Solomon’s work that counters the violence of white supremacy. We then turn, via the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to examine Solomon’s rejection of the natural world as an implicitly heteronormative realm. Instead, faer embraces the many parthenogenetic, intersex, polymaternal and decidedly non-normative creatures of the deep. Lastly we find in Solomon’s rejection of heteronormative kinship an imagining of collective being and reproduction that resonates with Sophie Lewis’s concept of amniotechnics and José Esteban Munoz’s vision of queer utopia. Finally, we turn outward to suggest that Solomon’s The Deep is not a static text, but one that constantly invites its reader to transform the story – and possibly, the world.
2nd Edition.
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