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Deviant futures: queer temporality and the cultural politics of science fiction

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Deviant futures: queer temporality and the cultural politics of science fiction

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Content DEVIANT FUTURES: QUEER TEMPORALITY AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF SCIENCE FICTION by Alexis Lothian –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2012 Copyright 2012 Alexis Lothian It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of then. ––Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1974) ii Dedicated to Alan Lothian (1947-2010) and Ellen Brush (1952-2011). I can barely speculate about how my life would look without both of you, and I’ll carry your legacy far into the future. iii Acknowledgments A PhD can be an isolating experience. But I never felt I was writing alone. Thanks first and foremost to my chair Jack Halberstam: for insisting I write the dissertation that was mine and not the dissertation I felt I probably ought to write; for telling me when the work got boring and when it was exciting; for never pulling any punches; and for keeping subversion, anarchy, and contradiction at the heart of the gaga academy. Approximately a decade ago, after reading Jack’s work on subcultural archives and scholars for the first time, I wrote in my online profile on a feminist message board that my ambition was to be “the femme Judith Halberstam.” It still kind of is. And thanks to the rest of my incredible committee. To Karen Tongson, who has been a savvy and inspirational mentor and guide through Los Angeles both lesser and greater, from conferences to freeways to karaoke bars. To Kara Keeling, whose comments, talks, and writings on speculation, futurity, and technology have consistently pushed me to think deeper, with more complexity, better. To Alice Gambrell, who has not only offered historical and literary guidance but who has shown me and taught me how to think by making. To Tara McPherson, all-round inspirational instigator in critical new media studies, who has been a huge supporter of this idiosyncratic project since its earliest stages. And to my unofficial sixth committee member and adviser in the undercommons, Kristina Busse: mentor, collaborator, cheerleader, the other half of my brain. This may not be one of our joint projects, but I still couldn’t have done it without you. For scholarly influence and practical support, thanks to faculty and staff at USC: especially Janalynn Bliss, Jack Blum, Bill Handley, Pennelope von Helmolt, Henry Jenkins, Tony Kemp, David Lloyd, Tania Modleski, Susan McCabe, David Rollo, Meg Russett, and iv Jeanne Weiss. Flora Ruiz’s eternal calm efficiency in the face of exams, schedules, visas, and other bureaucratic complications has saved my life more times than I can possibly remember. Fred Moten and Ruth Wilson Gilmore are no longer at USC, but their traces are tangible in this project––as is the generous mentorship and collaboration of Jayna Brown, Cathy Davidson, L. Timmel Duchamp, Anna Everett, and Lisa Nakamura. Thanks also to my students in the Writing Program, Gender Studies, SummerTIME, and Thematic Option, from whom I have learned a lot. My time in graduate school has been a pleasure, thanks to a marvellous set of fellow travellers. From heated class discussions to reading groups to coffee breaks, thanks to Patty Ahn, Deborah Al-Najjar, Jen Ansley, Micha Cárdenas, Matt Carrillo-Vincent, Jih-Feh Cheng, Gino Conti, April Davidauskis, Mary Ann Davis, Penny Geng, Nora Gilbert, Raeanna Gleason, Kai M Green, Tanya Heflin, Emily Hobson, Yetta Howard, Shayna Kessel, Sharon Luk, Jose Navarro, Veronica Paredes, Arunima Paul, Annemarie Perez, Saba Razvi, Roxanne Samer, Tom Sapsford, Suzanne Scott, Suraj Shankar, Charlie Shipley, Jennifer Barager Sibara, Josie Sigler Sibara, Margarita Smith, Stefanie Snider, Sriya Shrestha, Trisha Tucker, Erika Wenstrom, Alex Wescott––and many more. And thanks to my conference dancing partners and co-conspirators in critical new media collaborations: Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Anne Cong-Huyen, Tanner Higgin, Melanie E.S. Kohnen, Amanda Phillips, Marta S. Rivera Monclova, Margaret Rhee, Julie Levin Russo. Coming to USC took me far from my friends and family of origin, but I never felt I left them behind. Thanks first of course to my mother Anne Lothian; I’m so glad you didn’t bring me up to be normal. And the rest of my family and old friends across the pond: Alice Bell, Liz Berry, Anthony Cummins, Alex Dove, Merryl Drakard, Annick Guidez, Linda v Howie, Darren Irwin, David Lothian, Kirsty Lothian, Noa Lothian, Tom Lothian, Tiziana Mariotto, Eleanor Smith, Leslie Smith, Jenny Waring, Dominic White, Claire Wright. The friendships I have made in a decade of participation in online community have sustained me through graduate study, blurring the distinctions between academic and nonacademic community. An always incomplete list: Jess Adams, Rebecca Bryant, Monica Creek, Melissa Getreu, Jaymee Goh, Kayla Gassman, Megan Graham, Andrea Horbinski, Paige Kimble, Carolyn Kohl, Jackie Lee, Allison Morris, Chrystie Myketiak, Sandy Olson, Aby Parsons, Skud, Whitney Slone, Julia Starkey, Micole Sudberg, Gretchen Treu, K. Joyce Tsai, Anna Wilson, Chris Wrdnrd. My Twitter feed and Dreamwidth circle, along with my participatin in WisCon, and the Organization for Transformative Works, keep me certain that my writing has relevance outside the academy. Outside of the academic world, I’ve been sustained in this process by the Los Angeles Eco-Village Food Lobby, Urth Yoga (especially Keric Morinaga’s science-fiction-inspired teaching), and the USC Lyon Center’s outdoor pool. I’m grateful for the companionship of Silvie Grossmann and Cookie during the crucial years of writing. I am certain I will have forgotten many important people from this list; if you are one of them, please know that I am grateful to you too. But I want to close by reiterating my thanks to the core of people who have shaped this project (knowingly and unknowingly) since I first began to think of it, who are the audience for whom I write and the community in which I write, and whose friendship I can’t imagine being without. Alice, Gretchen, Jen, Jennifer, Josie, Julie, Melissa, Nina. <3<3<3<3 vi Table of Contents Epigraph Dedication Acknowledgments List of Figures Abstract ii iii iv ix x 0. Introduction: The Future’s Queer Histories 0.1 Futurity Now 0.2 A Brief History of Queer Time 0.3 Speculative Archives 1 4 17 1. Women and Children First: Feminist Visions of Reproduction, Utopia, and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century 1.1 Timelines 1.2 Queering Futurity, Reproducing History 1.3 Feminist Utopias and the Future of the Race: New Amazonia 1.4 Let the World End: Susan Ertz’s Ambiguous Ruptures in Progress 1.5 The Human Project Lives: Children of Men 30 33 40 54 63 2. Futureless Politics: Dystopian Renditions of Queer Sex and Gender in the Age of Fascism 2.1 Speculating Negativity 2.2 The Dystopian Impulse in Modernity and Queer Critique 2.3 Race, Gender, and the Fascism of the Baby’s Face: Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World 2.4 Negative Femininity in Nazism’s Queer Future: Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night 2.5 Fascist Futures in Queer Times 77 81 92 107 127 vii 3. A Now That Can Breed Futures: Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Capital, and Queer Possibility 3.1 Breeding Futures 3.2 Modernity, Race, and the Gendered Cultural Politics of Black Science Fiction: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” 3.3 Motherless Futures, Futureless Mothers 3.4 Deviant Blood Lines: Capital and Consumption in Jewelle Gomez and Octavia Butler’s Queer Black Feminist Futures 3.5 From the Future 132 140 156 170 4. It is not that I have no future: Gay Sex, Queer Worlds, and Samuel R. Delany’s Science Fiction 4.1 Gay Histories, Queer Futures 4.2 Getting Better? Queer Futurity and the Uses of Science Fiction 4.3 Bending Time to make the Future Queer: Dhalgren 4.4 Futures for Desire, Pleasure, and Slavery: Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand 4.5 Try This at Home 174 179 192 201 217 5. Epilogue: How to Remix the Future 5.1 Science Fiction and the Digital Future 5.2 Deviant Futures in Borrowed Time: Video Remix’s Queer Temporalities 5.3 Battlestar Galactica, Critical Fandom, and the Refusal of Closure 5.4 Queer Geek Politics After the Future References 223 227 239 250 254 viii List of Figures Figures 1, 2 Bip Pares’s illustrations for Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive 56 Figures 3, 4 Bip Pares’s illustrations for Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive 61 Figures 5, 6, 7 Visual media of the apocalyptic, nonreproductive future in Children of Men 66 Figures 8, 9, 10 Desirable and undesirable populations in The Possibility of Hope 70 Figure 11 Kee, Theo, Dylan, and the Tomorrow at the end of Children of Men 72 Figures 12, 13 Impossible futures in the background in Children of Men 74 Figures 14, 15, 16, 17 Star Trek and V for Vendetta reconfigured in Lim’s “Us” 231 Figures 18, 19, 20, 21 The evolution of vidding in Flummery’s “Walking on the Ground” 232 Figures 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 Telling a story of apocalypse, rebellion, and renewal in Flummery’s “Walking on the Ground” 234 Figures 28, 29 Humanoid wireless networks and digital connections in Battlestar Galactica 242 Figure 30 Darwinism revised into Cylon genetic experimentation in Charmax’s vid “Unnatural Selection.” 244 Figure 31 Colonizing humanity’s ancestors in Battlestar Galactica 245 Figure 32 Hera as an icon of prelapsarian childhood in Battlestar Galactica 246 Figure 33 Title card for “The Enemy Within” by Cylon Vidding Machine 248 Figures 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 Queerly remixing Battlestar Galactica 249 ix Abstract Speculations about the future shape our experiences of the present. From the romance and anxiety of technological revolution, to capitalism's crises, to the threat of climate change, the extrapolative logics of science fiction are part of the texture of modernity. But they have never been singular stories. This dissertation analyzes alternative futures dreamed up by feminists, queers, and people of color in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain and America in order to inquire into historical and political narratives that the seemingly transparent terminology of the future has obscured. Speculations about the future of humanity often presume that biological continuity requires a society organized around heterosexual procreation. Relatedly, access to technological capital defines whether cultures and subjects are advancing toward a progressive future or left behind in the past. Recent turns toward racialization and time in queer scholarship have brought attention to these discourses; I bring these together, drawing also on the history of feminist critiques of gender and reproduction. In the growing body of queer theory that focuses on time, scholars have traced productive deviations in the present and its erotic interplay with the past. My work explores marginal fictional futures’ complex challenge to dominant narratives of history and futurity. The dissertation focuses primarily on two literary contexts where marginalized individuals developed critical discourses of deviant futures: British feminist speculations in the first half of the twentieth century and twentieth-century African American science fiction. I consider the work that imagining deviant futures has done both within the context of the historical moments that produce futurities and from the retrospective position of later readers who reframe the speculative practices of the past within their own present. An x epilogue addresses the afterlife of these works’ ideas in contemporary digital media. Queer temporal theory’s challenge to traditional methodologies and periodizations gives me the tools to weave this archive of unfulfilled historical futures into an analysis of the gendered and racialized power structures embedded in the ways we think about time. In recent years, speculation has become a crucial theoretical framework within which philosophers and cultural critics have thought about the present and the possibilities of social change. My work offers necessary historical grounding to queer and ethnic studies’ adoption of this speculative turn. The first chapter, “Women and Children First: Feminist Visions of Reproduction, Utopia, and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century” focuses on utopian futures imagined by British feminists early in the twentieth century and forgotten soon afterward: primarily Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's 1885 New Amazonia and Susan Ertz’s ambiguous 1936 tale of the last woman on earth, Woman Alive, though I touch on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's more widely read Herland (1915). I explore the ways middle-class white feminists’ utopias directly addressed the violence of the apparently desirable racial future through their engagement with figurations of women’s independence as a danger to the future of the human race. Ambivalence coexists with unapologetic and unironic nationalist supremacy in many of these texts, making them difficult either to reclaim for feminism or to castigate as wholly complicit with racism and imperialism. I argue that this ambiguity tells us much about what it means to attempt to picture a different future with an imagination shaped by the problematic present. Returning to these texts brings the ambivalences of our present to light, as I show in this chapter’s closing discussion of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men. The second chapter, “Futureless Politics: Dystopian Renditions of Queer Sex, Gender and Reproduction in the Age of Fascism,” analyzes dystopias by British women writers xi between the First and Second World Wars. I work with Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night, cited by several recent critics of patriarchal and imperialist tendencies in queer studies, which merges a disturbing vision of nonsentient femininity with a homoerotic representation of fascism, and Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 Man’s World, which depicts patriarchal science as a form of totalitarianism. Closing with the afterlife of dystopian fascism in twenty-first-century popular film, this chapter considers feminist dystopia as a potential intervention into both historical and contemporary discussions of queerness and futurity. These unsettling fictions route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that trouble oppositions twenty-first century critical theory has tended to naturalize: between queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures. Drawing on black feminisms, queer of color critique, and the artistic movement of Afrofuturism, the third chapter, “A Now That Can Breed Futures: Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Capital, and Queer Possibility,” looks at the construction of black populations as threatening to the American future in the twentieth century. I trace figures of black female sexuality that emerge from the narrative foreclosures in W.E.B. Du Bois's 1920 “The Comet” and come to the fore in the queer radicalism of Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler's last novel Fledgling (2006), which demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy. The convergence of queer black feminism with science fiction emerges as a crucial national countergenealogy in the context of an alleged US postracialism and the unquestioned centrality of the nuclear family in the age of Obama. The fourth chapter, “It is not that I have no future: Gay Sex, Queer Worlds, and Samuel R. Delany’s Science Fiction” extends my queer analysis of feminist and racialized futurities to xii queer theory's primal scene of gay male public sex and the cultural practices that form around it. Linking the discourse of “world making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance with the idea of “world building” common in Marxist science fiction theory through their mutual engagement with Ernst Bloch, I analyze gay African American novelist and theorist Samuel R. Delany's science fictions Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). These novels imagine futures that center on queer sexual pleasure while paying close attention to racial and economic realities. I argue that they create queer worlds of theory and practice among readers in the process. I close with an epilogue, “How to Remix the Future,” that argues for the relevance of my research on temporal deviations to the contemporary digital media landscape. Focusing on the critical temporalities of remix videos that challenge the heteronormative construction of reproductive time and drawing on the example of the television series Battlestar: Galactica (2003-2009), this epilogue connects my research on speculative fictions’ histories with my related project on science fiction fans’ grassroots cultures of critical media production. While avoiding simplistic analogies or utopian claims for the political significance of either discourse, I contend throughout my dissertation that science fiction is (and has been, can be, should be) queer theory, and that queer theory is (and has been, can be, should be) science fiction. From the multiple convergences of both diverse forms emerge new ways of critiquing, imagining, and creating the past, present, and future. xiii -0- Introduction: the Future’s Queer Histories [W]e can't know in advance, but only retrospectively, what is queer and what is not ––Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (2011) 0.1 | Futurity Now We are living in the science fiction future. The cliché has its basis in a truth: we understand our times through narratives of past futures to which early twenty-first-century life seems to be the culmination. The twentieth century’s technological utopias play out, at least for the rich world, in continual wireless connectivity and media availability. Dystopian predictions are more convincingly reinforced by the sudden yet repetitive events of catastrophic climate change and the grinding horrors of global racialized inequality under a capitalism whose worst elements seem to be heightened by its apparently imminent but never (yet) actual collapse. The end of the world as we know it is overdetermined, continually imminent. Yet we also live in the debris of many ended worlds, whose inhabitants continue to live on. Queer temporal theory is the body of work that has taken on a lateral approach to the production and reproduction of futures. It asks what worlds are made and what pleasures found when time is not a relentless onslaught of future generations angled toward progress, degeneration, or some combination of the two. Humanity’s continuation seems to demands the privileging of heterosexual procreation; technological capital seems to define the possibility of advancing toward a desirable technoscientific future, leaving those who cannot access it behind in the past. Through these structures and more, deviant individuals and oppressed populations are rendered futureless in multiple ways–– both figuratively and literally. 1 Yet there is another conversation about possibilities and impossibilities that has often been drowned out both by the mainstream’s futurological cliches and by critical theory’s critiques of dominant temporality. This is the nonconsecutive tradition of critical speculation, where stories and images of science fiction futures have been used by cultural producers seeking futures that deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption. Outside the disciplines of science fiction and utopian studies, scholars and cultural commentators alike have paid only passing attention to fictions of imagined futures that attempt to reconfigure the present; inside those disciplines, the ideological underpinnings of futurity itself have remained largely uncomplicated. Building on the intersections of these two discourses, my project tracks science fiction by feminists, queers, and people of color in (broadly) twentieth-century Britain and America in order to unfold new analyses of the gendered and racialized power structures embedded in the ways we think about time. Such deviant futures articulate temporalities other than those that reproduce the predictable dystopias of the present. We need to pay attention to these voices, I contend, because the histories of their futures underwrite our present efforts to think critically about time. This project works simultaneously as a partial shadow history of science fiction’s ways of thinking the future, centering on oppositional and marginal works that tend to appear as footnotes at most in genre histories and taxonomies, and as an intervention into contemporary queer theories of temporality and futurity. Science fictions’ extrapolative logics have been part of western cultures’ common sense since at least the late nineteenth century, and they have never been singular stories. The speculative logics of possibility and impossibility are sites of contestation about the meanings of the future, the present, and the past. I consider the work that imagining deviant futures 2 has done both within the context of the historical moments that produce futurities and from the retrospective position of later readers who reframe the speculative practices of the past within their own present. The two areas on which the body of the dissertation concentrates, British feminist science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century and African American speculative fiction, show the range of ways in which bodies marked as deviant by their gender, race, or sexual practice have been managed, and have intervened, in the production of narratives about the future. Appearing in modes both desirable and discomfiting, these are futures for the sexual, gendered, racialized deviance that dominant temporal politics have tried and failed to eradicate. What social, political, and cultural forces do we invoke when we engage in the speculative logics associated with imaginative future- creation, world-ending or world-creating, in what we might call the practice of science fiction? And how is that practice gendered, racialized, conditioned by the workings of capital? These are some of the questions I hope to begin to answer by gathering and interrogating an archive of deviant futures. This introduction goes on to lay out queer theory’s ways of thinking about time and to review the temporal frames common in science fiction studies, particularly the tiny field of queer science fiction scholarship. Each body chapter then focuses on a few texts and develops their capacity to speak back to queer temporal theory, giving it a longer history and a potentially broader relevance. Finally, an epilogue addresses the ways new forms of digital media art have been used to speak back queerly to media versions of science fiction futures. I find in such transformative works a model for critical engagement with received temporalities. 3 0.2 | A Brief History of Queer Time The history of queer theory is itself a history of futures. As a politicized anti- discipline growing from a longer history of gay and lesbian scholarship, it emerged in the early 1990s from the convergence of activist energies with the US academy at what Janet Halley and Andrew Parker describe as “the riveting nexus of the feminist sex wars with the crescendo––which at the time we did not know would diminish––in AIDS-related death among United States gay men” (8). Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick and other instigators wrote criticism and theory that was motivated by a compulsion to change the world in such a way that gay people’s futures would no longer be curtailed, whether through the very real danger of death from AIDS or via the policing and delegitimation of deviant desires. Michel Foucault’s epistemological histories foregrounded the temporal elements of gender and desire’s intersections with power and ideology, showing the imbrication of power and resistance yet also opening spaces for a future where those relationships would look different than they had in the past. 1 Queer theory and activism pushed against structures that seemed immutable, insisting on the contingent past and unpredictable future of masculinity, femininity, kinship, and desire. How could attempts to envisage possibilities outside heteronormative structures not involve a certain futurity, a utopian thrust in the move from 1 Foucault is not often considered to be a utopian. But he closes the first volume of The History of Sexuality with a turn to the future, writing that “[p]erhaps one day people will wonder” at the flawed presumptions around sex and power contained in the repressive hypothesis (157). And in an interview with Duccio Trombadori published in English in 1991 as Remarks on Marx, he insisted on his project’s transformative potential: “I think that there are a thousand things to do, to invent, to forge, on the part of those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they’re implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. ... I do not conduct my analyses in order to say: this is how things are, look how trapped you are. I say certain things only to the extent to which I see them as permitting the transformation of reality” (174). 4 deconstructing existing binaries to visualizing how the world might be changed by those binaries’ subversion or destruction? In one of the first uses of the phrase “queer theory,” in 1992, Teresa de Lauretis asked whether “our theory could construct another discursive horizon, another way of living the racial and the sexual” (“Queer Theory” x). A queer future is held up as hopeful prospect at the end of 1990’s Gender Trouble, too, when Butler writes that “[i]f identities were no longer fixed ... a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old” (189-90). Queer theories have been, in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s 1995 description, “radically anticipatory, trying to bring a world into being” (344). Radical queer politics has been seen as a potential way out of the normativities imposed by the capitalist, neoliberal political economy of the West (most often, specifically the USA). Theory was a way to imaginatively activate new or emergent ways of life through intellectual work, through writing or teaching as well as philosophizing. Even when queer studies became incorporated into the disciplinary knowledge-production of the academy, this futural intensity continued. Donald E. Hall’s 2003 primer to queer theory, for example, explicitly invites its undergraduate readers to become queer critics, joining “a volunteer organisation devoted to working very hard to queer our future” (11-12, original emphasis). The queer worlds and new horizons to which these theorists and others like them alluded may be located in subcultural ways of living, buried in the insufficiently documented past, or between the lines of existing texts. Yet recurrent theoretical emphasis on the newness of queer life narratives which might bring about social change suggests that the queerest space and time may always be one which 5 has not yet come into being. 2 Yet these figurative futures are always invoked, rarely ever imagined concretely. To precisely name what a queer future might look like would, it seems, go against queerness’s refusal of binding normative constraints, tying things down to an overly predictable future. The futuristic concretizations I explore throughout this work show what the gestures toward futurity of queer theory’s earlier groundings miss––particularly in chapter four, where I examine science fiction by Samuel R. Delany, who shared many elements of historical and cultural context with the first generation of queer theorists. Although propositions like Hall’s suggest that an ahistorical future will remain perpetually ripe for queering, the actual political future that queer work may have had a hand in creating does not resemble early queer scholarship’s implicit utopias. Instead, as Lisa Duggan describes in The Twilight of Equality (2003), a politics of “homonormativity” emerged to encourage those formerly excluded from heteronormative life into “a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). Gay marriage activism, where working towards equality becomes synonymous with participating in the couple form and frequently involves very expensive weddings, has become the primary signifier of homonormativity. 3 While campaigns for gay marriage have come to provide a public face for liberal gay politics, radical queer theorists and activists have continued to demand a politics of deviation from the growing capacity for nonheterosexual subjects to be assimilated into the conservative marital timelines of the reproductive family home. 2 José Muñoz, whose work I engage in depth in chapter four, deepens and advances this idea in his theory of queer utopianism. 3 For a cogent run-down of the political arguments against gay marriage, see the petition at http:/ /beyondmarriage.org. It is worth pointing out that the queer radical opposition to marriage may itself become reductive, however. Tom Boellstorff’s essay “When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time” draws on the idea of coincidence to suggest the possibility of a “queer theory not necessarily opposed to marriage” that would create a temporal model structured by co-occurrence rather than linearity. 6 Theorists of such deviant temporalities frame them often as resistance to the growing capacity for some kinds of queers (usually white, economically privileged, and gender- normative) to be assimilated into the hegemonic comforts and violences of the neoliberal state. So Judith Halberstam writes in In a Queer Time and Place (2005) that queerness should be considered less as same-sex desire and more as the site of “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” that open up “queer relationships to time and space” (1). From this branch of queer politics has emerged a definition of queerness as a site where the lines between past and future created by heteronormative structures of social and biological reproduction can be diverted or broken off. In this context, the proposition of a queer future requires new ways of thinking about temporality itself. Perhaps the single most influential work on queer temporality has been Lee Edelman’s polemical No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). This project unfolds in part as a critique of and alternative to the relationship between queerness and futurity that has come to seem like common sense in the wake of Edelman’s theory. Working within Lacanian theory to create a psychoanalytic response to the assimilation of queer difference into conventional modes of family and temporality, Edelman argues that futurity itself is antiqueer. Invocations of a better social reality for future generations––no matter what that future may be and even if that future is declared to be radical, alternative, queer––are inextricably entangled with this straight ideology of reproductive futurism. This focus narrows the terms of debate to those which ensure the protection of a symbolically innocent “Child” and the dream of a clean, new future it symbolizes (1-3). For Edelman, reproductivity is part of the symbolic order of oedipal social relations against which queerness is a priori defined. The future is “kid stuff,” forward-looking temporalities by definition part of a normative 7 model that grinds out the same social relations over and over again while pretending to advocate progressive change. Progress, in fact, is a myth built up to mask the horrifying fact that “the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past” (31). Queerness is, in Edelman’s formulation, any iteration of the force that disrupts sociality’s illusory comforts and hopes; as such, it would be definitionally opposed to futurity. Queer subjects instead embody the “death drive” that unmakes the subject, the “grave” that “gapes from within … reality’s gossamer web” and exposes its fragility and falsehood (30). And for those who find themselves embodying that disruptive position, the only nonheteronormative response is to embrace one’s negative status and “insist … that the future stop here” (31). Edelman traces contemporary US iterations of a political operation of homophobia the French gay radical Guy Hocquenghem identified in 1978, wherein the “great fear of homosexuality is translated into a fear that the succession of generations, on which civilisation is based, may stop” (Hocquenghem 150). This fear is not just of homosexuality’s potential for nonreproductive pleasure, but of the areas—the spaces of public sexualized homosociality, the anus as the location of pleasure in a penetrated male body—in which that pleasure takes place. 4 Edelman takes up a trail blazed by Leo Bersani, who theorized gay male anality to embrace the “self-shattering” aspects of sexuality in the 1985 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 5 Bersani wrote in his 1995 Homos that “[i]n a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of sociality itself,” “a radical break with the social,” and therefore with 4 While people of all genders certainly participate in public sex cultures and partake of anal pleasure, it is scarcely controversial to state that it is with male-male sex that such practices are overwhelmingly associated. I address questions of the gendering of public sex in chapter four. 5 Bersani turned phobic public discourses around homosexuality at the height of AIDS against themselves, writing that “if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal … of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death” (222). 8 the conventional models of selfhood that are structured by it, is required to fulfill the promise of what queerness can signify (176). That promise, for Edelman as for Bersani, is structured by betrayal and discomfort; humiliated, disintegrated, shattered, powerless selves are unlikely to build brave new worlds recognizable as desirable futures, but they can disrupt them. In chapter three I discuss ways in which science fiction’s approaches to temporality have been mobilized to engage with anti-futurist, queer negativity. The oppositions between queerness, negativity, and futurity are never as straightforward as Edelman lets them appear when they are engaged through critical futurisms. One of the most crucial complications comes through the “reproduction” in “reproductive futurism” and its relationship to feminist history; another when race becomes a central term through which we attempt to think futurity. My work bounces off from Edelman’s to attempt an intersectional understanding of queer anti-futurism by broadening and deepening the archive of futures on which an analysis of reproductive futurism would draw––in part by thinking intensely about reproduction itself. In a rare discussion of gendered embodiment (characteristically contained in a footnote), Edelman argues that queer anti-futurism is most often embodied by male figures because of “a gender bias that continues to view women as ‘naturally’ bound more closely to sociality, reproduction, and domesticating emotion” (165). This gendering of futurity and sociality, to which Edelman briefly alludes, will be central to the argument of my first two chapters, which focus on the reproductive politics of feminists’ imagined futures. The almost universal historical and political presence of “reproductive futurism,” shapes the gender politics of futurity. If children are the future, women are the ones who will bear them. 9 Feminist theory has long offered critiques of the relationship between women and babies, which has relegated women to a reproductive position subordinate to men’s historical productivity. Shulamith Firestone’s rhetorically science-fictional 1970 polemic The Dialectic of Sex, which not only calls for the abolition of gestation and its replacement with cybernetic wombs but also insists that childhood itself is an oppressive structure that ought to be abolished, is just one of the most radical examples. Childhood for Firestone is the imposition of adult fantasies of innocence on individuals who should be acknowledged for their existence, not only for their potential (85). Because “[t]he heart of woman’s oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role,” biological reproduction must be ended in order to stop women being dehumanized by their role as incubators for the future of the human race (65). When Firestone talks about reproduction, she is as much concerned with the reproduction of social relationships, the perpetuation of means of production and ways of life through reproductive labor as understood in the Marxist sense, as she is with baby- making. She insists that the only way to reproduce a future that would not continually oppress women would be to separate the former from the latter senses of the term. A politically acceptable future will be arrived at only by getting rid of the Child. Here, gender marks a profound political distinction between anti-futurist content and form. Few feminists have seriously contemplated demands as revolutionary as Firestone’s call to abolish children and mothers, but they have often imagined what it might mean to reconfigure the gendered politics of reproduction. 6 Queer work tends to either skate over feminist critiques of 6 Hortense Spillers makes an important critique of Firestone’s racism in “Interstices,” and my analyses of feminist utopias and dystopias likewise focus on the ways in which their reimaginings of reproduction tend to be complicit with various imperial imaginaries. In chapter three I address the interventions black feminist futurist imaginaries have made into this landscape. 10 reproduction or take them as a given, moving immediately to the ways in which reproduction can be resisted and alternative temporalities and futurities explored; queer worlds would seem self-evidently not to include reproductive futures. But queer ideas and practices are still part of a culture that is constantly being reproduced. This project spends a substantial amount of time recounting historical aspects to the critique of reproductive futurism and developing new ways to think reproduction and futurity together without, hopefully, submitting to the cliches of reproductive futurism. My arguments assume and assert that same-sex orientations and the political critiques of radical queerness do not necessarily map onto one another, and that this disjuncture is not purely a product of the homonormative present but extends into the past. Therefore I consider the imaginative production of reproductive futures at particular historical moments and ask how they are differentiated by gender, desire, colonialism, capitalism, nation, and race. What looks normative and oppressive through one lens may appear differently through another, and we can understand the complexities of queer world building in the present better if we angle our analysis through more of these potentialities. In devoting a substantial part of this queer studies project to the cultural workings of reproductive bodies, I hope to show that it is necessary to pay attention to the deviances within what looks normative as well as the normativities within what is, ostensibly, utterly queer. I look at the reproduction of bodies, races, nations and social relations in turn of the century feminist utopias, in women writers’ uses of futuristic fiction to engage with European fascism, and at African American figurations of reproductive futurisms that insist on the differential meanings of sex and reproduction across racial lines. In each case, ‘the future of the race’ and the idea of ‘no future’ or ‘the end of the world’ are central fictional tropes that I unpack through their 11 exposition of historical contradictions and deviances and their resonances with queer thinking in the present. The idea of queerness as oppositional to futurity emerged in critical response to some of queer utopianism’s excesses of hope and transformation, and to assumptions that sexual and political radicalism could align to create the most fabulous avant-garde sociality. From a different angle, other queer temporal theorists have emphasized the pull of the past on the present in order to de-emphasize a futurity whose ostensible avant-garde radicalism has grown to feel highly suspect. In her 2007 book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love writes that “‘[a]dvances such as gay marriage and increasing media visibility of well-heeled gays and lesbians threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence,” and draws on fictional depictions of queer subjects in the past whose self-articulation demands that they be seen as more than “the abject multitude against whose experience we define our own liberation” (10). Love insists that to let go of the past’s problems and discomforts in the hope of a better future is to give up on the misfit elements that have most shaped the meanings of queer existence. She challenges the optimism of futurity as well as its temporal flow. In her introduction to Time Binds: Queer Histories, Queer Temporalities (2011), Elizabeth Freeman offers a brief personal narrative that resonates with Love’s work. Freeman writes that she once “thought the point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities,” but now accepts that “the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless” (xiii). Among the useless things she cites, with their “ways of living aslant to dominant forms of object-choice, coupledom, family, marriage, sociability, and self-preservation,” are “embarrassing utopias,” 12 the futuristic emissions of outdated modes of being (xvi). Many of the past futures I will discuss, particularly in the first two body chapters, feel embarrassing to approach if we are looking for historical precursors for radical queers. Freeman and Love’s generosity to the uncomfortable, ugly, and often violent past is a necessary tool for entering into engagement with these works without obscuring either problems or potentialities. Time is not only a linear movement from past into present and on to the future, although (as I discuss in the next section below) this progressive or developmental model is predominant in science fiction. It is also lived in the rhythms of the body. Freeman coins the term “chrononormativity” to talk about the bodily rhythms of normative time. In her work, which draws on Dana Luciano’s theory of “chronobiopolitics,” temporal norms are especially important because of their relationship to capitalism. Chrononormativity is, for Freeman, a matter of the rhythms that shape individuals’ lives into the form that enables them to participate in dominant histories and socialities. It is “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” and through it “institutional forces come to feel like somatic facts.” “Manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time” (3). Chrononormativity weaves anyone who can ease themselves into its tempo into the fabric of dominant culture, makes them part of the production and reproduction of social life and of capital. And it leaves out or leaves behind those who are out of step, who cannot keep up––whether due to poverty, disability, race, or sexuality. To think against chrononormativity is to acknowledge that “within the lost moments of official history, queer time generates a discontinuous history of its own” that is best told through the erotic entanglements of past, present and future. 13 Chrononormativity and chronobiopolitics speak as much to the politics of race and class as to sexuality, and temporality and futurity have been particularly important terms in work that brings together queer and African American studies. In a 2005 article on queer time and the erotics of history, Freeman writes that “[t]hose forced to wait or startled by violence, whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer” (57). Blackness and femaleness are temporally proximate to queerness here, although they are not the same thing. Freeman explores the ways in which dominant cultures exert power by naturalizing the temporal narratives they impose, leaving those who cannot or will not follow their schedules in a limbo of asynchrony. The “official time line” she describes is based on a state-recognized life narrative that follows marriage with reproduction and the creation of nuclear families to engage with capital as good producers and consumers. These privatized reproductive futures converge toward an ever-expanding future, a colonizing global modernity in which alternative modes of being will have been wiped out. Not being white or straight or male can leave one out of time, deviating from the expected temporality. Thinking race, coloniality and capital is necessary to thinking queerly about time and history, and I endeavor to do so consistently throughout the project. If we want to think temporality and futurity queerly, we should comprehend how race and gender frame the meanings of (hetero)sexual figurations of futurity, and understand what is left out by the ease with which queer scholars can dismiss futurisms’ cliches. Within Freeman’s “variously and simultaneously” are those who may participate, or seem to participate, in some aspects of official time and not in others. 14 Queers are most easily identified as those who evade the ‘straight’ time lines of normalized heterosexual, reproductive life narratives. But the straightness of those time lines is also affected by matters of race, location, gender, and economics. Sara Ahmed theorizes this idea in the spatialized version of queerness (one that also makes sense temporally) she develops in Queer Phenomenology (2006), where to be queer is to deviate from the expected social and structural “line.” She takes the “orientation” in “sexual orientation” very seriously indeed. Yet, part way through her unpacking of the associations between orientation and orientalism, she insists that queer deviations can produce their own coercive directions: “if the compulsion to deviate from the straight line was to become ‘a line’ in queer politics, then this itself could have a straightening effect. … Not all queers can be ‘out’ in their deviation. For queers of other colors, being ‘out’ already means something different, given that what is ‘out and about’ is oriented around whiteness” (175). Ahmed reminds us to “avoid assuming that ‘deviation’ is always on the side of the progressive” (174). One may be “queered” not only by the directions of one’s sexual desire but (as Kathryn Bond Stockton puts it) “by color,” or by other social deviancies (Stockton 183); one may deviate along one angle while holding the line and enforcing it for others in a different direction. As contemporary queer scholars have endeavored to do justice to the difference race makes in thinking about gender and sexuality, the discursive relationship of blackness and queerness in American culture has become an intensive site for queer analysis. Cathy Cohen, Roderick Ferguson, and other queer of color critics have highlighted the simultaneous exclusion of nonheteronormative subjects from black radical narratives of possible racial futures, while race- and class- specific kinds of exclusion from heteronormativity (named by Cohen as “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” and figured by Ferguson as the black 15 drag queen sex worker) are illegible to mainstream queer politics. Stockton’s work on the loci “where black meets queer” marks how racialized and sexualized debasement touch upon one another, often understood analogically though functioning in far more complex terms, while Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line shows how racial and gendered deviances have been co-produced in American history. Sexually deviant white bodies have been imagined as racially other and bodies of color marked as sexually deviant, both understood to be out of time with relation to dominant culture (Somerville 24). I discuss the effects of this in depth in my third chapter, on the gendered work of Afrofuturistic fiction, while the first and second chapters on British feminist utopian and dystopian writing show the transatlantic imbrication of race and sexuality. Theoretical analyses of black history and futurity often draw on similar archives and work with similar cross-time touches and anti-teleological histories to theories of queer temporality. Black and queer temporalities would seem to differ in that to be heir to slavery or colonization is to have had one’s native sense of time ripped from one, to have been forced into the past as other to European modernity, whereas to commit to a politics of queerness is to reject the temporality foisted upon one––whether that is defiantly to refuse any futurity at all or to take on a form of subjectivity that can be fully realized only in the future. But these modes are not separate or separable from one another. Valerie Rohy writes about the shared “anachronism” of black and queer subjects in US discourse, showing how racial and sexual analogies have worked through their mutual relegation to developmental lag and the white supremacist, heteronormative, eugenic ideal that the best future would come 16 from leaving them behind. 7 Drawing on Franz Fanon’s work, Kara Keeling connects the impossibility of incorporating blackness into white straight time to a colonial temporality that reaches far beyond US borders, working within the transnational paradigm of Afrofuturism to figure black political possibility as a radical kind of futurity, one that does not participate in the official time line. Often-incommensurate models of black and queer temporalities converge around a notion she draws out of Marx’s invocation of “poetry from the future”: the idea that the when of those lost to imperial and reproductive timelines could have its own rhythms, worlds, and poetries, though these may not be available to the scholarly seeker whose institutional perch is always to some degree contained by normative time. My fourth chapter, on Samuel R. Delany’s science-fictional combinations of black and queer futurities, opens onto temporal multiplicities that initiate new worlds and challenge the idea that the temporal politics of race or sexuality can be identified in advance; his works suggest that science fiction can combine with the various meanings of queer time to suggest futures that reflect, reshape, and transform the present. 0.3 | Speculative Archives If the focus of this dissertation is “the cultural politics of science fiction,” what is science fiction? Critics struggle over the edges, properties, and dynamics of the genre, whose definitions range from Darko Suvin’s structuralist notion of cognitive estrangement,” which I discuss in detail in chapter four, to Damon Knight’s pointed insistence that “science fiction 7 Rohy writes: “Much as the African American was judged backward or uncivilized, the homosexual was deemed a victim of arrested development. ... Both views imagine arrested development as contagious: it is not just that time stops for the other but that the other––the 'primitive,' the savage, or homosexual––wields the power to stop time for all the world. ... Assigning both homosexuality and blackness to the place of the past, such theories span individual and cultural time lines whose own straightness is never in doubt.” (xv). 17 is what we point to when we say ‘science fiction’” (1). I am interested in one particular cultural logic that science fiction has enabled: the process by which a text reconfigures its historical present in order to speculate about what a possible future might be like. As Roger Luckhurst writes in his cultural history of science fiction as a literary genre, the conception of time that allows the future to be a primary focus in this way is “associated with modernity” in the way it “orients perceptions towards the future rather than the past or the cyclical sense of time ascribed to traditional societies” (3). (I will further discuss some colonial implications of this modern kind of futurity in chapter one.) Luckhurst’s emphasis is on science fiction as a fictional engagement with “Mechanism,” on the permeation of technology into everyday life. While this leads him into a fascinating cultural history, it also limits the extent of the cultural politics that his view of the genre can engage: feminized concerns about gender, sexuality, and interpersonal politics slip into the margins, and works that are about the future yet not overtly concerned with technological modernity (like Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, a major focus of my second chapter) may not seem to count as science fiction at all. We can broaden our interpretations of the technological until texts such as this fit within it, but the temporality of futuristic speculation is also an important framework within which we can think science fiction as cultural form. The science fiction whose cultural politics I trace here, then, is a varied mode of cultural and critical production most often characterised by the articulation of future visions––whether optimistic, pessimistic, or critical of the very concept of linear progressive time. Its logics need not only be enacted in fiction but can form part of an approach to the world at large––and they frequently do. Many scholars have been invested in erecting clear boundaries between science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy: science fiction may be 18 more rationalist and technology-centric, fantasy may imagine nonrealistic elsewheres or worlds that function radically otherwise than this one, and speculative fiction may express any kind of alter reality. 8 Yet such taxonomies are inevitably reductive. Although most of the works on which I focus here can be categorized as science fiction according to most definitions, my elaborations of the cultural logics of science fiction, of future-imagining as a mode of cultural production, might as easily be drawn from any genre. I hope that they will prove to have relevance in contexts well beyond genre studies. As a literary and media genre, however, science fiction has entered the archive of critical theory in some well-defined ways. Politically conscious science fiction has often provided fictional proof for Marxist theoretical models, as in Fredric Jameson’s use of the left-leaning science fiction tradition to develop his theory of capitalism, utopia, and social change, or Carl Freedman’s assertion that “[o]f all genres, science fiction is … the one most devoted to the historical concreteness and historical self-reflectiveness of critical theory” (xvi). Feminist theorists have often drawn on the well-developed, intertextual literature and culture of feminist science fiction to help them demonstrate the cross-fertilization between fiction and social movements, as in the large body of feminist science fiction scholarship by critics including Sarah Lefanu, Marleen Barr, and Patricia Melzer. Feminist scholarship has also long seen science fiction as a vital theoretical force in itself, creating fictional worlds 8 Fredric Jameson distinguishes science fiction from fantasy very stringently in Archaeologies of the Future (2005: 66); I discuss speculation and speculative fiction as they are currently used in the next section below, but the historical context Samuel Delany gave in a 1990 Science Fiction Studies interview is worth remembering. He stated that “‘Speculative fiction’ was a term that had a currency for about three years––from 1966 through 1969,” when it “meant anything that was experimental, anything that was science-fictional, or anything that was fantastic” and “was a conjunctive, inclusive term, which encompassed everything in all three areas”––before it began to signify only experimental works that included science fiction elements, and eventually became a term used by non-science-fiction-oriented academic literature scholars, who used it to legitimate the science fiction that they liked. (346) 19 where feminist ideologies can play out in greater complexity than theoretical writing will allow, or opening literary and visual spaces within which new formations of gendered technological embodiment can be imagined. Feminist science fiction also helps feminist theorists to understand changing gendered dynamics of technology and subjectivity; Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” whose influential theory is built in part from analyses of Anne McCaffrey’s 1961 “The Ship Who Sang” and Joanna Russ’s 1975 The Female Man, is a powerful example. Scholarly intersections between queer theory and science fiction have been comparatively rare. Nevertheless, concerns with changing societies’ effects on subjectivities resonate strongly with queer critics’ articulations of non-heteronormative time and space. 9 The 2008 anthology Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction is still the only book-length work that engages science fiction with queer theory. 10 Contributors to the volume frame science fiction in all the ways I have described: as utopia that makes the queer future imaginable (De Witt Douglas Kilgore), as signifier of sexual subjectification through technology (Veronica Hollinger) and as politicized co-producer of queer realities (Wendy Pearson). If queer theory deconstructs the binary logics of identity and imagines how the world might be changed by their subversion or destruction in collaboration with activist political and sexual practice, here it naturally seems to converge with science fiction’s imaginative production of utopian futurities. This queer science fiction theory occupies the temporality of a promise, in which science fiction will offer an endpoint to queer theory’s 9 See Wendy Pearson and Veronica Hollinger’s writings for articulations of science fiction’s generic intersection with queer theory. 10 Phyllis M Betz’s 2011 The Lesbian Fantastic might count, but Metz differentiates her description of lesbian sf, fantasy and gothic as a playground for (uncomplicated, unproblematized) women loving (uncomplicated, unproblematized) women from the projects of queer theory quite clearly. 20 anticipatory trajectories. But my discussion of queer theory’s histories earlier should make it clear that this is just one, and a fairly dated, way of understanding what a queer critical project can be. The relationship between queerness, science fiction, and futurity, then is far from self- evident, for one of the things that both queer theory and fictional speculation can do is question the structures around which we base our valuations of what progress signifies, who benefits from which forms of demand for social change, and what it means to ‘have’ a future or be denied one. As I discussed in the previous section, queer scholarship does more than contribute to envisioning and activating possibilities for living queer lives in the future: it unpacks the significance of sexual norms and deviations to futurity itself. Science fiction is rarely associated with the currents in queer theorizing that emphasize queerness as countering assimilationist, normalizing politics through emphases on refusals, debasements, and impossibilities (although I will make such an association in chapter two). It seems to have little to do with the genealogy of antisocial or negative queer theory that is most vividly associated with Leo Bersani’s work on the value of unmaking rather than creating coherent selves and worlds. Fictional representations of alternative futures do feature as exemplary texts in Lee Edelman’s use of P.D. James’s The Children of Men to prop up his negative assertion that “no future” is what defines queerness’s radical anti-reproductivity (I discuss this further in the next chapter). In Disidentifications, Jose Muñoz writes movingly of Osa Hidalgo’s 1996 video Marginal Eyes, a video that seeks to “imagine the future” as “a queer world as brown as it is bent” (25). Yet, like Edelman though from a very different angle, the rest of his book moves away from this representational futurism and its association with science fiction to root his queer temporality of performance firmly in the present. 21 It is not difficult to understand why science-fictional understandings of futurity seem so antithetical to models of temporality that question the self-evident valuation of progress. Science fictions’ all too literal articulations of utopian visions, dystopian fears, and futuristic projections are inextricably entangled with the reproduction of racialized heteronormativity, with spatial and cultural colonization, and––especially in science fiction film’s emphasis on special effects––with capital’s fetishization of commodified newness. 11 Modern science fiction’s voyages of discovery trace their lineage to early modern narratives of European encounters with ‘alien’ indigenous peoples, as John Rieder shows in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008). And its focus on technological innovation has often fostered a dynamic in which, as Kodwo Eshun writes, “[s]cience fiction is now a research and development department within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow” (291). This is sometimes literally true, as in the case of technologists’ use of what Brian David Johnson of Intel Corporation calls “science fiction prototypes,” fictions “based on real science and technology” that are used “explicitly as a step or input in the development process” in order to “imagine and envision the future” (v). The science- fictional is part of the language through which capitalist and colonial temporalities begin to appear inevitable. But, just as some science fictions may be prototypes for the prediction of a future more or less like the present, others may pre-emptively imagine its collapse and/or transformation. A central argument throughout this project is that the failures of science fictions’ radical possibilities––generally not so much because they failed to come into being as because they closed down their alternative potentialities into an all too predictable future 11 The classic genre analysis of science fiction film’s visualities are Vivian Sobchack’s 1980 chapter on “Images of Wonder,” in Screening Space, and Susan Sontag’s 1965 “The Imagination of Disaster.” 22 even within their own narratives––do not invalidate their meaning, their interest, or their capacity to make a difference. The cultural politics of science fiction are never not gendered and never not racial, any more than they can be independent of national and socioeconomic location. This is no less true for the discourses of queer temporality with which I place the science-fictional in conversation. But while science fictions are reliant on the violent and gendered progress narratives of technological modernity, capitalism and colonization, they are not coextensive with them. Linear models of developmental and/or apocalyptic temporality give science fiction its structure; yet its extrapolative orientation toward alternative futurities exposes the complex and contradictory ways such modes can be employed. Constituted by and constitutive of scientific dynamics built with assumptions that western European man signified the most advanced, most adult and most human of subjects, science fiction has also provided an experimental site for working out other ways of being. As a scan through anthologies devoted to its queer (Nicola Griffith and Steven Pagel, Bending the Landscape), feminist (Justine Larbalestier, Daughters of Earth), and postcolonial (Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Meehan, So Long Been Dreaming) versions will show, science fiction has cherished uses for those whose embodiments situate them at a deviant angle to technotopian futurities: the nonproductive and nonreproductive, queer bodies, and bodies of color that colonizing and developmental discourses relegate to a “savage” and genocidally obliterated past. Futures imagined through engagements with history’s structural exclusions can tell us much, both about dominant ways of thinking about time and about how we might create alternatives. Speculative imaginings that have not been encoded into the everyday realities of the science fiction present help to demonstrate that the future need not be closed down into 23 familiar, straight lines; instead there will be deviant futures, in recursive relationships with deviant pasts and presents. If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates in Provincializing Europe, forward-oriented historical progressivisms signify the time of capitalism and colonialism, then the time of the colonized, excluded, and othered is most frequently to be found in the past. The temporalities of ghosts, the supernatural, and the “enchanted world” are those that discourses of European enlightenment seek to associate with childhood, alterity, unseriousness, the past. Bliss Cua Lim has shown how the cinematic fantastic “translates” between what Walter Benjamin called homogeneous, empty time and Lim calls colonial modernity and its others; Avery Gordon’s sociology of haunting also speaks to the perpetuation of the past in the present and to the impossibility of ever leaving it behind. The deviant futures this project follows suggest that technological, scientific, and reproductive futurisms can exceed the homogenization of time. Appearing in modes both desirable and discomfiting, these are futures for the sexual, gendered, racialized deviance that dominant temporal politics have tried and failed to eradicate. They deviate from conventional time lines of family, capitalism, upward mobility into what Judith Halberstam has described as the “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” that open up “queer relationships to time and space” (1). During the time between this dissertation’s conception and its completion, the logics and politics of science fiction have become more central to the worlds of critical queer and ethnic studies theory. This has not so much changed the relationship between theory and genre studies as it has begun to suggest a new way of thinking speculation, a term that applies to finance capital as much as to possibilities and alternatives. Speculative theory is work that grapples with the dense futurity of the present, altering concepts of reality since the real itself 24 is continually cast into question. Jayna Brown and I have gathered a dossier for Social Text’s online Periscope, and our introduction expresses this mode: 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. Here, speculation is both the prospect of temporal elsewheres and a logic that enforces capitalism’s here and now, through the dominance of financial speculation. Speculative critique both embraces the potentiality of utopias, forward-looking timelines, possibilities of radically different and better elsewheres, and acknowledges the embeddedness of such imagination in the often dismal logics of the present’s inequalities. This is the dialectic of imaginative futurity that will recur, in a range of contexts and forms, throughout the project. Speculative fictions in this sense provide tools for vernacular theorizing about the politics of the future. In their production of alternatives and deviations from and/or within predetermined progress narratives, they may allow such narratives to be occupied differently. They acknowledge that temporal norms are not easy to repudiate and force us to linger over processes of articulating what other ways of being in the world, antifuturist lives, or nonnormative temporalities might look like. The cultural politics of science fiction, when it is mobilized in less than affirmative relationships to the colonial and/or neoliberal and/or militarist dominant culture, open on the queer in all kinds of interesting ways—many of which have the potential to transform the way we look at queer critique itself. When I first began to conceptualize a project to conjoin queer critique and radical speculative fiction, I imagined that I would find myself awash in worlds of marvellously 25 desirable sexual and social possibilities, where space and time and economics and gender and race and ability would all be brought into new queer forms. This has occasionally been the case, but more often I have found myself recounting the limitations of works that aim to escape but are inevitably determined by the cultural conditions out of which they emerge, following the same logics of assimilation that have brought radical queer critique face to face with its own imperialisms, its own normativities. Certainly, queer sex is far from absent from the science fiction canon. But, as Candas Jane Dorsey wrote in a 2009 roundtable on “Sexuality and SF” in Science Fiction Studies, most of the time “queer isn’t queer enough in sf” (390). This may not, I have eventually realized, be the end of the world. If queer science fiction, and queer science fiction theory, seems to be located at a permanently receding utopian horizon, there is still much to learn from the conditions of possibility for coming closer to that horizon and slipping away from it. Rather than wading through the margins of the contemporary to assemble an archive that would reflect the way I wanted to think of queer worlds being built, I found myself on a quest to understand where such an archive might emerge from and why it does not materialize: constructing an archive of my own to work in parallel with the genealogies of queer theory and science fiction studies, thinking about how futurities as straight, racial, colonizing are constructed through the shape of their predictions and about how those predictions also produce excesses and margins that show what alternative timelines might look like. The critical discourses of deviant futures that marginalized people have developed vary enormously with cultural context, as the diversity of my transatlantic archive demonstrates. My first two chapters address British feminist speculative fictions in the first half of the twentieth century, centering on the temporalities of eugenics and empire and the challenges 26 posed by racially desirable women’s refusal to accept a reproductive role. “Women and Children First: Feminist Visions of Reproduction, Utopia, and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century” reads ambiguously utopian futures imagined by British feminists around the period of modernism and forgotten soon afterward: from Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's 1885 New Amazonia to Susan Ertz’s 1936 tale of the last woman on earth, Woman Alive. Ambivalence coexists with racial and nationalist supremacy in these texts, telling us much about what it means to attempt to picture a different future with an imagination shaped by the problematic present. These concerns are shared by my second chapter, “Futureless Politics: Dystopian Renditions of Queer Sex, Gender and Reproduction in the Age of Fascism,” which considers feminist dystopia (Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 critique of patriarchal science, Man’s World, and Katharine Burdekin’s antifascist 1937 novel, Swastika Night) as a potential intervention into historical and contemporary discussions of queerness, futurity, and fascism. Crossing the Atlantic to work with Afrofuturist fictions imagined in the long shadow of slavery offers a different set of perspectives on reproduction. The third chapter, “A Now That Can Breed Futures: Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Capital, and Queer Possibility,” introduces pleasure as a central term, tracing figurations of a radical future for black female sexuality that emerge from narrative foreclosures in W.E.B. Du Bois's 1920 “The Comet” and come to the fore in the queer speculations of Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler's 2006 Fledgling. “It is not that I have no future: Gay Sex, Queer Worlds, and Samuel R. Delany’s Science Fiction” follows these Afrofuturistic pleasures to a new understanding of queer theory's primal scenes of gay male public sex. I consider this as a zone of textual possibility (one that extends well off the page) via the queer worlds of 27 theory and practice created in Delany’s science fictions Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). Finally, elaborating on questions of audience and mediation that arise throughout, my epilogue “How to Remix the Future” explores the persistence of the historical futures I explore in digital video remixes created by science fiction fans attentive to gendered and racialized temporalities. This project follows an approximately linear chronology, but its discursive threads contain a web of many potential and actualized arguments. As I have worked through the texts in which I trace the future’s queer histories, recurrent threads arise to complicate the meanings of temporality and futurity. Looking at queerness as an element of deviant worldmaking opens on issues of pleasure in/and/as domination––from queer social pleasures co-produced with fascism to the erotics of slavery, from orgasmic intersubjectivity to selfhood’s erasure. A line from Delany’s Dhalgren animates the project’s frame: “It is not that I have no future. Rather it fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now” (10). The speaker, a queer, working-class, half-Native poet, knows that living without a future is not an uncommon mode of being. Yet “it is not that [he has] no future.” The double negative insists that futurity is not denied so much as dissipated among experiences of joy, pain, sex, love, oppression, and resistance in the now. Through processes similar to the logics of remix I explore in the final chapter, insubstantial and indistinct moments reconfigure themselves into new kinds of possibilities and impossibilities. The future need not be figured as a straight line toward utopia or dystopia, but neither must any lines that may form be repudiated for the sake of implicit present potentialities. Deviant Futures: Queer Temporality and the Cultural Politics of Science Fiction takes this insight as its starting point. Cultural producers 28 who use the logics of science fiction to address futurity critically lead me to new (if sometimes insubstantial, sometimes indistinct) ways of thinking queerly about time. 29 -1- Women and Children First: Feminist Visions of Reproduction, Utopia, and Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century Who would, after all, come out for abortion or stand against reproduction, against futurity, and so against life? ––Lee Edelman, No Future (2004) Let the world end. Let it end. ––Susan Ertz, Woman Alive (1936) 1.1 | Timelines Nothing gets outdated as quickly as the future. The past’s utopian dreams are particularly embarrassing to unearth, with their naive visions that too often shade into gendered, racialized, and colonial violence. Yet even the most horrifying utopian visions are born from a longing to live history differently, to create a future that will not wholly reproduce the past. Utopian thinking and writing has long been a site in which the temporal politics of racialized and gendered bodies, and of sexual acts, have been thrashed out. In this chapter, I explore ideas about gender and the future that were expressed in feminist utopian fictions at points in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when projections of imagined futures constituted a culturally important mode of thinking about the modern present. Grounding my exploration of queer temporality in feminist discourse by tracing the ways reproductive futurisms are produced, invoked, challenged, and negated in women’s writings about the future, turning to these texts allows me to explore how the critiques of “reproductive futurism” that characterize much contemporary queer analysis have been rehearsed in earlier contexts. 30 In the burgeoning of futuristic representations that appeared before the Second World War in Britain, many complex and disquieting examples by women writers have long remained out of print. Feminists have reclaimed, and later disavowed, the racially purist utopias of white American feminists Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Bradley Lane; their transatlantic contemporaries have been named in genealogies of feminist science fiction, utopia, and dystopia, but rarely examined in critical depth. 12 Feminist and also shot through with imperialism and racism, engaged with the politics of modernity yet far from the ironies and aesthetic experimentalism of modernist work, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s 1889 suffragist utopia New Amazonia and Susan Ertz’s 1936 romance of imperial feminist pacifism, Woman Alive, are examples of a genre of feminine futurist cultural production that might well seem deservedly forgotten. Yet the contingent, contradictory gendered imaginaries and sexual-social structures imagined by these writers route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that can add much to our understanding of temporal politics and pleasures. Corbett and Ertz's out-of-date, popular figurations of the future show how the feminist politics of reproduction and gendered embodiment function at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race with mechanisms of state power. Their articulation of anxieties surrounding the reproduction of ‘the human race’ shows an operation of gendered and racialized deviance that persists in the ways national futures are projected and reproduced in media and fiction up to and including the twenty-first century. I close the chapter with an extended discussion of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men in order to highlight this. 12 Bibliographic works on feminist utopia/dystopia include author, critic, and publisher L. Timmel Duchamp’s online bibliography of “Science Fiction and Utopias by Women, 1818-1949” and Roger C. Schlobin Urania’s Daughters. Critical and historical works on feminist utopianisms are myriad; Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine was one of the first book-length studies of women’s science fiction, and Darby Lewes’s Dream Revisionaries focuses on the period with which I am concerned here. 31 The film’s resonances with the earlier works shows how racialized reproductive narratives continue to shape the ways we construct the future in the present. The temporalities I engage here are conceptualized as lines: as chronological trajectories from the past to the future focused through a present in which writing and thinking take place. While futurity, especially when approached through a rubric of queerness, can equally be thought as a gesture, an eruption, or a rhythm reaching backward and/or forward from a present, the irrevocable forward flow of time cannot not be experienced, and the narrative temporalities associated with it dominate Anglo-American cultural common sense. 13 It is important to ask whether the linear temporalities of ‘normal’ life narratives (from birth to childhood through adolescence, reproductive adulthood, and old age to death), and the notions of development and progress that Euro-American philosophies have often associated with them, are necessarily straight. 14 And it is crucial to consider how breaks and bends in normative time have been articulated through the intersection of class, colonial and racial imaginaries with questions of gender and desire. I begin by outlining the significance of reproductive time in contemporary queer thought, showing the relevance of the historical imaginaries I discuss here to current debates and representations. Then I consider the construction of dominant temporalities through race, nation, and gender in early twentieth century Britain, working with Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889) and making connections to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 13 For a discussion of experiential and developmental models of temporality that pays attention both to their contingency and to their influence, see the introduction to Elizabeth Grosz’s The Nick of Time. 14 Elizabeth Freeman describes the role of the state in creating an “official time line” that shapes “the contours of a meaningful life by registering some events like births, marriages, and deaths, and refusing to record others like initiations, friendships, and contact with the dead” (“Erotohistoriography” 58); the normativity of the ‘straight’ life narrative is interrogated in Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, which seeks to “dismantle the … mutually exclusive construction of youth/maturity” (176). 32 US feminist eugenic utopia Herland. Finally, I look at the reproduction of tropes I have identified in later works that present ambiguous critiques of the eugenic temporalities of feminist utopianism. In Susan Ertz’s 1936 novel Woman Alive and Alfonso Cuáron’s 2006 film adaptation of P.D. James’s 1992 novel, Children of Men, individual women participate in the curtailing and rekindling of humanity’s future. Placing these texts in conversation helps us to see how racial and national eugenic concerns remain present in visions of the future. Ideas about the human race continue to be racialized, and though political and historical contexts change, correspondences between the women who are envisaged as bearing that future persist. Yet, even as racialized reproductive narratives continue to shape the ways we construct the future in the present, attending to the temporalities of futures marked as impossible might open spaces for suggestive new engagements. In all of the texts I discuss, racialized chrononormative models of productive and reproductive time are reproduced and yet do not go unchallenged. Figures and moments of excess and critique rise up and, if only for a moment that will rapidly subside, offer alternatives to the more embarrassing aspects of utopia. 1.2 | Queering Futurity, Reproducing History What has it meant to reimagine or reroute the generational, familial lines between past and future created by procreative structures of social and biological reproduction? One definition of queerness is the embodiment of such a break, or the disorientation of straight teleologies named by what Sarah Ahmed calls the “failure to inherit the family line” by those whose desires and practices are not contained by and do not continue heteronormativity (Queer Phenomenology 178). Since his flamboyantly argued 2004 monograph No Future: Queer 33 Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman has become the avatar for a position that queer bodies, by virtue of their presumptively nonprocreative status, signify the opposite of a universal politics always already constituted as “reproductive futurism.” The queer, in this model, becomes that which figures the end of the future—of what Edelman’s Lacanian discourse terms “the social order,” of the nation, or of the human race itself. Edelman argues that political struggle—for any cause, whether radical, liberal, or conservative—is defined by the idea of creating a better future and as such is always constituted by normative appeals to the “extrapolitical” value of “fighting for the future” by “fighting for the children.” Invocations of a better social reality for future generations––no matter what that future may be and even if that future is declared to be radical, alternative, queer––are inextricably entangled with this straight ideology. This focus narrows the terms of debate to those which ensure the protection of a symbolically innocent “Child” and the dream of a clean, new future he or she symbolizes (1-3). In Edelman’s frame, it is through structural form that futurity and all its associations belong to heteronormativity. Differences between children, families, representations, images, and projections are far less relevant than the hymn to the “Futurch,” the sacrifice of present pleasures for the sake of posterity, that they all have in common (Caserio et al 821). It is difficult to counter this argument inasmuch it remains safely in a figurative realm, unsullied by political materiality’s complicities and ambiguities and seemingly unmarked by the compromising messes of racialized, gendered embodiment. Nor do I precisely want to counter it. The figure of the innocent child certainly does set limits on what is speakable in political discourse, limits that are as dangerous to non-figurative children as to adults. The idea of choosing nihilistic pleasures over unreal hopes is a deeply seductive one. But, if we 34 pay attention to the content of Edelman’s formalism, we can see that fantasies of futurity both figurative and literal are always connected to material and political projects. 15 These include Edelman’s own, despite his footnote insisting that defiant insistences on reading the book’s critique of politics “politically” “represent the compulsory norm” it is challenging (157). Edelman’s “queer” is a figure of destructive negativity whose racial and gendered embodiments and global locations are not specified, but it emerges from a genealogy of white gay masculinity and speaks to a context of the Christian Right’s dominance in US politics. 16 Even the many analyses of futurity inspired by Edelman rarely give in depth attention to the gendered politics of procreation that constitute the common-sense ground on which his counterintuitive argument is made, preferring to write off physically reproducing bodies to the realm of normativity. 17 The connection between heterosexual sex and procreation is the backbone of Edelman’s opposition between queerness and futurity; queerness for him is what makes visible the drive for pure, self-shattering pleasure that is a potential in all sexual acts. Affiliating his queer critique with feminism via the key American political issue of abortion, Edelman takes the opportunity to critique the pro-life/pro-choice binary when he describes himself feeling interpellated by a billboard remonstrating against abortion rights, called out 15 This point has been made in a variety of ways by critics of Edelman working in the mode Roderick Ferguson named as ‘queer of color critique, including Kara Keeling and José Muñoz. 16 Alan Sinfield’s review highlights Edelman’s national context. 17 A notable exception is Susan Fraiman’s response to Edelman’s initial article publication of the No Future thesis in Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003), which analyses the status of the maternal body in Edelman’s writing (130). Feminism is also central to Judith Halberstam’s responses (Robert Caserio et al; “The Antisocial Turn in Queer Studies”). Sustained theoretical responses by scholars including José Munoz, Kara Keeling, Noreen Giffney, and Tavia Nyong’o make use of and complicate Edelman’s concepts with regard to the politics of race, gender, and history, but tend to focus on how reproductive futurisms can be evaded rather than looking directly at them as I do here. 35 as a negation of its “biblical mandate” to “‘Be fruitful and multiply’” (15). “Who would … stand against reproduction, against futurity, and so against life?” he asks, before insisting that it is the role of queers to do so (16). He lays out this argument through a dismissive discussion of PD James’s 1992 science fiction novel, The Children of Men. James’s representation of a quiet apocalypse born of universal infertility is an easy target. It ends, in Edelman’s words, “as anyone not born yesterday surely expects from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth.” (12). The impossibility of going against the redemptive logic of procreation, and the novel’s attribution of this to excessive sex and desire, neatly maps out Edelman’s critique of the antisex, antipleasure logic of reproductive futurism. If ... there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterilised, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organisation, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. (13) And yet this ‘pro-life’ logic is not as universal as Edelman seems to think, once we look away from the billboard toward more complicated contexts, as Nina Power does with regard to British politics in her 2009 essay on “Non-Reproductive Futurism.” No baby and no future do not mean the same thing for every gendered and racialized body, and to take mainstream American culture’s pronatalism at its universalizing face value is to elide that continuing fact. The Child may be the singular sign of futurity on which most if not all politics rely, but analyzing the intersecting gendered, racial and national investments that create narratives of reproductive futurism shows it does not come without a figurative family that is also politically, and unevenly, deployed. This chapter and the next are about the mothers in that family. 36 To jump from futurity to children to mothers is certainly on some level to participate in a heterosexual logic of (re)generation in which the future is indeed ‘kid stuff’ and kids’ only meaningful connections are to the presumptively heterosexual bodies from which they emerged. Yet to ignore (as theories of gay male negativity often do) the bodies from which queer and other subjects literally emerge is to risk participating in racialized and classed dynamics that elide the question of who disproportionately carries out reproductive labor. The history of population control has involved plenty of “coming out … against reproduction,” in the form of forced sterilizations of disabled, poor, and racialized women and the demonization of the inappropriately reproductive. Historically, the politics of birth control as feminist autonomy have been closely connected with ideas about shaping the reproductive future of the human race. In 1921, for example, Marie Stopes––best known for her advocacy of female pleasure in sexuality and of birth control––argued for “The Creation of a New and Irradiated Race” through a conjunction of pre-natal care, birth control, and the sterilization of the unfit. 18 Predictions and projections of the future of the human race have never been innocent of racialized and nationalistic understandings that seek to determine which kinds of humanity ought to be most desirable. And we should be able to look at those projections in a way that takes this into account, while remaining attentive to a a queer critique of reproductive futurism. 18 I return to Stopes’s work in the next chapter, where I will discuss how eugenic disourses have mediated the relationship between technoscientific, feminist, and fascist futurisms. In the US, Margaret Sanger is a better known figure for the nexus of eugenics and feminist choice; see Nancy Ordover’s American Eugenics (137 and throughout). Ann Farmer’s pro-life polemical history of feminist campaigns for legalized pregnancy termination wears its religious and political allegiances on its sleeve but also clarifies connections between abortion and eugenics. For more positive examples of Stopes’s influence in the areas of birth control and female sexual pleasure, see the chapter on “The Stopes Era” in Lesley Hall’s Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870-1969. 37 If Edelman shapes queer thinking about futurity, Walter Benjamin’s 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” has provided what may be the single most foundational text for scholars committed to theorizing temporality in a way that does justice to those absent from or oppressed by dominant tellings of history. Benjamin demands that progress be broken, calling for a counter-evolutionary temporality that would “brush history against the grain” and grant priority to those who did not survive (257)––a call that has been heeded by generations of historians, particularly those who seek to recover the queer past. 19 Benjamin describes the brutality inherent in a model of history that sees the present as the triumphant culmination of evolutionary development, where the fittest have survived and tell the stories of past struggle in ways that justify their victory. His critique of the “historicist” model of “homogenous empty time” demands a nonlinear understanding of temporality that does not obfuscate the perpetuation of historical violence’s pain. “[A] present … in which time stands still and has come to a stop” is necessary to critique the assumption of a homogenous progress through generations climbing over the bodies of the oppressed to reach a future useful only for a victorious few (262). This stoppage in time means there might be a relationship with the past where history’s victors would no longer be heroes; it means that linearity and development are insufficient structures for thinking about time politically. But the metaphoric language Benjamin uses to articulate the project of historical materialism in opposition to progressivist historicism also demonstrates the complicated position female bodies, as desiring and as reproductive, hold in relation to it. He wants to “stop” time in a moment whose potentiality has been translated into English as “pregnant 19 Roderick Ferguson's “The Relevance of Race for the Study of Sexuality” contains an excellent discussion of why Benjamin's theory of history retains the importance it does for critical sexuality and race studies. 38 with tensions,” refusing to capitulate to normative historicist temporality by birthing generational progress. 20 Benjamin writes: The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history (262). The seductive, obfuscating utopian vision of progress is a “bordello” for Benjamin, conjuring the image of a debauched female body laid out for the use of men who will be corrupted by her touch. 21 In Benjamin, “the whore called ‘Once upon a time’” sucks the masculine energy from the historical materialist who would heroically counter historicism’s erasures. Female sexuality, routed through the economic, figures linear, conservative, straight time and does the work of the oppressor. Benjamin’s insistence on thinking history through “oppressed ancestors” rather than “liberated grandchildren” seems nothing but laudable if we want to be critical of reproductive futurism, to give the past its due and not give up on changing the present for a vague dream that the future might be better (260). But if the historical materialist “blasts” a stop in a “pregnant” moment before it can birth a new generation of progressive history, we must wonder what it means that woman’s work of reproduction (giving birth, keeping things rolling) is so easily dismissed as counter- revolutionary. Benjamin’s “blast” out of the continuum of historical time has been a method used by many writers and artists who wanted to engage critically with modernity. It has not only been used by Marxists but also by those whose political affiliations were far more suspect, 20 Elizabeth Freeman discusses Edmund Jephcott’s translation of Benjamin’s gesättigen (saturated) as “pregnant” (Time Binds 155). 21 This moment in Benjamin is reminiscent of Marx’s “use of the prostitute as the apocalyptic symbol of capital’s emergence,” which Roderick Ferguson critiques in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (9). Marx’s prostitute for Ferguson was a figure of nonheteronormativity, a disruptive female body out of place whose presence disrupted a social flow of history as Marx argued capital’s exploitation did. 39 from Wyndham Lewis’s Blast magazine, to Ezra Pound’s proclamation to “make it new,” to the Italian futurists. 22 In “Theses,” the blast’s self-evident connection with oppositional politics is intended to cast light on overshadowed and overpowered participants in the past rather than to abandon history altogether. Benjamin makes a critique of the presumption that history has ever been or can ever be a stable continuum, rather than refusing or turning away from history itself. And yet that very laudable work also performs its own overshadowing, pushing aside the labor that has underwritten history’s continua and the erased subjects whose contributions may not have been radical enough to reflect in the flashes from the blast furnace. I seek to account for the ways the future looks from from the perspective of the bodies that are pregnant (the English translation of Benjamin's formulation suggests they may be so perpetually), the employees in historicism's bordello who may not blast through history or seek to break its continuum but nevertheless imagine how the future could be bent in different directions. 1.3 | Feminist Utopias and the Future of the Race: New Amazonia The turn of the twentieth century, like the turn of the twenty-first, was a moment when various discourses of temporality—scientific, political, philosophical—converged to make the imagined future a critically important rhetorical site for thinking about the present. The onset of modernity with its rapid social and technological upheavals meant that the present seemed like something very different than a seamless continuation of the past. 23 22 See Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism for discussion of the politics of the modernist avant-garde. I discuss early-twentieth-century futurism, and its imbrications with fascism, in the light of gendered dystopian temporalities in the next chapter. 23 See Philip Wegner’s Imaginary Communities for an account of the roles images of utopian futurity played in modern nation building. 40 Imagining the future as a point of completion within which the complications of the present would be resolved through processes about which writers speculated, assorted visions of future civilizations began to set in place images of gleaming technological futures that would later become the stuff of science fiction cliché. 24 Writers seeking to ameliorate social inequality used their representations of utopia to firm up progress narratives that understood scientific development as a route away from the backwardness associated with nonwestern cultures over which Europe reigned and towards a perfectible rationalism. Not all representations of the future were positive ones, of course; E.M. Forster, for example, used a vision of the future to critique what he saw as the alienating dangers of modernity in “The Machine Stops” (1907), and much of the aesthetic thrust of modernist writing has been analyzed as a critical response to the galloping changes in modern temporality. 25 Nevertheless, the dominant story told about the future, galvanized by the immense popularity of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 American utopia Looking Backward 2000-1887, which Wegner describes as “the single most influential narrative utopia of the nineteenth century” (62), and by the work of H.G. Wells in Britain, was a positive, hopeful one of human ingenuity’s triumph in a changing world. In the liberal model of temporality that predominates in these works, history figures as a relentless timeline marking “the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward” toward the human race’s “ineffable destiny” (Bellamy 36). Situated at the metropole of a powerful empire, many British progressives used 24 For a comprehensive cultural history of Anglo-American science fiction’s emergence as a genre from the technological and temporal discourses of modernity, see Roger Luckhurst’s Science Fiction. 25 For a broad overview, see the section on “Time” in Randall Stevenson's textbook Modernist Fiction. I discuss Forster’s story in more depth as part of my discussion of negative futurities in the next chapter. 41 the idea of such a destiny to naturalize a temporal order of which their civilization was the pinnacle. 26 The place of women’s embodiment and sexuality at this nexus was largely debated through the figure of an independent and dangerous ‘New Woman.’ Would women’s liberation from a purely reproductive role enable or disrupt the flow of civilization’s progress? Sally Ledger describes the New Woman as a “feminist activist, woman writer or textual construct,” (4) embodying campaigns for changes in women’s position that generally included suffrage, dress reform, and changes to legislation that banned married women from property ownership. “The ‘newness’ of the New Woman,” she writes, “marked her as an unmistakably ‘modern’ figure, a figure committed to change and to the values of a projected future” (5). In men’s utopian fictions, women’s liberation was also often associated with modernity, but the threat of the liberated woman is tamed by her tendency to ‘freely’ choose traditional positions. Bellamy asserts repeatedly that his postcapitalist utopia would benefit everyone, but his men “permit” women to work because it increases their “beauty and grace” and makes family life more amenable (185). Women give birth to those who will inherit the future, and they are love objects for men engaged in building it, but it is men who make forward progress. Even William Morris’s 1890 News From Nowhere, whose pastoral futurity operates as a heavy critique of the model of progress valorized by Bellamy and his followers, shows women engaged wholly in reproductive roles. Women’s challenges to their 26 Utopian imaginings were not exclusively devoted to imperial chronologies, as Leela Gandhi shows in Affective Communities when she analyzes an “anti-imperialism” made available through “small, defiant” “utopic flights from imperial similitude” that challenged the distinctions between “West” and “non-West” (7). But here I am primarily concerned with what was articulated through, rather than in evasion or contestation of, progressive chronologies. 42 status as incubators of future nation and empire, rather than mature and productive contributors to the country, were also frequently expressed in utopian fiction. In Time is of the Essence: Victorian Temporality and the New Woman, Patricia Murphy describes the dominant late-Victorian temporal order as structured by “history, progress, Christianity, and evolution,” and writes that these were understood to “unfold” in a “masculine,” linear, goal-oriented time, “contributing to the advance of civilization over the centuries” (4). Women, on the contrary, were relegated to a marginal temporality of reproductive cycles. If the New Woman was a modern figure who belonged to the future, her insistence on stepping out of a feminine temporality meant she was also often read as a danger to it, through her irresponsible demands for power in the present at the expense of future generations. Murphy writes that “[i]n contesting her ordained gender role, detractors claimed, the New Woman not only imperiled the stability of Victorian society, but the future development of the human species” because “the New Woman’s agenda countered the natural progression of civilization and hampered the female’s primary reproductive function” (6). Dealing with the conjunction of feminist activism and the naturalization of women’s reproductive role as essential to the “progression of civilization” involved complex negotiations with assorted temporal, political, racial, and imperial discourses, which women's utopias showcase. Such utopias include Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900, published in London in 1890, where an apparently superhuman woman dressed as a man single-handedly revolutionizes British gender relations through parliamentary reform, as well as the better remembered American utopias Mizora (1880) by Mary Bradley Lane and the 1915 Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose colonial narratives place utopian, white, all-female societies in undiscovered regions of the planet. Refusing the confines of 43 gender, and even reproducing without the heterosexual family, are frequently central to these utopias’ reconfigurations of masculine national futures. The idea that a feminist futurity might actively be opposed to the continuation of imperial civilization is expressed most strongly (though still ambiguously) the 1889 New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future. Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, an English suffragist campaigner who published as Mrs George Corbett, created an ambiguous feminist utopia that both illustrates the convergences of science, imperialism, and eugenics that create the timelines of fin de siecle futurity and contains sufficient ironies and hiccups in narrative and ideology to open the possibility of an underlying critique. 27 Corbett opens New Amazonia with a polemical pronouncement that “British Civilization” is ““Corrupt, Degraded,” and “Rotten to the core” (6). Refusing a future to the dominant social order, her response to this rottenness is a feminine re-visioning of Britain’s national and imperial future in which the “English” have become “extinct.” In a dream dreamed by a New Woman who falls asleep in outrage at a petition by upper-class ladies against women’s suffrage, Corbett shows a state seized by women––New Amazonia––in order to challenge the masculinity of imperial civilization and renew it from a feminine perspective. This nation is run by the descendants of the now-“extinct” English (14), women taking all the major positions of power. Yet, though the British empire has been destroyed, we learn that the new nation has been established in its crucible: New Amazonia’s society has reoccupied the land formerly known as Ireland. Anne McClintock comprehensively 27 Corbett's novel is out of print and out of copyright; I am discussing a potential reprint with the feminist science fiction publisher Aqueduct Press, but in the short term I have made a pdf scanned from microfilm available at http://queergeektheory.org/Corbett.pdf. For comprehensive studies of futuristic fiction in this period, see Lewes and Matthew Beaumont’s Utopia Ltd. 44 discusses the gendering of power in the British empire in her 1995 book Imperial Leather, writing that that “white women …. were ambiguously complicit” in imperialism “both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting” (6). Corbett’s utopia, making women wholly active by imagining them in imperial power, highlights that complicity. She gives her imagined New New Women the future through an act of colonization, using futurity as a technology for perpetuating English greatness even while she engages in a feminist critique of imperial civilization. Ireland is turned over to a progressive “petticoat government” (21) after the Irish are “finally extinguished” in a genocidal suppression of anticolonial rebellion. In the absence of the inconvenient Irish, a focus on achieving “[h]ealth of body, the highest technical and intellectual knowledge, and purity of moral” results in “the most perfect, the most prosperous, and the most moral community in existence” (46-7). Yet, if we compare Corbett's re-colonized Ireland, which at least acknowledges the violent fate of the natives though it can in no way be said to side with them, with the unexamined settler colonialism of Gilman's Herland (in which “natives” of the land near the country of women exist only as counterpoint to the women's advancement, and certainly play no role in the history of that hallowed ground), we see that at least the possibility of contestations to imperial futurity appear in Corbett's narrative. 28 In a 1997 essay, A. Rose argues that Corbett successfully challenges the use of scientific discourse to justify patriarchal and imperial domination 28 Corbett talks at some length about the “disruption of the British Empire” that brings New Amazonia to power, but mentions only Ireland, Canada and Australia (22); outposts associated with majority non-European populations do not enter her consciousness as even potential sites for the post-patriarchal renewal of humanity. A more extensive consideration lies outside the scope of this dissertation, but further research into how Corbett's depiction engages with the gendered content of the period's debates regarding Irish home rule would likely prove rewarding. 45 because “[w]hen New Amazonia flourishes ... the implication is that Ireland’s social and economic problems in the nineteenth century are not inherent to Irish character or climate, but rather a consequence of British rule” (13). Yet Corbett’s vision of “Home Rule” assumes that the Irish—one of whom appears in the narrative only once, as a maid (126)—are “unable to support [them]selves” (28): only progressive women, who challenge patriarchy while renewing imperialism in a kinder, gentler mould, can be trusted with governance. The logics by which Corbett projects the development of her Amazons––a matriarchal race of “perfect human being[s],” “close upon seven feet in height” (11)––show the extent to which to speak of the future of ‘the race’ was to speak through scientific and political discourses that mingled imperialism and eugenics to figure a controllable posterity for ‘civilization.’ Tracing the uses of race as a technology for delineation and domination of populations, Wendy Hui Kyung Chun shows how the development of “the human race” as a scientific concept provided “a means by which origins and boundaries” could be “simultaneously traced and constructed,” thereby rationalizing dominant temporalities (10). For Victorian scientists, distinguishing humans from animals involved ranking populations as further from or nearer to the nonhuman world, and the default “human” subject was always the European. 29 Darwin’s theory of natural selection brought in a continuity between humans and nonhumans which risked disrupting easy assumptions of racial or species superiority: natural selection assumes that all variation arises from deviation and that any currently demonized deviant mode of existence may rise up to evolutionary prominence 29 Linnaeus, who provided the taxonomies by which species of plant and animal are still named, also described “subspecies” such as Homo sapiens asiaticus, which were defined by their deviation from a European norm (Chun 11). 46 given the right confluence of contingent, unpredictable factors. As Donna Haraway writes in When Species Meet, Darwin “put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man” (11). But the contingency that Darwinian thought introduced into Victorian temporality was quickly taken up as a focus and prescription for guided social selection, wherein ‘survival of the fittest’ was mobilized as a way human evolution — history — could be moulded in the temporal shape of the most powerful, creating and justifying the denial of futurity to undesirable populations. In The Nick of Time, Grosz reminds us that, while “those with the most powerful positions of course want to justify their power through the justice of fitness,” “Darwin himself refuses to privilege any particular milieu past, present or future” (47). What we know as social Darwinism appeared in his work’s wake. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined the term eugenics to interpret the contingency of Darwinian selection into a future where the improvement and purification of the race was a utopian breeding project, improving ‘the stock’ to eliminate more animal strata. Galton understood eugenics to be crucial in order to maintain the human race’s quality against a danger that natural selection would become a downward spiral: [T]he race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fitted for a high civilization … until the time comes when the whole political and social fabric caves in, and a greater or less relapse to barbarism takes place (362) For Galton, barbarians are those who have been left behind by temporal logics of scientific progress and evolution, which in his model demand pressure from the most advanced human actors in order to create a future worthy of the name. Similar founding texts of eugenic discourse figured the poor, the ‘feeble minded,’ the colonized, and the sexually 47 deviant as dangers to the future of humanity. Such figures risked provoking a descent from civilized man into barbarian alterity, a collapse from progress into chaos. The suggestion of immaturity in those subspecies who were denied access to humanity, later given psychoanalytic weight by Freud’s description of a “similarity between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual,” (Civilization 97) offered a developmental justification for the positioning of non-European subjects as temporally backward. The positioning of the New Amazonians at the endpoint of a linearly imagined evolutionary temporality is made evident by their perception of the narrator as a “child,” while they are adult; she is perceived as uncivilized in contrast to their high civilization. To argue for the improvements in the ‘human’ race that women’s liberation would provide, Corbett places her avatar in the place of the primitive—although she is of course the one who has the vision of futurity, and so is simultaneously placed massively ahead of her time. This idea that the worthiest human beings were those with visionary access to futurity was written into the “civilised” personality by Galton, for whom an ability to “keep before his mind the claims of the morrow as clearly as those of the passing minute” was a marker of the man capable of being a proper subject for evolutionary perpetuation (348). For the eugenic activists who followed Galton, undesirables were likewise marked by their inability to see the future, which declared them unfit to live in it. Eugenics meant controlling the population of the “residuum,” racially imagined as “a degenerate subspecies” who “live only in the present” and were far too likely to reproduce without proper consideration for their contribution to evolutionary futurity (Mazumdar 17). Beyond reproductively-focused eugenic discourse, the imbrication of evolutionary, colonial and sexual logics in modern culture’s self-diagnosis is evident from the discourse of decadence 48 typified by Max Nordau’s 1892 Degeneration, in which fears for the future of culture figured the sexual excesses of the “over-cultured decadent pervert” as a dangerous resurgence of the “primitive” (Dollimore 96-99). In History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault describes the route to sexual discourse’s status from personal practice to “public issue” bearing on racial futurity as part of the development of state-led systemic analyses of population. When sexuality comes into its own as a vector of power there are regulations that “favor or discourage” increasing birthrates according to “exigencies of the moment” (26). In shaping the future through the discursive disciplining of bodies, emergent biopower combined ideas of “hygiene,” “evolutionist myths” and “moral cleanliness” as it “promised to eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized populations” (54). Part of the logic of elimination was that “sexual perversion resulted in the depletion of one’s line of descent—rickets in the children, the sterility of future generations” (118). The argument was not so much that deviant sexual acts automatically functioned against posterity, but that they should, on moral grounds, be banned from reproduction. If progressive temporalities were to be maintained, the lines of posterity from deviant bodies had to be cut. Corbett presumes that such faults will have been bred out long ago. Foucault briefly mentions the “racisms of the state” when he brings the question of population control into his analysis of sexuality and power, implying that the moment that encourages reproductivity for western desirable subjects is one of anxiety about encroaching others. Ann L Stoler’s expert unpacking of Foucault’s theory shows how colonial taxonomies for class and race worked through reproductive circuits. She writes that the management of sexuality was also the management of empire through racialized discourses of class and gender: “the colonial order coupled sexuality, class and racial essence in defining 49 what it meant to be a productive — and therefore successfully reproductive — member of the nation and its respectable citizenry” (178). Sexual deviants (homosexuals, ‘masturbators,’ prostitutes), colonial subjects, and the lower classes were brought together as undesirable populations; people who had, according to various connected logics, no future. In other feminist utopias, most notably Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and With Her in Ourland, populations deemed futureless when women are given total control of posterity include men. The visitors to Herland in Gilman’s 1915 novel do not travel to the future, but to a hidden land in which Gilman constructs a parthenogenetic, mother-idealizing female space that feels retrospectively queer in its absence of compulsory heterosexuality. Nevertheless, as Alys Eve Weinbaum shows, “national familialism” remains a ”normativizing mechanism through which the nation’s ‘Aryan,’ female citizenry imagines its relationship to ‘futurity’” (104). Given what seems to Gilman’s narrator to be the insoluble problem of “pressure of population,” the Herlanders avoid a conventional worldview––Galton’s––of evolution as a violent “struggle for existence” among “an everlasting writhing mass of underbred people” that includes the “hopeless sub-stratum of paupers and degenerates” (Galton 205). Instead, the model of nation as female-headed household produces a vision of eugenics with love, in which “Mothers” becomes synonymous with “Conscious Makers of People,” even when that group consciousness requires sacrifice. Gilman describes some women’s willingness to give up their procreative ability for the sake of the group as “negative Eugenics,” waxing for some time in the voice of her protagonist’s dawning consciousness about how important it was for the women to undertake the labor of reproduction (or to refrain from doing so) for the sake of the race (Herland 205). In Gilman's writing, there is no outside to a eugenic reproductive model, and the male visitor to utopia must learn to accept 50 the righteousness of the Herlanders' ideals before he can contribute his much-desired diversity to their gene pool and receive the reward bestowed by the final page of With Her in Ourland: “in due time, a son was born” (387). New Amazonia's reproductive ideologies, and the relationship of the visitor from the past to the politics of the future, are less easy to sum up. The New Amazonian state is called the Mother, but those who hold positions of power within it and shape the future of the polity are banned from marriage and procreative (as opposed to symbolic) motherhood. Because its “laws and social economy hold out wonderful premiums for chastity,” the “most intellectual compatriots, especially the women, prefer honour and advancement to the more animal pleasures of marriage and re-production of species” (81). Yet it is worth noting that the only result of indulgence in “carnal propensities” that occurs to Corbett is illegitimate offspring (whose risk of social deviation can be quickly, if unpleasantly, eliminated). If nonprocreative pleasures take place in the homosocial, scientifically enabled environment of the Mother’s bosom, they are invisible and therefore undenounced, because sexuality is strictly linked to population control. For both Gilman and Corbett, sexual continence is a condition of being allowed access to posterity in either political or reproductive futurity: in New Amazonia, “the offspring of vice is not permitted to live” (82). 30 In common with other ‘new women,’ Corbett seems to have “little or no conception of female sexual desire” (Robb 6), unless it was a symptom of the lack of self-control of a rampaging, oversexed underclass who knew no better than animals. If nonprocreative pleasures take place in the homosocial, 30 Lewes writes that, because they were struggling with the idea that women who stepped away from their ordained role as pure reproducers were endangering ‘the race,’ British women utopianists often shied away from the total elevation of motherhood and domesticity that was often seen in their American contemporaries, preferring to idealize women’s participation in the public sphere. citation 51 scientifically enabled environment of the Mother’s bosom, they are invisible and therefore undenounced, because sexuality is strictly linked to population control. In addition to the elimination of “vice,” the mistress race is bred through strict immigration controls and a regime by which “each new-born child was subjected to examination, and no crippled or malformed infants were permitted to live” lest their unfitness spoil the race (46). Marouf Arif Hasian, in The Rhetoric of Eugenics, understands women’s uses of eugenic rhetoric to be appropriations in the service of feminism’s higher cause, making eugenics more than “racist” ideology by placing it in the service of a “constructive” project (73; 78). If women were conventionally expected to give up their own right to futurity for the sake of their children’s, then for them to insist that their status as productive and reproductive actors in their own right was essential to the evolution of a ‘better race’ supported the improvement of women’s lives in the here and now. But this argument falls apart quickly, even when we do not turn immediately to the futures of those whose ‘races’ are deemed to be ‘worse.’ In an 1899 collection on The Morality of Marriage, self- described New Woman Mona Caird mounted a “Defense of the ‘Wild Woman’” who would not give up autonomy for the sake of her children or the future they would embody. In a passage suggestive of whole new vistas of nondevelopmental temporalities that would challenge the forward thrust in which Corbett is caught up, she wrote: I would suggest what appears to be a new idea (strange as this may seem), namely, that the rights of the existing race are at least as great as those of the coming one. There is something pathetically absurd, in the sacrifice to their children, of generation after generation of grown people. … I protest against this insane waste of human energy, this perpetual renunciation for a race that never comes. (183) 52 Here Caird challenges the imperial logic of racial futurity by insisting that the present deserves consideration regardless of its tendencies toward rising or falling on an evolutionary ladder. Instead, she embraces no future as a potentially ethical position of commitment to those who are alive here and now. This is a commitment to which Corbett's concerns about whether the colonial feminist utopia is worth the bodies it leaves in its wake also, eventually, leads her. Corbett’s protagonist greets the news of the New Amazonian State Mother’s eugenic programs with some anxiety––even though, as a woman writer, it is her posterity that New Amazonia assures. She also shows ambivalence through a figure in her narrative who appears in order to show what of the Victorian social order has, in her opinion, no future. The narrator finds herself in New Amazonia in the company of a pseudo-aristocratic poseur named Fitz- Musicus, the embodiment of effete masculine decadence, who somehow arrived in her dream by taking “hasheesh” (10). Fitz-Musicus is unable to conform to the mores of the future and spends his time there aggrandizing himself and trying to seduce the women, to the point where they declare him feeble-minded and decide to euthanize him as he constitutes a force “more likely to promote retrogression than progression” (143). The narrator’s “blood [runs] cold” at such a clear example of New Amazonia’s negative eugenic policies, and she decides to warn him that his “life … was in danger”—upon which act her utopian dream is brought to an abrupt close. Despite its hegemonic take on racial, imperial, eugenic temporalities, New Amazonia hints in the end that pastness, immaturity, and even degenerate pleasures may be preferable to the violent purity of an immaculately evolved future. 53 1.4 | Let the World End: Susan Ertz's Ambiguous Ruptures in Progress New Amazonia presents a seamless vision of futurity worked through dominant temporalities of evolution mastered by eugenics for the sake of ruling-class women, erected off the backs of lower classes, colonized subjects, and profligate ruling-class men. It is only with a closer reading that cracks and ambivalences in this narrative appear, showing that the exclusions and violences on which visions of utopian futurity as fully-achieved progress rest are not wholly uncontested. Later representations of the future in the twentieth century keep their cracks much closer to the surface. This section considers how the gendered and racial politics of reproductive futurism were articulated in conjunction with narratives about the breakdown of imperial progressive temporalities. When scholars discuss futuristic projections in twentieth-century Europe, they frequently describe the First World War as a cataclysmic break when a predominantly optimistic approach to modernity and the future was replaced by one of fear, anxiety, and trepidation. Matthew Beaumont, for example, writes in 2005’s Utopia, Ltd that “in 1914 … history intervened decisively to stop the blood supply that had hitherto sustained utopian thought.” With Europe’s deterioration into all-out war, “[s]ocial development was dramatically interrupted, collapsing the supports on which the troubled late-Victorian dream of progressive evolution had rested,” and “the new machines and new societies of the late nineteenth-century prophets and predictors suddenly appeared in an obscene light, like a form of technological or sociological pornography” (13). Yet the “obscenity” of looking at hopes for orderly utopian perfection head on in the wake of their association with violence should not blind us to the work still done by that dream in neoliberal narratives of unevenly distributed development, and in the hopes and fears of techno-possibility in the digital age. 54 Perhaps utopian images of progress are framed in the language of the sexual by Beaumont because they are what we are assumed to desire but dare not admit to. I close this chapter by looking at two narratives that use images of an apparently feminist, progressive reproductive futurism to lay claim to eugenic utopianism in an age of no future. In the presence of feminist eugenic futurisms ‘out of time,’ of what we might see as throwbacks, we catch glimpses of the unevennesses in our own futurities that the seemingly seamless discourse of progress obscures. Susan Ertz’s 1936 futuristic romance Woman Alive was published at a moment when dystopian critiques of modernity and fascism were the themes of most imaginings of the future. I deal with the role of fascism in futuristic imaginaries in the next chapter, but this novel’s ostensible faith in the “proud and progressive” English nation seems more appropriate to the Victorian era (34). Its untimeliness may be part of why it has scarcely been discussed in studies of 1930s literature. Elizabeth Maslen writes that Ertz has been “dismissively categorized” as a writer of domestic fiction, left out of even most feminist histories (7). Yet she maps sexuality and the future of the race through a feminist project in complex and contradictory ways that show continuities between post-World War 1 European disillusionment and progressive eugenic utopianism. The novel was illustrated by prolific female genre artist Bip Pares, whose stylized images (figures 1-4) of female figures, geometric cities, and anonymous crowds situate the novel within a combination of romance and propagandistic futurism, highlighting its awkward contradictions. 31 31 Two bibliographic articles by Bill Connelly in the Imaginative Book Illustration Society’s journal Studies in Illustration discuss the life and list the work of Pares, who came from an upper-class English military family and drew campaign maps during the Second World War as well as prolifically illustrating and designing for commercial publishers. 55 Figures 1-2: Bip Pares’s illustrations for Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive Woman Alive, like New Amazonia, takes the form of a dream vision of the future. A psychic grants a male doctor the perception of his own old age, which takes place in a post- apocalyptic landscape in which biological warfare has killed off all women and the remaining men must confront the imminent cessation of human life on earth. We follow the doctor as he discovers the last woman alive, Stella Morrow, and persuades her—largely by introducing her to his attractive and genetically desirable, widowed son in law—to take up the task of regenerating the human race by marrying and having children. Appearing in Pares’s drawing (figure 1) as a figure of classical beauty passive under a multigenerational male gaze, Stella is a conflicted figure who first appears in defiant repudiation of her gendered relationship to reproductive futurity, wishing to “let the world end” by accepting the destruction of male 56 civilization. Later, she becomes a regal mother dedicated to solacing the last days of English men; she guides the future history of the human race by choosing ancestors and archiving knowledge carefully for the utopian community her descendants will build. Through Stella’s struggle with the gendered burden of responsibility for a national historical continuum’s perpetuation, Ertz shows English women in a liminal position: reproductively positioned as responsible toward national futurity but also critical of the masculine failures that link it to violence. The England of the future that Ertz represents draws on tropes from utopians like Bellamy, Morris, and Corbett as well as early science fiction film, mingling imagery of utopian technological progress with social democratic visions of a welfare state. London is a city of chrome and glass towers, the Thames is fit for swimming, and “all those who could not be absorbed by the trades made parks and beautiful England instead of living idly and miserably on the dole” (33). But this future appears in the background, parenthetical to the primary plot. The scale of importance is neatly delineated in the illustration (figure 2) of Stella’s wedding, where the woman all in white towers above small silhouetted, androgynous men who hold her veil, a crowd of dark figures cheers behind her, and the futuristic landscape––star of most utopias––is merely a set of geometric shapes on which barely visible human figures perch. We are here not for a treatise on social possibility, but for the ways in which one woman can be shown to inhabit and make a personal future from well established utopian and dystopian figures. Within this frame, Woman Alive presents a progressive future whose history has come to a stop, in which the men who survive the loss of half the population of the world try to live with the knowledge that they will not be reproduced, with the “amputation” of “man’s 57 mystical dependence on a future” (82). This stoppage in historical flow produces a contemplative space from which the narrator laments that the human race’s contamination with “national prejudices, factional hatreds, jealousy, cruelty, bigotry” could only lead to its “end” (34) in a war between European nations. Extinction is species wide, but the national and racial content of reproductive futurism remains powerful. Although ‘human nature’ is blamed for utopian progress’s slide into violence, the novel’s passing depictions of the fate of non-European humanity make it clear that the absence of futurity is even more of a problem for those whose access to futurity was curtailed to begin with. We learn that women “went quickest in the hot countries,” (39) that the “inertia” of “fatalism” in “Eastern countries” meant “the people had fallen into such apathy that the dead lay in the streets and the living merely awaited their turn to die” (27). Such orientalist visions of racial alterity as futurelessness are also articulated in sexual terms: In some countries men were trying to outdo the vice and libertinism of Rome in its worst days, and making a parade of it. In England and America and the League of English-Speaking Nations generally, such behaviour was severely punished, as indeed it was discouraged and frowned upon in most of the European countries. It was an offence here for men to masquerade as women … in those countries were it was permitted or ignored, order and discipline of any sort were soon overthrown. (143) Even when no one has a future, ethnically-othered gender-deviant anarchy is figured as endangering what little future there might be. Though such nonreproductive modes of sexual behaviour are not actually blamed for the end of the human race, they do stand diametrically against any prospect for renewal of the old social order. Anglophone men, on the other hand (Woman Alive depicts Britain, America and Australia as united in the “League of English-Speaking nations”), plan to “go down with the ship with … flags waving”: they 58 have the best grasp on order and discipline and therefore deserve the appearance of the world’s last woman in their ranks (42). What makes the novel worth unearthing for my project is Stella’s response to her responsibility for re-starting history. She insists on contemplating the end of the world as a distinct and not necessarily undesirable possibility. This former girls’-school gym teacher is at first horrified by the idea that she will be forced to mother an entire species, and seeks to evade her responsibility through gender transgression. Reminding her rescuer that she “wasn’t wanted as a woman,” she dresses in men’s clothes and declares that she means “to live as a man and die as a man” (90). When the Prime Minister implores that she is “the only woman in the world,” she refuses the literal truth of his statement in order to connect his courtship to perfidious masculinities, snapping “[n]o one’s ever said that to me before” (99). The text informs us that all of Stella’s problems are caused by having been jilted; yet her nihilistic insistence that “men … deserved to die” and that their world should be allowed to end are met as propositions containing “a good deal of truth” by the novel’s rationalist male narrator (64). Her desire to join with the English men’s disciplined fatalism is a very different prospect than the “vice” of men who masquerade as women; it figures clarity, proof of good sense and English grit, rather than degeneration. 32 Yet each serves the same function in hastening the end of reproduction. Although she embodies the future in the most literal sense, being the only prospect for human reproduction, Stella insists on defining futurity as something beyond herself. 32 While both are coded as gender deviance, female masculinity has often carried very different meanings that male femininity: Judith Halberstam discuses the involvement of masculine women in nationalist and military projects briefly in Female Masculinity. I address these issues in the following chapter. 59 When she demands that the men who want to breed her “let the world end,” she perceives “the world” as “the old world” and thinks that even if there is no future for any human being there may be one for the planet. For Alan, the American pilot she will eventually marry, the “monstrous joke” of humanity’s “absurd failure” is that “[i]t took several million years for it to evolve out of the slime” in order only to “commit suicide” (42), Stella takes a longer view and suggests that “man” might “give way to other animals” (100) as part of an evolutionary process. She imagines “a vast grave for all the men left in the world,” marked by a “towering monument” engraved with the line “Man was a fighting animal” to highlight the opposition between species-futurity and gendered violence. In Pares’s illustration (figure 3), the planet is dwarfed by the memory of humanity, but Ertz has Stella approach this with rather more optimism. Stella embraces a Darwinian decentering of human beings in relation to nature, rather than insisting that evolution be subjugated to ‘civilized’ human needs: “Let’s make way for … sensible lions and tigers and bears” (100). From this perspective, her refusal of her gendered relationship to futurity is not only a demand for masculine autonomy that seeks to escape a naturalized model of femininity by refusing the future altogether. She wants to initiate a post-human understanding of futurity, where the continuation of “the world” is not automatically a national or even a human project. 60 Figures 3-4: Bip Pares’s illustrations for Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive The posthuman future in Woman Alive is, like Stella’s gender-nonconformity, only a tantalising glimpse that Ertz sets aside for a future that owes more to Galton than to Darwin. Stella’s nonreproductive, antihumanist autonomy is traded for a progressive futurist project when she falls in love with a conveniently fit man. Yet as she gives in to her status as embodiment of the future, she continues to challenge masculinist nationalism, insisting that her children be given no access to histories of war and violence “by threatening to remain single” (181). Men’s irrationality and violence is shown through their willingness to fight over Stella; they would “rather the world had no future at all than that [theirs] shouldn’t be the predominant race in it” (160). Having abandoned her preference that the world have no future at all if she will be forced to reproduce it, Stella decides that “each of [her] daughters” will marry “a member of a different race or nation” provided Stella considers that nation 61 “worthy of preservation … because of their value to the world and to civilization, or because of some peculiar racial genius” (162). Racial hierarchy is to be reinscribed in the form of biodiversity, with the white Englishwoman deciding how humanity will be defined. And Stella wants to use her gendered association with the future to divert history’s violence- driven continuum, controlling not only biological but also textual reproduction—war and violence will be elided from her children’s future. This eugenic project will lead to the low- conflict result of “a pleasantly homogeneous world,” a “colony” where everyone is carefully chosen, related, and fundamentally English though they may have diverse heritage (173). Her vaunted peace of feminist postnationalism becomes a neo-imperial future where peace is cultural hegemony for the English colonizing class: the undesirable races, nations and classes will at last have no future in literal as well as figurative terms. Though a nonhuman future will develop in the parts of the world Stella’s family do not reach, we are to hope that they will eventually overrun it. Stella’s conflictedness enables the novel to signify against the grain of its conventional narrative flow, offering moments of queered temporality that suggest breaks in its dominant story of ‘the world’s’ future as the heterosexual reproduction of an Anglo- American family. In figures 3 and 4, she stands alone amid anonymous crowds of men, signifying as an idolized leader in frames reminiscent of fascist propaganda. Yet even in her marriage, Pares’s image has her appear without her husband, hers the only face visible in a cheering throng. Lining up with the nationalist project she starts out by resisting, it is as an autonomous figure that Stella takes her place to symbolize the body of a dominant progress, reproducing a racial future and guarding against the reproduction of inappropriate knowledge. Nevertheless, in the end her autonomy lines up with the nationalist project she 62 starts out by resisting. In the last of Pares’s illustrations (figure 4), she stands forth as an anonymous figure cheered by even more anonymous hands, without even her markers femininity remaining. Stella takes her place as the body of a dominant progress, reproducing a racial future and guarding against the reproduction of inappropriate knowledge. The brightest hope of the future for which Stella finally signs on is likely to resemble a faintly multicultural version of Corbett’s New Amazonia. 1.5 | The Human Project Lives: Children of Men The texts I have explored here force us to recognize that we cannot easily discard or reclaim the ways of living and thinking futurity that we inherit, challenge as we may the logics of generational transmission. Visions of the ends of temporalities of domination become affirmative reproductions all too easily. The discussions of complicities and ambiguities in politicized visions of (no) future that I offer in this chapter ground the complex analyses of more explicitly and purposefully queer futurities I produce in the rest of the project. I close by contemplating the reproduction in the present (which may be inheritance, influence, or simply coincidence) of tropes from the fictional past futures I have unearthed here. I referred to Edelman’s invocation of James’s The Children of Men briefly above. The analyses this chapter works through show the tradition of science-fictional wrestling with eugenic futures from which both James’s 1992 novel and Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film emerge. In an evolutionary dead end, both texts depict the human race’s future as ended altogether; the last bastion of civilization, Britain, is beset on all sides by those who cannot cope with the end of days. The relation of these events to eugenic histories can be seen if we 63 consider tropes wherein the poor, the ‘feeble minded,’ the colonized, and the sexually deviant appear as dangers to the future of humanity. I discuss the origins and workings of early British eugenic ideas above. In the US, population control enforcement was legally mandated: at least 70,000 people are known to have been sterilized in the United States between 1907 and the close of World War II. Disability and immorality, class and race provided reasons for declaring people not worthy to participate in the future of humanity (Ordover 134). In James, the end of reproduction seems to have been a direct result of a moral failure to engage with the future, which she subtly suggests has been brought about by a failure of eugenics in past generations: “Pornography and sexual violence … increased and became more and more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children” (James 7-8, my emphasis). Making love and breeding children has become something only the nonwestern do, and such inappropriate breeding brought whiteness to its end. The distance between white and human races seems a negligible leap for James. Cuarón’s film takes James’s profoundly conservative novel and updates its messianic narrative with a radical twist for the twenty-first century’s futural anxieties. It widens its politics of re/production out far beyond James’s demonization of sterile pleasures, in the process showing their connection to eugenic discourses. As the camera pans across a news collage (figure 5), the film represents the end of hope, linking a worldwide failure of human reproduction to global political crises. Infertility (“NO BABY HOPE”) is depicted as a root cause of massive social unrest and eventual migration, as shown in crowds of panicked faces and screaming headlines. In transferring events from nostalgic middle England to a contemporary landscape of hypermediated propaganda, high-tech decay, and immigration paranoia, Cuarón shifts focus from individual to global modes of reproduction and the 64 apocalyptic narratives that accompany them. As today when the comparatively low white European birth rate is widely understood as competing with immigrant fecundity, the possibility of a future is made national and racial: in a video screened on a bus in the film (figures 6 and 7): images of collapsed and burning cities around the world are followed by the slogan ONLY BRITAIN SOLDIERS ON, framing the militaristic yet civilized imperial nation against ravening barbarian hordes. 65 Figures 5-7: Visual media of the apocalyptic, nonreproductive future in Children of Men Both novel and film seek the redemption of futurity through the reclamation of those the state marks futureless, but do so by incorporating them into pre-existing political 66 temporalities. In the novel, the baby who will regenerate a moribund humanity evades state recognition, born of two people who evaded compulsory fertility tests because their disabilities meant they were not on the list of those from who a new race would be bred if it came to exist (188). 33 James makes occasional mention of shadowy “Sojourners” who are “import[ed] from less affluent countries” to do the “dirty work” (58), but the affairs and future of British citizens are the novel’s only real concern. The film version of Children of Men carries the idea of a redemptive futurity built from rejected bodies further, bringing front and center the illegal others whose subjugation enables Britain’s pretense that it has a future. As Clive Owen’s white British protagonist Theo walks obliviously through London, flashing his passport, noncitizens are imprisoned and policed beside and behind him, as well as dying on TV. Even when no one has a future, some futures are still more desirable than others. 34 The future in Children of Men, as in Woman Alive, is held by one woman. Kee is a young, illegal, black woman of undisclosed national origin, with no father. Her pregnancy might save all of humanity’s future, yet she––as a person without citizenship––lacks human rights and is marked out by the dystopian British state as a polluting force. She gives birth to the future in a refugee camp. Yet, as her daughter’s birth signals moments of transcendent hope onscreen, any prospect of visual or narrative autonomy for Kee is erased as she is handed from her white male protagonist protector into the hands of anonymous scientists on a mission to save humanity. As Aimee Bahng shows in detail, Cuarón’s film critiques many of global capitalism’s models for futurity while technologically reproducing reproductive 33 The texts and themes discussed in this chapter would all benefit from examination in the light of disability studies, though such research lies beyond the scope of my current project. 34 In the “Happy Futures” chapter of The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed discusses the film’s depiction of Theo’s depressed disengagement from his world in similar terms, though perhaps with more sympathy for his plight. 67 futurism in the form of “a narrative arc that writes a man’s hopes and visions for the future across the body of a woman of color” (113). The film’s open ending offers no suggestion that her fate at the hands of the Human Project scientists will be a pleasant one, however. The uses that scientific humanisms make of the bodies of the excluded are well documented: Hortense Spillers, for example tells how in the history of slavery “captive flesh” has provided a “living laboratory” for the curing of captors (208). The recently publicized story of how Henrietta Lacks’s body was posthumously transformed into life saving and future- creating cells demonstrates that some human projects are more equal than others (Skloot). Looking at the film through Kee’s perspective demonstrates the extent to which childbearing bodies may be excluded from the larger implications of reproductive futurism. A double meaning here inheres in the association between children and the future. A future for the children (born and unborn) of some may be built from—off the backs, at the expense, on the labor, and out of the bodies of—the children of others. As the brood mare for a future in which nothing but her loins are given a stake, Kee’s possible fate was prefigured by representations of women who bear forth futures without having access to them. She has helped me see the extent to which gendered and racialized histories of futurisms haunt contemporary queer theory, and the processes by which critical science fictions try and fail to counter dominating temporalities. In the documentary The Possibility of Hope, which appears on the DVD extras to Children of Men, environmentalist James Lovelock—initiator of the Gaia hypothesis that personifies Earth—epitomizes how ecological discourses have inherited the eugenic content of reproductive futurisms. He speaks of his grandchildren’s anxiety about perpetuating a world on the brink of collapse. As the screen shows the elderly white man playing with some 68 beautiful pale-skinned children (figure 8), he says “they are the ones who should be reproducing.” These children, it appears, can recognize the problems of the world and therefore exert some control over it. Elsewhere, the film intercuts archive footage of teeming dark-skinned bodies in a seemingly postcolonial metropolis (figure 9) with mountains of decomposing garbage (figure 10), suggesting a connection between the mounds of trash and the presumptive others on the screen who, unlike the beautiful white children, lack the capacity to think about the future. It seems that little distance has been gained from visions of humanity’s future that mark some human bodies as futureless, and the disappointment we might feel in contemplating this perhaps shows the limitations inherent in thinking historical time as linear, developmental, evolutionary. 69 Figures 8-10: Desirable and undesirable populations in The Possibility of Hope 70 The scientists who save Kee belong to the “human project”; the histories I have discussed in this chapter show how little innocence projects of human futurity have had. Kee bears the future of the whole human race yet has no official home or even identity, being an illegal subject without citizenship. Cuarón’s decision to cast a young black woman in the role combines the film’s conservative narrative of reproductivity––children are our future, and if adults do not take due responsibility for producing them then human relationships with the world and one another will collapse––with a body Hollywood has not frequently taken to signify a desirable future. 35 As a poor, pregnant black teenager and illegal immigrant––and one ignorant of the father of her child's identity, at that––Kee fits almost every twentieth- and twenty-first-century stereotype of the person whose excessive reproduction ought to be curbed. Yet, in the closing shot of Children of Men (figure 11), there she sits amid the wreckage of the world, in a boat with her daughter, Dylan, and the corpse of a white man who has just died to save them. Patiently, they wait for a crew of scientists who will nurture mother and child in their role as the origin point for a renewed humanity. In her role as humanity’s hope, Kee and her daughter Dylan seem to signify the triumph of procreation: a nonwhite, noncitizen future might be less than perfect, but if it is the only future possible, then it can be embraced. 35 My third chapter addresses the temporalities of black female figures as reproductive and sexual subjects. 71 Figure 11: Kee, Theo, Dylan, and the Tomorrow at the end of Children of Men Yet there is something about the figure of Kee that makes this prospect unconvincing, that eludes her apparent role in the reproduction of futurity as subtly as Corbett and Ertz's protagonists did theirs. The lines from Kee to the white racial mothers discussed here are broken, however, mediated by the discarded bodies of those deemed unwelcome or unacceptable in eugenic genealogies. She appears constantly surrounded by white women, black men, or white men, never alone from her first appearance in the back of a crowded car to her elevation from a small boat containing one white man to a larger boat containing many. It is as if each representative of each possible future is afraid of what might happen if she were to slip out of their sight. Kee is not a queer character, but––as with Stella––there is something queer about the way she fails to synchronize with the narrative in which she is situated. She carries a singular, normative, and very straight future for Cuarón, but when placed in the context of her affinities with other similar figures, other whores in historicism's bordello or laborers in the reproduction of futurity, she embodies uncertainties and excesses to which we should pay attention. 72 Kee’s affinities point to the fact that around the edges and against the grain of the primary narrative Children of Men employs, it offers visual cues for alternative, negative, perhaps impossible models of presents and futures that work in spite of and against reproductive futurity, colonial reality, normative hope. Though we follow a conventional story in the foreground, background images in Children of Men suggest stories to tell about futures and possibilities that go against, alongside, and underneath the story of redemptive reproductive possibility in which the film asks us to find our fight for the future. It suggests that there might be unknown quests and pleasures, buried in and hidden by violence, futures unforeseen and unforeseeable, that we could access through viewing, reading, or inhabiting the film in a different way. Some nameless characters rise up against the state that wants their lives to be impossible: as our protagonists march past a crowd of protestors chanting, in a shot that ends on a shot of a woman in hijab with her fist raised, we get to see people in the process of being led, standing up to a regime that has declared their lives impossible–– lives that they’ve been living regardless. Others, presumably citizens, stand around demanding the end of possibility in a mockery of protest, waving signs that declare THE FUTURE STOPS HERE (figure 12). 73 Figures 12 and 13: Impossible futures in the background in Children of Men The film tells us that the future does not have to stop here, that the human project lives and we just have to give ourselves over to it, have faith in its science. But we might also ask whether these people are campaigning in favor of the apocalypse, perversely hoping to avert it by acknowledging it, or just trying to force their way into the main plot of the film. The image in figure 13 marks these prospects: while Theo strides past, we might look to the 74 graffiti, whose demands that we pay attention hint at the existence of oppositional media networks and perhaps at significations of the images we could only know by context. We might also wonder whether the hopes of the person who painted the slogan past which Theo is carrying his latte can be satisfied with the way things are turning out. What might Kee know about the people who drew the graffiti––the slogan writer the human project failed as a source of hope when it carried Kee away from all the other futureless subjects, or the artists who made the other drawings? We might even ask how the soldier, a man of color whose position in retrenched anti-immigrant Britain can’t be secure, feels about it all. Within the narrative strictures of the film, these are impossible stories; they are not possibilities of interest for the cinematic and ideological reproductive project in which Cuarón is engaging. But in conjunction with Kee’s story they might point to alternative temporalities and possibilities––those created by people who are Kee’s ancestors and heirs according to different systems of reproduction Kee’s heirs in this sense might be other representations of black women’s futures, or other versions of herself that traffic outside the legitimated purposes of adding to studio profit. I have been responsible for a few of these, creating a critical remix video (“The Future Stops Here”) by re-editing scenes from Children of Men together with other futuristic films to bring her and other marginal figures to the center; creative science fiction fans active in feminist and antiracist critique have written stories that provide her with a truculent, rebellious, or contemplative internal voice. 36 The remaining chapters will focus on works that 36 I discuss my media project in the short essay “Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: the Uses of Remix Video,” cowritten with Kristina Busse. Critical fan fiction includes “After Tomorrow” by sabrina_il and “Sick” by sophinisba. I address the cultural politics of critical science fiction fan production in the epilogue to this dissertation. 75 (re)produce futurities more radically different than the ones they inherited, on projected breaks in historical continuity that suggest more than the merest glimmers of alterity for the oppressed. But looking closely at these figures, who do not quite line up with the narratives they are supposed to reproduce, has already shown that, if historicism's “whores” step out of the figurative bordello and into realms of protest and possibility, then they have the potential to remake or unmake the world in different ways. That may not just mean occupying the timelines and hierarchies they inherit without being legitimated by them but demanding the lines flow in different directions; suggesting that the future could, after all, become a different kind of place. 76 -2- Futureless Politics: Dystopian Renditions of Queer Sex and Gender in the Age of Fascism In a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of sociality itself, only what that society throws off—its mistakes or its pariahs—can serve the future. ––Leo Bersani, Homos (1995). Women have no existence and no essence; they are not, they are nothing. ––Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903). They have destroyed us by doing what we told them. ––Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937). 2.1 | Speculating Negativity “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever” (280). So George Orwell, in one of the most famous lines from 1949’s iconic dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four, characterizes a worst-case scenario of violent repression, endless war, and ideological coercion. A boot stamps forever; a single moment of violence eliminates the possibility that any future at all could be possible, since all consciousness of possibility that might be contained in a human face will be continually obliterated. This boot belongs to twentieth-century Europe’s most terrifying ender of futures: the uniformed Nazi, the fascist, the soldier of totalitarianism. Around this violent negation of choice, potential, and futurity––its violence always unevenly distributed––speculative imaginaries flower. Such imagery of fascism repeats endlessly in narratives about dystopian futures, and recurs also in theoretical writings about futurity and negation––including work by queer theorists who are concerned about the relationship between sexuality, negativity, and politics. This chapter 77 explores that nexus of sexuality, violence, and futurity through a history of dystopian fiction that has been overshadowed by the canon of Orwell and Aldous Huxley: anti-fascist British women writers between the First and Second World Wars who used the logics of science fiction to express complex ideas about the gendered and sexual content of fascist and protofascist politics. The dystopian fiction of Charlotte Haldane (1894-1969) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963) was written in dialogue with the rise of European fascism and is disturbingly alert to the seductions as well as the horrors it proffered. They route anxieties about science, gender, and fascism through images of desire, sexuality, and reproduction in ways that often present the fascist boot in the face as coexisting with representations of queer sexuality and sociality that could masquerade as points on a sex-positive, antihomophobic agenda for the social changes required to make early-twenty-first-century Britain or America into more equal, affirmative, and sexually healthy places. In these imagined futures of genocidal violence, same-gender desire is accepted as a healthy part of every man’s sexuality; sex workers are as respected as artists and musicians for the pleasure they bring; consensual sex is a source of pleasure more than guilt. To present sexual pleasure within a negative future might simply serve to underline the immorality of such behavior, as in the case of Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World (discussed further below) where “every one belongs to everyone else” and the implied reader draws back in horror (47). Little to do with the subcultures it anachronistically resembles, Huxley’s sexual freedoms offer a distorting mirror to show why monogamous heterosexuality must be best. Yet the presence of queer desires’ fulfillment in the past’s negative futures can also demand that we recalibrate the ways we think about queer politics, reproduction, and sociality in the present. Feminist dystopias offer much 78 material for such calibrations. Haldane’s 1926 Man’s World and Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night use divergent strategies to route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that trouble oppositions twenty-first century critical theory often tends to naturalize: between heteronormativity and its others, queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures. The violent unfuture of Nineteen Eighty-Four, together with Huxley’s pseudo-utopia of technologically mediated false consciousness Brave New World, has set the terms for what dystopia means both in academic criticism and in popular culture. Both titles have become shorthand for forms of oppression, surveillance, disturbing scientific advancement, false consciousness––and, often, for the need to preserve the world as it is in the face of frightening changes. 37 Both texts will pop up repeatedly as reference points below, but this chapter primarily draws on their precursors, which have not made it into the popular imagination, in order to insist that there are different and differently gendered ways to think about dystopian futurity. The feminist dystopian negativities I present hint at the breaking down of conservative developmental temporalities rather than their conservation in the biological or ideological reproduction of traditional values. In Haldane’s Man’s World and Burdekin’s Swastika Night, the production of futurelessness––not just an undesirable world for some, but the notion that the future could end altogether––is a powerful element in the novels’ dystopian depictions of gender, power and biological reproduction. Man’s World depicts reproductive anxieties similar to those in 37 Although sometimes, as in the case of reality TV’s Big Brother House, pop-culture resonances turn the meaning of the original text upside down in ways that demonstrate how oddly pleasure and violent oppression can be imbricated. 79 the utopian or near-utopian texts I discussed in the previous chapter, in a highly ambiguous and discomfiting dystopian future that shares several elements of its biological and ideological critique with the later Brave New World. 38 Swastika Night, which has been slowly growing in influence since its republication in 1985, shows a more intense vision of negativity whose resemblance to Orwell’s vision has often been remarked. 39 I am less interested in these novels’ relationship to canonical texts than I am in the shapes they give to gender, violence, and futurity in and of themselves, however. As I dug into these works, the ways their futures deviated from the expectations into which I had been conditioned into by a genre canon that excluded them led me to understand how, when approached with the tools of queer temporal theory that I elucidate and develop throughout this dissertation, they could offer interventions into the intellectual reproduction of twenty-first century queer ideas. These works offer resources for the queer project of articulating a politics that might not rely on reproduction: a futureless politics. At the same time, they insist that same-sex desire can all too easily appear as one of the various interlocking forces that set in place politically horrifying futures. Feminist dystopias of queer reproduction underline the necessity of thinking negatively about radical politics. This chapter begins by laying out contrasts and common concerns between the ways the idea of futurelessness interweaves with fascistic ideas and images in the politics and aesthetics of modernity, in dystopian theory, and in queer studies’ uses of these. Then I 38 Haldane and Huxley moved in similar circles, though her social status was lower; a successful journalist, she reviewed Huxley’s novel in Nature on its appearance, making perhaps a sidelong reference to her own work (unreviewed in that illustrious journal) by opening with a remark that “the writing of ‘Utopias’ is far more entertaining than reading them” (“Dr Huxley and Mr Arnold” 597). 39 Daphne Patai discusses this in her 1984 article “Orwell’s Despair, Burdekin’s Hope”; in a 2009 blog on the Guardian website, Darragh McManus described Burdekin’s novel as “Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Lost Twin.” 80 move on to unpacking the implications of the various ways Man’s World and Swastika Night route anxieties about power, violence, and sex through images of male homoerotic desire and speculative modes of biological and social reproduction. Haldane creates a specifically “homosexual” understanding of futurity in which cultural and biological reproduction are separated in order to best serve the future of “the white race”; brief images of female rebellion suggest ways in which this could be unmade. Burdekin’s depiction of Nazi futurity is also aided by a homosocial view of cultural reproduction. I argue that her novel creates images of female-gendered futurelessness in a manner that intensively critiques not only German Nazism but British imperial and English nationalist politics. Judith Halberstam has drawn attention to “the potentially sinister associations that can be drawn” between queer negativity and “the masculinist anti-domesticity and anti-reproductive politics of homophile movements in the 1930s with Nazi sympathies” (“The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies” 147); Burdekin engages complicatedly in that critique. Finally, my concluding section engages briefly with a present-day fascistic dystopia, the 2003 film V for Vendetta, in order to show how my development of ideas from Haldane and Burdekin might offer a toolkit for unpacking and critiquing twenty-first-century common sense about the relationships between gender, sexuality, negativity, and the dialectics of political oppression and resistance. 2.2 | The Dystopian Impulse in Modernity and Queer Critique To say that a given idea, institution, or social structure has no future is likely to mean that things are looking grim and ought to be replaced with something else: that the future lies, existentially unthreatened, elsewhere, rather than that it’s all over. In other words, stories about the wholesale crushing of futurity are most often either tales about hopes for survival 81 or, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, parables for the values writers think we ought to conserve about the present. To paraphrase the terrorist from Duncan Jones’s 2011 film Source Code, as he is caught with a nuclear bomb he is about to use to blow up Boston: if new hopes and possibilities are to arise from the rubble of what we call civilization, there will have to first be rubble. The end of the world as we know it is imagined in order to set the scene for a brave new one. In the previous chapter, I considered racial, colonial, and gendered embodiments in terms of the reproduction of futures, looking to feminist utopian works that sought––with varying degrees of success––to reconfigure the cultural scripts by which futurity is constituted. The texts I explored there were concerned with the possibility of reshaping developmental histories by bending the reproductive future away from patriarchal elements women writers did not want to see inherited. Yet delineating a linear temporality within which a future emerges from past and present seemed inevitably to mean that there would be no future for some group constructed as less worthy, less desirable, or less than human. The lasting terror of Orwell’s negative future lies, from this perspective, in the transplantation of a futurelessness comfortable when pertaining to enemies and others into the quotidien Englishness of Winston Smith’s London. All the same, in suggesting that “a picture” of everyone’s “future” could consist of a narrative-destroying image of violence, Orwell crystallizes the affective force that representations of unpleasant futures can carry when they suggest that there might, just possibly, be no future at all: that the future might consist of a shattering violence from which it would be impossible to rebuild. Scholars of utopia historicize narratives of dystopian futurity to a time when the violence inherent in modern temporality became impossible to avoid. Gregory Claeys describes dystopian fiction as a literature of fears about futures of annihilation, writing that 82 after the “grotesque slaughter of the First World War,” “[e]nlightenment optimism respecting the progress of reason and science was … displaced by a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its newly created destructive powers” (307). The idea that there could really be no future rises up when developmental narratives leading upward through science break down. For many writing in the second half of the twentieth century, the paradigms for utopian projects gone horrifyingly wrong have been the technologies and ideologies of genocide embodied by the Nazi death camps. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment defines this relationship between utopia and violence when they name utopia and progress as the attempt to “overthrow fantasy with knowledge,” “liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters” when in fact “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (1). If utopia is the idea of a humanity liberated from fear, dystopia is the calamity that goes along with it; dystopian fiction lovingly describes calamity’s triumph. For Tom Moylan, following Fredric Jameson, anti-utopia is the conservative cynicism about possibilities in which “there is no alternative”; it can be differentiated from dystopia because it “does not guarantee a creative and critical position that is implicitly militant or resigned” (xiii). Yet, since the presence of alternative potentiality in a text depends on the perspective from which it is read, the boundaries of this taxonomy are far from clear. In the standard readings of the most celebrated dystopias, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, dystopian negativity is a cynical perspective that ends up arguing for the perpetuation of things as they are: too much trying for better worlds and we will surely end up in a worse one, critics imply. Tropes of dystopian anxiety are also present in modernist responses to technology that fear the potential annihilation of a future that would have remained comprehensible through 83 its resemblances to the past. The onset of modernity has been described as a moment of time speeding up, with accelerated technological change and the growth of media bringing a technological future into an imminent present. 40 Industrial changes in production, communication, and transformation saw subjective time growing increasingly regulated, and this contributed to anxieties about the “machine”––often a metaphor for the threatening collectivities of industrialization as much as for mechanism itself––that were expressed through imagined futures. E.M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” shows a world where mechanization has taken over from humanity, a prospect the author viewed with horror. As the mechanical Machine that mediates everyone’s life crumbles around people who have lost the ability to control it, Forster’s characters come to embrace the collapse that will kill them. The last lines of Forster’s story give their title to Moylan’s 2000 book on the history and characteristics of dystopia, Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Those scraps, which Forster’s characters glimpse before they join “the nations of the dead,” signify in Moylan’s work the moments of hope, of worlds and futures rebuilt from rubble, that dystopias carry despite their unpleasant features (v; 111-121). Both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the texts that define dystopia for most readers, also depict the anxiety of losing subjectivity in the face of modernity’s mass movements. Their protagonists, dissatisfied citizens, fear disappearing into the anonymous mass of consumer capitalism or totalitarian government; they long for and cling to an old-fashioned subjectivity. 40 All that is solid melts into air, in Marshall Berman’s influential appropriation from Marx. The chapter on “Time” in Randall Stevenson’s Modernist Fiction gathers and summarizes the substantial body of modernist work dealing with changing temporalities. 84 In their introduction to the 2003 anthology Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Raffaella Baccolini and Moylan attempt to circumvent presumptions of dystopia’s generic conservatism by defining a “critical dystopia” as a text that keeps the possibility of a utopian impulse open within its pages, thereby enabling “a space of contestation and opposition for … subjects whose class, gender, race, sexuality, and other positions are not empowered by hegemonic rule” (7). They coin the term “critical dystopia” because the negativity of an uncritical dystopia, one that like Huxley’s and Orwell’s is concerned with an undesirable future whose lack of appeal functions to underline the necessity of the present, fails to account for moments of hope that signify speculation about alternatives. If utopian hope develops through plans and impulses for better things, Baccolini and Moylan suggest in their definition of criticality that dystopias’ value comes through the same impulse: imagining things getting worse so that we could contemplate them better. Dystopias here appear as part of the work of the utopian impulse Ernst Bloch describes in The Possibility of Hope: a kind of active “longing” that we can mobilize into work that changes the world (196). 41 But what kind of politics emerge from dystopias that fail to be critical in Baccolini and Moylan’s Marxist terms? This chapter explores what a dystopian impulse, one that harnesses the destructive forces of futurelessness, might produce. Such an impulse would break things down not in order to build them up again but because disruption seems necessary––and it would not line up neatly with radical or conservative political programs but, rather, cast their exclusions into question. Baccolini and Moylan approach this idea when they cite Bryan Alexander’s analysis 41 Chapter four addresses Bloch’s ideas of futurity in detail. 85 of Fredric Jameson’s writings on Adorno. Alexander defines what I am calling a dystopian impulse by citing Jameson’s celebration of Adorno’s “bile” as “a joyous counter-poison and corrosive solvent, to apply to the slick surface of what is” (Baccolini and Moylan 2003: 4). At the same time as the use of “joyous” shows that Jameson is also aware of the perverse pleasures that negativity might bring, this suggests that negative futures are imagined in order to dissolve the presumption that the present’s political problems are eternal and inevitable–– and that this is worthwhile even when the contestation consists of a complaint rather than the opening of routes to potentially redemptive futures. Sarah Ahmed describes this kind of politics in her writings about the “feminist killjoy,” whose constant reminders of gender refuse to leave a complacent present or future unproblematized (The Promise of Happiness 50). Sometimes it is the “joy” of a too easy, too dystopian declamation (of the sort that deflates all politics by giving up on the point of trying to change things) that needs to be killed, as is the case in my critique of Edelman’s antifuturism. But, often, from the history embodied by Burdekin and Haldane into the present, marginalized feminisms have found important resonances in dystopian imaginations. In a discursive history that has connected with similar feminist ideas less often than we might prefer, queer politics of negativity have added their spin to the conventionally dystopian idea that all political movements eventually become oppressive by countering assimilationist, normalizing politics. They have done so through homing in on refusals, debasements, and impossibilities. One strain of the queer thought often described as antisocial emerged in the work of socialist and gay liberationist Guy Hocquenghem in 1970s France before it was taken into US queer theory via the work of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Bersani and Hocquenghem represent gay male sexuality as an exemplary force for 86 the ways in which sexual desire unmakes any easily understood conception of the political. In 1972 Hocquenghem wrote, famously, that “[t]he gay movement is … not the signifier of what might become a new form of ‘social organisation,’ a new stage of civilised humanity,” but instead “demonstrates that civilisation is the trap into which desire keeps falling” (148). Since homosexuality is a “non-sexuality” because (as an adult and mature form of sexuality rather than an infantile one) it is not a functional part of the Oedipus complex upon which, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, society is founded, homosexuality endangers civilization through a “frightening non-humanity” (148) that carries a message of humanity’s end: “a fear that the succession of generations, on which civilisation is based, may stop” (150). Sexual pleasure unconnected with reproduction, engaging parts of the body that are not only nonreproductive but associated with waste and death, constitutes a dystopian impulse; it leads, figuratively if not literally, to a danger of society’s end. 42 These queer antisocialities of gay masculinity are not without their glimmers of utopian possibility. These take the form of suggestive speculations about making that could happen after unmaking, about new forms that would do something other than reproduce civilization as we know it. Hocquenghem places queer sex’s negative force in the service of revolution: he wants to to end civilization by embracing homosexual desire’s capacity to break through capitalist oppression, kept going by the family’s reproductive operation in the perpetuation of subject psychology. His dystopian impulse destroys in order to build, insisting that a new order is possible, though that order must be structured radically differently than the old. 42 The literal associations of gay male sexuality with death that were concretized in the first years of AIDS epidemic are after Hocquenghem’s time, though they are crucial to Bersani’s discourse. I discuss AIDS when I address Samuel R. Delany’s 1970s and 1980s work in chapter four. 87 Bersani, too, gestures toward the possibility that acts of debasement and refusal could engage in a kind of worldmaking, that such acts could create a future: “[i]n a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of sociality itself, only what that society throws off—its mistakes or its pariahs—can serve the future” (180). The future he imagines sociality’s underside to be serving is not explicated in detail but (as I discuss more in chapter four) stands as a moment of flash utopianism, a gesture rather than a plan. In Bersani, gay negativity routes the pleasures and horrors of what he calls “antirelational” sexuality through male/male desire that eliminates the female body with its connotations of fecundity and life. He celebrates the anus as a zone of waste and shame whose association with pleasure might have the power to unmake sociality as we know it. As I discuss at length in the previous chapter, Edelman’s analysis of political futurity also refuses sexuality’s reproductive function, through the way in which of “the Child” functions as a universal guarantor for political projects. Heterosexual reproductive sex is, for him, the alibi for a re-production of political and social structures that ensures a basic conservative propagation of things as they are, complete with systemic inequalities. One need not be straight to stand up for reproductive futurism, and to oppose it––an act of irredeemable negation that Edelman demands––is to be marked as dangerously queer regardless of sexual or political identifications. My previous chapter engaged the gendering of these queer models, and the possibility for alternatives, through the problematic but important history of feminist utopian reproductive imaginaries. This chapter takes on their mirror in feminist reproductive negativities. In the “Shadow Feminisms” chapter of 2011’s The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam argues that the unmaking of subjectivity Bersani et al celebrate is an unmaking of masculinity that is profoundly challenged through specifically feminine modes of feminist 88 politics. Halberstam’s example is an unmaking of the political itself that takes place in masochistic art; I consider similar dynamics in less artistically elevated locations. Understanding the relationship between dystopian futurity (representations of society as a downward spiral) and queer negativity (demanding a break in or reframing of the temporal order’s reproductive chain) becomes clearer when we consider a third vector of negativity that plays into both: fascism. In her 1975 article “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag shows the centrality of the ideas I have been calling negative to fascism and Nazism, both historically and as a continuing aesthetic and intellectual force. She critiques the erotics of fascism and the continuing appeal of fascist aesthetics by writing that “[f]ascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death” (np). In the work of Leni Riefenstahl to depict “the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community,” Sontag finds an embrace of the dissolution of the self. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism concludes something similar: that the populism of totalitarian political movements exemplified by Nazism comes out of a mass urge to be divested of the fears and responsibilities of a lonely self, an embrace of violence projected onto Others. Writings from practitioners and theorists of queer BDSM have separated political and sexual surrender, mindlessness and death-glamorization, insisting that to fetishize a uniform is quite different than to advocate death camps. 43 But in popular culture the imagery of fascism remains a shorthand for dystopian authoritarianism, as I discuss with respect to V for Vendetta in the final section below. 43 See Gayle Rubin, “The Leather Menace.” 89 In twenty-first-century Anglo-American popular culture, to describe any political project as fascist is to insist that it has no future––or that any future to which it is liable to lead should be avoided at all cost. Fascism and Nazism have become, after their facts, images for pure political negativity. Emptied of content, they become that which every right- thinking person must self-evidently disavow. In US politics, right-wing rhetoric accusing Obama, feminists, or anyone with an investment in the welfare state of being simultaneously fascist and socialist suggest that the term has lost all meaning save a vague dystopian threat; the transatlantic bogey of ‘Islamo-Fascism’ may have something to do with historical memory of fascist military expansion and antisemitism, but as a racist and xenophobic construct it remains absent of a concrete referent. Even the rapidly mainstreaming far-right European nationalist movements that appear to be direct heirs to twentieth-century European fascist organizations want to avoid the term, insisting that the true fascists are others whose politics are far more deplorable. 44 I discuss fascism mainly as a set of historical political movements, but the term interests me because of its intensely overdetermined nature and the ways in which it has trafficked far beyond its origins in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. While fascism and Nazism are, for some, clearly distinct both as political and as aesthetic forms, other critics have found the aesthetics of fascist artistic form difficult to repudiate or even to separate from other modernist cultural production. As Andrew Hewitt writes in Fascist Modernism (1993) the relationship of avant-garde modernism to historical temporality leads it into complex imbrications with fascism. What Walter Benjamin, in “The 44 Andrea Slane discusses the workings of the term “fascist” in US politics in her 2001 book A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy. 90 Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” called the aestheticization of politics, tangles with the modernist aesthetics of the avant garde and suggests fascist futurity as a vector of modernity. Futurism, as most famously exemplified by F.T. Marinetti’s glorification of violent change, is the artistic movement whose search for new forms has been most associated with fascism’s drive to create a new nation, even a new world, through violent utopianism. To make things new is one of the many contradictory impulses shared by modernist writers attempting to wrestle with the destruction of older ways of life––an aesthetic that in its more metaphorical forms led to much of the celebrated canon of modernist literature. As Hewitt, Judith Halberstam, and Erin Carlson have expressed in various contexts, many of the modernist figures from whom queers draw elements of our politicized aesthetics were imbricated with fascist movements, linked to nationalist social control through the politics of gender, class and empire. 45 Carlson closes her analysis of the aesthetic commonalities between “Sapphic Modernists” and their fascist contemporaries by writing that “[t]oday, as in the 1930s, political affiliations and accountability cannot be a question simply of the technologies employed, the vocabulary of explanation exercised, or the categories of thought invoked, but of the uses to which they are put” (192, citing Klotz). If modernist literature has been shown to be close to fascism at times, its stylistic innovations are generally still taken to be important grounds for radical potentiality. The popular, populist, or less highbrow forms of writing that coexisted with it are rarely granted the same measure of complexity. But, just as Carlson reminds us that the aesthetic techniques of fascism can be and have been utilized for a variety of political ends, so too do 45 In the chapter “The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You: Homosexuality and Fascism” in The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam discusses this with regard to the masculinities of Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. 91 literalistic extrapolations and popular science fictions contain a range of potential meanings that cannot be reduced to their genre. Speculative fictions demonstrate the uses to which ideas about fascism, futurity, and negativity have been and continue to be put. To interrogate what might lie within these formations in an age when fascism is so disturbingly present and constantly repudiated that it has become too slippery to grasp, I turn to futures projected from positions where the future of fascism had not yet been determined. 2.3 | Race, Gender, and the Fascism of the Baby’s Face: Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World Fascist political movements have been obsessed by futures––and vice versa. It is no coincidence that the artistic movement of futurism, embracing modernity and violently deprecating tradition, got caught up in the grandeur of fascist politics’ national and racial forward march into militarized glory and the violence that accompanied it. Planning to conquer the future necessarily also means annihilating the past, as Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (engaged more fully in the previous chapter) powerfully insists. Bertolt Brecht, in conversation with Benjamin in 1938, insisted that futurity was fundamental to both fascism and its opposition because the Nazis were “planning for the next thirty thousand years.” Benjamin remembered Brecht as invoking reproduction to denounce a fascist futurism that wished to “deform the baby in the mother’s womb,” in struggle against which Marxist intellectuals and revolutionaries “must under no circumstances leave out the children” (“Conversations with Brecht” 218). Edelman quotes this conversation in No Future in order to argue that Benjamin’s sensation of “a power that has its source no less deep in history than fascism” signifies the structural similarity of the 92 near-universal emphasis on children, and on threats to children, as justificatory figures for any politics, any future. Naming and shaming the forces that invariably reproduce politics as heterofuturity, Edelman uses Brecht and Benjamin to explicate his memorable term “the fascism of the baby’s face” (151). Invoking fascism for the figure of reproductive futurism “which subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself,” adds an emotive rhetoric to Edelman’s insistence that “whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear––Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or of an ever expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity,” all “political programs” are defined by reproductive futurism and thus are programmed to reify difference and thus to secure, in the form of the future, the order of the same” (151). Edelman insists on the universality of a reproductive futurism demonstrated by the notion that the worst possible imaginable thing is the deformation of childhood. In these terms the same tools, the same insistences on “not forget[ting] the children,” define both fascist and antifascist politics. This analysis can help us see why fascism has lost so much of its specificity as a political referent. If all political programs are characterized by an authoritarian enforcement of the forms of social reproduction they wish to fulfill, then elements of the fascistic can be identified almost everywhere. By this token, Edelman’s notion of the queer as negative anti- reproductive force becomes that which opposes fascistic politics by virtue of its opposition to the baby’s face, even if queerness in and of itself has no political content. Yet the closeness of the image of queer negativity shattering the fascism of the baby’s face to Orwell’s depiction of fascist futurity as a “boot stamping on a human face” should remind us that Edelman’s analysis of social-psychic structures of futurity is intended as an upheaval and a challenge to conceptions of politics rather than a contribution to political discourses 93 themselves. It is a commentary about the chilling effects exerted by baby-faced iconography on what can be legitimated as political, not a discourse on either fascism or procreation as such. The impossible ends of reproduction about which Edelman enthuses are represented by figures who absolutely refuse to think about the children or to act in coherently political ways. These are invariably men who defy normative sociality (from Scrooge to various Hitchcock protagonists). Edelman understands this masculine dominance to be due to “a gender bias that continues to view women as ‘naturally’ bound more closely to sociality, reproduction, and domesticating emotion” (165). This sexist construction has had a political history within feminism, too. It was common for feminists in the early twentieth century to use the unquestionable necessity of reproductive futurism as part of a discursive arsenal in activism toward women’s rights as mothers. As my previous chapter discusses, familial formations of reproductive futurism are imbricated with ideas about ‘the future of the race,’ meaning the notion that humanity’s calibre could be improved via eugenic discourses that mark some bodies as more worthy of reproduction than others. This reproductive logic of racialized futurity connects the universalizing ‘fascism of the baby’s face’ with the specificities of nationalist projects. The work of Marie Stopes, the early twentieth century English feminist advocate for birth control and sexual pleasure, demonstrates the way eugenics, empire, fascism and feminism work together to create a reproductive futurism in which straight familiality, racial nationalism, and colonial time all line up. In her 1921 Radiant Motherhood, Stopes laid forth a set of plans to improve life for British women. Her hope was that with family planning, better hygiene, and encouragement for women to enjoy their sexuality, the horrors of poverty and repression could be lifted and “we at present in the flesh may link hands with 94 grandchildren belonging to a generation so wonderful, so endowed and so improved out of recognition, that the miseries and the depravity of human nature to-day so wide-spread, may appear alike a black and hideous memory of the past, as incredible to them as the habits of cannibals are to us” (244). Her rhetoric of blackness and cannibalism serves as a reminder that the pleasures she thinks will build a vibrant nation are only for a few; they suggest images of the irradiated youth stepping over their depraved and nonreproductive elders. Stopes’s argument operates through the temporality that rationalizes empire: she understands some races and places on the globe to be developmentally delayed, closer to the animal, and overly reproductive in comparison to the restrained white European civilization that ought to inherit the earth. A danger to the future is “the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded, and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs … like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping out its vitality. … by ever weakening the human stock, in the end they will succumb with the fine structure which they have destroyed” (245). This vast and ever increasing stock of degenerates (the eugenically unappealing, the futureless, the excessively reproductive) endanger the future of the human race altogether, risking an end to the future; it is “in the hands of the mothers” to redeem civilization, to reproduce the right future. This maternalism was a strategic intervention as well as yet another iteration of the reproductive futurisms I have already explored at length. After gaining many rights due to their work for the nation in the First World War, women in Britain as elsewhere in Europe were losing jobs to returning men, and a significantly larger population of women than men raised questions about the fate of the “surplus.” 46 Stopes 46 “[B]y the fall of 1919 three-quarters of a million women who had held jobs by the Armistice had been dismissed … by 1921 the proportion of employed women was smaller than it had been before the war.” 95 mobilized traditional gender roles to insist that marriage and childbearing were more noble than any form of industrial employment, because they would grant women responsibility for a racial and national future. Yet, through this feminist demand, the fascism of the baby’s face has the potential to become a force as genocidal as the fascism of invading armies and death camps. That potential, whose transnational connections to racialization I discuss in the next chapter, is imaginatively realized in Haldane’s 1926 dystopia. In the 1926 novel Man’s World, Stopes’s contemporary, the British feminist writer Charlotte Haldane, used science fiction to envisage a future in which a “new and irradiated race” might dwell. Haldane, née Franken, was the child of a German Jewish immigrant, whose status as an enemy alien during World War One brought Haldane into a difficult relationship with British nationalist fervor. 47 A prolific journalist who supported her husband and son through her writing before marrying the celebrated scientist JBS Haldane in 1926, neither Charlotte Haldane’s writing nor her politics are easy to categorize. In the same year as the dystopian Man’s World, Haldane published Motherhood and its Enemies, a screed whose promotion of maternalist politics and dismissal of women’s ‘unfeminine’ ambition has led to it being described as a classic of antifeminism. 48 Here she seems to advocate a fascism of the baby’s face as a way of supporting women who wish to be mothers and liberating those who do not. The contradictions of Motherhood and Its Enemies make a little more sense given its (Adamson 26) 47 In her excellent biography Charlotte Haldane: Woman Writer in a Man’s World, Judith Adamson describes the young Charlotte Franken after her father Joseph emigrated to the homeland of his American wife to avoid internship: “[w]hile tens of thousands of Londoners cheered and danced with joy when war was declared, spreading ‘Hun’ atrocity stories and listening to clergymen and politicians identify … killing [Germans] as a holy vocation, Charlotte faced the ‘shameful secret’ of her father” (21). 48 See, for example, the discussion of this book in Susan Squier’s 1994 Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (108). 96 context. It was rushed into print so that Haldane could sell it at the 1926 conference on population control, a site where the “dangerous” profession of “human geneticist” (Motherhood 235) was being mapped out (Adamson). Haldane was critical of eugenics because of its potential for race- and class-based abuses; in fact, the book’s main target was not feminism but masculinist science. Her novel shares this address, which helps make sense of the way in which it hovers awkwardly between utopia and dystopia. Despite the presence of sufficient advocacy for women’s eugenically acquired familial rights for the book to appear in many ways to be one of the colonizing feminist utopias I addressed in the previous chapter, this is no future in which Haldane expects her readers to want to live. In the future Man’s World dreams up, evolution has been taken firmly in hand by a scientific State premised largely on the pre-natal control of gender. For Haldane, white supremacy, practical eugenics, and prenatal sex determination are all part of this triumph of science. A coterie of übermen take over the world after a cataclysm that resembles the First World War, and they set out to craft a scientific society somewhat in the vein of Wells’s 1905 Modern Utopia––regardless of the body count. Haldane’s novel makes the racialization of this utopia-turned-dystopia explicit. Her “world” of scientific perfection is postnational but wholly racial, reserved for “the white race” (8 and throughout). Nonwhite bodies appear in the novel exclusively as part of the material on which scientific experimentation is carried out. “[A]rtificially created desert tracts” have been created to mark “the boundary lines between the white and adjoining races,” and even the need for colonial labor has been 97 eradicated by science, left behind in a disorganized and premodern past. 49 Her descriptions chillingly figure the scientific dehumanization of racialized bodies. Winburg, the fat, mild, amiable Brain of chemical warfare … had invented the dreaded Thanatil … a deadly poison … and … had first suggested the exploitation of that enzyme which produces the black pigment in negroes, and which, when attacked by the tyrosine ester of Thanatil absorbed by the dusky skin, gradually liberates the poison till the central nervous system is invaded, causing paralysis and death (64). The poison development for which Winburg received anointment as one of the leaders of the scientific dictatorship is a pure technology of genocide, imagining skin pigmentation as biological determiner of racialized death; such a possibility of genetically marking racial others might, a decade or two later, have been Goebbels’s dream. 50 In Haldane’s novel, as if to remind readers who might be willing to write off “negroes” as less than human, lesser ethnicities within the “white race” are also portrayed as evolutionarily undesirable and dealt with accordingly. A settlement of “Celts” whose “decadence was incorrigible” in that they refused to abandon those of their relatives who were infected with disease, for example, is exterminated (184). Characters in the novel, even those who are critical of the State under which they live, speak of such events in a matter-of-fact manner which we might interpret as the author’s acceptance that sacrifices must be made for the triumph of science, but her biography suggests that there may be more at stake here than what Sarah Gamble has described as an “apparently uncritical foreshadowing of many of the policies advocated by Nazism” (5). Herself Jewish, having experienced antisemitism in Germany and in Britain, 49 “[T]he tropical sources of oil, cotton, quinine, and other vegetable products whose cultivation had formerly demanded thousands of white and coloured sacrifices, were abandoned in these synthetic days to their earlier disorder” (Haldane, Man’s World 64). 50 Such ethnically specific annihilation is still a popular science fiction plot; in a 2010 episode of the Fox TV series Fringe, an immortal Nazi scientist perfects a poison that will attack only Jewish people. 98 and a fervent antifascist in the 1930s, Haldane offers a disturbing vision here of the way scientific progress can dehumanize racial others, working through a dystopian impulse to imagine a depth and power of ideology that would make critique almost impossible––the form of state subjection that has come to be known as totalitarianism. 51 If race in Man’s World signals the dystopia of a scientific imperialism that shades seamlessly into proto-fascism, the novel’s gender politics––ostensibly its primary focus and the main area on which discussion of the novel as an early work of feminist science fiction has centered––are less easy to define. Elizabeth Russell considers the novel’s thesis to be that “the future of women in a man’s world is grim” (16). But white women are portrayed, on the whole, as happier in this future than they might have been elsewhere. Faced with Haldane’s imagined future technocracy, as Gamble remarks, it can be difficult to tell whether we are reading “a utopia or a dystopia” (13). In Man’s World, male scientists rule and women are divided into castes of “Mothers” and “Neuters.” The mothers are venerated as “vessels singled out for the propagation of [their] race” (51), and trained from adolescence in the discipline that lets them give birth to boys by focusing intensely on masculinity while they are pregnant. Women who are not Mothers are Neuters, dedicated to the nonprocreative reproductive labor of administration, meeting men’s sexual needs, and participating in artistic 51 See Adamson for details of Haldane’s background, including her immigrant upbringing and extensive antifascist work in the 1930s. The status of Jewishness in this novel deserves a more sustained examination than can be made here. Jews are both idealised and othered; a Jew (Mensch) instigates the scientific revolution and encourages the extermination of most of humanity, while another (Arcous Weil) sparks a conspiracy against the state but apparently engaged only as a social experiment. Weil has several soliloquies on the Jewish “race” that seem to mirror antisemitic ideas of Jewish conspiracies and of Jewish responsibility for antisemitism. He speaks of “that catalytic power, which was the essence of Jewish influence everywhere and at all times” (154) and says that “it is impossible for a Jew to respect a woman, or even a man, of another race. We only respect intelligence, and therefore acknowledge no overlordship, whether of sex or personality. That would have been our supreme asset, if only we could have hidden it. But we can't. So we were persecuted for centuries” (155). 99 and scholarly production. The problem of women surplus to humanity’s reproductive needs, urgent in the 1920s, is solved by a combination of feminist elevation of motherhood and access to employment. Haldane seems to have found the idea of a maternal vocation quite appealing, although she herself simultaneously worked as a professional and raised children. Squier discusses the strong class element of these ideas, which contrast with the middle-class feminism of Haldane’s peer Naomi Mitchison, writing that her desire and inability to give up work to look after children was a strong element of her feminism (Babies in Bottles 108-9). Her Mothers insist that “by giving [them]selves wholly to motherhood [they] do not surrender [their] own chances of development” (52). They are have escaped from the “employee” role of wife in a nuclear family, living instead in “exquisite spots” (54) where communal child rearing takes place. And Nicolette’s depiction of the lives of the Neuters seems like a bluestocking utopia in its own right. They “led calm and beautiful lives; their friendships were lifelong and many, and between those of all communities there was constant interchange of visits, and stimulating contact.” The Entertainers, whose work includes being sexually available to men, “were perfectly trained and fashioned to bring beauty to the world” and “smiled perpetually” (130). In spite of Haldane’s dismissal in Motherhood and Its Enemies of the “female intersex,” who she wants to restrict to “subordinate positions which do not call for great emotional development” (152), there are elements of a feminist utopian impulse among the Neuters of Man’s World with their “lifelong and many” friendships and “stimulating contact.” In a manner that resonates with 1970s lesbian feminist 100 utopian fiction, 52 a model of queer reproduction (of feelings, art, relationships) appears in the background of Haldane’s dominant male scientists and tightly regulated vocational mothers, which seems––in contradistinction to the reproductively oriented women’s imagined worlds of my previous chapter––accessible at the cost of “immunization.” It seems that Haldane saw some ways in which a protofascist scientifically reproductive state could open up marginal spaces for the nonreproductive to create different futures. The narrative of gender inversion Haldane invokes with her “intersex” women converges with eugenic discourse to produce a queer kind of temporality. The “sexually indeterminate” protagonist, Christopher, embodies a failure of proper female reproductivity: he turned out queer because his mother wanted a girl, a situation Stopes thinks was also the status of the “racial loss” Oscar Wilde (Haldane 296; Stopes 157). Christopher, who we first meet as he earnestly explains the eugenic common sense of his society to his younger sister Nicolette, grows up to challenge reproductivity further by tempting her away from her proper gendered place; he becomes a queer threat to the reproduction of his society’s future. While Nicolette is drawn back from her rebellion against “vocational motherhood” by falling in love with a perfect ‘racial’ model of a man and re-committing to her future as a racial reproducer, Christopher’s deviant gender is marked as a failure to be properly racialized. The social ‘Brains’ agree that it must be expiated for the sake of the “virility” of the “white race” (298). In a highly romanticized soliloquy, Christopher decides that he prefers to die than to attempt to conform to society. He describes his society’s fear of a queer futurity: 52 For a brief and informal but incisive account of 1970s feminist utopias’ appeal, and their problems, in the 1970s and 1980s, see Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, “War Machine, Time Machine” 40-1. 101 It was not the homosexual body they dreaded, but the homosexual soul; the soul in which the seeds of ‘love’ were doomed to infertility, the soul that was sufficient unto itself. (Haldane 282) Later, Nicolette’s partner, an illustrious scientist, explains to her why her brother had to die. You see how essential it is for us … that the men and women of the governing class shall be as normal as possible. If they were not, our power would wilt away in a few centuries. We have no use for sterility, for above all things we aim to keep the race going until each individual shall have achieved complete self- consciousness…. In the meantime there will always be Christophers, and they will always suffer. (298-9) Christopher’s sterility is portrayed as a mystical “self-sufficiency” that seems to be quite close to the “individual … self-consciousness” that the scientific elite are seeking for everyone. He is a threat to the future of the race because he embodies its possibilities; he has come too early. After his death, his transcendent musical compositions will allow his insights to be recreated and reproduced, so that though his inappropriately gendered person is eliminated from a biological relationship to futurity, he will still contribute to the “race”. His role is to suffer for the sake of the future; his futureless existence opens on to the prospect of an as yet unimaginable queer futurity. 53 Christopher’s death gives him a future by opening up his artistic spirit to nonsexual forms of racial/national reproduction that are unavailable to women. The minor character Morgana rebels against her assigned gender role in a not dissimilar way to Christopher. She chose to explore science rather than become a mother and now feels trapped by the way women are “divided off into breeders and non-breeders to serve the race.” Morgana does want to bear a child, but she is not comfortable with the restrictions placed on what the Neuters may do with their bodies. She hopes for a similar kind of immortality to Christopher 53 The queer future as the ’not yet’ is a refrain in José Muñoz’s queer theory, which I address in depth in chapter four. 102 when she declares that the normatively gendered “kind may make a race, but [hers] is what keeps its banner flying” (260). But her rebellion is restricted to women’s realms; she cannot achieve the premature futurity Christopher does, only a petulant demand to have it all. Morgana complains that women are “pushed into [men’s] beastly rigid castes and divided off into breeders and non-breeders to serve the race,” insisting that she does not “care about the race”; having chosen to be a Neuter because she was interested in science, she now wants to have a baby because it will be an interesting “experiment” (188). She follows Christopher’s suicide with her own, seeing no future to her rebellion without his to follow. 54 Womanhood cannot appear as queerness here, and a woman in rebellion against the future (which she is deemed genetically inappropriate to reproduce) can only make even a suicidal protest when routing it through a heterosexual relationship to masculinity. The novel ends with an odd jump to the perspective of a baby in the womb, the dictatorial being for whose good Christopher and Morgana have died and Nicolette given up all her personal ambitions. “His eyes, as yet vague, unfocussed, endeavoured to fasten on [Nicolette’s] face. … He smiled, gurgled at her, kicked lustily with joy and pride” (294) and by the end “He” dictates discretion in Nicolette’s grief for her brother. Capitalized similarly to Edelman’s iconic Child, the unborn being in Haldane’s imagination, by way of Nicolette’s, signifies the dangerous future in whose name fascistic scientific reproduction gives up on the present. If Haldane’s transformation of scientific modernity into a dystopia with fascistic tendencies seems familiar, this is probably because of its resemblances to the classic and 54 Before jumping off a riverbank, Morgana is shown thinking that “[t]ere were a dozen ways of following Christopher, and she need not fear that she would not catch him up—this time” (292). 103 endlessly cited dystopian narrative embodied by her cousin by marriage Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World. Man’s World’s status as a source for Huxley is the only context under which Haldane rates a mention in most studies of dystopia and science fiction. 55 The two novels have much in common, from their solution to the surplus women problem being a third gender of nonfertile women (Neuters or freemartins) to the production of the new world emerging out of the ruins of a major war after which scientists take the reins of society, to the kinds of happiness that scientifically organized pseudo-utopia seems to bring to its inhabitants. In Man’s World, Arcous Weil reminds Christopher that “War and epidemics have vanished, the attitude towards sickness transforms pain into pleasure; we can remain young as long as we like, and a generation lives and dies together; we have lost universal fear and found universal friendship” (159). In a parallel expository moment in Brave New World, Mustapha Mond assures his eager students that “everybody’s happy nowadays” in the age of free sex and the perfect drug soma. Both follow the classic dystopian plot structure of an individual who becomes unhappy with a seemingly perfect world. The character in Brave New World who most resembles Christopher is more the frustrated artist Helmholtz Watson than the main characters Bernard and John, however. Unlike John, whose nonproductive love is closely tied to the obscenity of heterosexual monogamy, Helmholtz––who is closer to Christopher in that he does not enter the brave new world from outside––is a queer artist who takes his desire to be alone and read Shakespeare off to a quiet colony where he may not be subjected to fascistic “happiness” but will be liberated to explore his artistic interests 55 David Seed’s essay on Brave New World in Blackwell’s Companion to Science Fiction mentions Man’s World and Swastika Night in the same paragraph, the only occurrence of both texts despite Swastika Night’s comparatively large impact, which I discuss below. 104 with others of his intellectual calibre. This escape hatch calls attention to the fact that, for its privileged discontented, Brave New World is scarcely a dystopia at all. 56 The negativity of its future inheres largely in the lack of autonomy, the inability to alter the world, that characters who deviate from the norm experience. Both novels’ idea of rebellion is an individual destabilizing power that is in each case contained: Helmholtz to an island, Christopher to an obscure posthumous future. Huxley is in many ways less damning than Haldane, allowing as he does for livable outsides to his World State. His dystopian society is not only for the white race, although the only mention of a racialized subject we see is simply the “overproductive ovary” of the “Negroid female” in the “tropics.” 57 The indigenous others left behind in his text have a reservation to live on––and representation in the novel––not simply a patch of scorched earth beyond which no world can be imagined. And, for those who fail to fit in to the productive society of the World State, escape and not only suicide is possible. In the light of Man’s World, Brave New World appears as a text with a horror of the female-bodied reprofuturism on which Haldane concentrates. Indeed, the novel appears in Edelman as an example of anti-reproductive, anti-futurist figuration, of opposition to the fascism of the baby’s face. Huxley’s pontificating scientist-politician Mustapha Mond is one of the passing examples Edelman gives of fictional figures who “stand outside the natural order of sexual reproduction” (165). Reading Mond as queerly antireproductive draws attention to the vision of universally “infantile” sexual pleasure and the perversity it 56 For encouraging me to think through this notion I am grateful to my USC Thematic Option honors student Devon Meyer, whose research paper in Spring 2011 traced Brave New World’s relationship to eugenics and used this to argue for the ways in which the novel functions as a utopia in opposition to the emphasis on its dystopian critique of collectivity with which it is frequently taught in US high schools. 57 My next addresses reproductive tropes around black femininity in depth. 105 implies––supposedly a source of horror to Huxley, but looking rather fun with queer hindsight. Huxley has childbearing become utterly obsolete, replacing birth with the precision-engineering of embryos whose intelligence is calibrated to a precise degree as they are churned out along production lines modeled after Ford’s (7). The end of the family that Mond celebrates is a worst-case scenario where industrial capitalism has run riot, babies “bottled” in order to ensure homogeneity of production. 58 Yet Mond’s opposition to sexual reproduction does not stop him being greatly in favor of making a future ‘for the children.’ He presides over bottled embryos who are prepared through hypnotic suggestion for their role as satisfied, promiscuous, genetically predetermined citizens, and smiles fondly at children engaged in “erotic play” as they pass him by (50). Mond is in fact the architect of an industrial-reproductive futurism figured by the idealization of the embryo on the production line rather than the babe in arms, but no less keen to reproduce itself through the fascism of the Bokanovsky-group of babies’ faces. His disgust is reserved for reproduction in the “obscene” confines of the family, and for motherhood in particular. He describes the horror of the old-fashioned baby through misogynist use of animal sexual metaphors: the mother is “a cat that could talk,” “brooding” over the child at the breast with “unspeakable agonizing pleasure” (33). Huxley uses his expectation of a reader’s shocked reaction to Mond’s disgust in order to express his fear of the loss of individual potential in an industrialized future where reproduction might follow the same rules as capitalist production, linking that loss to a disappearance of the connection between mothers and children. His world, with its promiscuous men and vacuously over-sexed females who need pregnancy substitutes to 58 Squier’s Babies in Bottles provides a comprehensive analysis of the significance of such figurative test tube babies in the context of real-world reproductive technology. 106 maintain their mental health, links a critique of advanced capitalism and the culture industry to a fear that patriarchal gender norms will be lost. If Edelman’s queer theory sees ‘no future’ as what queer negativity reproduces, the historical dystopian fictions I explore depict queer kinds of sexual, social, and cultural practice as reproducing both oppressive futures and revolutionary no-futures. Man’s World shows various threats that queer practices can pose to a fascist politics articulated through scientific reproduction, yet also shows how an oppression that wears a baby’s face may require the complicity of nonreproductive forms. In both its explicit critiques and the norms that its unexamined representations of gender impose, Brave New World reminds us that nonheteronormative means can also reproduce conservative futures. Where cultural reproduction of fascistic and otherwise oppressive futurities takes place through queer practices, the neatness of opposition between queerness and reproductive futurism must collapse, exposing the uncomfortable multiplicity of political perspectives contained within both terms. Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 dystopia Swastika Night, which is both more radically negative and more explicitly, urgently concerned with the danger of fascist realities, will take us further into this dystopian deviance. 2.4 | Negative Femininity in Nazism’s Queer Future: Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night In 1934, the novel Proud Man by Murray Constantine used the science fiction conceit of a visitor from the far future to criticize Huxley’s recent Brave New World for its inability to imagine that altering social and familial norms might lead men and women to “change” their nature (226). Constantine’s protagonist was a “person” without gender, who looked with 107 sympathy and confusion on the antics of men and women in the twentieth century. When the person turns to futuristic prediction to learn about society in a less “dogmatic” way, s/he finds that Huxley’s effort at futurism has “no imagination” (227). By implication, Constantine’s own imagination offers superior methods for thinking futurity. Constantine was a male pseudonym for Katharine Burdekin, who published ten novels under that name and as Kay or Katharine Burdekin. Daphne Patai made the connection between the two identities and brought some of Burdekin’s work back into print in the 1980s. Burdekin lived for much of her life with a female companion in rural England, preferring to remain outside the cultural centers both of modernism and of the scientific and political intellectual ferment in which Charlotte Haldane was embedded. 59 Burdekin cared little for stylistic experimentation, writing for herself to express ideas and editing little. Burdekin and Haldane share this speed of writing and concern for seemingly transparent expression over prose texture––antithetical to modernist aestheticism, although for Haldane this was due more to her need to earn money from writing than to personal preference. Much of Burdekin’s work, on the other hand, was unpublished during her life and remains so; many of her later novels were never submitted to presses. 60 Though her work remains obscure, much of Burdekin’s writing attempts to articulate futures for gender and reproduction that attempts greater feats of “imagination” than Huxley. She harnesses the logic of science fiction to inisist that the meanings and politics of gender will not remain historically stable. 59 Although, George McKay writes, “her friends and admirers did though include Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Margaret Goldsmith, and Frederick Voight, as well as the Woolfs and Bertrand and Dora Russell” (187). 60 Biographical information is taken from Patai’s introductions to the reissued novels, where she documents 1980s conversations with Burdekin’s surviving partner, and from her essay “Imagining Reality.” 108 Burdekin wrote several novels that use a futuristic perspective and long historical scope to look critically at gender relations, including homosexuality. Her work in the 1920s and early 1930s was engaged with many of the same scientific, technological and historical themes as Haldane and Huxley, but in a less dystopian vein. 1929’s The Rebel Passion depicts a gay medieval monk who is taken on a time-traveling tour by an angel and shown the inevitable upswing of European progress, whose traumatic break in the First World War will be healed by the League of Nations. 61 In The Rebel Passion, as in 1933’s Proud Man and The End of This Day’s Business (written in 1935 and posthumously published in 1989), scientific endeavor is portrayed as part––though not all––of an evolutionary progress that will lead to a better (if not quite utopian) future. If The Rebel Passion takes its place among visions of utopia whose racial and colonial elements make them appear as terrifying dystopias to contemporary readers, Proud Man and The End of This Day’s Business both represent the future as a more complicated set of possibilities, where changes in gender norms bring their own problems: structural discrimination against men, in Business, and the loss of modern gender’s pleasures with its difficulties, in Proud Man. The resonances of both with feminist and queer activism would be worth exploring at greater length, as would Burdekin’s strange 1929 children’s book, The Children’s Country, which is peopled with immortal, unfeeling, unaging 61 There is much to say about this novel, whose sympathetic presentation of the monk and his sister draws on the discourse of inversion without falling into the tragic narrative exemplified in The Well of Loneliness by Burdekin’s acquaintance Radclyffe Hall (to which novel, according to Patai, Burdekin penned an unpublished sequel). It shows a gender-equal pastoral future similar to Morris’s News from Nowhere––and, like the nineteenth- century utopian texts from which it draws much imagery, offers that future to European whites only. As is common in the experience of reading these out-of-date texts, the contemporary reader in search of an affirmative history for her political allegiances experiences affective whiplash as we shift from Burdekin’s gentle affirmation of nonheteronormative gender to the virulent racism in her depiction of slavery as necessary to the development of black Americans and annihilation as the destiny of “the yellow races” (244). Even a 1929 review found that “Mrs Burdekin ... shows herself a dupe of that strange myth, the Yellow Peril’” (unnamed reviewer, Times Literary Supplement; 312) It is easy to see why this novel, unlike Burdekin’s subsequently published work, has not been republished by feminist presses. 109 “Children” who prove dangerous to a human boy and girl. The novel of Burdekin’s that has been most widely read, however, is the one whose concerns speak most profoundly to mine. In its intense negativity and its response to immediate political events (the rise of Nazism) rather than vaguer historical forces, 1937’s Swastika Night was a significant departure from Burdekin’s earlier work. Swastika Night is far more pessimistic than Burdekin’s other novels, emerging from her anxiety about imminent and overwhelming war. After the Second World War, ‘what if Hitler won?’ dystopian alternate history scenarios became very popular; Swastika Night, written before war between Britain and Germany was certain, remains one of the most complex. For Andy Croft, Burdekin’s is “undoubtedly the most sophisticated and original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s and 1940s” (209). That sophistication lies primarily in the novel’s engagement with ideas about femininity and reproduction. 62 Like Brave New World, Swastika Night imagines a future in which alternatives to marital heterosexuality are mandated in order to guarantee a future for an all-powerful state. But Swastika Night’s futurity is little concerned with the tropes of scientific modernity with which Haldane and Huxley are obsessed, and its industrialization of motherhood takes place not through technology but through women’s enslavement and debasement to animal status. The texture of life in Burdekin’s dystopia is more medieval than modern, shaped by church and farm work, with only an occasional aeroplane to remind us we are long after the twentieth century. Nevertheless, 700 years into the future, women’s apparent nature has changed so much that they no longer seem to be thinking beings—not because the human race has 62 For detailed discussion of Swastika Night in the context of 1930s history and as a feminist text see the essays by Patai; Joannou chapter 6; Maslen chapter 2. 110 evolutionarily degenerated, punished for its racial or sexual sins, but for immediate political reasons: the global ascendance of Nazism. If Haldane and Huxley show scientific modernity as possessing generalized fascistic tendencies, Burdekin sees the immediate threat of Nazism as a potential annihilation of scientific and all other hopeful futures. Swastika Night’s action takes place almost entirely among men. The novel enacts a direct link between masculine domination and fascism, similar to the connection Virginia Woolf made between military and patriarchal power in England and Germany in 1938’s Three Guineas as well as to Klaus Theweleit’s exposition of proto-Nazi male bonding and misogyny in Male Fantasies (1985). Dystopian extrapolation leads the glorification of fascist masculinity into Burdekin’s imagined annihilation of female personhood in what Keith Williams describes as the “logical conclusions” of “the Fascist ‘cult of masculinity’” (152). Across the German empire (and, we are given to assume, the undepicted Japanese empire that controls the rest of the world), fascism is maintained through a religious cult of masculinity that insists “women [are] not part of the human race at all” (79). Other subjects viewed as less than human (Jews, nonwhites who are not elevated to the status of ‘subject races’) have been completely obliterated, but women remain necessary for procreation, so they much be kept around. As the Nazi mythology idealizes an image of Hitler as “exploded” rather than of woman born, women do not even have the privilege of being respected for their role in incubating future generations (79). Burdekin’s Nazis lack the scientific knowledge to develop, as a scientist in Man’s World does, a viable technique for reproduction without women. 63 Instead, women become pure reproductive conduits with no hope of a future. 63 Elizabeth Russell draws on Haldane’s passage in which womanless reproduction is proposed to argue that the caging of women in Swastika Night is functionally equivalent to their position in the “gilded cages” of Man’s 111 Kept in cages, their sole function is to be raped when men want children. The closest they come to humanity, at least for the German Knight we see indoctrinating a “herd” of women into their lowly position (the closest the novel comes to a female point of view), is when they mourn for the sons who are taken from them at a young age to learn to be men. The only “human feeling allowed to them” is “the leave to be … passionately proud of a male child” (14). Inarticulately, the no longer human women want access to the future whose bodies they birth even though it is one that excludes them. Burdekin’s understanding of fascist misogyny draws on the Austrian Otto Weininger’s 1903 work Sex and Character, which was admired by Hitler and by many fascist intellectuals. Weininger's book draws the reader through carefully constructed logical formulations to lead us apparently inexorably to the conclusion that women are not human. 64 “Woman,” whose existence was defined only by a sexuality Weininger found repulsive, embodied utter negation and meaninglessness; her “demure outward self was a simulacrum constructed in keeping with male expectations and assumed in order to win male esteem” (Sengoopta 11). This is also the opinion of the German Knight von Hess in Swastika Night, who declares that “[w]omen will always be exactly what men want them to be. They have no will, no character and no souls; they are only a reflection of men” (70). Weininger associates womanhood with World (22). The idea of reproduction without women was also a seductive one for the Italian futurists. Women are associated with the past and tradition that ought to be vanquished and surpassed; it is an annoyance that the female body is also necessary for bring the children who will be necessary for life in the future. Reproduction via a machine, is the ideal answer, as Clara Orban demonstrates in her analysis of Marinetti’s 1910 novel Mafarka the Futurist, whose main character uses technology to engender a son “without the stinking complicity and help of the female womb” (Marinetti qtd in Orban 57). 64 In a fascinatingly prescient argument, Weininger insists that maleness and femaleness cannot be defined through biology alone, that “female men” and “male women” and any number of “sexually indeterminate types” exist and that their deviations from a heterosexual norm must be considered fully natural. His critique of the biological basis of gender replaces biology with Platonic models of man and woman that allow him to casually dismiss all counterexamples to his arguments as the result of “sexual indeterminacy,” while he bases his claims on an ideal that may not exist in the world but is all the more important for that (9). 112 a lack of capacity to engage with history or even with the rhythms of social life, since a woman is a purely sexual force that gathers men to her and away from their productive autonomy either in order to push into an undifferentiated reproductive future (if she is a woman of the type 'mother') or into a futureless and narcissistic zone of sexual pleasure (if she is of the type ‘prostitute’) (216). Women’s reproductive capacity and the families that are built around it are simply a prop to the real reproduction of social and political life, which is transmitted nonbiologically from men to men. Feminists have shared this analysis of power’s lineages as a way women could challenge the social order from a position outside of it, as in Woolf’s demand in Three Guineas for women to oppose war through the formation of an “Outsiders’ Society” embracing the notion that women “have no country,” “want no country” and may therefore belong to “the whole world” (129). 65 If Woolf’s critique of the patriarchy of fascism found a utopian possibility in the idea that women were excluded from the production and reproduction of the nation, Burdekin’s dystopia unpacks the purely negative side of this conceit. Burdekin literalizes the idea that women could be outside of history in her disturbing female figures who appear to lack any consciousness at all. For all that Burdekin draws very clear lines between masculinity and Nazism, she does not exonerate women from complicity with the past and present politics that provide the ingredients for her dystopian future. The book of secret history that documents the “Reduction of Women” describes women as “throwing themselves into” the negation of 65 Marie-Louise Gättens expertly unpacks Woolf’s linkage of women’s reproductive role in the family with colonial and fascist power, and her insistence that “disloyalty” to both private and public spheres was a necessary route to avoiding war, in her essay “Three Guineas, Fascism, and the Construction of Gender.” 113 their own personhood with “conscious enthusiasm” (82). Burdekin does not suggest reasons for women’s complicity in their own subjugation, other than von Hess’ s misogynistic false- consciousness theory of women’s belief that if they “if they did all that men told them to do cheerfully and willingly, the men would somehow … love them still more” (82). But the real history of Nazi gender offers some suggestions. Claudia Koonz’s work on Nazi femininity shows the extent of complicity among women in an ideology of male supremacy where “the blatantly male-chauvinist Nazi Party” was supported by the reproductive labor of “the largest women’s organization in history.” Koonz describes Nazi feminist claims to power, actuated through traditional femininity, through science fiction rhetoric as “the nineteenth- century feminists’ vision of the future in nightmare form” (xx). Indeed, Burdekin’s harsh portrayal of femininity is a sharp rejoinder to the feminist utopian ideas explored in the last chapter: that women devoting themselves singlemindedly to procreation could occupy dominant temporalities in a way that would prove empowering, or that dedication to reproduction in the service of a racial project for improved heredity could be potentially good for even dominant-class women. In Swastika Night, capitulating to a solely reproductive role leads women not to a separate sphere of feminine power but to their obliteration in a future that is wholly male. They are not even a threat, but something totally overlooked. Burdekin lingers in that zone of negativity, not refuting it but showing what its ugly consequences might be. She asks what would happen if women acceded wholesale to their figuration as bodies on which male visions of futurity (with fascist hypermasculinity as the most male of all) will be engendered. Burdekin’s nightmare of masculine fascist domination relies on a social world that reproduces itself through relations between men. Both in Burdekin and in many historical 114 analyses of fascism, that homosocial misogyny shades into homosexuality. The antisociality of fascistic violence connected to the antisociality of homosexuality for thinkers who imagined both as rejecting the positive forces of life and reproduction signified by the female body. Wilhelm Reich, for example, wrote that “the most brutal … types were those …. who were either latently or manifestly homosexual” and Adorno declared that “[t]otalitarianism and homosexuality go together” (cited in Theweleit 54-55). In Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality Under National Socialism, William Spurlin describes this kind of thinking as “the discursive reduction of homosexuality to fascism, or to the location of homosexuality as fascism's source,” which he finds to be a reductive “conflation of sexual with political deviance, whereby homosexuality is pathologized as a fascistic fascination with the erotics of power, and fascism is reduced to a psychosexual manifestation of homosexual narcissism” (73). The sexual deviance of homosexuality, Spurlin implies, is benign variation; the political deviance of Nazism is genocidal, and it is horrifying to think that the two could be in any way connected. Erik N. Jensen calls the idea that “homosexuals ... formed the backbone of the Nazi movement” a “pernicious myth” that elides the persecution and murder of gay people under Nazism (322). The pink triangle, concrete marker of that murder, has been a vital symbol for the AIDS movement because it stood for homosexuality denied a future, as the criminal neglect of gay men and others with AIDS did to so many. But Stuart Marshall’s 1991 essay on the problematic nature of the pink triangle as a logo for AIDS activism is an important reminder that the homoerotic imagery of fascism has been both a site of murderous homophobia and a means by which hegemonic state and patriarchal power is maintained. Homosexuality may not consist of a pathological fascination with the erotics of 115 power, yet such fascinations do exist; fascism may not be produced by homoeroticism, yet homoeroticism may be involved in its reproduction. Bersani’s antisocial queer theory confronts the erotics of fascist violence head-on through Jean Genet’s homoerotic “fascination with what he outrageously calls the beauty of Nazism” in Funeral Rites. Bersani argues that this is “in no way a plea for the specific goals pursued by Nazi Germany.” Instead, he writes, Genet “insists on the continuity between the sexual and the political” in a way that “superficially glorifies Nazism as the system most congenial to a cult of male power justified by little more than male beauty,” but also “transforms the historical reality of Nazism into a mythic metaphor for a revolutionary destructiveness which would surely dissolve the rigidly defined sociality of Nazism itself”–– though Bersani does concede that “the metaphoric suitability of Hitler's regime for this project can hardly be untroubling” (Homos 171). When the Nazi and collaborator, Erik and Riton, fuck, Bersani reads the twinned virtues of Genet’s anality and amorality as negatively transformative, nonreproductively bringing forth a future borne of society’s leavings that will refuse “to accept a relation with any given social arrangement” (171). These are the dystopian impulses of queer negativity: eroticizing and fucking the Nazi in the ass breaks down the rigidity on which Nazism, as a form of civilization, relies, and by extension breaks down the rest of society’s close-to-fascistic underpinnings. Though anti-Nazi struggle is rejected with all politics here, the idea that disgusting sex among those considered disgusting could be revolutionary, transformative, and dissolving, provides grounding for the utopianly suggestive call to “rethink what we mean and what we expect from communication, and from community” with which Bersani’s Homos ends (183). Though its relationship to fascism, sex and sociality differ wildly from Genet’s, Swastika Night develops a feminist 116 version of an antisocial politics wherein the destructive force of Nazi masculinity produces, through the antisocial practices and dystopian impulses of its dehumanized others, the seeds of its own annihilation. The contradictions of homosexuality and fascism become clear in Carlson’s discussion of the ways homosexuality functioned as part of the anti-fascism of W.H. Auden and his generation, who were “[a]lienated by the hypocrisy of the ruling-class values that permitted almost any degree of exploitation, deception, or brutality within the confines of institutionalized heterosexuality, but punished love between men” (180). Carlson goes on to quote Christopher Isherwood’s recollections of male homosexuality and homosociality under Nazi ultranationalism, where he described the prospect of an alignment with the two as a tragic misrecognition: [Christopher] knew only one pair of homosexual lovers who declared proudly that they were Nazis. Misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta, they fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love, with all women excluded. They were aware, of course, that Christopher thought them crazy, but they dismissed him with a shrug. How could he understand? This wasn't his homeland ... No, indeed it wasn't. Christopher had realized that for some time already. But this tragic pair of self-deceivers didn't realize—and wouldn't, until it was too late—that this wasn't their homeland, either. (Isherwood, Christopher 124-25; his ellipses; cited in Carlston 181) Eventually, it was “too late” for the “era of military man-love” to materialize; same-sex love was dangerous enough to the fabric of Nazi society that it was punished in the same way as all other forms of deviance. But Burdekin, writing about what it might mean to organize the world around Nazi masculinity from the perspective of an English woman living outside a heterosexual family structure, could not know how that story would end. Her imagined future creates a world of nationalist homoeroticism that offers precisely that “New Sparta,” with its exclusion of women, and takes it to its logical extreme. Both in Burdekin’s fiction 117 and in the realities that coexisted with and followed it, the dream of homo-Nazism creates a nightmare. Burdekin attempts to represent the gendered elements of a fascist homoerotic nightmare without falling victim to the homophobic blaming of fascism on that homoeroticism. In so doing, her worldbuilding evades the standard narratives about homosexuality and fascism that members of later gay movements have held. Swastika Night cuts through these tangles by imagining a Nazi homosexuality that is not antisocial. The Nazi Empire of Swastika Night is suffused with homoeroticism. “Men … love boys, nearly all of them, at one time or another, in one way or another” (120). That love is not demonized, but it is not idealized either; one man’s “love” of a boy leads to the boy being battered to death for sullying his pure flesh with the body of an unclean woman. Though visiting the “Women’s Quarters” is a reproductive duty, “[n]o stigma attache[s]” to men who avoid it, whose “whole sexual and emotional life [is] lived among men” (166). Male love is a site of pleasant feeling in the extraordinarily ugly world Burdekin creates. As Maroula Joannou writes, men’s love of men in Swastika Night even has the capacity to “destabilise the established boundaries of race and class” (182). The Nazi Hermann abandons his fatherland and eventually dies for the love of English Alfred, who he is expected to despise according to the hierarchies of Nazi ideology. But male love is also, through the erotics of the uniform and the idealization of a virility that abhors the feminine, the vector along which fascist power is transmitted. Power’s transmission through triangulated homosocial desire has been a truism in queer theory since Eve Sedgwick’s 1985 Between Men; Burdekin shows a homosocial future that associates female debasement with male love. She separates a homoerotic masculinity that slots neatly into existing power structures from the kind of gender deviance that would involve men identifying with 118 women’s concerns, and imagines a world where the former has become so powerful that the latter is no longer possible. The antisocial, antirelational force that Bersani finds in the most politically and physically disgusting parts of queer sex is imagined in Burdekin as associated with femininity. Male love reproduces the Nazi future while motherhood and biological reproduction are a site of disgust. Burdekin’s dystopian impulse is to take Weininger’s notion of women’s exclusion from subjectivity to its logical extreme. She places the degradation of their oppression center stage and offers little prospect that it might be heroically overthrown. Caged women are portrayed as “living their stupid lives in little groups of two or three women with their daughters and very tiny sons” (157), but of what those “groups” might do among themselves, we are told nothing. Yet they are not without some images of resistance. A little consciousness appears in the figure of Marta, a woman “so old she was no longer a woman at all, and therefore out of reach of all womanly feelings of shame and humility.” Marta “was not free, but perhaps by mere age had passed out of reach of psychic subjection” (15). But she appears only on one page, and thereafter leaves the novel to go about her cynical life without spearheading a community in resistance. 66 The protest of the women does not take place through a positive, heroic politics but in a negativity played out on the ground of reproduction––the female birth rate is steadily and catastrophically declining. Von Hess, the German aristocrat, thinks this is “the tragedy of the human race” (70): that women have “destroyed us [men] by doing what we told them” (12), birthing boys without reproducing their subhuman selves. Now “the race is coming to 66 Women not unlike Marta do spearhead resistance in Storm Jameson’s evocative 1942 dystopia Then We Shall Hear Singing, where old women’s memories of a former time keep resistance to fascist occupation alive. 119 extinction” because of the “unconscious” “discouragement” of the women (70); and the men cannot admit to this because “[i]f a woman could rejoice publicly in the birth of a girl, Hitlerdom would start to crumble” (14). Even as they wail for their own erasure from the Nazi future their sons will build, the women’s very biology protests, and through excess of submission they commit themselves to the end of the world. George McKay finds this depiction to be “a biologic essentialism, in which women's bodily functions, the sole aspect for which they are valued, refuse to operate” (198). The reduction of women to biology seems to me more a commentary on the ways in which ideology shapes material reality than an inscription of women as mere bodies, however. As Burdekin decries the reduction of women to breeders, she also insists that the most thorough denial of selfhood and subjectivity nevertheless cannot render human bodies wholly pliable, wholly without volition. Denied the opportunity to refuse, the women’s very submission to reproductive dehumanization becomes resistance. Rather than create more of their debased and unwanted selves, they continue the male master race, and in so doing bring it closer to its end. By following an evolutionary timeline in which the rewarding of masculinity leads to the production of more men which in turn leads to the failure of human reproduction, they demonstrate the contradiction Burdekin understands to be at the heart of fascism and that we might extrapolate to other forms of hierarchy and oppression. It can perpetuate itself only by producing more of those it claims to want to eradicate. Burdekin uses her female characters’ negative resistance to critique fascism through a feminist lens by framing it as a dead end. Women’s futurelessness contains a seed of protest against oppression, but it is one that is routed through impossibility, silence, and a refusal to even exist. Given this negativity, it is interesting that Burdekin’s work––which by 2010 could 120 be described as “the best known” of dystopian “fictional satires” written in response to the rise of fascism (Claeys 126)––has been taken up by critics as a barely ambiguous narrative of feminist hope. Patai, who has written most about Burdekin, contrasts her to Orwell and other male dystopians because of her narrative of “hope” rather than despair. 67 Similarly, in a 1987 review of the Feminist Press edition, Robert Crossley wrote that the text “should appear on anyone's short list of the essential works of dystopian imagination, as a novel with as much critical energy and point as either Huxley's or Orwell's more celebrated warnings, but built on a substructure more … inspiriting than theirs” (98). Yet, on the novel’s publication under a male pen name, a major concern seems to have been whether its pessimism made Hitler’s victory seem too likely. Publisher Victor Gollancz found it necessary to add a note to the frontispiece of their 1940 reissue, insisting that the author has “changed his mind” and now takes a more inspiriting and nationalistic view: While the author has not in the least changed his opinion that the Nazi idea is evil, and that we must fight the Nazis on land, on sea, in the air and in ourselves, he has changed his mind about the Nazi power to make the world evil. He feels that, while the material destruction and misery they can and have brought about are immense, they cannot do spiritual harm even in the short run: for they can communicate the disease only to anyone who has the tendency to take it. He further feels that Nazism is too bad to be permanent, and that the appalling upheaval through which the world is passing is a symbol of birth, and that out of it will emerge a higher stage of humanity. (np, original emphasis) Swastika Night’s negative depiction of a Nazi future in the throes of imminent extinction was too close to a future that the publisher could not risk letting be seen as possible; it would have been unpatriotic to imply that Hitler was likely to win the war. And so readers are demanded to reinterpret the futureless dystopia as a “symbol of birth,” a route toward better 67 She makes this argument extensively in “Orwell’s Despair, Burdekin’s Hope.” 121 possibilities. It did not seem so to readers on its first publication, at least according to a 1937 reviewer in the Guardian, who described the book as not a “novel” but a “nightmare.” 68 In Man's World, Haldane imagined a “homosexual soul” excised from the present for the sake of a future that might one day complete the potential of its compatibility with the scientific-fascist state. Swastika Night presents a similar narcissism and turning away from reproductive ends, fulfilled in an unpleasant present just beginning to realize that there may be no future. The reproductive powers of Nazi homosociality are beginning to transform into a trajectory toward death: We are stagnant. … in the rich mental and emotional life men live when they are going somewhere, aiming at something beyond them, however foolish, we have no part. We can create nothing, we can invent nothing … We are Germans. We are holy. We are perfect, and we are dead. (121) Here the absence of futurity is attributed to German-ness as much as to queerness, and its excessive virility means that all kinds of reproduction—including art and printing—are going to cease. Although it has managed to reproduce itself for 700 years, the final degradation of women and dominance of homosexuality proves that without women, the future can go nowhere. Burdekin suggests that the dead weight of Nazism can be overcome by beginning to move beyond masculinity into the “self-conscious” state that Haldane figured as Christopher’s posthumous queer futurity. She contemplates the “dead”ness of Nazi rule as a site for renewal: an adolescence that even the most oppressive society could pass through in order to find something new. Sometimes … I think that the past civilizations with all their unimaginable complexity and richness … were only the childhood of the race; that this gulf, this dreary blankness, is like the dullness that comes on boys sometimes at adolescence, and that our manhood is yet to be. That perhaps… these dull boys, 68 The Manchester Guardian reviewer, Harold Brighouse, felt that the novel’s nightmarishness caused it to fail as a work of art; Frank Swinnerton in the Observer of the same week found it exemplary of an “original talent.” 122 these stupid destructive adolescents … will, if they can but proceed with their duty of growing up, pass on to a maturity before which the childhood genius even will be like a candle in daylight (131-2). Here and in her other novels, Burdekin is committed to the idea that the destruction of war, race, and class oppression are connected with gender hierarchy and that all these inequalities may constitute a “destructive” adolescent period from which the human race will emerge as adults. The End of This Day’s Business and Proud Man both offer versions of this narrative and suggest utopian visions of what ‘adulthood’ may look like, but they stop short of seven ultra- Nazi centuries. Swastika Night’s extended adolescence is very difficult to credit as an interregnum in such a smooth narrative of progress. The hope for dystopia’s maturation into utopia is located by almost all critics of the novel in the fact that, amidst all the death and misery, our protagonist, Alfred the Englishman oppressed by German empire, tries to change things. From the German Knight von Hess he learns how pre-Nazi history was erased by the new world order; he is astonished to see an image of a beautiful, sentient woman who was once granted the honor of standing next to Hitler. Von Hess gives him a book to share with others and reconnect the future with the past; reproducing a new kind of futurity and halting the dominant time of Nazism becomes the work of an archive that passes from eccentric German knight to English rebel to the care of the lowest caste of all, the Christians. 69 Alfred aims to employ the archive in order to “destroy your [German] Empire” (23). He learns that he must do this by teaching gender history, showing men how desirable (so desirable they could be mistaken for boys; 67) women used to be and could be again. If he teaches the English how their past 69 This analysis of the novel through histories, archives, and futures is Patai’s focus in her introduction to the 1987 edition. 123 was stolen from them, including the beauty of women and the fact that they once possessed a great empire (77), after “hundreds of years” (69) gender equality and perhaps also heterosexuality may be rediscovered and the Germans conquered. Whether an English conquest of Germany would truly vanquish the cult of Nazi masculinity is left open for the reader to decide. Burdekin describes England as a festering site of resistance to Nazism––yet she makes a direct connection between British imperial dominance and the future Nazi empire, even as she mobilizes English nationalism to enable Alfred’s hope for change. Burdekin informs us that “one of the motive forces of German imperialism” was “[j]ealousy of the British Empire,” and one of Alfred’s motive forces is a powerful nostalgia for it. 70 Alfred has developed his own theory of selfhood, which comes to him because he realizes he is not “inferior” to the Germans who oppress him. He thinks that to be truly “oneself” (which for him means to be a man) one must “know [one] is superior to everything else” (106). For an oppressed subject, this may be a radical conception; attributed to a British man in the twentieth century, it is impossible to separate from a colonizing mentality. On this note, it is worth remarking that the devastated future Europe of Swastika Night is wholly white. Jews have long since been eradicated, the role of despised other taken by non-Germans and, especially, Christians; Asians and Africans do apparently exist, but are as safely outside Europe as if they were contained by Haldane’s cordon of devastation. The novel’s protagonist is a colonized English subject whose rebellion against his subject state is 70 Barbara Brothers writes that antifascist “women writers tell us” that in the 1930s “[i]indifference and assent, not lack of knowledge about Nazi brutality, characterized the British” (259). Although Burdekin does not directly address this, the connections she makes between British nationalist and imperialist masculinity and fascism hint at this critique. 124 encouraged by a dissident German aristocrat. Alfred wants England to be the future, to take the place of Germany, and though he declares that the world they will make will be a different one, his hope is rooted in a perpetuation of pre-existing hierarchies. The conjunction of Alfred’s efforts to change the future with the women’s resistance through refusal shows the limitations of jumping on board with temporalities of domination. Women are too mired in oppression to feel the requisite superiority in Alfred’s worldview, he is sure, and so their position as the negative reflection of man seems to be set. Looking at the daughter born to the woman he habitually fucks at the end of the novel. Alfred tries to imagine a situation in which she might rise to his level, but such a future is unimaginable to him. Loretta Stec finds a “utopian impulse” in Alfred’s attentiveness to his daughter, drawing from it a reading of the novel as “a hopeful, feminist” suggestion that “when women are more respected a better world will result” (184-5). Yet what Alfred discovers in picking up his daughter is also that the hope the baby represents, as an embodiment of a possible future that may be different from the present, cannot coexist with a gender that marks a total absence of futurity. The feel of the baby in his arms ... made him feel as if he and his daughter were a unit ... while Ethel was an outsider. ... A man could sit with a dog quite indefinitely, but he could not stay with a woman except to satisfy his natural needs…. one couldn’t stand it…. . Once you’ve started to think about women, it’s intolerable. It has the atmosphere of a stinking bog, heavy and evil and sickening. … Edith must live all her life [in the women's quarters]. I hope she'll die. (161-5) From hope that things might change, Alfred is distracted into disgust. The baby is “his,” which suggests the beginning of a patriarchal lineage; but she is also of her mother, and like her mother, which bans her from the world he occupies. The contradiction is “intolerable,” and Alfred ends his soliloquy by hoping for her death, since if he does not think of the baby 125 as equivalent to a “dog,” like her mother, he cannot conscionably relegate her to the “bog” of femininity. He is forced to realize that a baby does not contain all the hope and potential of a new world when its prospects for life are utterly curtailed from birth, and he turns instead to his sons to pass on his new knowledge in what becomes (on the eve of the Second World War) a project for an English nationalist future. Even if Alfred conquers his disgust, he will rescue his daughter from her contaminated origin and set her up as a hope for a new kind of reproductive futurism, a new normative familiality of the kind that Burdekin had, in her own life, rejected. Once again, the futureless politics of the women prove more transformative than the politics of hopeful futurity. Swastika Night has had, in the past decade or so, an interesting contemporaneity in queer studies. In the light of recent emphasis on critiquing the homonormative reproduction of hetero-familial hegemony in queer theory and activism, and the constitution of much queer temporal theory in opposition to gay marriage activism’s desire for access to state- recognized reproductive temporalities, Burdekin’s narrative of fascism’s homosocial reproduction has important resonances in the first decades of the twenty-first century. In particular, the novel has resonated with efforts to delink homosexuality and radicalism necessitated by critiques of racism and sexism in gay political movements. In her 2002 essay “Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International,” Heidi Nast invoked the novel’s “postmarriage, postfamily state” (895) as a worst-case scenario that might be extrapolated from her analysis of gay transnational adoption as contributing to a globalized segregation of reproductive labor. If children are increasingly commoditized (as possessions and as concentrated sites for expressions of wealth, to wit the retail explosion of children’s goods) and privileged white heterosexual and gay men hold a competitive edge in their 126 purchase, what sorts of politics will emerge in future around poor women’s bodies and ownership over their reproductive products? Will a queerly patriarchal scenario similar to that depicted by Burdekin ([1937] 1985) obtain hundreds of years hence? (896) Burdekin’s queer afterlife shows how the constructions of reproductive futurism and futurelessness produced in early twentieth century dystopian temporalities map onto contemporary discourses at a global scale. In Nast’s model, children are idealized, longed for, and claimed in the global north, while they are overproduced in the global south, whose women are imagined as in danger of becoming like Burdekin’s––producers of raw human material to reproduce a future that will not be their own. What a child represents—as commodified personification of the future of a certain kind of life—becomes more important than his or her origin and wellbeing, as once again a baby’s face closes down possibilities for alternative futures. Like any fiction but especially works that speculate on social futures, Burdekin’s dystopia was a commentary on the immediate political concerns of her present. Yet Nast borrows the predictive logic of Burdekin’s vision, and it allows her to comment critically on the developing shape of a new present. The obsolete future endures. 2.5 | Fascist Futures in Queer Times In this chapter, I have pored over outdated dystopian futures in order to explore the relationship between biological and social reproduction in feminist writing. I have focused on speculative fictions that manipulate ideas about gender and political negativity into worlds that are presented as fundamentally negative, although they are not without elements of pleasure. Indeed, it is the very role that pleasures play in these works that underlines the point this chapter’s temporal juxtapositions make clear: that an opposition between 127 queerness (whether understood as homoerotic desire or as deviant gendered subjectivity) and reproductivity does not always hold in historical or imaginative context. Spending time with imagined futures that stand for roads not taken out of the past, we can see that queer sociality and antisociality are as capable of perpetuating political horrors as heterosexual reproduction is. Emphasizing the “uncomfortable” ways that desire lines up with politics in The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam has asked what is at stake in the fact that ideas about queer futures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have owed so much to the age of Nazism’s genocidal ascendance. I have shown that Burdekin’s prescient feminist critique of Nazi genocide also develops gendered ways of thinking about queer futurity that challenge its most common associations. Haldane and Burdekin’s dystopian novels reproduce negative futurities for critical political ends, offering a hidden history of no future where gendered critiques lead into critiques of racialization and empire that resonate into the twenty-first century. I close with some brief examples to suggest these afterlives. James McTeigue and the Wachowski Brothers’ 2006 dystopian fantasy V for Vendetta provides a neat exemplar of fascism’s afterlife in twenty-first-century transatlantic popular culture. Fascism continues to provide the visual and ideological language for popular representations of dystopian futurity, while queer representations provide straightforward opposition. The film imagines a near-future repressive neo-fascist English state that is thoroughly intertextual and overdetermined. Its images of raging demagogues and hate-filled rallies are drawn from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1989 graphic novel, which appeared in print at the height of Thatcherism and features a Leader of Britain who wants to reclaim “fascism” as a way out of “the wilderness of the twentieth century” (37)––a prospect given a disturbing currency by David Cameron’s recent British politics of austerity and 128 authoritarianism. The film elides the word “fascism” to enable a more direct connection to the US political landscape into which it was directed: one where state counter-terrorism in the name of freedom was the greatest threat to civil liberties. The Leader’s mouthpiece, Prothero (Roger Allam), froths in the manner of a Fox News pundit, fulminating against “godlessness” and the horror of social others who should be cleansed from the body of the state: “Immigrants. Muslims. Homosexuals. Terrorists. Disease ridden degenerates. They had to go!” Prothero’s speech sets up a clear delineation of the fascists and the others, and one of the film’s chief pleasures is the way it brings not only the audience but the everyday TV- watching people of Britain into alignment with terroristic others in a way that is liable to break down the regime. It is no accident that the mask worn by the “terrorist” V (Hugo Weaving) has become a rallying point for anarchistic movements both virtual and physical. Nor is it accidental that we are brought into the resistant fold through a queer domestic narrative of love and selfhood. The masked revolutionary who breaks through the discipline of a police state to revenge himself on those who have oppressed him, who inspires the ordinary people to mass revolt and who has since been taken up as the face of Anonymous dissent, proves to have been inspired by a lesbian love story. Written on toilet paper and found hidden in a corner of his cell, the tale of Valerie (Natasha Wightman), a queer woman who did not survive her imprisonment and torture for medical experimentation, tells of the “last inch” of dignity that, even when she loses her lover and is tortured for her sexuality, she will never give up. Her love and desire form the heart of her individuality and the sign of all that cannot be contained by ideology; they keep her whole when the power of the state wishes to deny her humanity. Her ability to cling to queer selfhood makes V’s anarchist initiation of a democratic future possible, both because it gives 129 him the courage to grasp on to his own “last inch” and because he reproduces his own formation as revolutionary subject on the body of the one who will succeed him, Evey (Natalie Portman)––a relationship whose heterosexuality in the film, lest we forget that if queer desire secures a future it will not be a future for itself, is sealed with a kiss. Queer femininity persecuted by fascism makes a hopeful future possible. But this seductive story is too easy, obscuring the real complicities of queer desire and dystopian politics by relying on a set of clichés that Burdekin and Haldane unmade before they were sedimented into common sense. The power of violence to permeate ideology bubbles up from the revolutionary moments failed or unbegun in Haldane and Burdekin, highlighting the sometimes excessive ease with which we tell ourselves stories about queer radical possibilities. In early 2011, a gay pride march was called in East London in response to a public campaign of homophobic stickering. This seems unremarkable and right-on until we realize that the stickers, which used Muslim religious rhetoric to denounce homosexuality, were in fact providing a pretext for anti-immigrant campaigning under the alibi of queer rights. One of the march’s main organizers was revealed to be a member of the far-right English Defense League, a party whose main platform is the national purity of an England whose borders it would like to close down (Geen). In seeking to associate Islam with an anti-gay ‘fascism’ that would exclude queer sexualities from its religiously oriented future, the group perpetuated a neofascist project, a future of national and racial exclusion. Real queer love and pain became an alibi for anti-immigrant organizing; as in the case of Burdekin’s homofascist lovers, sexual and political radicalism failed to align. Yet, though the complicated failures of that alignment have been the focus of this chapter’s dystopian 130 explorations, the radical queer response that excoriated the conjunction of queerness and fascism and demanded a queer politics attentive to racial as well as gendered and sexual alterity should not be forgotten. Fatima El-Tayeb’s groundbreaking 2011 book European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe begins, from a continental European perspective, to imagine what a queerness attentive to the continuing force of Empire within Europe, including its power within gay movements, might look like. It appears not as gay domesticity but as a range of artistic and performative pleasures engaged by generations whose racialized exclusion from European nations mean they are offered no future. The dystopian futureless politics outlined here show negative possibilities opening out of the foreclosure of futures, cautioning us to recognize when such foreclosures take place and to attend to their complications. But that is not to say that excluded subjects do not build new engagements with time and space, new worlds of imaginative and concrete speculation. My remaining chapters take up the production of such worlds by subjects marked as futureless by race, gender, and other forms of difference. 131 -3- A Now That Can Breed Futures: Afrofuturist Entanglements of Gender, Capital, and Queer Possibility for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours: For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. ––Audre Lorde 3.1 | Breeding Futures In the 1984 poem “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde gives voice to a conversation about possibilities and impossibilities that has often been drowned out by dominant futurologies. Her words articulate the power that discursive invocations of possible futures can have when immediate, personal futures are profoundly uncertain. Those who “were never meant to survive” are heirs to the social death of slavery; laborers who create the 132 edifices of modernity but do not get to live in them; those who will not or cannot be disciplined as proper subjects for liberal individualism. 71 Yet in Lorde’s formulation, to be made an object in this way is also to resist: to refuse to give in to what is meant, to the figurative weight of structural futurelessness. 72 This precarity forces Lorde’s speakers to perceive space and time beyond its surfaces: “looking inward and outward / at once before and after,” because they are denied the privileged blinkering that lets futures seem foreseeable. “[T]he illusion of some safety to be found” is too likely to be a trap, to restrict possible life narratives even as it seems to open them up. For Lorde, all this risk becomes worthwhile due to the pleasures that happen while out of dominant time and space––“in the hours between dawns,” “in doorways coming and going.” Without a program or a set of predictions, in the allusive language of poetry, Lorde asserts that, through these unreliable gaps, the “now” of oppression and pleasure will converge to bring forth futures in all directions. Here, the imagined future is not only a far-off image that casts its light into the present and the past and limits what we can see there. It is also a resource out of which dreams and worlds can be built, and one that has sometimes meant most for those whose access to material resources in the present has been limited. This chapter explores some ways in which how black cultural producers have labored to imagine queer kinds of futures for race and gender. It traces how discourses of technological and reproductive futurity have 71 “Social death” is Orlando Patterson’s influential formulation of slavery’s signification. The idea that some subjects are not meant to survive within modernity is further extended through Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the “necropolitics” of historical and contemporary colonialism. 72 In his powerful analysis of the aesthetics of the black radical tradition, Fred Moten writes that “[t]he history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (1). Joao Costa Vargas’s 2008 book Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities uses Lorde’s language to frame its analysis of the dialectics of genocide and seemingly impossible survival among oppressed black communities in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. 133 been adapted, adopted, and resignified in fictional visions of black futures, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois and ending with Jewelle Gomez and Octavia Butler. Lorde uses the language of procreation to describe how possible futures emerge from the present when she hopes for “a now that can breed / futures.” Breeding, more often than not, has been a word used to animalize human reproduction, whether in queers’ desultory references to heterosexuals or in referring to the ways slave women were treated as less than human when owners assumed they could be “bred” like livestock. It strongly suggests the histories of eugenics considered in the previous two chapters, wherein desirable racializations for the future of humanity were imagined to be planned and predicted by “breeding” in and out particular strains of deviance, ability, and gender. Lorde reclaims and reframes breeding to conjure a reproductive futurity that would not only mean the recreation of heteronormative, white-centered familial norms and the exclusion of othered bodies. Her futures will not be for children and childishness at the expense of adults, but will keep the “dreams” of ancestors constant in existences to come. Like the “freedom dreams” described by Robin Kelley in his book of that name, these futures matter more for their power in the present than for the concrete ways they may or may not be brought into being. The way Lorde invokes “breeding,” transforming it from a term antithetical to queerness and offensive to blackness into a nexus of hope and possibility for the black, queer, feminist subjectivity she articulates, guides me through the complexes of race, reproduction, sexuality, and pleasure that I consider in this chapter. I show how black cultural producers have labored to imagine futures different from and challenging to the “now” in which they spoke, focusing on how the cultural politics of science fiction and racialized reproduction converge around the processes that breed futures. Bridging the historical and contemporary aspects of 134 my dissertation by addressing texts from the emergent canon of black science fiction between 1920 and 2005, I consider how the idea of “breeding,” with all its offensive and eugenic entanglements, has been adapted, adopted, and resignified in imaginings of black futures. 73 My first two chapters explored how imagined science-fiction futures functioned as interventions into the dominant order for cultural producers (white, middle-class, British women) whose positions within dominant futurity were assured, if marginal. This chapter details some disruptions and continuities to the eugenic narratives that appear when we contemplated how futurity has operated as a resource for those who, in Lorde’s words, “were never meant to survive.” This aspect of the cultural politics of science fiction has been most widely explored, in the past two decades, under the sign of Afrofuturism, which has emphasized the particular relationship that Afro-diasporic subjects (often but not exclusively black Americans) have had to history and futurity. Coined in 1994 by Mark Dery, the term is used retrospectively to refer to futuristic aspects of twentieth-century black cultural production. Dery asks whether “a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history” can “imagine possible futures” (8). His answer is that it can, have, and must, but 73 After this chapter was already drafted, I discovered that I had been in unacknowledged conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s 2010 Duke University dissertation We Can Learn To Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996. Her project to interweave the “two rhetorically impossible claims “ ‘Black maternity’ and ‘queer intergenerationality’ ” and to perpetuate their co-creation of a “rival model of production, interrupting a development timeline with the possibility for a radically transformed society” turns out to have been in unknown and unacknowledged conversation with everything I am seeking to express in this dissertation, but especially with this chapter, which shares an epigraph with Gumbs’s dissertation, gathering the projects together under the expansive imagery of Lorde’s “Litany.” Gumbs rekindles the deviant forms of reproduction that have formed among impossible subjects of queer black feminist poetics during the rise of neoliberalism. In settling on its archive of fairly literal futuristic representations, my work lingers in contradictions, amid the problematic temporalities that impossible subjectivities adopt and occupy––as Lorde does breeding––but cannot always surpass. 135 that those imaginings should be sought in places other than the literatures of the official time line. Inherently cross-disciplinary, Afrofuturist theorizing deals with music, everyday uses of technology by black people, and a wide range of works of speculative fiction, ranging from Sun Ra’s aural vistas of Egyptian space travel to Kelley’s invocation of surrealism as the heart of the “emancipation of thought” black political radicalisms demand (5). Hopeful Afrofuturity emerges when alternative figurations of time and space come together, making something utopian out of the memory of horror. Drawing from many modes other than narrative, Afrofuturistic thought often figures disruptions to the dominant time line as rhythmic rather than directional. An often-cited exemplary moment is the passage in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1951) where the protagonist listens to jazz and finds that the invisibility of racial exclusion allows him aural access to “those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead” (8). 74 Afrofuturistic analyses have worked with similar cross- time touches and nonteleological histories to theories of queer temporality, as I show in the introduction. Lorde’s linkage of wayward modalities of “love” and the “fear” of racial oppression is a powerful demonstration of the ways queer affective and black political timelines can converge. For both black and queer subjects, being forced out of the regulations of dominant temporality opens up a different set of futures and worlds, existences in other modes than historically exclusionary humanism, and tempos that figure otherwise than straightforward timelines, articulating differential temporalities that are syncopated, off-key, sidelong, queer. In her work on Afrofuturism and queer temporality, 74 Lisa Yaszek’s essay “An Afrofuturist Reading of Ellison’s Invisible Man” demonstrates the novel’s extensive influence in the development of Afrofuturist thought. 136 Kara Keeling describes both blackness and queerness as sites of unpredictability and risk within the capitalist markets that compete to sell “foreseeable futures.” 75 Within the logic of capitalism, we are used to thinking about the future as a resource: one that is bought and sold to the highest bidder, as in the case of ‘futures markets’ where investments in possibility are bought and sold; or one that is about to run out, as with the ecological futurity that is transmuted into capital by carbon trading. In capitalism’s convergence with and mobilization of the logics of heteronormativity, children become the ultimate site of futurity: to be saved, saved up for, given expensive commodities, and idealized at the expense of adult needs, pleasures, and desires. 76 Lorde envisions the future as a different kind of resource, a non-predictive mode of possibility that keeps oppressed people going in a hostile world, and one in which adult pleasures and children’s interests need not be at odds. But to what extent do the predictive narratives in which those who were never meant to survive engage––their concrete and rationalized attempts to imagine futures different than their presents––participate in the logics of capitalism, risk, and the reproduction of oppressive social norms? My focus will be on an aspect of Afrofuturist speculation to which relatively little attention has so far been paid: the ways in which it employs linear and reproductive time against the racist, colonial, and capitalist logics with which they are often associated. In many of the texts claimed for the emergent canon of literary Afrofuturism, the predictive tropes of science fiction are in full operation, and 75 Keeling made this connection in a talk on “Black Futures” given at UCLA on 20 May 2010. Keeling also draws on Lorde’s writings about poetry and the erotic to show how this “risk” is played out through language and embodiment. 76 This is, of course, an allusion to Lee Edelman’s indictment of reproductive futurism in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. See my first chapter for a detailed engagement with Edelman’s theory. 137 reproduction––of human bodies, of social relations––is absolutely central. It is these works that I wish to contemplate in this chapter. 77 I begin by historicizing black futurity, looking in some detail at one of the earliest texts scholars have claimed for Afrofuturism: W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet,” which carries out an intense critique of the racial politics of modernity while producing a literal and somewhat melodramatic vision of what ‘breeding’ a future to challenge racism could mean. I show how reproductive futurism and eugenic discourse operate to underline his critiques of racialized temporality, moving from the general themes he employs to the way they play out in the barely visible figure of a black mother in the background of the story. What kind of future can she breed, and what would a narrative of black futurity look like from her perspective? If the main popular narratives through which the early twentieth century imagined the future were straightforward utopian or dystopian future-histories––in which something happened and its consequences were carried to logical extremes––that has no longer been the case for the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty- first. Cautionary tales of temporal extrapolation are, if not outnumbered, at least matched by stories of time-traveling paradoxes and eternally living vampires who bring the past into the present. From 2010’s Hot Tub Time Machine to Twilight (2008), it is clear that there is little 77 Though I have chosen to focus primarily on African American female futures, the conceptual work I do here will often apply to other populations structurally excluded from the rhetorical and material production of nationalist, white, colonial futurity I explored in the previous two chapters. Marleen S. Barr reductively names the futuristic writings of African American women as “Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory,” but the trajectories instigated by the work of writers like Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston, and Nnedi Okorafor reach through and between submerged histories and globalized futures to remake much more than a literary and pop-cultural subgenre. See Aimee Bahng’s Speculative Acts and Jillana Enteen’s “On the Receiving End of the Colonization” for analysis of women of color’s anti-imperial uses of science fiction, particularly the Caribbean-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson’s postcolonial futurities. Catherine S. Ramirez and Grace Dillon have analyzed the uses of futuristic fiction by Chicana/o and Native cultural producers, coining the terms “Chicanafuturism” and “indigenousfuturism” respectively. (Dillon’s coinage is the title of a forthcoming book; personal communication.) 138 about these forms that predisposes them to radical critique. 78 But, no less than extrapolative futuristic narratives, such tropes also offer prospects for thinking about survival beyond the limitations of the present: breeding grounds for Afrofuturism and queer futurity. In the last section of this chapter, I explore the ways that Jewelle Gomez (1991) and Octavia Butler’s (2005) Afrofuturistic rewritings of vampire mythology bring forth eternal life from histories that were “meant to be” dead ends. My focus is less on the specific symbolic work that vampire figures do and more on the effects they can have on the temporal landscapes around them. In their provision of a mode of reproduction that is not (hetero)sexual and does not revolve around children, the convergence of vampire stories with science fiction futures allows these writers to do queer work with received discourses of black female futurity, reconfiguring the history and future of racialization by imagining how it would look according to a different set of norms. Altering the meanings of birth, death, and consumption through their re-production of a figure most commonly associated with whiteness and capital accumulation, Octavia Butler’s last and queerest protagonist, the black vampire child Shori, and Jewelle Gomez’s eternal lesbian-feminist vampire, Gilda, stretch reproductive time and unbalance history by refusing the double binds of racialized and gendered reproductivity. 78 Though viewers so inclined could certainly turn them in such a direction, in a number of ways: the techniques of critical fandom I discuss in my epilogue, for example, or through Judith Halberstam’s assertion that “if you watch Dude Where’s My Car slowly and repeatedly and while perfectly sober, the mysteries of the universe may be revealed to you” (Queer Art of Failure 21). 139 3.2 | Modernity, Race, and the Gendered Cultural Politics of Black Science Fiction: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” In the chapters above, I discussed how science fiction narratives of imagined futures have tended both to challenge and to reproduce dominant national, scientific, and gendered models of temporality. In Toward A Global Theory of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva describes the construction of this enlightenment model of humanity and history as wholly dependent on racialization. The developmental temporality on which colonial hierarchies of civilizations rely conceptualizes subjectivity as self-determining and enables narratives of historical progress by producing colonized people of color as the material upon which Enlightenment subjects act: racialized others who are “without a future” in and of themselves (xii). For da Silva, black people are the prototypical Others of modernity, those from rather than for whom modernity’s futures have been made, through the material construction of a transnational racial category via the traffic in slaves and the accumulation of global capital out of the fruits of their labor. 79 Modernity relies on the production of blackness. And the speculative temporalities of science fiction belong, as we have seen, to the timelines of modernity. In a 2003 essay on “Science Fiction and Empire,” Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr describes science fiction as an outgrowth of the temporality of Enlightenment thought and the technological developments of modernity: “an expression of the political-cultural transformation that originated in European imperialism and was inspired by the ideal of a single global technological regime” (231). 80 The regime that imposed European ideals on the 79 Cedric Robinson traces the role of slavery in the development of “racial capitalism” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (9). 80 As I discuss in my introductory chapter, John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction provides a close historical reading of colonial tropes in late nineteenth and early twentieth century science fiction; Roger Luckhurst’s cultural history of science fiction connects these narratives to the development of technological 140 rest of the world has grown up into the unevenly distributed utopian and dystopian future of global capitalism, within which science fiction is––in Afrofuturist critic Kodwo Eshun’s words––“a research and development department within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow” (291). If the timelines of futuristic fiction are invariably the developmental temporalities that map an Enlightenment vision of history onto the past, present, and future, according to a taxonomy of human development that places masculine, western-European whiteness in the privileged position, then stepping forward in this time may be less than appealing for those who are not its official subjects. Yet the futuristic projections of women and people of color work in various ways to prove that, while imperialism and capitalism may be the major forces that have led cultural producers to speculate about what futures could develop from the present, speculative imagination has also been used in alternate ways. In Lisa Yaszek’s words, “white writers weren’t the only or the first” to engage with science and technology” through speculative fiction. (“Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future” 59). The imagined future has been an especially vital resource for black communities, in the US and elsewhere, to build political and cultural meaning in the present. In his influential The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy argues for the longstanding presence of a transatlantic “Afro-modernity” that challenges the racism and nationalism of Anglo-American narratives about modernity’s technological and social forward march. Gilroy insists on black peoples’ material understanding of a modernity that relied on their labor but excluded them from subjectivity. modernity. 141 For the descendants of black people enslaved in the Americas, seeking a future in spite of being denied one has long been a matter of life and death. In her influential 2000 anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Sheree R. Thomas brings together the discourses of science fiction, Afrofuturism, and the black critique of modernity to argue for the formation of a new canon of black science fiction. All the writers I cite in this chapter feature in this anthology. 81 In her introduction, Thomas figures black writing as an unrecognized shaping force—like the “dark matter” physicists know is there because of its effect on the universe but cannot identify—in the history of modernity and of literary futurities, and argues that the established genre of science fiction in literature, film, and television has been a vital resource in how black people have thought about their individual and collective futures in the twentieth century. This has been true, Thomas asserts, even though the practice of projecting futures out of the present and imagining them to be inevitable has given power to the temporalities of modernity and empire. In a similar scholarly argument, Gregory Rutledge writes that “Africans and their descendants have been marked as the primitive for centuries” and therefore objectified within “a protracted science fiction, or insidious fantasy”––in other words, white modernity––“against which the slave narratives were some of the first counter-briefs” (237). If being forced in to modern time lines has subjected African people to objectified, commodified positions in the ‘science fictions’ of white supremacist futuristic narratives, as Eshun writes, then “the vigilance that is necessary to indict imperial modernity must be extended into the field of the future” (288). Counter-futures must continually be imagined. 81 A second anthology in the Dark Matter series, Reading the Bones, was published in 2004. 142 In a critical contribution to Dark Matter, novelist Walter Mosley draws from this context to insist that, for black Americans who have been “cut off from their African ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being excluded from history … science fiction offers an alternative where that which deviates from the norm is the norm” (405). These accounts of Afrofuturism as a deviant future for science fiction let us see how a genre often associated with political or spectacular extrapolations from the large-scale changes of modernity can also be crucial to re-envisioning and changing the “norms” that govern the social and political worlds of minority populations. In relating science fiction to racial history, Mosley finds that imagining deviant futures is a way to suggest that the failures of the present and the past need not be permanent ones. Black uses of science-fictional tropes emerge less as extrapolations asking where scientific and technological teleologies might lead, and more as meditations on what the possibility of such extrapolation might mean. What assumptions about the meanings of words, images, and stories will be undermined? And which, the theoretical frame this project builds insists we must add, will be reiterated or maintained? The historical heft of Thomas’s collection, and the literary proof of her argument about “dark matter,” comes from the inclusion of a 1920 story by Du Bois: “The Comet,” which was originally published in Darkwater, his 1920 collection of mingled fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. 82 Thomas uses Du Bois to add weight and depth to her construction of a genealogy of “black writers … offering distinctive speculative visions of the world” (xii). 82 The second Dark Matter volume also contains a speculative fiction from Darkwater, “Jesus Christ in Texas,” although this story works more through the logics of fantasy and religious allegory than the technological frames and progressive temporalities generally associated with science fiction. 143 Transferring smoothly from Darkwater to Dark Matter thanks to its activation of tropes that would become intensely familiar to aficionados of twentieth century science fiction, and neatly adopted into Afrofuturism’s retroactive canon, “The Comet” draws an Afro-diasporic critique of global modernity together with interventions into US discourses of racialized gender, interracial coupling, eugenics, and miscegenation. The story’s premise is a catastrophic one: that New York has passed through the tail of a comet which emits asphyxiating gas. Only those breathing air away from the surface of the earth are saved, and, for them, it seems as if the entire world had been destroyed. The story’s protagonist is Jim, a young black bank messenger whose employers have sent him on an errand into the “fetid slime” of the bank’s underground “lower vaults,” where he escapes the destruction of the city (251). Eventually, he meets another survivor, a young white woman named Julia who had been developing photographs in a darkroom when the comet hit. After confronting racial prejudice and despair, the two of them prepare to come together to breed a new, post- racial humanity in the ruins of the old world. Their consummation of an interracial future for the human race is aborted, however, when Julia’s father and fiance arrive. Jim narrowly escapes lynching. As he leaves to return to his marginal position, a black woman who seems to be his wife emerges, holding the corpse of their child. Like many European writers at the period, Du Bois draws on the experience of the First World War to present apocalyptic violence as a cataclysmic break in modernity’s progress narratives. 83 But, in line with the critiques of modernity from which Afrofuturist theory would later grow, he places that modern cataclysm into the context of the long-lasting 83 I discuss the effect of the First World War on British utopian imaginations in the previous chapters. 144 trauma and apocalyptic loss brought upon people of color by the colonization and enslavement that underwrote white modernity. Rather than the “worst-case future” being something to be warded off by a fictional warning, as it might be in the classic dystopian mode, it is, in Mark Bould’s words, “woven into every kind of everyday present reality” because “Apocalypse already happened”—whether that apocalypse took the form of slavery and the Middle Passage, of colonial domination, or of the continuing deprivation of black communities (np). 84 In the essay “The Souls of White Folk,” which appeared in Darkwater alongside “The Comet,” Du Bois connected the violence of the First World War in Europe with the violent oppression to which Europeans had not ceased to subject those of African descent: As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battle-smoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: this is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture. (63) “The Comet” makes this critique transatlantic through a fictional vision of New York’s possible destruction. The comet’s passage transforms a “human river” of New York working people into the “stillness of death,” where “a hundred men and women and children” are “crushed and twisted and jammed … like refuse in a can” (254). 85 They resemble those felled by the guns of the Western Front, but the ghastly equation of human bodies with “refuse” also recalls the lack of care for human life––the transformation of people into property so 84 Bould outlines Mark Sinker’s understanding of Afrofuturism, described in Sinker’s article in The Wire before Dery first coined the term, in “The Ships Landed Long Ago.” “The Comet” also initiates Darryl Smith’s vision of “African American futurist literature” as “meta-asmipocalyptic in character,” containing “narratives of historical culmination” that “remark upon the apocalyptic nature of the actual African diaspora,” which for Du Bois is closely linked to European colonial oppression (216). 85 Reiland Rabaka links the comet’s violence to the “then recent bloodbath of World War 1” (26); Amy Kaplan writes that the “comet brings the war home into the modern metropolis and into the heart of black and white families” (209). 145 that genocide could be viewed as a mildly inconvenient wastage of potential work––that the trade in slaves engendered. 86 The history-instigating yet all too frequently elided events of slavery, apocalyptic for those they tore from one world and thrust into a new one, are also the unremarkable history whose legacy still keeps global capitalism in motion by providing bodies whose labor perpetuates the global technological regime. 87 In the figure of Jim, Du Bois reminds us that the equation between racialized subjects and “refuse” is not over in the twentieth century, for Jim’s position within New York’s capitalist structure is that of a life that can easily be spared. He is sent into the vault because the danger to a “more valuable man”––a white man––would not be worth the risk (252). Amy Kaplan writes that “[i]n his descent into the bowels of the earth, the black working man from Harlem evokes the work of colonial laborers and links them to the financial center of New York,” connecting Jim’s position as a lackey with the labor and other resources that are subsumed by colonial capital (207). His race makes him expendable and denies him access to the accumulation of resources through which the bank that employs him plans to guarantee a future. Banned from access to full humanity by his race, Jim is “outside the world” and so the world’s end—talk of which he overhears from white people who address him directly only to assign him a task—does not end him (251). Du Bois 86 In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman offers an evocative and succinct description of this process: “Death wasn’t a goal of its own but just a by-product of commerce, which has had the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead” (31) 87 The other early twentieth century work that entered the emergent canon of black science fiction through Dark Matter, George Schuyler’s 1931 Black No More, considers racial futurity even more explicitly as a capital investment. In that satirical novel, the future of racialization looks set to disappear when whiteness goes up for sale. But it is the black protagonists who profit, giving up on racial history to buy up a future of access to whiteness in which color will be fetishized. Tracing the history of the black future from Schuyler’s origin point would highlight the same themes of interracial heterosexuality and the figurative politics of black reproduction that thinking through Du Bois does, but the novel’s comic edge would add a different tone. 146 suggests that, though black futurity has not been considered a good investment, its capacity to survive in the face of outrageous risk may make it a good bet in the long run. And so Jim sets out to capitalize on the death of the white future in order to repair the damages caused by the white past’s ownership of him and his. For a while he roams the ruins of a world that excluded him, sole participant in a posthuman future where he satisfies his hunger on the high-class cookery of “ghost-haunted halls” that “yesterday, would not have served [him],” tasting at last the fruits of the labor he and his colonized cohorts represent (255). In holding out the future to a black living subject in the midst of death, Du Bois transforms white modernity’s relentless insistence on forward motion into a death march, turning the experience of historical apocalypse into a source of strength and bringing about a transcendent culmination of black history through Jim’s elevation. Du Bois’s text works simultaneously with and against the official time lines of modernity, combining its radical critique of white culture both with Jim’s pleasure in finally enjoying that culture’s advantages and with an apparent glorification of reproductive heterosexuality. Du Bois suggests that––after the destruction of the world as we know it––a new humanity must be bred in order to solidify Jim’s inheritance. That future is to be born from a utopian act of interracial heterosexual intercourse. 88 Jim will move from standing outside the world to creating a new one through sexual congress with Julia, on whose white female body a new breed of transracial reproductive futurism will be engendered. Julia’s 88 The intersections of Du Bois’s personal race/gender/transnational politics are explored by Alys Eve Weinbaum in “Interracial Romance and Black Internationalism” and by Michele Elam and Paul D. Taylor in “Du Bois’s Erotics.” 147 devotion to a maternal future enables Jim to experience an empowered masculinity that contains a connection to his racial history. She looked upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood—his sorrow and sacrifice. She saw him glorified. … In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leapt the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly sceptres hovering to his grasp. (264-5) Du Bois refigures the racial past here so that, instead of being defined by “shackles” and exclusions, Jim will contain African majesty in his status as the new Adam. No longer forced into the “crass and crushing and cringing” place we saw him take up at the story’s beginning, through transcendent union with the white woman, his “sceptre” of phallic patriarchy will be “ghostly” no more. Gazing toward Jim, Julia reaches for her maternal future, seeing herself as “primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life” (264). Without the surround of a society to enforce them, race- and class-based divisions fall away so that Jim is “no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be” (264). Having grieved and accepted the end of the world, here the white woman embraces her position as transcendental breeder, last and first woman in the “race to be.” This conception of a post-racial state, in which humanity will no longer be granted to whites at the expense of colonized and racialized people because racial politics will have been bred out, relies on the inscription of “primal” gender divisions through which the future can be reproduced. Like the imperial mothers of the feminist utopian fictions I analyzed in my first chapter, in this moment the woman understands herself to be the source material from which a new and 148 better future will emerge. Out of her body will come the personification of an improved human race. The utopian future Du Bois evokes in “The Comet” is a eugenic one, biologically shaping the races that could inherit the earth by claiming Jim and Julia as the fittest survivors, for all that it does not participate in the white supremacy that has categorized most eugenic projects. A white future and a heteronormative future were often close to the same thing in the ideas about ‘improving the human stock’ that trafficked among genetic researchers working in the wake of Darwin. For sexual reformists and feminist birth control advocates, and the architects of American immigration law, ‘good’ reproducers were primarily those who would bring America’s racial mix closer to a universal whiteness. 89 However, in 2004’s Unnatural Selections, Daylanne English demonstrates that, in the early twentieth century USA, eugenic calls for “interventions in individual reproductive lives in the name of collective (racial or national) progress” (29) were “not necessarily accompanied by a platform of white supremacy, or, for that matter, even racial purity” (17). African American projects for racial uplift and improvement also followed the strategy of encouraging “better breeding,” leveraging heterosexual intercourse to improve the material and social conditions of black Americans rather than to maintain a white supremacist status quo. In addition to “The Comet,” Du Bois’s 1928 novel Dark Princess also focuses on this belief in “racial uplift through selective breeding” (English 16). In that novel, a half-Indian, half-African American baby is declared by “‘The Great Central Committee of Yellow, Black, and Brown’ … to be 89 See Nancy Ordover’s American Eugenics and Alexandra Minna Stern’s Eugenic Nation for details of the ways eugenic projects for race, class, and sexual ‘improvement’ were instituted in the twentieth-century USA. Marouf Arif Hasian traces the extent to which eugenic practices constituted a rarely questioned aspect of British and American common sense in the early twentieth century, including the particular tendencies it involved for women and African Americans, in The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. 149 the ‘Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds!’ ” (cited in English 43). Like Jim, this child is set to inherit the earth when the reign of whiteness fails. “The Comet” seems to glorify interracial hetero-futurity as a potential eugenic utopia made possible by the literal destruction of the world of racial inequality. But Jim and Julia’s vision of glorious prospects for a new racial future does not hold; the arresting power of the racial present intervenes. As Jim and Julia move toward consummation, they are interrupted by the real world in the body of Julia’s fiancé and father, wealthy white male figures who have the real power to control Julia’s reproductive capacities and define a eugenic national future. Jim narrowly escapes a lynching and he steps “outside the world” again, “shrinking” as he goes (268). Heterosexuality cannot conquer racism after all. The black women who appears at the end of “The Comet,” presumably to prove more reliable than the perfidious Julia, suggests that Du Bois’s real eugenic hope for a post-apocalyptic future lies in intraracial heterosexuality, in a baby uncontaminated by whiteness’s corruption. Yet the mother of Jim’s child does not immediately lead him back behind the veil to repopulate Harlem as a site of positive, fully black, pan-African futurism. Instead, Du Bois kills the offspring of the man and woman of color he depicts. A woman mounted to the platform and looked about, shading her eyes. She was brown, small, and toil-worn, and in one hand lay the corpse of a dark baby. The crowd parted and her eyes fell on the colored man; with a cry she tottered toward him. (268) For my project, the most important figures in the story are this tragic couple, mother and child. The dead baby demonstrates how, even in the face of overpowering reproductive rhetorics, breeding for some is productive of death rather than birth; it stands as evidence for the damage that the history of racial slavery has done to the future of blackness. Yet Jim’s 150 wife shows how the vision of post-racial post-apocalyptic futurity that Jim and Julia experience, foreclosed though it may be, blinds both them and us with its light. For, clearly, this woman somehow survived without the transportational resources held by Julia’s family, and therefore the two Jim and Julia were not the only New Yorkers who made it through the comet’s transit. Du Bois seemingly has no need to offer us a rationalization for the continued existence of Jim’s wife. Did she get out of New York? Was she, too, underground? How did she slip through the gaps though her baby did not? Does she just not need to breathe as much as other people? The woman appears in the story as little more than a holder for her dead baby, proof that Jim will be forgiven for wanting to father humanity with Julia. But if this nameless black women fails as a signifier for reproductive futurity or a racialized eugenic future, we should ask what meanings she carries in and of herself. If we look for the future as she might have imagined it, what will we find? 3.3 | Motherless Futures, Futureless Mothers “The Comet” shows Du Bois imagining either an elevated future of post-racial reproductivity or no future at all. Either way lies the end of black culture and identity, something to which his life’s work of activism for racial uplift would seem to make him adamantly opposed. The survival of Jim’s wife is the only moment in the story that allows a future to be imagined outside of that binary. In “The Damnation of Women,” also printed in Darkwater, Du Bois wrote that he saw that he saw “more of future promise in the betrayed girl-mothers of the black belt than in the childless wives of the white North,” and sought to “ward [black] race suicide … by honoring motherhood” even outside marriage (189). The mention of “race suicide” hearkens to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 proclamation that the 151 “wilful sterility” of white women was endangering the glorious future of the white American race, while excessive nonwhite children were in danger of taking over. 90 Du Bois reminds us that the association of properly heterosexual, marital reproductive behavior with a racially desirable future is not exclusive to colonizing whiteness. That the “honor” of marital motherhood might not be the chosen path for any given black woman seems to have been an impossibility for him, since its willful avoidance is associated with profligate whiteness and since only the “betrayed” would be mothers without marriage. Yet the negativity of the future Jim’s wife and her baby represent undermines these representations of an African American reproductive future. She shares race and origin with Jim, but––inescapably attached to a baby that did not make it––she cannot capitalize on the empty world as Jim did. Jim’s wife seems worthy of “honor” since she has done her duty to keep the black race going; but she is betrayed by Jim’s contextless romance with postracial heterofuturity. He never thinks of her as he rises above his ancestry to make the future with Julia. The racial dead end that she and her baby embody is perhaps a sort of “racial suicide” that embodies a critique of Jim’s misplaced virility, his seduction by whiteness. Black feminist writings about reproduction clarify the extent to which racialized exclusion from futurity has been lived in gender-specific ways, and demonstrate why an Afrofuturism that does not centralize gender and sexuality is likely to breed futures that reproduce gender-based oppression. Anne Stavney writes that Du Bois and other black male writers of the Harlem Renaissance tended to advocate for racial renewal by using the image 90 Valerie Rohy writes that “Childbearing, gender roles, and sexual choices were for Roosevelt a national and racial concern integral to the future of white America. Then as now, the white claim to reproductive futurity served as the homophobic project that would install straight familialism as the only thinkable tomorrow” (94). 152 of “the black mother” as a “symbol for primacy and rebirth” that would connect “the past” of “racial and geographical origins” with “the future in terms of coming generations” (543-4). “The Comet” depicts that narrative as a failure, but nevertheless relies on it. Stavney also points out that figurative uses of black maternity in the service of a masculine Afrofuturism “rarely attend to the actual social and economic conditions encountered by most black women of their era” (544). Women’s writings of the Harlem Renaissance, which address racial futurity as a matter of personal realism rather than extrapolative possibility, narrate those social and economic conditions and their consequences. In Nella Larsen’s 1928 Quicksand, Helga Crane grasps after futurity of and for herself and ends up beaten down by the demands of others––whether they be exoticizing, insisting on a respectability that precludes desire, or keeping her in her place through religion. Becoming reproductive is for Helga an experience of sinking, an admission or capitulation to the fact that she can have no autonomous future, a kind of death. Neither breeding a eugenic future of upwardly mobile racial eugenics nor giving in to an almost animalistic role in reproduction can save her. Hortense Spillers’s powerful essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” explicates this double bind by tracing the operations of racial gendering to slavery’s unspeakable violence. Spillers shows how slavery’s “ungendering” of “female flesh”––dehumanizing black women as commodities with the capacity to breed––has been enacted as exclusion from the normative gender of the nuclear family (214). Using the grammar of psychoanalysis to show how African American women have been positioned in a negative relationship to femininity, Spillers demonstrates that the psychoanalytic language of (white) subjectivity is undone when it is forced to describe a material history in which people were not only inscribed into the dominant social order in abject positions, but denied 153 access to that social order’s definitions of human subjectivity altogether. They are not meant to survive within that story, even while the story would not be speakable without them. As Spillers puts it, “[m]y country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (203). Many critical analyses of reproductive temporality in the wake of slavery center on the intolerable dynamics by which refusing to survive has sometimes been the only way to lay claim to a future not owned by someone else. Toni Morrison’s 1988 Beloved, drawing from the story of Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter rather than let her endure slavery, has become a literary touchstone for the ways histories of slavery haunt. 91 A mother separates the reproduction of the social relations that dehumanize her from the reproduction of her child, resisting by giving in to the lack of value placed on her body; refusing to breed a future for slavery is the only possible route to freedom she can perceive. Morrison tells us that Beloved’s is “not a story to pass on,” because too many ghosts and too many pasts might render the present unlivable or unrecognizable (275). For scholars working with this ghostly paradigm, that unrecognizability and its potential to change the present is essential. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon transfigures Morrison’s haunting prose into sociology and writes that the reader/scholar’s task will be “to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future” (22). But, still following Lorde’s invocation of the “now that can breed / futures,” I am interested in what it means when countermemories arrive not only through reckoning with death and its after effects, 91 Gilroy writes of Margaret Garner’s choice in terms of a “discourse of black spirituality” containing a “utopian truth content that projects beyond the limits of the present” so that the “choice of death over bondage articulates a principle of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking” (68). 154 but by cheating it: when stories are passed on, futures are bred, and somehow something other than a recapitulation of pre-existing social relations is created. I have used Du Bois’s 1920 story to lay out some of the norms and complexities of racialized futurity. To bring forth the mother and baby’s potential to deviate from that narrative requires moving into her future: to dreams of different presents, alternate narratives, de-periodization. Following Kara Keeling’s work in “Looking for M––: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry From the Future,” I want to ask when the time for these out-of-sync figures might be, given their resistance to the convergence of straight reproductive and historicist temporalities. Keeling uses Marx’s invocation of “poetry from the future” to insists that the when of those lost to imperial and reproductive timelines could have its own rhythms, worlds, and poetries, though these may not be available to the scholarly seeker whose institutional perch is always to some degree contained by normative time. Keeling writes that “[f]rom within the logics of reproductive futurity and colonial reality, a black future looks like no future at all” (578). But that absence of futurity is a starting point for her analysis, not an ending. Drawing on Franz Fanon’s work, Keeling connects the impossibility of incorporating blackness into white straight time to a colonial temporality that reaches far beyond US borders, working within a transnational Afrofuturist paradigm to figure black political possibility as a radical kind of futurity, one that does not participate in official time lines. She argues that, through the disappearance of the character M––, the documentary film The Aggressives “seeks to enforce a straight time but fails to do so because its own subjects disturb that time by repeatedly pointing to the violences that guarantee it” (577). For Keeling, being without a future is not just a position of exclusion but also a point from which important, political disruptions of normative temporalities can be 155 enacted (567). Keeling finds that the forces that corrode and disrupt time, so that the meanings of futurity and humanity themselves are brought into question, are as important as the concrete visions of better possibilities that activism for material improvements in the condition of oppressed people might bring about. The figure of the queer in Edelman’s work and Franz Fanon’s image of the native as “corrosive element” within colonialism are the two points from which Keeling triangulates this disruption (567). But Du Bois’s marginal, failed black mother is also suggestive in this context, undoing the normativity of the narrative within which she barely appears. The when of Jim’s wife is not the secure insistence of maternal origin and futurity that both Julia and white feminist utopians at the turn of the twentieth century set forth. If futures are not bred through modes that ensure the predictability of a straight time tied to the accumulation of resources gained through exploitation, what is their relationship to reproduction? 3.4 | Deviant Blood Lines: Capital and Consumption in Jewelle Gomez and Octavia Butler’s Queer Black Feminist Futures I answer my own question by turning to works that breed black futures in Lorde’s sense by severing the common-sense connection between heterosexuality and reproduction, replacing the logics of genealogical blood lines with deviant visions and building new kinds of pleasures. In “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” Spillers writes that, when she has sought “any discursively rendered experience concerning the sexuality of black women in the United States, authored by themselves, for themselves,” she has encountered “a disturbing silence.” She goes on to write that “black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb”; in the racial discourses through 156 which sex and power speak themselves, “the black woman disappears as a legitimate subject of female sexuality” because … enslavement relegated them to the marketplace of the flesh, an act of commodification so thoroughgoing that the daughters labor even now under the outcome … the black person mirrored for the society around her what a human being was not” (155). Spillers uses literal and metaphorical dehumanizations to articulate the absence of discourse that attends the denial of black female subjectivity within dominant languages and frameworks for thinking sexuality. The imaginaries to which I now turn similarly engage these gendered dehumanizations not by seeking a return to the human or a future for it, but by extending metaphoric nonhumanity into imaginative fiction and laying claim to the possibility of antihumanist pleasures along with nonheterosexual reproductive sexualities and temporalities. From a straight perspective, the importance of sexual pleasure to futurity is obvious and straightforward. Pleasure is useful, and its presence within social relations keeps them going––not just via sexual reproduction, but also through the pleasures of consumption that make life within capitalism fun. By making physically enjoyable the sex acts that will lead to the production of new human beings, sexual pleasure has evolved, so the common-sense logic goes, to keep the human future going in a straight line. The absence of pleasure from many reproductive sexual acts, the possibility of reproduction that does not commence with hetero sex, and the spending of sexual pleasure in nonreproductive directions, are all marginal, irrelevant deviations. 92 92 I discuss this perspective at greater length in my first chapter’s discussion of Lee Edelman’s analysis of P D James’s 1992 novel The Children of Men. The productive role of sexual pleasure in the creation of queer worlds, communities, and futures will be theorized more deeply in the next chapter, where it is the central focus. 157 Nonstraight modes of being, on the other hand, reproduce themselves by affinity rather than biology. This is a mode to which pleasure is necessarily central, and not just as an alibi. Queers reproduce by recruiting, and although that recruitment relies on somebody doing the biological work of reproduction that will result in new potentially-queer youth, queer sexual pleasure in and of itself is what creates queer relationalities, people, and communities. Elizabeth Freeman argues that the continued production of queer modes of being is not only a matter of sexual or social contact between individuals, but that “queers survive through the ability to invent or seize pleasurable relations between bodies” and that “[w]e do so … across time” (“Erotohistoriography” 58). In the hands of cultural producers committed to the politics of survival against the odds, this connection of survival to pleasure, where “pleasurable relations between bodies” are what makes life possible, sets forth new common-sense relationships to time, race, and reproduction. Jewelle Gomez and Octavia Butler are two such cultural producers, who have made the pleasurable relationships between marginalized bodies into centers for reimagined visions of gender, race, history, and futurity. Their respective appropriations of vampire mythology in novels that also function according to the logics of science fiction repurpose some of the figures whose histories and connotations I traced in the first half of this chapter. In complex and sometimes ambiguous ways that go further than any simple narrative of reclamation, they make possible alternative visions of racialized reproductive temporality. Butler and Gomez speak to different contexts, but here I am primarily interested in their interconnections, in what their insertion of vampire reproduction does to make familial and 158 historical timelines, and color lines, deviate. 93 They envisage reproductive scenes and new biologies to map out alternative relational modes between production and reproduction, routed explicitly through pleasure in ways that challenge not only the common tropes of vampire mythology and science fiction but also the associations borne of AIDS that link queer sharings of bodily fluids inexorably with the reproduction of viruses that carry death. And, in doing so, they reconfigure the meanings of racialization in the history of the American color line and of global postcolonial politics––twisting the connections between blackness and technologies of futurity, between consumption and exploitation and reproduction. Since at least Marx’s 1867 publication of Capital, vampires have been used as figures for a capitalist mode of production that perpetuates itself by appropriating the life-force of those it exploits. The undead who suck blood to prolong unlife signify fear, desire and exploitation; Marx wrote of the deadly monstrosity of capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour” in an analogy that has been enthusiastically taken up since (367). 94 This analogy shows capital seeking immortality via expansion, reproducing its future while leaving a trail of the dead. Like the alluring vampires of fiction and film, capital continues to seduce its victims, recruiting workers to consume the labor of distantly and locally located others in the form of ever-increasing quantities of shiny commodities, accumulating wealth by siphoning value between parts of the world. 93 My methodology in bringing these texts together owes a lot to the logics of juxtaposition I have learned from my work in new media: see the closing chapter of this dissertation. 94 Donna Haraway writes that “the vampire” in culture has become inseparable from “the marauding figure of unnaturally breeding capital, which permeates every whole being and sucks it dry in the lusty production and vastly unequal accumulation of wealth” (Modest_Witness 215). Rob Latham’s 1997 book Consuming Youth links this vampire figure to the technological cyborg metaphors also common in Marx, reading the combination as symptomatic of neoliberal youth cultures. 159 The metaphor of capital as vampire reminds us that human resources are not, generally, renewable. Gomez and Butler’s works highlight unresolved contradictions in the ways pleasure and consumption are lived under capital, and glimmer with more and less desirable prospects for utopia and change. The changed meanings of reproduction in these queer vampire stories also change the functions of temporality and futurity. As Eshun emphasizes in his analyses of Afrofuturism, the future is a commodity that is highly in demand, sold to the highest bidder as the epitome of continual change and expansion. Both novelists connect their vampires to ecological models of consumption without exploitation. Instead of accumulation and expansion carried forth on a straight line at the cost of life and labor for all those who do not profit from it, human blood and labor appear as renewable resources, reproducing through the transmission of blood not as genetics but as an exchange of pleasure. These vampires refuse to alienate the blood they take from the people it belongs to, framing the exchange within what, for Gomez, is an explicitly lesbian and feminist vision of a sexual pleasure that refuses predation, objectification and exploitation (xiv). Immortality becomes a metaphor not for the access to futurity for some at the cost of others but for survival against overwhelming odds. The two novels use vampire immortality and reproductive consumption to mediate between past and present in fairly different ways. Queer black feminist Gomez’s 1991 collection of vampire tales, The Gilda Stories, begins with slavery and works through black history at intervals that culminate in a seemingly apocalyptic future, creating a queer reinscription of racial history and reproductivity. Gomez works within an explicitly lesbian subcultural and political framework, describing the character of Gilda as embodying “a feminist perspective that challenge[s] the traditional narratives about women of color and 160 about lesbians” (x). Building a model of vampire futurism that owes much to Audre Lorde’s writings on the erotic as a source of power and connection for women of color, she makes the often-critiqued utopian prospects of 1980s lesbian feminism’s view of sexual pleasure work on a larger canvas that includes the history of race in the Americas, with respect not only to blackness but also to indigeneity. Gomez cites Octavia Butler, by far the best known black female writer of science fiction and a consistent critic of American and global racial histories and futures, as one of The Gilda Stories’ greatest influences (xi). Yet Butler’s work has always tended to emphasize the impossibility of getting away from the gendered biologies of reproduction, often focusing on women whose complicated positions resolve in reluctant contracts to continue reproducing the future that they find oppressive, yet to which they can imagine no alternative 95 Butler’s last novel, Fledgling (2005), moves away from that theme to present a mutation of vampire mythology that also contains a queer variation on narratives of racialized reproduction. Butler invokes an alternative reproductive futurity out of the always compromised realm of science and technology––specifically genetics and eugenics––complicating Gomez’s utopian tendencies. Both novels open with scenes of bloodletting that are emblematic of the refigured futures to come, reversing the gendered and racialized power relations to which we are accustomed. Vulnerable figures––a young runaway slave girl, a child injured to the point of death––show their teeth, and set alternative narratives in motion. When Gilda begins, it is 1850 in Louisiana. An unnamed “Girl,” who will later become the vampire named Gilda, has 95 An important example is Dana in the 1978 novel Kindred, who bears no children herself but midwives a child of rape to be her ancestor even though the child’s mother tells her she would rather die. 161 escaped from slavery and is hiding in a cellar. A white man comes upon her hiding place and tries to rape her, and the book’s first blood is spilt: He bent forward on his knees, stiff for conquest, already counting the bounty fee and savoring the stories he would tell. ... He started to enter her, but before his hand finished pulling her open, while it still tingled with the softness of her insides, she entered him with her heart which was now a wood-handled knife. ... She felt the blood draining from him, comfortably warm against her now cool skin. It was like the first time her mother had been able to give her a real bath ... a cleansing. ... Looking down at the blood soaking her shirt and trousers she felt no disgust. It was the blood signaling the death of a beast and her continued life. (11-12) Narrating violence in surprisingly intimate terms, Gomez portrays Gilda/Girl’s death-blow as a work of nature. Her weapon becomes her body, the knife of her heart a necessary means to reclaiming the body that the slaveholder would alienate from her. He expects her to be nothing but a source of “bounty,” a personal “conquest” to match the cultural erasure to which her people have already been subjected. But she turns back to “enter” him with a literal erasure, even finding a sensual and reassuring pleasure in the violence, which rekindles a maternal connection slavery has broken for her. The scene is simultaneously empowering and disturbing, setting up our expectations for the world the rest of the novel is going to create. Traditional vampires instrumentalize human lives as means to their own perpetuation, killing with indiscriminate ease. But here Gilda/Girl, not yet a genuine vampire, claims her own subjectivity by draining the blood from one who sees a young black girl as less than human. As Shannon Winnubst describes in detail, Gomez “turns the structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism in classical vampire narratives against themselves” (9). Where Dracula and his successors figure as sexual predators 162 consuming feminized bodies, in Gomez the victims have a chance to bite back, and to do so without becoming monstrous. It is the white rapist who is the real vampire here, the one who sucks up and uses others for his own nefarious ends. Gilda/Girl identifies him immediately as one of “those whom her mother had sworn were not fully human” (10), who “suck up the world and don’t taste it” (11). Looking to “open” and consume a black female body he cannot perceive as unconsenting, even as he prepares to sell Gilda/Girl’s life for money and her story (reframed as his) for masculine notoriety, he is an avatar for intersecting systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capital. His is the vampirism of rampant consumption, colonial expansion, and whiteness. This vampirism created the world Du Bois depicted Jim as “outside” in “The Comet”: the world that makes reproduction a terrifying double bind for those who are not meant to survive as its primary subjects. Bathing in this man’s blood is a rebirth for Gilda/Girl, who thereby not only escapes but also strikes down the systems that subject her. It is a “cleansing” that enables her “comfortabl[e]” “continued life,” the future of peaceful immortality she will eventually gain as a different kind of vampire. Gilda is not innocent of death or violence––but, despite this, Gomez creates a utopian bloodlust from the ways in which, having known dehumanization and rebellion, she shows a respect for those whose life force she consumes that this man could never attain. Fledgling also opens with its protagonist’s consumption of another’s life force, but it is a scene far less easy to interpret as empowering analogy, and far more disturbing. The narrator, unnamed as yet, awakes in darkness and pain with no memory. All she knows is hunger, and she satiates it at the first opportunity: 163 I heard something coming toward me, something large and noisy, some animal … It came to me like a tame thing, and I lay almost out of control, trembling and gasping, and thinking only, food! … It touched my wrist, my face, my throat … making noises of its own. … I seized the animal … tasted its blood, smelled its terror. I tore at its throat with my teeth until it collapsed. Then, at last, I fed, gorged myself on the fresh meat that I needed. (1-2). Soon enough we learn that the “animal” she killed is a man named Hugh Tang, a member of her extended family who has come to try and rescue Shori from the wreckage of her home after it is destroyed by white supremacist vampires. But, for the first chapters, all we know of Shori is her hunger and the power it lends to her determination to survive, no matter what the cost. After her meal, this tiny black child is rescued by a large, hairy, white man in a car, latches on to his neck, and feasts. She seems to be bleeding him dry, but we learn that this connection—sexual like all vampire loves, and in this case offering a cross-age desire that is disarmingly queer for the grown man who finds himself caught up in it––has initiated a symbiotic relationship that will extend his life as well as hers. Butler’s vampires, who call themselves the Ina, are not undead or immortal but a long-lived parasitic species who exist in “mutualistic symbiosis” with the humans whose blood they drink (63). Ina saliva contains a “powerful hypnotic drug” that renders human “symbionts” “ highly suggestible and deeply attached to the source of the substance” (73). In exchange for an addiction whose termination would end their lives, symbionts receive intense sexual pleasure when they are fed from; they grow “healthier, stronger, and harder to kill” and their lives are “lengthen[ed] by several decades” (63). The Ina need their symbionts to live, and the humans come to need their Ina, yet humans are always to some extent in danger. Butler’s exchange of blood transforms consumption into reproduction, messing up the correspondences of capital, 164 eugenics, gender, and race––refusing to turn away from or utopianize the darker side of this pleasurable interaction. The Gilda stories are less concerned with scientific temporalities and more with the politics of historical time. Gomez’s vampire protagonists emerge from a subaltern American history in which those conventionally rendered futureless are given immortality. Gilda shares vampire longevity with her Lakota lover, Bird; before Gilda/Girl becomes a vampire they share their peoples’ oral histories as they imagine the “rhythm of life without bondage” (10). 96 In vampire life, both are committed to creating that life without bondage, maintaining connections and collectivities with black and indigenous people in and beyond the US. Although taking blood invokes the logics of white vampire capitalism for some of their peers,for Gilda and Bird vampirism participates in a politics of collective struggle against racist domination. 97 Bird travels to connect with indigenous peoples, “pulling together the strands of knowledge about her nation” (177); Gilda searches for a “link” to her people in “each new place” she lives (196), always tying herself to black communities and taking on human obligations within them. She runs a beauty parlor, helps organize a women’s church group, and joins black radical political and artistic movements. These immortals become the “living history” of their people’s struggles (177). Gomez takes the dead European conceit of 96 In her recent article “Queer Theory and Native Studies,” Andrea Smith discusses the possibility of such a rhythm as a mode through which Native critique would undo the linear time frame on which queer critiques of reproductive futurism rely: “Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past, and future become co- present” thereby enabling participants to know that “we lived differently before” and “can live differently in the future” (50). 97 Capitalist vampires in Gomez include Fox, a black pimp, and Eleanor, a rich white lady in late-nineteenth- century San Francisco, whose pleasure is in sucking not only blood but all agency and humanity from their victims––young sex workers for Fox, naive lovers for Eleanor. There are also Sorel and Anthony, queer white male vampires who teach Gilda and Bird the way of blood exchange. They always remain disconnected from the humans who are, in the final analysis, prey to them, however––unlike Gilda and Bird, for whom human/ vampire is never the primary distinction on which they base their lives. 165 eternal vampiric life and invests it with a temporal significance that emerges from different traditions, providing communities whose past has been lost or stolen with a link to it via the stretched-out life narratives of immortality. Gilda’s vampire sire (a woman hundreds of years old) tells her that “[t]he real dream,” the most important purpose for blood-sharing immortals, is “to make a world” (44). Gilda’s stories tell of her discovering and creating that world, of the decisions she makes about what kind of world it should be. The future her vampirism breeds is in no uncertain terms a queer one, anticipating many of the insights and aspirations of the movement in queer theory toward what Roderick Ferguson named “queer of color critique.” In the language Roderick Ferguson borrows from Toni Morrison to intersect women of color feminism and Marxist historical materialism, these vampires intimate an unstable, imperfect and yet nevertheless utopian “something else to be.” Citing Lorde, Ferguson insists that “we must recognize that we need each other” (110). For vampires and those who nourish them, this might be a different kind of need to the death-dealing consumptive necessities that capitalist vampirism propagates. This need to consume others’ bodies and labor would not use up the consumee, reproducing interdependence rather than, or at least in addition to, exploitation in what Butler names as symbiosis. Natasha Tinsley redefines “queer” in a 2008 essay by updating the logic of Lorde’s litany for survival. What makes queerness matter for her is that it activates the pleasure relations between those who were never meant to survive. It is “a praxis of resistance,” the need or desire “to love your own kind when your own kind is supposed to cease to exist” (199). This is the kind of queer possibility that Gomez’s vampirism activates: the love of subjects who are supposed to be erased for others like them, in acts of pleasure that flow between consumers and consumees who are linked through 166 race, community, sexuality, love. Gomez reinterprets the imagery of science fiction’s extended timelines, in which we go back in time to remember history and projecting a timeline forward to unpleasant extrapolations of capitalist modernity’s story of development, to make that form of queerness happen for more than a moment, more than a memory. She makes that temporality self-reproducing, immortal. That Butler’s reimagining of vampire mythology is also an intervention into matters of queer and racialized futurity is not as obvious as in The Gilda Stories. Where Gomez’s vampires retain connections to their human origins and participate in racialized histories according to their natal allegiances, Butler’s are depicted as a separate species independent of and parasitic on humanity. Like most vampires, the Ina are whiter than white, their pallor linked to their inability to tolerate sunlight. Fledgling’s protagonist, Shori, is protected from the sun by dark skin she was given by genetic manipulation carried out in cooperation between her white Ina grandmothers and black human mother. She provides a technological intervention of African humanity into this science-fiction version of moribund European vampirism. Shori’s blackness is an artifact of technology; the Ina effectively invent blackness as futurity, breeding it into their line in order to help them survive. That genealogy is not without its disturbing connections, for Shori is 53 in the early twenty-first century and arrived as a child from Europe. Her mothers, we must assume, were doing their genetic research amid the genocidal triumphs of the 1930s and 40s. They expect the black future to be reproduced through a very restrictive, biologized heterosexuality in which Shori will “mate” with a group of Ina brothers whose scent she finds irresistable, bringing the deviant lines of Butler’s linking of vampire futurity to queer sex back into straight reproduction. Yet, in a context where blackness is structurally embedded as an impediment to survival, her 167 vision of vampire eugenics is a significant intervention in itself. Shori’s vampire family claim repeatedly that “[h]uman racism meant nothing to the Ina because human races meant nothing to them” (148), but the novel insists that this is not and can never be the case, embedding a critique of the racist discourse of colorblindness in its science fiction premise. Horrified at the interracial and interspecies miscegenation that produced Shori, several Ina plot to kill her and all who were involved in her creation. A large part of the novel is taken up with a legal battle in which she challenges their racism and wins her own right to exist as a human/Ina hybrid. Like Gilda and Bird, Shori’s racial status causes her to be more aware of her connections to the human than are her Ina peers. She sees race where her fellows refuse to recognize it, which means that she perceives human difference and the power relationships that structure it in ways that her colorblind family cannot. For both Gomez and Butler, racially othered vampire figures blur boundaries between vampire and human, suggesting the possibility of a utopian vampire politics that would be more concerned with collective longevity than with deathly consumption. It should be clear by now that, for both Gomez and Butler, the reconfiguration of vampirism functions as part of a larger Afrofuturistic project to reclaim science fictions’ methodologies for breeding imaginary futures. Butler transfigures the narrative of eugenic futurity that is often taken up in science fiction as a defense of whiteness and colonialism, logics I have spent much time tracing in this dissertation; Gomez reorients the logics of capitalism, showing how racialized populations may be best served to survive them and to insist that they do not extend everywhere. Gilda’s story extends into a projected future where Gomez demonstrates the opposition between her vampirism and the bloodsucking accumulation and alienation into which capital would transform her vampire figures. In a 168 dystopian, apocalyptic earth of 2050, where excessive capitalist exploitation has destroyed the US’s land and people, “the existence of the Vampire” becomes widely known (235). As “Hunters” are sent out to capture those who can give eternal life to the rich, the vampires have become the victims, and Gilda runs from men she recognizes as “essentially the same” as the bounty hunter who tried to rape her as a child (234). In this dystopian future, metaphoric vampirism wins out over the literal, abstract exploitative exchanges over concrete mutualistic ones. The resistance to domination which Gilda and her people embodied could only function in hiding, in the interstices of all-too-powerful social systems, it seems. And yet the vampire utopia is not entirely conquered. Even as she runs from those who persecute her, desperate to avoid becoming a part of vampire capital, Gilda brings hope to a suicidal woman by inviting her into her family and into the living history of African American consciousness that she represents. As the last story comes to a close, Gilda and Bird meet at the ruins of Macchu Picchu. There, they resolve to continue living in the world where they and those like them have “lost land” (250), to bring it what life they can in the form of “stories and dancing again” (251). The connections with colonized peoples that sustain Gomez’s oppositional vampirism allow prospects for utopia to continue to shine even in the most dystopian of contexts. Gomez shows how the subaltern past can create a new kind of future when it is kept alive; she allows her vampire mythology to converge with an ecologically motivated dystopia in order to suggest a concrete set of possibilities for what vampires can make possible. Although Gomez’s conclusion slips toward cliché in its utopian return to origins, it nevertheless offers a powerful sense of what a queer, feminist, multiracial Afrofuturism could make possible. 169 Vampires constitute a kind of time travel, bringing the past into the present and signifying the oxymoronic prospect of an unchanging future. The prevalence of aristocrats and American Civil War veterans among the vampires of popular culture is a telling sign of the kind of memory they most often exist to perpetuate. Gomez and Butler’s vampire fictions transform the conventional and very white imagery of bloodsucking aristocrats, together with science fiction themes of possible futures and genetically modified organisms, into a breeding ground for queer reproductive possibilities. Gilda makes black and indigenous lesbian feminist relationality into an anticapitalist strategy for building a new world in the shell of the old; Shori is the embodiment of a eugenically bred future who takes things into her own hands to fight racism and exploitation and create the world anew. Through immortal vampire sex and queer bloodsucking children, they create timelines that deviate from the ones they inherited, and refuse to be co-opted in the service of a future that will look just like the past. These timelines are not without their problems, for Gomez’s lesbian feminism at times slips into nostalgic idealization of a lost indigenous world, and Butler continues to portray heterosexuality as an inevitable biological imperative. Their works are critical engagements with straight and capitalist temporalities, not negations of them. Their deviant futures begin to be realized only when we read them with one another, with the histories they reframe,and through the nonlinear understanding of temporality that Lorde’s poetry evokes. 3.5 | From the Future I opened this chapter with Audre Lorde’s poetic inscription of a now that can breed futures. I have followed it through several more prosaic representations of what a black future 170 bred out of the inequalities, complicities, and failures of assorted nows might look like. Of course, my own analysis emerges from a present itself bred out of the pasts these texts engaged. From images of Europe’s apocalyptic wastelands during World War One and the consciousness of colonization and commodification, Du Bois bred a heteronormative future of post-racial, eugenic humanity that collapsed when punctured by the sharp image of a black reproductivity that was not meant to survive. Today, the post-racial future that was an ironic utopian dream for Du Bois has become a piece of nationalist propaganda in contemporary liberal US politics. Under a President who is black, technologically enabled, and a science fiction fan, we might presume that the future that forms the normative horizon of American politics will now be, in some ways, Afrofuturistic; yet the radical, transnational, political, counter-capitalist content of Afrofuturistic imaginaries on which this chapter has focused remains resolutely deviant. 98 That a single heterosexual coupling cannot breed a shiny new future on its own was an obvious if not necessarily desirable conclusion for Du Bois, but it has become a mode of predictive common sense in mainstream American political culture. Tavia Nyong’o succinctly accounts for this narrative in the introduction to his history of American discourses of race amalgamation. He discusses how, in the stories told about Barack Obama’s interracial origins, “the long history of sex across the color line—a history utterly commingled with the history of Africans in America … was magically transmogrified into a simple story of redemption in which a single marriage across the color line redeemed a history of slavery” (The Amalgamation Waltz 5). Heteronormative reproductive futurism, 98 Olivia J. Greer has analyzed the contradictions inherent in seeing Obama as an Afrofuturistic figure, drawing on Jennifer DeClue’s work. 171 inflected by a racial discourse that pretends to invoke history while obscuring its persistence in the present, is the narrative into which we are all expected to buy as as the price of an inspirational black first family. Meanwhile, economic crises continue to erupt and the only officially admissible future seems to be one wholly reliant on markets and ever-increasing consumption. When American hegemony and neoliberal capitalism do not look as exclusively white as they once did, it is more important than ever to pay close attention to the radical and critical uses to which racialized narratives of futurity have been put in the distant and not so distant past, and to pay attention to the futures dreamed up by those in the margins, for whom economic and cultural precarity is nothing new. This is why we need to engage Afrofuturistic counterdiscourses through as many modes as possible––to understand how reproduction, futurity, and consumption need not always be put together in the same predictable ways. The vampire narratives from which Gomez and Butler breed their feminist Afrofuturisms contain just a few possibilities for such deviant relationships between past, present, and future. There are many others; an earlier version of this chapter addressed Butler’s Kindred, which relies on heterosexual reproduction to power a narrative in which black woman in the 1970s, married to a white man, goes back in time to ensure the occurrence of the interracial rape that will conceive her great-great-great-grandmother. Overdetermined, this ostensibly straight narrative time catches on itself, bending backward into negative spirals and forward toward rhythms of possibility. In Kindred, Butler confronts us with the persistent logic of normative time, insisting that the logics of reproductive futurism are not easy to leave behind––yet not easy does not mean not possible. The circular temporal narrative Kindred employs is, in the end, very close to the science fiction 172 conventions of time travel in which the logics of linear temporality are questioned only in order to set them more powerfully in place. 99 Butler’s later work in Fledgling gives a stronger sense of how we might think the future queerly while doing justice to the historical intersections of race and reproduction and their power in the present, especially when put together with the queer activist project of Jewelle Gomez’s lesbian vampirism. Both demonstrate that heteronormativity is not the only way to breed a future. If the survival of Du Bois’s anonymous black woman, Jim’s wife, is unrecognizable within the tragically straight racial temporality of “The Comet,” Butler and Gomez uncover some of the deviating lines we might follow in order to tell her story. And if factual and fictional historical depictions of black women’s negotiation of reproduction and sexuality show how often they have been excluded from official time lines that were nevertheless erected on their backs, the extended life narratives of Gilda and Shori, and their empowered and queer relationship to reproduction, reminds us of the persistent presence of the past within the future. In the larger scope of my project, these stories provide a middle ground: between works that turn conventional reproductivities and temporalities against themselves, demonstrating the complications and ambiguities within seemingly straight temporalities, and the momentary temporalities of queer hope and desire that I go on to discuss in the next chapter. If Gomez and Butler imagine queer pleasure as a means to the end of a newly conceived biological economics, the theorists and cultural producers I turn to next engage pleasure as an end in itself and transform its impulses and flows into queer temporal politics. 99 Sherryl Vint discusses Kindred in these terms. She differentiates Butler’s work from the commonplace logics of science fiction time travel because of the intensity with which protagonist Dana engages the present’s formation from the past. I agree with her argument, and yet I also find that considering Kindred in the light of a queer Afrofuturism leaves such an analysis unsatisfying. 173 -4- It is not that I have no future: Gay Sex, Queer Worlds, and Samuel R. Delany’s Science Fiction Can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction? ––José Munoz, Cruising Utopia (2010) [I]f science fiction has any use at all, it is that among all its various and variegated future landscapes it gives us images for our futures ... And its secondary use ... is to provide a tool for questioning those images, exploring their distinctions, their articulations, their play of differences. ––Samuel R. Delany, “The Necessity of Tomorrows” (1984) It is not that I have no future. Rather it fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. ––Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1974) 4.1 | Gay Histories, Queer Futures The deviant futures this project has so far explored include eugenic feminist utopias, dystopian representations of fascist homoerotics, and Afrofuturistic renditions of black female sexuality. None are the first images that come to mind when the word “queer” is spoken. Where do the scenes that have inspired most critical writings on queer times and places––the histories and cultures of gay sexual activity––fit in to this genealogy? The history of ephemeral sexual contact between men has shaped thinking about queer times and spaces even among theorists for whom those are not the primary populations of focus; bathhouses, tearooms, and cruising grounds are at the centre of radical theories on queer publics. 100 One of the most influential archivists of such spaces is Samuel R. Delany, whose 1999 Times 100 See Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 174 Square Red, Times Square Blue lovingly describes working-class men’s sexual contacts in New York porn theaters in an elegy for a milieu lost to gentrification where men came together sexually to “fulfill needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge” (90). Delany’s “yet” suggests some possible future where the sexual needs met by the porn theaters would be at the heart of social organization. As a prolific science fiction writer, Delany has used speculative fiction to contemplate what such a future could be like. I use his work to explore in depth what it means––what kinds of temporalities are created, what kinds of futures formed––when the science fiction mode engages with queer practices and histories, like those of the men in the Times Square theatre, that are often left out of dominant futures. This means exploring a convergence of futurities that center around the idea of making worlds: living and/or thinking in a manner that constructs potential alternative modes of being. Scholars of queer public cultures discover, scrutinize, and validate worlds that already exist, feeling out possible futures from formations and practices of the present, like the sexual acts of men in darkened theaters; science fiction writers imagine alternatives, crafting imaginative blueprints that envisage conditions of possibility for radically different lives. Delany’s two most ambitious science fiction novels, 1974’s Dhalgren and 1984’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand, engage simultaneously in both projects and more. Up to this point, I have approached temporality mainly through models that focus on constructing and critiquing timelines of historical movements, generations, and genealogies. Looking at Delany’s fiction lets me explore how the narrative tactics of science fiction, a genre whose most popular literary and media versions have tended to proffer timelines reliant on unmitigated heterosexuality, can turn against assumptions that the future must be 175 straight––or at least arrived at through heterosexual reproductive logics. 101 This chapter asks what science fiction can add to the body of work that approaches temporality not as a progressive timeline in which the future is a predictable tomorrow, but by conceiving futurity as it is known to historically present thought and feeling. When futures of this kind are thought queerly, the centrality of heterosexual reproduction, and the politics of sexual citizenship with which it is associated, slip out of centrality and into the margins. Delany is read as a theorist of public space by queers, as a postmodernist by literary scholars, as a sometimes iconoclastic participant in African American public discourse, and as a leading genre theorist by science fiction scholars. 102 His interventions into all these fields converge in his creation of queer science fiction worlds that are both grounded in the racial and economic realities of their historical moment of production and extended into relevance well beyond it by the particularities of genre reading and writing. In the narratives and the meta-narratives his fictions unfold, he has used the genre’s conventions and philosophical interventions to map futures that have offered many readers a path to understanding and participating in queer practices of time, history, and social space. Novelist Nalo Hopkinson writes that “[w]hen [she] read Delany’s novel Dhalgren at about twenty-two years old, it blew [her] brain apart and reassembled the bits.” From Delany she learned that “you could use 101 Writers in the feminist science fiction tradition have consistently examined gender and sexuality, but in 2009 Rob Latham edited a special section of the journal Science Fiction Studies on “Queer Science Fiction,” which featured many complaints about “the failure of sex and gender inquiry in SF” (Dorsey, “Some Notes on the Failure of Sex and Gender Inquiry in SF”; see also Andrew Butler, “Heteronormative Futures”). 102 For scholarship on Delany within the tradition of science fiction studies see work by Damien Broderick, Carl Freedman, and James Sallis. Teresa Ebert and Kathleen Spencer detail his science-fictional reflections of and contributions to postmodern and poststructuralist theory. In the context of African American studies, Robert Eliot Fox (Conscientious Sorcerers) has written about Delany’s fiction, Ross Posnock about his autobiographical/critical writings, and Jeffrey Tucker’s 2004 A Sense of Wonder is one of few studies which takes into account the political and theoretical implications of Delany’s work across all the genres he inhabits. The many queer critics interested in his writings on sex and spatiality include Judith Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place), Dianne Chisholm, and Tim Dean. 176 science fiction and fantasy to talk frankly and personally about the sexual and other lives of marginalized people” (Nelson 110). Delany’s works of science fiction laid groundwork for imaginative reconfigurations of sex, love, birth, desire, and death that manage to reproduce neither heterosexuality nor white supremacy. 103 In writing queer cultures into being on the largest imaginable scale, Delany’s science fiction allows heterosexual logics to be cast aside in imagining the future not just of individuals but of earth itself. He sidesteps the problem of imagining utopianly queer worlds, problematic because of its tendency to shut down the future into a narrowly altered model of the present, by making queer affects and day-to-day experiences building blocks for his worlds. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket show two very different strategies for doing that: a narrative incoherence that builds a queer kind of futurity by refusing the temporal logics of plot, and a futuristic set of continually broken and undermined systems of queer institutionality, power, gender, and race. Both proffer futurity as space: urban spatiality in the case of Dhalgren, and an expanded universe of outer space (figuring space travel and colonization while refusing the simplistic frontier narratives that all too often accompany such fantasias) in Stars. Both document futures imagined at particular political and cultural moments––cultural upheaval and social unrest in the late-1960s USA and male sexual communities on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic respectively. In both cases, the kind of queerness created is centered on Delany's experiences in New York's gay male sexual 103 Jo Walton writes that “Delany is a black gay American writer with experience in the gay and left-leaning hippie communities” and that therefore “[i]n the sixties and seventies he could not write openly and directly about his experiences, he had to disguise it as SF.” Though this is a simplified account of Delany’s history, like Walton, I find the alterations Delany makes in the structures of reality to fit his experiences in at least as interesting as the more direct representations of those experiences that have characterized his work since the 1980s. 177 subcultures; in both cases, class and race are at the heart of the ways queerness and futurity coincide. Delany's extensive autobiographical writing makes this context easy to trace. His documentary and autobiographical works have become required reading for queer theorists of public sex and the impact of AIDS on gay male sexual communities. In discussing work written before he took on this role I try to resist nostalgically framing it as “pre-AIDS,” however––in large part because I understand the importance of Delany’s queer futurities to go beyond their significance as representational elegy for what might have been. As works that circulate in an active community of subcultural readers, these writings also have a role in the reproduction of the queer present. For fans, readers, and scholars, of which I am only one, science fiction in general and Delany’s works in particular provided initiation into realms of possibility we would later find articulated in queer theory and activism. They built worlds in our minds that we have been trying to make real in our practices of living ever since. This chapter theorizes the process of that building. I argue throughout that Delany’s queer models of futurity reproduce queer social practices and survival strategies, asking to what extent the model of queer temporality as sexualized ephemera is useful outside specific historical gay male formations and showing how science fiction’s narratives and associated cultures have enabled it, to some extent, to traffic outside them. I first discuss convergences between discourses of world building in queer theory and science fiction, then turn to the novels’ production of historically grounded queer times and spaces. Finally, I discuss the role queer science fictions can play for their readers in constructing imaginative relationships to personal and social worlds and futures. 178 4.2 | Getting Better? Queer Futurity and the Uses of Science Fiction In the winter of 2010, the US mainstream media began to show a surprising interest in queer futures––or, rather, in the absence of personal futures for young queers. A so-called wave of queer suicides inspired a national media focus on the hostile environment that high schools and other institutional structures can be for queers, gender nonconformists, and other deviants. Sex columnist and gay nuclear-family memoirist Dan Savage began a viral video campaign to remind the young that “it gets better.” Lamenting that “[m]any LGBT youth … can't imagine a future for themselves,” the It Gets Better Project urged gay adults to “show” teens “what the future may hold in store for them.” 104 While the range of videos shared on Savage’s website was and is diverse and the project has unimpeachably admirable intentions, the insistence that growing up is all you need to make things better promotes a vision of gay futurity that says everything will be okay for young queers as long as they embrace their destiny as a cog in liberal, multicultural American society. This narrative’s connection to American nationalist discourses was highlighted by the fact that even President Obama, not generally considered a queer figure, offered a contribution to the campaign. Politicized queers responded to It Gets Better by insisting that the narrative of “bullying” on which the campaign focused was a flawed one because it assigned responsibility to certain individuals and not the social forces that render certain ways of being worthy of ridicule. It also marked queer youth as legible only or primarily in their 104 These phrases were current in April 2011; as of February 2012, the site is still going strong, but its wording has changed and now refers to youth being able to see “a positive future for themselves” (“About the It Gets Better Project.”) 179 susceptibility to self-inflicted death. 105 As Jasbir Puar’s work encourages us to see, sometimes outrage and righteous grief at the suffering homophobia causes can be leveraged, via whiteness, into a defense of liberal freedom that ensures “it” will get better for some only at the cost of worse fates for others. 106 I bring up this campaign because of what the progressive life narrative it encourages us to adopt obscures. It is not only the fact that things may not get better for any given individual, as many critiques have insisted, but also that possibilities for thinking and living differently might exist for even the most disenfranchised subjects within the world as it is. In 1994’s “Queer and Now,” Eve Sedgwick described queer theory as a kind of It Gets Better Project when she wrote that the work of theorizing was about keeping the “vividly remembered promises” queer adults made to themselves in childhood. We write, she says, to “tell kids who are supposed never to learn this that, farther along, the road widens and the air brightens: that in the big world there are worlds where it’s plausible, our demand to get used to it” (1). 107 Savage tells his imagined former self that the world has got used to him, that he or it has adapted. But he and his partner can offer hope only through what Sarah Ahmed calls “happiness scripts,” norms to belong to that signify better futures only for those who stay on the right (straight) path: finding a partner, getting married, having children (59). For queer scholars and activists seeking a different definition of a better or 105 See the “Teach-In on Queer Suicide” at Social Text’s online Periscope for a range of responses, including critiques of the idea that 2010 saw an increase in queers killing themselves rather than an increase in the mainstream media’s reporting of such deaths. 106 Puar commented on the “It Gets Better” campaign on the Guardian newspaper’s blog; her stance is given historical and theoretical context by her monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. 107 For reminding me of the relevance and power of Sedgwick’s emotive essay in the context of the 2010 discourse on queer suicides, I am grateful to Kara Keeling’s 2010 Los Angeles Queer Studies Conference keynote. 180 livable life, the idea of making a queer world broadens the meaning of what Sedgwick’s promises can signify: the difference between making individual LGBT lives better in the world as it is and changing the world’s orientation toward norms and bodies. Introducing Fear of a Queer Planet in 1994, Michael Warner declares that heteronormativity’s “totalizing tendency” can only “be overcome by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world” (xvi). In the 1998 article “Sex in Public,” Warner and Lauren Berlant expand on this by describing “queer culture” as “a world-making project, where world differs from group or community because it refers to more people than can be identified” (558). The world they envisage queers making is a lifeworld, a social world of experience that is felt and shared by participants in communal practices––hanging out in bars, fucking in public space, messing around with drugs and gender––other than those the straight world tells them will make their lives better. Bringing forth a similar idea from a different philosophical perspective, Sara Ahmed closes her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness by suggesting that the kinds of unhappiness in which queer, feminist, and racialized subjects find themselves coded by dominant culture is one in which those who “deviate from the paths of happiness” might begin to “make a world” “in which things can happen in alternative ways” (223). In other words, when it fails to get better is when the most interesting things might happen. Ahmed’s ‘something might happen’ is a far more modest hope than Warner’s “necessarily and desirably queer world,” in part perhaps because the normative Anglo-American world has taken on rather a lot of queer aspects between 1994 and 2010, without breaking the strangleholds of straight public culture. 108 Nevertheless, all 108 On the dynamics of homonormativity and neoliberalism in the USA see Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality, and Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages. 181 these suggestive descriptions of possible queer worlds demonstrate the extent to which prospects of alternative futures have a powerful hold on queer imaginations. Transformations could occur, things could happen, different ways of being can be possible and desirable; the world could be made to deviate because of deviant desires. If it shows a rose-tinted view of logics of Enlightenment progress to believe that it is possible for things simply to get better, if it is hopelessly naïve to think that a new world can be made better without participating in logics of domination, we still have the hope that we will continue to make worlds in practice. The scholar whose work offers the most extensive theorization of queer life as the making of worlds is José Muñoz, whose writing on queer futurity invokes counterintuitive temporal models that expand queer presents to counter the the unmarked straightness that so often corresponds to invocations of the future. Muñoz first develops his theory of queer world making in his 1999 book Disidentifications, writing that “through the transformative powers of queer sex and sexuality ... a queerworld is made” (23). For him, queer world making is about making continued and unbowed existence possible within a public sphere that disenfranchises queer of color subjects via far more vectors than just sexuality, and it has a powerful utopian dimension. Muñoz writes that queer performance by artists like Vaginal Creme Davis “offers a utopian blueprint for a possible future while, at the same time, staging a new political formation in the present” (100). His 2009 Cruising Utopia further develops this idea that performative pleasures in the present can contain implicit “blueprints” for utopian worlds within themselves. In clubs, on dancefloors, and at art galleries he finds “performances of queer citizenship” that contain “a sign of an actually existing queer reality, a kernel of political possibility within a stultifying heterosexual present” 182 within which we can locate the “anticipatory illumination” of “social actors performing a queer world” (49). Munoz argues that the anticipatory illuminations of queer world making can even be carried in profoundly negative situations, so that a “leap” to death or an experience of being beaten up can be as much a site of queer utopian (im)possibility as performance, sex, or other kinds of creative praxis. 109 Even when the future is impossible to imagine or in the very process of being radically curtailed, the present still contains a promise that can leap across space and time to make worlds. For Muñoz, whose contributions have enlivened queer futurity at moments when antisocial and negative modes of critique predominate, 110 queer world making is a utopian project of constructing glimpses and fragments of futurity he finds in queer art, sex, performance, longing. That queer world gets theorized through spectatorship at and participation in performance, through sexual comings together, and through the very work of theorizing itself. Muñoz draws on Utopia in Performance by Jill Dolan for the category of the “utopian performative”: momentary, affective utopias which can be created by the collective sensation of affective perfection that theatergoers sometimes experience in the presence of a sublime performance. Dolan writes that such epiphanies have the capacity to “persuade us that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression and unequal power relations lives a future that might be different, one whose potential we can feel as we’re seared by the promise of a present that gestures toward a better later” (7). Dolan argues that these affective utopias are politically radical in and of themselves, which I would question: the first two chapters of my 109 Chapters of Muñoz’s book deal with a “jeté out the window” of Fred Herko’s suicide and a scene of intense violence when a boy is beaten up in Leroy Jones/Amiri Baraka’s play “The Toilet”; Muñoz draws utopian potentialities out of both moments. 110 I engage with queer negativity and its relationship to the imagined future extensively in my first two chapters. 183 dissertation show various examples of utopian feeling transformed into imperialism, fascism, and political repression. But in connecting utopian feeling to experiences of marginalization and the political structures that produce it, as Muñoz and Delany do, a politics that makes pleasure matter can emerge. The practices of connection between people, of sexual feeling, love or lust or art, instigates pleasure, connection, and a searing now that reaches back and forward in time in flashes, breaking up the relevance of the distinction between now and later. Such moments reproduce by leaping across time, when skin prickles in recognition at a sudden understanding––or a turn of phrase or an image brings tears to the eyes and shivers down a spine. The theory of temporality Muñoz mobilizes in order to figure the future as an emanation of present performance comes from the work of Ernst Bloch. Bloch’s massive work, The Principle of Hope, published in German in 1951, defended utopia against charges of naîveté and totalitarianism from within Marxism by insisting on the political potential of longing. Bloch defined the utopian as a “Not-Yet-Conscious”: an impulse of possibility that “wells up utopianly” from even the most untenable of positions and is both a psychic fundamental and the heart of revolutionary struggle (196). Bloch defines hope as the critically utopian impulse that motivates critique, separating longing from the violence its actualization may produce. This conception of utopia as a momentary and mobile negation of oppressions is what Muñoz activates as queer. Bloch argued that “everybody lives in the future,” theorizing that hope for better possibilities to come was a central part of human consciousness and that such hopes manifest in utopian impulses through which people articulate futurity in everything from daydreams to architecture to artistic production (4). Muñoz discusses queer concretizations of such impulses, arguing that minoritarian and queer 184 subjects have the greatest need to engage the Not-Yet-Conscious in order to enable survival, and indeed that queerness itself––as the transformative ideal of a queer world––is located on the horizon we access through illuminatory glimpses that transcend the everyday. For Muñoz, Bloch enables us to think futurity as an unfinishable project, a way of living difference from and in the present that creates intransitive queer possibility. Muñoz’s queer futurities are always ahead of the present, never expected to arrive; they are flashes of longing, epiphanies, and orgasmic moments, not goals to strive toward. The source material of Bloch’s utopian theory is neither so firmly anchored in a present nor so hospitable to queer prioritizations of pleasure and desire. Bloch indeed praises the potentiality of dreaming, but prioritizes what he calls the “concrete” over the “abstract” utopia. The concrete dream is favorable because it “does not play around and get lost” (144); “the utopian function” that Bloch thinks will lead to revolutionary world making is “only immaturely present” and “easily led astray” in the “abstract utopianizing”of individualist desires for better lives amid current social conditions (145). Ruth Levitas writes that for Bloch, “[w]hile abstract utopia may express desire, only concrete utopia carries hope” (67). Muñoz’s queer version of Bloch, on the other hand, finds hope in forms of desire that “play around” and may even be “led astray” from the realms of the properly political. This is how he finds queer futurity in his opening discussion of Andy Warhol and Frank O’Hara’s depictions of drinking Coke: in transmuting this description of a quotidian capitalist practice into “feelings of fun and appreciation,” he reimagines it “as a mode of utopian feeling but also as hope’s methodology” (5). Pleasure here is the only necessary content for utopia, whose processes become the focus regardless of ostensible political relevance. 185 Bloch’s take on pleasure is illuminated by his insistent critique of the psychoanalytic idea that sexuality is the central drive, associating Freud with bourgeois ignorance of the importance of hunger, of material existence, in favor of the “spicy drives” of sex (64). 111 So the dreams from which Bloch develops his ideas of the future come from those yearnings more than from the more complex demands of desire, a relegation of the sexual and other matters of pleasure that is the antithesis of queer world making as Muñoz demonstrates it. 112 For Muñoz as for other queer and queer of color theorists, pleasure is not something that can or should be put aside in favor of focusing on food; though pleasures have no necessarily political content, as I discussed in the previous chapter on black female sexuality and Afrofuturism, the denial of their necessity is a vector of oppression. Bloch sees the need for pleasure as essential in the form of yearnings for home, satisfaction, a completion at which we can’t quite fully arrive; but he has less truck with any form of hope that will allow 111 Bloch writes: “a man dies without nourishment, whereas we can live a little while longer without the pleasures of love-making … The stomach is the first lamp into which oil must be poured. Its longing is precise, its drive is so unavoidable that it cannot even be repressed for long.” And yet “it is seldom mentioned by the doctors ... This omission shows that it is always only the better class of sufferers who have been and are treated psychoanalytically. The problem of finding nourishment was the most groundless of worries for Freud and his visitors” (65). 112 This becomes especially evident in a fascinating passage that underlines the difference between the original Bloch and Bloch as queered by Muñoz. Bloch writes: Hopelessness is itself … the most insupportable thing; downright intolerable to human needs. Which is why even deception, if it is to be effective, must work with flatteringly and corruptly aroused hope. Which is also why hope is preached from every pulpit, but is confined to mere inwardness or to empty promises of the other world. Which is why even the latest miseries of Western philosophy are no longer able to present their philosophy of misery without loaning the idea of transcendence, venturing beyond, from the bank. All this means is that man is essentially determined by the future, but with the cynically self- interested inference, hypostasized from its own class position, that the future is the sign outside the No Future night club, and the destiny of man nothingness. Well: let the dead bury their dead … the beginning day is listening to something other than the putridly stifling, hollowly nihilistic death-knell. (Principle 5) The image of the “No Future night club” serendipitously prefigures the influential work of queer theory by Lee Edelman that Munoz’s Cruising Utopia is angled against. Nihilistic, anti-Marxist and anti-utopian forms of philosophy are figured here as a dance party where people are paying too much attention to the pleasures of the present to remember about the future. The drive for pleasure that is not future-focused is presented as a drive toward death and annihilation, a bad object for Bloch that occupies the space Edelman identified as figuring the queer (see earlier chapters for a detailed engagement with Edelman’s work). The No Future night club is, on the other hand, precisely a place where Muñoz’s vision of queer futurity might be found. 186 itself to be fulfilled, orgasmically, in flashes of pleasure that intimate the potentiality of a future whose arrival cannot be concretely worked toward. Queer futurity, on the other hand, is produced by those flashes, where futurity is the work of dance and performance and orgasm more than concrete planning. If queer theorists have made sense of their transformative project by describing queer practices as world making and focusing on the momentary senses of futurity and potentiality that pleasurable instants intimate, science fiction’s futures tend to be described as works of design and planning: worlds that are built. World building in science fiction (both in literature and in visual culture) is about creating a plausible imaginary universe, one that will generally be contemplated from the outside rather than lived within: about structures and institutions, rather than experiential and interpersonal realities within them. As such, it would seem to hold few of the temporally fluid features of Muñoz’s queer world making. Yet scholars who seek to claim science fiction futures as structurally laden with radical possibility have also used Bloch’s conceptions of utopia to make their case, focusing on how science fiction writers can craft imagined worlds that posit a future whose difference from the present can make a case for political change. Darko Suvin, whose 1970s works set the terms for the then-emerging subdiscipline of science fiction studies, finds the literary genre of science fiction to be “distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional 'novum' (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic” (63; original emphasis). He draws on Bloch's idea of the Novum, the artistic construction of a Not-Yet-Conscious that lives inside the present, which can be made concrete in what he called, after Brecht, the “cognitive estrangement” of science fiction. As the literature of cognitive estrangement, Suvin defines science fiction by its ability to make readers think outside the obvious narratives of mundane existence. Suvin 187 imagines this estrangement to be significant only within a narrowly economic understanding of the political, but queer reconceptualizations of sex, desire, and reproduction certainly function as novums and cognitive estrangements for many who encounter them. Fredric Jameson’s descriptions of utopia in Archaeologies of the Future (2005) hint at connections between these two uses of Bloch. Jameson writes that “discussions of temporality always bifurcate” into “two paths,” and that these paths of “existential experience” (moments) and “historical time” (lines) are “seamlessly reunited” in literary utopias (7). For him as for Bloch, utopian possibility is that which disrupts capitalist claims that there can be no alternative, an ideology that denies the possibility of politically radical futures by insisting that they will always be only a reproduction of the present. The central feature of utopian futurities, for Jameson, is that they grow out of impulses that do not take part in that reproductive futures market. Jameson’s Marxist taxonomy of utopian form presumes gender, race, and sexuality to be peripheral concerns to the serious matter of global capitalist materiality. But his perspective nevertheless suggests a co-production of the future with the present, of world-making moments with world-building extrapolations, of the orgasmic with the political. If we bring all these derivations of Bloch––Muñoz’s affective moments, Suvin’s novum, and Jameson’s disruption––together, we might begin to envisage a queer science fiction that could do in the realm of the cognitive what Muñoz’s momentary feelings of utopia do in the affective register. A science-fictional queerness could make new forms of futurity by thinking about, and from, moments of pleasure. For Suvin, the science fiction novum’s importance is its capability of “deviating from the author's and implied reader's norm of reality” (64). The capacity to make worlds that deviate from the norm is also the center of Delany’s theorization of how science fiction 188 works as a mode of thought, although for him that deviance functions less to estrange others than to center his own queer experience. Delany writes that “science fiction does not try to represent the world” but instead “consciously misrepresents the world in an endless series of lucidly readable ways” (“Starboard Wine, An Introduction” 15); telling of events that “have not happened” (“About 5,750 Words” 44) but, crucially, that could. His 1984 description of a moment in his own youthful science fiction reading shows his personal investment in science fictions’ ability to show readers how to deviate from norms. In reading Robert Heinlein’s 1959 Starship Troopers, Delany was astounded by a passing mention well into the book that its narrator was of Filipino descent. Delany was “dazzled and delighted” by this implication that in Heinlein’s imagined future “the racial situation ... had resolved itself to the point where a young soldier might tell you of his adventures for 200 pages out of a 300- page novel and not even have to mention his ethnic background – because it had, in his world, become that insignificant!” (“Necessity of Tomorrows” 30). This fleeting fictional description, within a military science fiction novel scarcely noted for political progressivism, caused him to “realize that up until then, with all the efforts going an about [him] to ‘improve the racial situation,’ [he] really had had no image of what the ‘improved racial situation’ was actually going to look like.” By writing his apparently race-blind future world, Heinlein inspired Delany to wonder what a post-race world would “smell like, feel like,” to ask himself how he would “know it had actually come?” (31). Heinlein did not provide a utopian blueprint for that day, but his work showed Delany a fragment of possibility at which he could grasp and worry: not so that the young Delany could imagine a race-blind 189 utopian future, but so that the details, feelings, smells, pleasures, and pains of a different set of racial possibilities could become more than a brief intimation for him. 113 Delany’s extensive theoretical writings on science fiction are widely influential in science fiction studies but little read among the other cultural theorists who draw on his work. In the critical vocabulary Delany developed in the 1968 essay “About 5,750 Words,” science fiction can be distinguished from mundane literature by its engagement in world building on a linguistic level. As a reader moves through the sentences of a science fiction novel, they must remain open to many threads of possible meaning. One of Delany’s favored examples is the phrase “he turned on his left side,” where the surface physical interpretation (‘lying down, the man or boy turned over’) might, in science fiction’s context, be superseded by a technological possibility submerged in mundane reading (‘the male cyborg or android switched on the sensors in his left side’). (He does not mention a third, sexualized meaning, that would multiply the referents of ‘he’ and imagine perhaps a prosthetic body whose erotic potential could be manipulated at will). The reader cannot take any interpretation for granted, cannot assume that familiar master narratives of meaning- production are always in play, and therefore must come to recognize that the mundane reading of any sentence is as much defined by mainstream cultural assumptions as the science-fictional one is by the parameters of its imaginary textual society. This science- fictional mode of reading, where social customs and sentences’ meanings can be overturned 113 In the same essay, Delany describes his reading of politicized African American fiction at the same age, when critiques of American racism made him feel that change was hopeless. I discuss some of the adult Delany’s depictions of futuristic racializations below; Jeffrey Tucker’s A Sense of Wonder provides a definitive account of Delany’s science fiction from a African American Studies perspective. Tucker also discusses Delany’s essay “The Necessity of Tomorrows” in a 2010 essay published in Social Text, “The Necessity of Models, of Alternatives.” 190 at any moment by imaginary social change, calls attention to the arbitrariness of mundane realities’ regimes of the normal. Thus, as Wendy Pearson argues in her 1999 essay “Alien Cryptographies,” the linguistic and cognitive estrangements of science fiction have the potential to render the genre’s readers ready to be queered, preparing them for visions of widely varied social and sexual relationships. 114 The sense of expansive textual possibility that Delany calls reading as science fiction is very similar to reading history or literature for queer presences in the past—to the erotics of queer textual searching, of seeking the interpretation for which one longs and yet also trying not to close off unpredictable possibilities. In the mode Eve Sedgwick described as “reparative”, we look for queer possibilities and allusions, and in order to do so we have to resist the narrative and syntactic logics that would hide, erase, or shut down such prospects in advance (“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”). Sedgwick’s promises to queer children are tightly tied to these engagements with cultural production, to words and sounds and images desperately cathected to the point where they create new shapes to inner worlds. Here words are feelings, and the suggestion that things might get better in the future is something to be experienced and lived for in the now. Writings from the past still have the capacity to create and disrupt some possibilities for queer worlding in an age when the standard of LGBT political engagement often looks like a bland commitment to “it” getting “better.” This is true even though, as I have already discussed, so much queer-themed science fiction restages the contemporary terms of LGBT political debates (in which the 114 Science fiction film and television might seem unsusceptible to the narrative-based refigurations of reality that Delany describes, but viewers’ relationships with nonrealist imagery can be just as queer. My final chapter describes viewers’ creative reinterpretations of science fiction visual media that employs a similar recombinant logic to Delany’s science-fictional deviant grammar. 191 writers are often involved) into futures with relatively narrow scopes. As James Sallis writes, Delany has tended to circumvent temporalities of assimilation in his imagined futures through the way that he “creates entire societies in order to depict those at the society’s margin” (xiii). What happens at the margins he so loves is very often sex, and sexual pleasures become utterly central to his and his characters’ ideas of what a world is. That importance is not because the sex is reproductive, at least not in the biological or procreative sense, although his nonprocreative sex is very often involved in the creation of structures that function like family. It is because the acts and experiences, fantasies and mental erotics of sex itself create socialities and worlds. 4.3 | Bending Time to Make the Future Queer: Dhalgren Let me ask the terrible question: Could it be that all those perfectly straight, content-with-their-sexual-orientation-in-the-world, exclusive-heterosexuals really are (in some ill-defined, psychological way that will ultimately garner a better world) more healthy than (gulp...!) us? Let me answer: No way! (Dhalgren 720) I first read this passage, buried deep in Delany’s mammoth 1974 novel Dhalgren, at an impressionable age. After days or weeks or months wading through a strange textual universe populated by social and sexual deviants whose connections and epiphanies and great sex I didn’t entirely understand but didn’t want to look away from, it occurred to me that this weird world might not be entirely separate from the one I inhabited when I looked up from my book. On the one hand, it suggested an “us” out there neither straight nor contented with sexual orientations and their meanings in the world; on the other, it offered a new view on ways in which my surroundings already failed to live up to the straight 192 rendering of what “a better world” might be. Disappointments transfigured to electric possibilities. Such a reading experience may be the easiest way to describe the queer work of Dhalgren, Delany’s longest, most famous, and perhaps least read novel. In its 800 pages, a world is built by institutionalizing marginal desires and practices, engaging both the complexities of nonstraight time and the production of narrative and representational space in a fictional vision of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Describing Patti Smith’s understanding of futurity in the New York punk scene that shared many participants with Delany’s East Village subcultures, Tavia Nyong’o writes that “once one abandons the hope of following all the rules and regulations of straight society, the future becomes an open space rather than the disciplinary, delayed temporality of generational, Oedipal succession” and that this kind of futurity “is not a disciplinary ideal … so much as it is that most queer of spatial tropes, an ambience (104-5). Dhalgren’s tangled narrative produces a space that is both the book itself and its setting and subject: the disintegrating metropolis of Bellona, where “certainties” of cosmology, geography, and the linear chronology of cause and effect have withered away (Gibson xi). For many critics, the book is figured as itself a space into which they enter. William Gibson’s introduction to the most recent edition tells of his transformative experiences in the “prose-city” and exhorts readers to “go inside” the book (xiii). The spatialities of Dhalgren and Bellona have influenced not only the personal queer lives of readers, but also queer theorists’ maps of anti-normative desire. Pat Califia’s essay “The City of Desire: Its Anatomy and Destiny,” in the collection Public Sex, lists the novel as a source for the modeling of metropolitan sexual maps without giving an explanation for the reference (213). Similarly, Gordon Brent Ingram cites Dhalgren when he coins the term 193 queerscape in the 1997 anthology Queers in Space (461). Invoking Bellona without giving full details as to why, these oblique references invite the imaginary city to stand as a mysterious emblem of queered space. Fragmentary, ambiguous narratives of the kind that Dhalgren both employs and inspires are not uncommon in experimental writing and have often been used by queer writers. 115 What makes Dhalgren distinct is the science fiction element, its insistence that this novel builds a world different from the ‘real’ one and that this world can be inhabited. The novel insistently and playfully participates in the cultural and genre logics of science fiction, offering clues to its futuristic temporality by playing on the age and date of birth of the protagonist, Kid. Early on, as Kid approaches Bellona, he meets and has sex with a mysterious woman and the following exchange takes place: “How old are you?” “Twenty-seven.” “You have the face of someone much younger. … You have the hands of someone much older. “What year were you born?” “Nineteen forty-eight.” … “Well, if you were born in nineteen forty-eight, you’ve got to be older than twenty-seven … I was born in nineteen forty-seven. And I’m a good deal older than twenty-eight.” (4) The novel was published in 1974; someone born in 1948 was 27 in 1975; we are, therefore, in the future, or at least the vicinity of Bellona is. But this is not a future that can be identified through any conventional or predictable timeline, though the novel does offer some science fiction tropes of as-yet-impossible technology (holographic projector necklaces) and astronomical irregularities (a second moon). A science fiction fan character 115 David Wojnarowicz’s 1992 Close to the Knives is one example of a narrative whose fragmented temporalities and queer activities bear multiple passing similarities to Dhalgren. 194 (Tak, who also happens to be a gay leatherman and a former skinhead) describes Bellona within the text as “science fiction” because it follows “conventions” of the world being malleable and hospitable when one lands on an alien planet (372). The description is manifestly insufficient, intentionally ironic, and profoundly informative. We do not have to know Dhalgren’s genre to see that its sentences should be read in order to construct a world whose contours we can’t expect to know in advance; its relationship to genre conventions of predictability is profoundly antagonistic. Its puzzle-led structure is as much like computer game as narrative, sending a vague character in as an avatar for a reader/player who follows quests to find out who they are depicting. It is not coincidental that its name was given to a popular online space in the 1990s, DhalgrenMOO (Mitchell). A lasting impression with which I emerged from my first, teenage reading of Dhalgren was of near-constant queer sexual activity throughout the book: between men and in mixed- gender groups that the protagonist, Kid, encounters as he meanders through the lost American city of Bellona. On returning to the novel years later, I was astonished to see how small a proportion of the text is actually taken up with explicit sex description, and how very much of that sex is heterosexual. Andrew M. Butler finds the novel to be a poor response to the strides made by gay activism in the 1970s because most of the frequent graphic sexual depictions in the novel are straight ones. But it is no accident that the novel leaves an impression of queerness despite its heterosexual depictions. Homoeroticism shows up frequently, graphically and without fanfare. To give a few examples: the city’s main social centre is a gay bar, Teddy’s; Kid is introduced to this scene by Tak Loufer, a white gay man who makes it his business to “catch” new male entrants to Bellona (including Kid) and offer them a homoerotic sexual initiation, queering their experience of the city from the beginning 195 (307). When a member of the “scorpion” gang Kid leads calls him a “cocksucker” he is able to respond calmly that he has “sucked [his] quota of dick. And enjoyed it,” exposing and defusing the insult’s homophobia and mocking a bystander who is thrown into panic by it (674). And regardless of who is fucking whom, the novel works to imagine a social framework that is not based on heterosexual couples, nuclear families, or any state forms that privilege them. Tucker writes that “Dhalgren is set in a space where certain sexual signifiers are decoupled from their negative, antisocial connotations or signifieds, disrupting the sexual/ social myth” that enables the dominance of heteronormativity (Sense of Wonder 78). The ‘straight’ sex that Kid and other characters have in Bellona is as polymorphous and perverse as the ‘gay’ sex, a source of bodily pleasure that never concerns itself with marital trajectories or the production of future generations. 116 Delany has stated that, in writing Dhalgren, his intention was emphatically not to provide “a sympathetic portrayal of the social problems of those who deviate sexually from the social norm,” but rather to challenge the hegemonic standards of heterosexual society itself. Using science fiction genre conventions allowed him to “completely subvert ... the entire subtext that informs a discourse of ‘social problems/ sympathetic/sexual deviate/normal’ in the first place” (“Of Sex, Objects” 40). In this city, 116 For example, take an uncomfortable scene where many of the scorpion men take turns at fucking Risa, one of the few women in the group. The pornographic description of this gang-bang focuses on the men’s competitiveness with one another: Kid’s language dehumanizes the “dazed” Risa as he steps up to “get a piece” (676). Though Risa clearly consents to the situation (she is variously described as reaching for and “grab[bing]” each man, 675-7) it still seems to be one which represents the worst excesses of male heterosexist power. Feeling guilty the next morning and fearing that Risa may have been sexually exploited, Kid asks her whether she felt “forced” or “enjoyed” the experience. She responds vehemently, saying that (despite his involvement) he “can’t have any part of that”; it was “mine ... all mine” and leaves Kid musing on whether he wants “to get gang-banged [him]self” (684-5). Risa, then, was not the victim of a heterosexual, sexist power dynamic but merely pursuing, and finding, her own pleasure. 196 the people who have and cause “social problems” are not the queers and deviants (either those who come to Bellona to experience its alternative reality or those who were already there) but those who try to maintain some semblance of the previously hegemonic social norm. The novel not only insists that those who cannot fit themselves into the scripts of normative sex and sociality can be happy and functional despite their disadvantages; it rescripts the world entirely. As I explain above, Delany defines the praxis of science fiction as distinct from mundane “literature” at the level of the sentence because of the increased number of possible endings to any given proposition. In Dhalgren, those augmented possibilities are never closed down into one interpretation, giving the novel as a whole the structure of an unfinished sentence. It suggests what Delany’s definition of science fiction’s sentence-level world building, stretched to its limits, might produce. As readers, our close attention is not “reward[ed]” with explanations and resolutions to the mysteries of life in Bellona – we don’t find out the ‘real’ Kid’s name that Kid has forgotten, 117 why the novel is called Dhalgren, or even what caused Bellona’s change from a ‘normal’ city to the always-already post- apocalyptic space in which the novel takes place. The confusion that Dhalgren’s structure elicits is felt as much by the novel’s characters as by its readers, and not only because of the unreliability of Kid’s narrative point of view. Lacking a solid plot in which to participate, characters are hardly ever sure whether and when any described event has actually happened and what its effect may be. The novel’s anti-structure subverts the experience of narrative 117 Though he does momentarily recall it — “Michael Henry…” (778). 197 causality by removing the linearity of not only plot but time. Tak tells a story of his life in Bellona: I go down a street; buildings are burning. I go down the same street the next day. They’re still burning. Two weeks later, I go down the same street and nothing looks like it’s been burned at all. Maybe time is just running backward here. Or sideways. But that’s impossible too. (376-7) In Dhalgren, everything and nothing is “impossible,” because the impossible is a daily occurrence. Wondering why gets one nowhere; cause and effect cannot function when time is not straightforward. Recounted events never coalesce into a single story, and the stories which are told resist readerly expectations of narrative arcs and closures. 118 Time in Dhalgren “leaks; sloshes backwards and forwards, turns up and shows what’s on its... underside” (414; original ellipse). The novel’s temporality becomes a fluid thing, its shape liquid, unpredictable, and changeable. When we reach the end of Dhalgren, we find an unfinished sentence (“I have come to” 801) which catapults us back to the first page for its possible completion (“to wound the autumnal city” 1). The temporal status of everything narrated between is thrown into confusion by this Möbius structure, as we start to question whether the events told at the end occurred before the novel’s beginning. And, lest we be seduced into believing that the book is structured as a simple circle, the final section (“The Anathemata: a plague journal”) is a collection of scattered, potentially connected, unfinished texts which date their own composition to numerous points within, before, and after the 118 Critics of Dhalgren have charted various pathways around the novel, from rationalizing the uncertainly named protagonist Kid’s disorientation and loss of time as the worldview of “a multiple dyslexic with epilepsy” (Weedman 63) to reading the inconclusive structure as an unfulfilled quest narrative exemplifying the futility of the American dream (Bray, “Rites of Reversal”); Brian McHale reads the irrationality of Dhalgren’s narrative structure as part of the postmodern critique of metanarratives (71). Robert Elliott Fox remarks somewhat facilely that “[t]he book (the experience) is ... finally, what you make of it” (“Meditations”). 198 events narrated in the rest of the novel. In its refusal of linearities of progressive time, this queerly futuristic temporality becomes a space into which readers feel that they have entered. Entering Dhalgren the novel, for those who are not dispelled by its formidable opacity, is somewhat analogous to entering Bellona the city. “Once you have transgressed that boundary, every atom, the interior of every point of reality, has shifted its relation to every other you’ve left behind, shaken and jangled within the field of time, so that if you cross back, you’ll return to a very different space from the one you left” (480). Once a reader has been inside the novel, which is to say inside the city, they may never again entirely inhabit quite the same “field of time.” Dorothy Allison has written of childhood science fiction reading as accessing a “hidden message,” the “secret” first intimation that sexuality “didn’t have to be the way everybody said it was” (100). Images of different worlds can be transferred into life narratives to shape a reader’s queer future, as easily accessible books become portable queer worlds. The downmarket, juvenile reputation of science fiction may have helped to render such queer escapes (not all accessed through avant-garde works like Delany’s, of course) more accessible to isolated or young people than overtly gay, lesbian or transgender subcultural activity and performance. 119 Ann Weinstone’s 1999 review-essay “Science Fiction as a Young Person’s First Queer Theory,” extends Allison’s conception of science fiction as a secret portal to queer possibility. Writing about Sedgwick’s collection of queer critical readings, Novel Gazing, Weinstone defines “queer literary studies” as a mode of “reading outside of established 119 Changing media may make online equivalents more likely first encounters these days, but science fiction’s various fan communities remain some of the most available to weird kids and adults who may not identify with available narratives of sexual identity. My collaborative essay with Kristina Busse, Robin Reid, and several fan interlocutors, “Yearning Void and Infinite Potential: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space,” discusses some of this. 199 concepts and categories” which is rooted in queer readers’ experiences of finding “transformative magic” in antiheteronormative texts. She locates her own first such encounters in science fiction, and extols the potential of science fiction to embody queer transformations. In Weinstone’s personal model, reading science fiction––specifically, reading Dhalgren––occurred at “a moment in queer adolescence when ... having been sure that you were condemned to live alone among perpetual adults of perpetual resignation––a companion appears, a companion world.” The previously unimaginable life narratives Dhalgren suggested were enough to provide her with a queer escape from what she calls “perpetual adults of perpetual boredom.” She describes herself in the grip of the novel as “abandoned, delirious, electrified,” and says that Dhalgren drew her into “the relief and opportunity that flows from the lifting of the imperative to be socially, economically, and sexually coherent.” If social, economic, and sexual coherence mean making sense of your experience by interpreting it through the dominant social narratives of race, gender, capital, and the heterosexual nuclear family, then submitting to those narratives is what Weinstone calls the act of “perpetual resignation.” Queer texts, performances and lives exhibit the availability and livability of incoherent alternatives. Dhalgren’s expression of the possibility of queerness allowed Weinstone to refuse this resignation, challenging the need for so-called “coherence” by demonstrating how we impose normativities on ourselves by pursuing coherent life narratives. Thus, Delany’s novel invited Weinstone in to what she later experienced as the world of queerness and of queer theory. The novel’s incomprehensible structure was experienced as a critique of the governing hetero-narratives into which she was being indoctrinated, and the text’s radical inconclusivity, “the pleasure of not making sense” it provided, enabled her to envisage a future in which making sense would not be required. 200 4.4 | Futures for Desire, Pleasure, and Slavery: Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Delany has written that science fiction “is not about the future” because it “works by setting up a dialogue with the here-and-now, a dialogue as rich as the writer can make it” (“Second Science-Fiction Studies Interview” 343). That dialogue takes place through a consistent production of utopian impulses and projections of imagined futurity. Delany’s science fiction consistently imagines it might mean to take marginal and/or debased sexual pleasures, queer pleasures, and give them the centrality in world production that heterosexual, familial normativity has had in most others. In “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner describe the “radical aspirations of queer culture building” as a matter of the “changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture.” “Queer social practices like sex and theory” help build this world (548). To these practices Delany adds science fiction, which functions for him as a way to narrate how the “changed possibilities” of a culture built on queer referents could look, function, and feel. In Dhalgren, he carries out that dialogue by spatializing science fiction’s futuristic conventions, though within the space he creates we encounter many moments of Blochian utopian futurity as an affective force within the characters’ and the readers’ present. Delany’s 1984 Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand works with a futuristic social structure projected thousands of years into a galactic future, attempting to conceptualize an entire universe structured around gay sex and queer theorizing. This intensely complicated space opera style novel takes place within a galactic civilization where millions upon millions of human and alien societies intersect, and Delany’s depiction of this “huge field of difference” (Freedman 150) has 201 fascinated most of the text’s critics. 120 Stars revolves around two protagonists, Rat Korga and Marq Dyeth, who are discovered (by an all-pervasive and largely benevolent computer surveillance operation called, in an interesting predictive serendipity, the “web”) to be one another’s “perfect erotic objects” (166). Korga is a mentally mutilated former slave who escapes enslavement only through the destruction of his entire world, and Dyeth is an “Industrial Diplomat” who experiences the galaxy as an infinite cycle of heterogeneity among whose differences he is paid to negotiate. As in Dhalgren, Stars stretches Delany’s idea of science fiction’s sentence-level cognitive estrangement to the limit of most readers’ willingness to follow. In this novel his narrative choices are more obviously futuristic, political, and queer, as Delany attempts to create the texture of a world––a universe––structured around assumptions radically different than our own. In the language used in the longest section of the novel, “[t]he ancient, dimorphic ‘he,’ once used exclusively for the general indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men) [is] reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she,’ during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to” (73). In this system, feminine rather than masculine pronouns are the ‘unmarked’ terms: rather than human women and children being officially incorporated into the category of “man,” “woman” has become a descriptive term which signifies nothing about gender, sex, or species but which indicates legal ‘personhood.’ As readers, we must constantly remind ourselves that “she” does not indicate female sex or feminine gender, and that the use of 120 Critical accounts of the text tend to focus on the concept of difference which structures the novel (Freedman), its linguistic refiguration of grammatical gender as a marker of desire (Bray, “Trial by Language”), and the ways that these factors structure the sexuality between its two protagonists (Rogan). 202 “he” tells us an important fact about the speaker but nothing at all about the individual the pronoun describes. We must constantly and consciously remember that a world is being built, with our collaboration, in every sentence that we read. Delany names this language Arachnia and explains its prevalence by the fact that his assemblage of diverse future cultures is linked by “web” implants worn by most galactic citizens. This is a connection difficult not to link to the utopian and dystopian visions of digital connection that cyberpunk science fiction and the growth of internet studies would shortly make popular and to the expansions of gender beyond physical embodiment that would become part of the language of digital media. 121 William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which coined the term cyberspace, was published in the same year as Stars in My Pocket. In an alternate universe where queer black science fiction writers are as popular as straight white ones, perhaps we are all speaking Arachnia. At the end of his 2003 book Sex Changes, Patrick Califia offers a brief utopian vision when he urges us to imagine what it would be like “to walk down the street, go to work, or attend a party and take it for granted that the gender of the people you met would not be the first thing you ascertained about them” (277). The pronominal system in Stars forces the reader into this position, since we are rarely given enough information to identify a character’s gender, or even how gender works in this world. By sustained use of his Arachnia pronoun system, Delany insists that the future of gender and sex will be the end of their existence as the primary characteristics which define any individual, offering a utopian fantasia for the label-averse. Our narrator in Stars in My Pocket, Marq Dyeth, however, is “a 121 Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s 1995 The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age is the classic exploration of online gender play in the early days of the internet, but the continuing significance of gendered self-fashioning online can be seen by a 2010 debate over gendered drop-down menus in the forthcoming Facebook alternative Diaspora (Dopp). 203 strange human being ... [whose] predilections run toward only one gender” and so the maleness and masculinity of every character the narration calls “he” is assured (90). This often means that Arachnia pronouns fall into line with standard English “he” and “she.” We are never presented with a female as “he” or object of desire, only male “women.” When Marq narrates one of his earliest sexualized memories, he recalls seeing a hand (bitten nails and calloused hands are major erotic objects for Marq) which he thinks belongs to a “human male” previously referred to as “she.” The pronominal change to “he” in Marq’s internal monologue enacts the recognition of desire, “the shift in pronoun coming ... simply, with a warmth and pleasure flowering.” The eroticized hands, however, do not belong to the male but to a “muscular, human female”; and as soon as Marq realizes that, the pronouns change again and he refers to “her big hand” (79; my emphasis). Merely to perceive a female body is enough to cancel out Marq’s burgeoning desire, and to return the Arachnia pronoun to effective English usage. The conflation of (grammatical) masculinity and being the object of desire is self-evidently exciting and utopian for a male-desiring male subject, but it also equates femininity with the impossibility of desire, and elides any possible disjunctures between gendered identity and embodiment. Delany has often insisted that science fiction neither can nor should be utopian, because “utopia presupposes a pretty static, unchanging, and rather tyrannical world” (“Science-Fiction Studies Interview” 323). The failures of the Arachnia pronominal system from a non-gay-male perspective serve to underline that critique of utopia, as well as a focus on masculinity that is present in all of Delany’s queer worlds, built as they are out of the experience of a life lived amid gay male sexual subcultures. But castigations of utopia for their tyranny make sense only if we understand utopia and futurity to be reliant on outcomes 204 rather than processes, and elide the fact that Arachnia is certainly the elaboration into a world of a utopian impulse-–what if we were constantly to mark our desire in language? In his 1988 memoir The Motion of Light in Water, Delany’s “one piece of science fiction” was to hope for a “sexual revolution” that would “come precisely because of the infiltration of clear and articulate language into the marginal areas of human sexual exploration” (268). The encoding of desire into language in Stars seems to offer just such a possibility, especially when combined with the novel’s lyrical and graphic sexual depictions. In the introduction to Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany continues to science-fictionalize his memoir by insisting that “polemical thrust” of his arguments and recollections is toward “new institutions” that might fulfill the sexual needs that were met, for working-class New York men, by the porn theaters he memorializes (xv). Where his nonfiction writing engaged in politicized longing, his science fiction had already crafted the plans for how such institutions might look and feel. In Stars, the integration of public sex into society demonstrates the importance of sexual pleasure in everyday life in Marq Dyeth’s home city on the planet Velm. Anyone can enter a “run” which caters to their preferred type of sex and enjoy a burst of pleasure as part of their quotidian activities. Runs are underground spaces which function as both public sex venues and art galleries “where you come for sex ... [a]nd sculpture” (225). Delany’s description of experience inside a run suggests a quasi-utopian potentiality for these communal pleasures: We walked off ... between statues, where now there were three, now twelve, now two, some entwined with one another, some watching, now a hand, not his, lingering somewhere on his body or mine. Once we moved through nearly twenty, most in sexual contact with one another. ... the many bodies centimeters away moving together, apart in the warmth, a moment of cool as contact broke, 205 then warmth again, to hold, to handle, and, even though we only moved through, as supportive as if we’d stayed. (278) Even though the two protagonists do not participate in the group sex they encounter, the “contact” between bodies soothes and supports them. The repetitive rhythms of Delany’s prose give a sense of the “lingering” pleasures of such a sexuality. We also sense a community in the “supportive” “warmth” of the sexual environment, where individual identities break down to become components of a whole containing “many bodies.” The scene offers readers a suggestive and enticing image of how a world in which sexuality was institutionally embraced and supported without repression might be––although, as I discuss below at greater length, this world of utopian sexual feeling is never suggested to be outside of power structures. Delany’s emphasis on “institutions” is an insistence that a more liberated approach to sex would not be an escape from power. In the case of Velm, the runs were institutions “integral” to Velmian culture “before humans came” and “moved right into them” (276). In other words, the liberating sexual scenes in which the narration takes such pleasure are products of colonialism. The Motion of Light in Water is punctuated with scenes which mirror those of Velm’s runs, recollections of illicit spaces in New York where individuality broke down into a mass of sexual bodies and “cock passed from mouth to mouth to hand to ass to mouth without ever breaking contact with other flesh for more than seconds” (202). Delany’s non-fiction uses such scenes to call for sexual revolution and new insitutions at particular, urgent political moments in queer history: the decimation caused by AIDS and its attendant political panics, along with the loss of working-class men’s social and sexual lifeworlds to gentrification processes. Dianne Chisholm writes of Delany’s public sex memoir that the 206 “memory of mass sex … invokes the space of sexual revolution before the advent of gay militancy” as “[s]hades of revolutionary prehistory bleed into the postrevolutionary present, where AIDS has decimated the village” (45). She finds Delany’s revolutionary hopes for alterations in sexual discourse, and his suggestions that a future could emerge from utopian moments of sexual pleasure, to be nostalgically determined by the losses incurred by AIDS. We are used to thinking of queer futurity as curtailed by AIDS. The epidemic’s spectre of premature death has shaped many narratives of queer temporality, creating a necessity for “rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity ... by making community in relation to risk, disease, infection and death” (Halberstam, Queer Time and Place 2). The devastation AIDS wreaked on the personal futures of gay men produced social and sexual landscapes shaped in unexpected ways, including the culture of barebacking Tim Dean traces in Unlimited Intimacy (2009). Delany moved away from depicting queerly futuristic societies as the epidemic and the gay political response to it burgeoned in the 1980s; the sequel to Stars remains stalled to this day and Delany has published nothing set in a futuristic society since. 122 While working on Stars, Delany was also beginning the work of merged fantasy and memoir that would later be acclaimed as among the first published works of fiction to deal with AIDS, 1985’s “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.” “Plagues” is based on “misinformation, rumor, and wholly untested guesses at play through a limited social section of New York City during 1982 and 1983,” and shows a city of continuing sexual practices limned with fear (476; original emphasis). Delany stopped writing science fiction at around the same time he began to write about AIDS, curtailing his expansive, extrapolative queer futurities as 122 Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is forthcoming in April 2012, but the novel is set in a near future featuring none of the extravagant depictions of alternatives seen in the works I discuss here. 207 the hopeful futures of gay life and gay worlds around him began to come to an end. Yet the science fiction continuations of queer world making projects he had begun in the 1960s work alongside his polemics and memoirs to create alternative futures for what was in the process of being lost. Perhaps in response to the immediate danger to queer cultures and communities that was emerging as he worked on the novel, or to the conservative political discourse of ‘family values’ that sought to celebrate the curtailment of gay men’s futures, Delany uses Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand to elucidate a system that would allow a queer society to perpetuate itself through continuing generations. Alternatives to child-raising structures based around heterosexual biological reproduction are common in science fiction, particularly among texts with feminist or utopian inflection; Delany’s other versions include the communes of 1976’s Trouble on Triton. In the Velmian “nurture stream” that raised Marq Dyeth, however, Stars contains Delany’s most explicitly imagined science-fictional model of an anti-hegemonic ‘family’ structure. The Dyeth “stream” has existed for seven generations, merging human and alien lives with “no direct egg-and-sperm relations between any ripple of parents and any ripple of children” (117-8). The lines between parent and child, like the edges of the ‘family’ itself, are blurred, hence the fluid and mobile metaphor of “ripples” in a “stream.” The clearly delineated roles of a nuclear family are nowhere to be seen, and we are never clearly told how many parents or children there are in each “ripple.” With the disappearance of sexual biology from the business of reproduction, the concept of a parent’s power over or ownership of a child has also vanished: “the stream structure conceives of all children as gifts from society, as gifts to society” rather than as parents’ possessions (120). Queer 208 families of choice move from single-generation support network to multi-generational reproductive means, perpetuating queer society. 123 As a product of this reproductive mode, Marq is enabled to transform a fetishistic desire that makes him unusual even in this broad universe into a world “wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it” (340). He can revel in the absence of representation rather than lamenting it because all his various parental influences agreed he “was a ripple that shored their stream” (342). The stream reproductive structure, probably the closest Delany comes to a blueprint for utopia as pure ideal, figures the cultural reproduction of deviant desires as predictive of a future that extends to the novel’s readers, who might be encouraged to find their own “structures of desire” to be “wondrous” and “exciting.” This vision of transformation is an ultimate It Gets Better Project for worlds as well as individuals, suggesting what it would take for everyone who is queer in every way to be valued, imagined at a moment of mourning when things were about to get worse. Delany’s fictional worlds always represent fertile grounds for queer sex and other nonnormative activities. But in his critical science-fictional dialogues with the present, he has consistently refused to portray futures where things get simply better. Even as the versions of grammar, sex, and reproduction in Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand suggest marvelous possibilities for joyous futures grown out of queer desire, the prospect that this queer future will be curtailed looms continually large. Stars opens with the loss of a world and ends with 123 Valerie Lehr’s Queer Family Values describes the importance of queer familial forms beyond coupledom and marriage, writing that “the task gays and lesbians face is the transformation of straight culture. ... This is a task that I believe requires us to look critically at the family, since this institution is so powerfully implicated in the construction of identity. ... structural change is necessary for guaranteeing freedom” (98). 209 the narrowly averted danger that Velm will also disappear through the mysterious forces of “cultural fugue,” an ambiguous term that describes apocalyptic conditions brought about possibly through internal and possibly through external processes. The worlds we build through narrative and through living, the novel insists, are fragile. Reading the novel through AIDS offers one way to make sense of this elegiac quality, but it is also very much a matter of the ways Delany incorporates racialized and economic power structures into sexuality, history, and time––through his representations of slavery. The novel’s first 58 pages are taken up by a tale of a slave––Rat Korga, who will eventually join with the Velmian Marq Dyeth––who loses his world, a narrative frequently elided in critics’ focus on the queerly utopian aspects of Stars’s worldbuilding that I have outlined above. For Mary Kay Bray, Rat Korga’s story functions as “an opening spectacle displaying a failed society, setting the stage for what follows” in Marq’s monologues (19); Freedman focuses his analysis on the “utopian moments” which emerge in Marq’s narrative, and describes Rat Korga’s world of Rhyonon as a “counterutopic locus” whose repressiveness highlights the possibilities inherent in the “radically sexual and polymorphous utopia” which Marq describes (157-159). 124 But, if we read the novel through Rat’s subjection as well as Marq’s pleasure, then the narrative temporality of the novel can no longer be experience as a progress from worse to better, from the loss of a dreadful and oppressive world to the gaining of a gloriously queer one. 124 Freedman does not actually describe Stars In My Pocket’s universe as utopian; citing Delany’s appropriation of Foucault for Trouble on Triton, which is subtitled “An Ambiguous Heterotopia,” he calls the novel as a whole a heterotopian space of difference, though he emphasizes the utopian moments within it. 210 The science-fictional enslavement to which Delany subjects Rat Korga is both similar to and radically different from historical American slavery. 125 In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya Hartman describes the subjection of American slaves as a rendering of “will ... indistinguishable from submission” (33). Delany uses science fiction to turn the discursive technology of enslavement Hartman’s historical analysis describes into literal, mechanical procedures to erase agency. On the planet of Rhyonon (whose name, like Korga's, we do not learn until we have moved out of the “Prologue” into Marq Dyeth’s much longer narrative), slaves are those who have submitted to a treatment called “Radical Anxiety Termination”––the initials of which cause slaves to be called “rats,” hence Rat Korga’s title––which takes away the capacity to learn and to make choices. Rhyonon’s model of slavery is considered by its culture to resemble suicide more than racialized oppression, as to become a slave requires consent. However, Delany’s description of Korga’s induction into rat-hood make it clear that his consent, at least, is neither autonomous nor informed. He becomes a rat because his desires, physiology, and mental capacities invalidate him from any other personal or social future (he is a ripple that shores no one’s stream). The novel’s opening lines, in fascinating contraindication of its reputation as a site of queer utopianism, show us the end of Korga’s official personhood. Of course … you will be a slave. … But you will be happy … Certainly you will be happier than you are. ... I mean, look at you, boy. You’re ugly as mud and tall enough to scare children in the street. … You’ve been in trouble of one sort or another for as long as there are records on you: orphanages, foster homes, youth 125 Though simple historical representations are not reproduced, in the work of an African American writer as engaged in critical discussions of race and history as Delany is, it seems bizarre to assume––as Russell Blackford, who finds it “difficult to imagine ... how any pretensions to humanity could be found” in a slave- holding society (28), does––that this history is not being invoked. 211 rehabilitation camps, adult detention units – and you haven’t gotten along in any of them. Sexually... ? ... In this part of the world your preferences in that area can’t have done you any good. You’re a burden to yourself, to your city, to your geosector. ... But we can change all that. (3) Here Korga is interpellated as a failed subject, a “boy” whose failure to live up to social norms fits him only to be a slave. Even Korga’s features are inscribed with the temporality of his subjection: “ignorance’s determinant past, information’s present impossibility, speculation’s denied future” (3). These have been determined not only by his economic disadvantage, tendency to get in “trouble” and (homo)sexual minority status, but by physical traits (height) invested by his society with social significance. His lack of place in Rhyonon society has, it seems, written future enslavement on his body. It has destined him to be one of those who ‘choose’ to do the work of a world to which they have no personal access. 126 The abjection and maltreatment Korga suffers as soon as he becomes a rat make the slaver’s use of promised ‘happiness’ to obscure violence immediately evident. Rat existence is clearly shown to have none of the advantages with which the Institute try to dupe the marginalized and despairing. And yet degradation is not unremitting in Rat Korga’s narrative. If he does not find happiness as a rat he nevertheless manages to participate in world-making practices of sexual pleasure, adding an extra dimension to the intense role pleasure plays in the novel. Hartman’s close attention to the “enduring legacy of slavery” (6) in the formation of racialized subjectivities in postbellum America, where “the texture of freedom [was] laden with the vestiges of slavery” (116) helps demonstrates how some of the most “utopian” moments, concepts and pleasures in Stars In My Pocket rest on the legacy of Rat Korga’s 126 This rhetoric resembles not only slavery but also the language used around undocumented subjects in the US and Europe who are portrayed in the media as voluntarily forfeiting their rights because they ‘choose to come here’; see Mae M Ngai, Impossible Subjects. 212 captivity, on a loss of world and future that can never be relegated to the past. The previous chapter discussed Afrofuturism as a science-fictional frame by which the erased histories of African diasporic subjects are reimagined on the canvas of the future; Delany writes the losses of slavery and the continuing labor of enslaved and dehumanized individuals into even his most far-off future, yet refuses to separate them from experiences of pleasure. Seeking to locate tactics of resistance among the everyday practices of the enslaved, Hartman writes that “on rare occasions the pleasures available within the confines of slavery indeed possessed glimmerings of insurgency and transformation” (48). For Rat Korga, such insurgencies and transformations are sexual. In an extended section of the “Prologue,” Rat Korga is illegally purchased by a private individual. The unnamed woman who buys him is a sexual “pervert” aroused by the unequal power relations of slave society. She would like to give Korga his freedom (“if I could, I’d make you free – before I made you serve me!” 23), not for his sake but as a gift to herself; she has little interest in his needs and desires. And yet, as her gift to herself, Korga has more agency, more volition, than anything else we come across in his narrative. She provides him with the major commodity his life before and after the RAT process had denied him: information, in the form of a glove which connects to planetary communication networks. With the glove he becomes aware not only of the history and geography of his planet but of horror at his own situation, of his “rage that welled through his body but, because of what they had done to him, connected with nothing” (31). He does not gain autonomy or recover the capacity for volition, but his mind and awareness are almost infinitely expanded. And when sexual pleasure comes into play (not with the woman, but when she sends him off to a cruising area to “indulge” his “foul and unspeakable desires” as she has just indulged hers by beating him), again power and 213 awareness bloom out of pleasure. Thanks to the glove, this is now more thoroughly articulated: “with words whirling and falling in his head, the wonder, pulsing and pulsing from spine to genitals, settled slowly into the wordless memory of wonder” (50). For that moment, painful past and unpromising future become irrelevant in a moment of utopia that places Korga in the same world he will later occupy at the runs on Velm––the world of public sex’s orgasmic futurity that so much of Delany’s nonfiction writing has labored to make political. In the depictions of Velm’s runs I discussed above, we see Delany’s hopeful figure for interracial and interclass sexual contact here on earth: overcoming oppression by a view of intercultural and interpersonal difference “that is not simply tolerated ... but is actively desired, sought, and embraced” (Freedman 158). 127 Robert Reid-Pharr has used his own experiences in sexual contact with others of violently different social status to his own (an academic “black gay man,” as the title of his book announces) to express a similar momentary utopian hope. He hopes that “something powerful” can happen in the orgasmic utopian impulses of sex across race and class lines where participants “imagine, if only for a moment, a world transformed, a world so incredibly sexy and hot that the stupid, banal, and costly structures of racism, homophobia, poverty and disease that work to keep us apart become nothing more than dully painful memories from the past” (11). Yet such “painful memories” cannot remain in the past even in a world that is wholly imaginatively transformed. They are not erased by pleasure, nor even separate from pleasure’s production. Writing about the 127 The importance of contact between different social spheres is a major tenet of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, in which Delany builds on Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities to develop his idea of a distinction between interclass “contact” and intraclass “networking” and valorizes urban public sexual spaces for the forms of contact they elicit. 214 incorporation of slaves’ pleasures into masters’ ends in the nineteenth-century US, Hartman writes that “it is impossible to separate the use of pleasure as a technique of discipline from pleasure as a figuration of social transformation” (78). The historical materiality of her analysis means that she must focus on the disciplinary uses of pleasure, narrating such horrifying instances as the figuration of black women as so sexually insatiable that they could not be raped (96). Delany’s placing of political and historical matters into nonrealist fictional contexts means that he is able to figure pleasure as simultaneously transformative and disciplinary. Narratives of enslavement cluster around Rat and Marq’s relation of mutual erotic perfection. The excess of pleasure that their mutual objectification allows is enabled by the impossibility of Rat’s complete escape from his history of enslavement. The power differential between Rat and Marq is an intrinsic part of their statistical erotic perfection, after all. Marq acknowledges this when, as they lie in bed together, he reminds Rat that “if you had lived a more ordinary life on Rhyonon, you wouldn’t be here” (200; original emphasis). Delany’s work consistently emphasizes the radical possibilities of material pleasures which can come from erotically inflecting power relationships that would be insupportable in the realm of the political. The figure of Gorgik in the Nevèrÿon series, the former slave turned liberator whose pleasure in sexualized master/slave relations enables his revolutionary work, is the most obvious example of this, but Rat and Marq’s relation hints at it too. In the moments of most pleasure Rat and Marq experience together, we see that within structures of inequality pleasure may have uses which are perversely transformative. Their sexual pleasure is described as “dizzying” and calls up a wealth of alien metaphors (“the line between my arm and his chest was the crevice of some sunken -wr”; 197) which 215 suggest an excess of joy beyond simple description; in public sexual encounters with others, similar moments of transient bliss are achieved (278). These moments of erotic perfection fulfilled are among those described as utopian by critics such as Freedman, taken to signify the radical potential of the heterogeneous, multi-gendered, interspecies sexual acts in which Marq participates. And yet these sexual pleasures differ from the attempted erotic encounters which gave the enslaved Rat some hope of transformative pleasure only because of their mutuality and success, not because of a fundamental difference in the structuring of desire between the contexts of enslavement and emancipation. Unequal power structures produce an eroticism whose fugitive pleasures provide an escape route for people subjected to those structures while they still remain within them. And the futures at which those pleasures hint could build a new world––or destroy one. Delany’s work brings science fiction’s extrapolative futurities into correspondence with temporalities that are syncopated, off-key, sidelong, queer. His work underlines the illusory seamlessness of seeming progress, of the idea that things can get simply better. 128 My reading of Stars In My Pocket shows the role of racialized histories in this questioning of progress narratives; work on the musical temporalities of Afrofuturism further elucidates how “insubstantial” fragmentations of the way we understand time. In “The Grooves of Temporality,” Alexander Weheliye connects African American representations of modernity with Walter Benjamin’s vision (in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which I also discuss in my first chapter) of “history as an uneven chain of monadic shrapnel that disjoins 128 I take this to be Fred Moten’s meaning when he discusses the temporalities of jazz in In the Break, as sites “where discontinuity could be figured as ubiquitous minority, omnipresent queerness” (69). Moten draws on Delany’s work in that text and elsewhere, and his comments on an early version of this chapter have been instrumental in the development of my project. 216 the putative continuum of empty, homogeneous time.” Both work to “recalibrate the flows” between “the future and the past” to account for temporal “discontinuities” (320). Through attentiveness to what Benjamin called the “tradition of the oppressed” who have been forced out of recorded history, “the teleological model of history ruptures; in its place, a more nuanced theory of temporality materializes that takes notice of the complex relations of domination and subordination linked to the inscription of history as it pertains to black people in the United States and the global oppressed” (322). It is the seamlessness of seeming progress that is an illusion, one available only to the relatively privileged. Being forced out of the regulations of dominant temporality opens up a different set of futures and worlds, existences in other modes than historically exclusionary humanism, and tempos that figure otherwise than straightforward timelines. 4.5 | Try This at Home In a phrase from Dhalgren that resonates with my project as a whole, Delany has Kid say “it is not that I have no future. Rather it fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now” (10). The kinds of futures that Delany’s queer science fictions craft force us to recognize that living without a future is a not uncommon mode of being. Yet he is committed to crafting and creating futures––it is not, after all, that Kid, or Korga, or Marq, have no future. But the form that their non-negative futurity might take is difficult to see, because it is not a simple case of linear progress, of things getting better. It fragments, sent in all directions by pleasure and pain; it is rhythmic as well as narrative. This chapter has shown a complex array of connections between ideas of queer futurity and performances of politicized sexuality. Samuel R. Delany’s queer science fiction engages with the possibility that homophobic and 217 sex-negative worlds will get better, that worlds could exist within which those marginalized by their desires will find life not only worth living but filled with pleasure. He does so while maintaining a critical relationship to the liberal progress narratives embodied by the well- intentioned “it gets better” campaign, insisting on the continual presence of racialized difference, economic inequality, and other material differences within glorious futuristic possibilities. Sexual pleasure in his work functions as a kind of utopian impulse, in a mode similar to that which José Muñoz describes queer performance. Pleasure links the past and present and lets a different future feel possible, even when it takes place within structuring limitations. Although Delany has moved away from science fiction to continue his writing on sexuality and pleasure in more realist forms, his earlier works’ combination of science fiction’s rationalist ideas of world building and futuristic extrapolation with the futural feeling of a Blochian utopian impulse ––whose queer appropriation by Jose Muñoz Delany anticipated––make them important reading for anyone concerned with queerness and temporality. The power that Dhalgren and Stars in my Pocket have had in the lives of many who did read them makes this clear. Science fiction’s potential role as an initiation into realms of possibility that are articulated by queer theory suggests that the two modes of writing link in the life narratives of their readers as well as by means of estrangements and futures in texts. Theory can offer contemporary readers detailed persuasion of the arbitrarily historical nature of sexual, racial and social structures; and so can science fiction. But science fiction’s stories of estranged futures (and alternative pasts, presents and other temporalities) can also offer passports for entry into queer worlds whose pleasures may provide fuel for political endeavor in mundane reality, or simply a way to think oneself out of it. Delany provides images that suggest worlds 218 that could emerge from recent theories of queer space, queer time, queer political aspirations and mentalities––worlds of sexual subjectivities beyond gender binaries and straight/gay/ lesbian/bisexual identity distinctions that have not, yet, occurred, which misrepresent reality productively enough to queer our concepts of the future. There is a big difference between the experience of reading complicated, postmodern texts and the communal, corporeal practice of dancing, being in a crowd, feeling embodied and electrified. Yet intensively occupied fictions, and the socialities that radiate around them, create futures in the present too. I opened this chapter with Nalo Hopkinson’s description of what reading Delany’s fiction made possible for her, and have returned to the work of fiction in the lives of reading individuals and publics often throughout my analysis of the narrative strategies Delany uses to imagine queer worlds and futures. The readers I have cited have almost all been women, though Delany’s futures are based largely in the sexual lives of gay men, and in closing I want to suggest that this gendering tells us something about kinds of sexual public formed in the realm of fantasy and narrative that nevertheless might, as Warner says in Publics and Counterpublics, “make possible ... active participation in collective world making through publics of sex and gender” (57). Delany is very conscious of gender and seeks to redress its inequalities, representing many sex-loving female characters in his fiction, but he’s also quite forthright about his work’s primary audience being gay men. In Dhalgren, an exchange between Tak and Kid unpacks the relationship between women and public sex. Tak asks Kid to “show [him] a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you'll find?” and Kid responds, rhetorically, “[q]ueers” (21). In the novel, the places in question are occupied by women just 219 as much as by men, and Kid and Lanya have a lot of sex in public, suggesting that the “queers” of the stereotypical view may not all be male or even gay. But 25 years later, in a passage in Times Square Blue where Delany describes a visit to one of his regular porn theaters in the company of a female friend, we find women still positioned as able to comprehend the joys of public sex only as a source of unwarranted fear. Delany’s friend Ana is distracted by the screen and cannot see the sexual acts taking place in the dark. Unfamiliar and out of her comfort zone, she recognizes very little in the scene Delany lovingly describes, despite her prior familiarity with his anecdotes. She is “scared to death” throughout her time in the theatre, though she cannot name a specific source for the fear (30). Delany understands this discomfort as “fear of the outside that Ana brought within” produced by the narratives of gender which interpellate female bodies in public space as in constant danger of rape. He dismisses her perception in order to discuss the metaphorical “violence to the West’s traditional concept of ‘woman’ ” which must be done before enough women “consider such venues as a locus of possible pleasure,” taking their rightful place in the public sexual sphere (32). Violence against women (and, even more, against those whose bodies trouble normative gender) is not only metaphorical, though, and Ana’s wariness of certain spaces, though engendered by fear, may be as much a survival strategy as a symptom of internalized oppression. Clearly, the roles of participants in public sexual cultures should not be––and are not––necessarily male. But it is possible to read Ana’s experience at the porn theatre in more than one way, to understand her disengagement as something other than a symptom of oppression, whether of her along the axis of gender or by her along the axis of class. It is interesting to note that, in The Motion of Light in Water, a woman named Ana was one of the 220 first people Delany heard ask someone if they were “queer” (and affirm her own queerness shortly afterward) (259). This gives a very different image of this woman, who we may as well imagine to be the same person than the apparent naïveté Delany highlights in Times Square Blue; it also reminds us of the many queer lives and practices not represented by his urbanist vision of public sexual space and by the futures that spiral out from it. In the porn theatre, Ana stared at the screen. Her staring can remind us of the ways in which engagement with cultural production is a world making practice too, though it may not take place in public space. In reading or in viewing, participatory textual interactions offer dreamed-up worlds to tentatively, transformatively, joyfully step inside. Readers can fantasize about queer worlds like Delany’s without necessarily being willing or able to give up the restrictions and privileges that make it difficult for them to enter the real world equivalents. I have long been involved in documenting and archiving the sexual and political practices of science fiction fans with a view to better understanding these issues. My final chapter moves into this realm. I have briefly touched upon the connections between Delany’s world building and new media social practices, from the 1990s virtual world based on Dhalgren to the connection between online transgender and genderqueer languages of activism and Stars In My Pocket’s pronoun experiments. In the next chapter, which functions as an epilogue, I look toward the deviant futures that emerge from the intersection of the queer histories of speculation this dissertation has explored with the transformative possibilities that emerge in new forms of cultural production in digital media. Through amateur creative practices with which members of fan communities respond to the science fiction worlds they choose to imaginatively dwell within, I will explore how 221 communal practices of creative at-home engagement can also develop queer relationships to temporality and futurity. 222 - 5 - Epilogue: How to Remix the Future Sampling is like sending a fax to yourself from the sonic debris of a possible future. ––Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science (2004) We’re living in a den of thieves Rummaging for answers in the pages ––Regina Spektor, “Us,” as vidded by Lim (2007) 5.1 | Science Fiction and the Digital Future The previous four chapters have explored constellations of futurity and its absence across multiple formations in twentieth-century Britain and America. They engage historical appearances and intersections of utopia, dystopia, eugenics, feminism, fascism, empire, race, capital, technology, blackness, performance, gayness, femininity, and many kinds of sex. In each case, I have tried to show what we can learn from negotiations and transformations enacted by science fictions’ engagements with and critiques of the way the future’s discursive creation. In the early twenty-first century present, however, one theme has a tendency to overpower all others when it comes to constructions of futurity: the digital. Questions of media change and the effects of mediated communication are everywhere in the futuristic fictions whose temporalities I have been unpacking throughout this project: from the remote connectivities in Corbett’s utopian New Amazonia to the book as banned archive in Burdekin’s dystopian Swastika Night; from Afrofuturist framings of technology as racial collectivity to the prefiguration of wireless connectivity in Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. The ease of online communication has seemed to fulfill previous moments’ 223 dreams and nightmares alike, retrospectively turning works from Edward Bellamy’s visions of the future of commerce (discussed in chapter one) to EM Forster’s fear of the loss of all human contact (discussed in chapter two) into concrete predictions. Critical thought about new media and technology is constantly faced with questions of futurity, and popular conceptions of digital media have been particularly shaped by the speculative tools of science fiction. Most famously, the term “cyberspace”––which dominated analyses of the emergent medium of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s––was coined by William Gibson in his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer. 129 In this final chapter, I gesture toward some engagements with digital futurity that continue the deviant histories this dissertation has traced into the present. Even as digital media has been theorized in and through science fiction since its earliest days, the ways in which it has been used to engage with science fiction texts have been central to its development. As I have mentioned in passing many times already, grassroots cultures of critical science fiction fans work with and through the cultural logics of science fiction that I have unpacked throughout this dissertation in order to produce art and fiction where speculative critique joins to queer pleasure. Compelling deviant digital futures emerge from creatively recombinant orientations to the archives of cultural production that digital transformations have made more readily available for appropriative 129 The chapter “Why Cyberspace?” in Wendy Chun’s 2006 Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics unpacks the reasons for and effects of this widespread adoption of Gibson’s imagined spatialization of the abstract digital, as well as the techno-orientalist logics with which it was involved. Works in the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk, and its film equivalents from Blade Runner to The Matrix, have provided analytical examples to innumerable scholars of new media.The cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling even provides an example to begin and end Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, whose analyses are highly critical of new media’s tendency to create futurist temporalities, though Sterling’s science fiction is less important to Zielinski than his media art. 224 re-production. 130 Science fiction fans’ remix cultures can both reproduce and challenge the commonplace utopian and dystopian technofuturist clichés that circulate around new media. I am interested in how forms of digital remix enable amateur creators to craft deviant versions of media temporalities, making visible some of the critical processes by which the marginal science fiction writers I have been discussing repurpose gendered and racialized temporalities of reproduction and colonization. The chapter begins by exploring what it means to critically reconfigure the imagined future by means of digital media, engaging a particular form that has emerged from science fiction fan culture: fan video or vidding. I consider the queer kinds of relationship to science fiction temporalities that vidders’ appropriations create, and examine the ways that this form can be employed to articulate deviant futures––as well as scholarly analyses of them. Then, in a final case study, I look at critical fan responses to the 2003-2009 TV series Battlestar Galactica. The temporal complexities of the show (a serial that engages a previous serial with retro production design trimmings and technological updates that analogize early-2000s technology, combined with explicit analogies to racial histories, US imperialism, and the 2003 Iraq War) make it especially apt for my project. The series developed a seemingly futuristic setting that, after many convoluted plots centering around consciousness, reproduction, and the construction of the human, folded itself into a developmental, evolutionary progress narrative of the kind I have spent many pages unpacking here. The 130 Remix has become common practice and a key literacy for the digital age; its uses by marginal cultural producers are legion, and I cannot hope to adequately represent them here. See Marcus Boon’s discussion of the wide range of “industrial folk cultures” that draw on the ease of digital copying to develop new creative forms (25). Hip hop’s cultures of DJing and sampling have been crucial to the shaping of digital remix cultures and the ways they have intersected with copyright law, though I do not have space to discuss this at length here. See Paul D Miller, Rhythm Science, and Abigail Derecho, Illegitimate Media. 225 appropriation of Battlestar Galactica’s temporal weirdnesses and their reconfiguration in amateur art is testimony to the deviant futurities and queer speculations that can blossom amid the contradictions and complications of newly mediated relationships to old narratives. This dissertation’s focus has been primarily on science fictions by marginalized creators, at moments when print was the medium most available for those with limited resources to produce culture. Circulating more often as entertainment and/or cultural commentary than as high art, the deviant futures from twentieth-century print culture that I have examined nevertheless form something of an avant garde for popular fiction. As my occasional analyses of mainstream film have acknowledged, the industrial world of commercial media contends with different concerns, many of which structurally exclude marginal perspectives. Yet my focus on the transformative appropriation of ideologies that underline oppression and violence also suggests ways of engaging with the immersive atmosphere of racial, gendered and capitalist normativity that is present in the television and film industries’ speculative output. Within an early-twenty-first-century media landscape saturated both with futurity and with anxieties about the future’s loss, amateur digital interventions into industrially produced imaginaries bring together the critiques and concerns of the marginal speculative archive I have been building with the genre specificities of science fiction media. Critically queer fan engagements with digital futurity are one form in which the histories this dissertation has traced perpetuate themselves. Familiar images, themes, tropes, and connections will recur, as futures from the deviant past and the deviant present reach out to touch across time. 226 5.2 | Deviant Futures in Borrowed Time: Video Remix’s Queer Temporalities Elizabeth Freeman locates queer possibilities in art that works with “the excess generated by capital,” that can “collect and remobilize archaic or futuristic debris as signs of things that have been and could be otherwise” (xvi). This dissertation has collected archaic futuristic debris across a span of more than a hundred years, and has sought to remobilize them in an exploration of queer rhythms and affective historiographies lived in relationship to reproductive and technological futures that cannot be seen simply as straight or colonizing. I end with the excesses of a less archaic and more capitalistic kind of speculative fiction than I have so far discussed: science fiction television, whose futuristic debris are regularly repurposed by creative fans who take advantage of readily available digital video editing technologies to make television futures deviate from their broadcast form. Thanks to various subcultural intersections and social media connections as well as to offline cultural overlap, geek cultures formed around science fiction media have in recent years been converging with radical critiques of race and gender reflecting national and transnational concerns with uneven distributions of power in the digital future. Out of these meetings come new critical literacies, new ways to make meaning, and new futures for cultural theorizing in and beyond the academy. Queer, feminist, and critically antiracist science fiction fans have built online cultures of grassroots production and critique that mobilize science fiction to transformatively reoccupy, reconfigure and remix their relationships to media time. Media and science fiction fans have been recombining images from their favorite shows and setting them to music to create “visual essay[s]” since the 1970s, when Kandy Fong made slide shows of Star Trek to show at conventions (Coppa, “Women”). Francesca 227 Coppa and Tisha Turk have written about the gendered histories and rhetorical practices of vidding, and about the complex narratives, arguments, and stories that can be developed in videos crafted from juxtaposed film and television visuals with a pop-music soundtrack. While vidding, like other appropriative arts made easier by digitization, was predated by the analogue. Yet the affordances of the digital, both in terms of technological ease (nonrivalrous copying, video sharing) and of communication (linking localized audiences into global networks of grassroots production with diverse and conflicting perspectives) have allowed it to branch out into more diverse, more critical forms. Vids create meaning through audiovisual repurposing: the juxtaposition of a well- known image, one whose original context would be well understood to an audience of fans, and the lyrical content and connotations of a particular song. This form of retelling by re- editing comes from a history of playing with, celebrating, and queering loved texts. A few examples from one of the most widely screened vids, “Us” by Lim (2007), will explain how vidders manipulate the overdetermination of science fiction media images. 131 “Us” is one of the most technologically elaborate vids ever produced. As in most fan videos, every choice of image, cut, effect, and juxtaposition is overdetermined and dependent on the contextual knowledge the viewer brings to the footage as well as the affective investment they bring with them to the vid. Lim’s vid foregrounds this through its use of visual effects, offering a meta-analysis of creative fan subculture. Footage is taken from films and televisions shows which have large fan followings and which have been central to the history of Anglo- 131 “Us” has been screened at the California Museum of Photography and featured in Michael Wesch’s influential educational video “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube”; a still from the vid has graced the cover of Cinema Journal thanks to a short essay “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership” that I published there as part of an In Focus feature on vidding. 228 American science fiction’s slash-oriented media fan subcultures: Star Trek, Blake’s 7, The Professionals, The X Files, Stargate, Buffy, Lord of the Rings, and many more. 132 Lim used a digital paint program to modify the footage she used, ‘drawing’ over it with pencil-colored lines; the result is that the filmed images appear to be drawn by hand. This becomes a visual metaphor for the way fan creators understand their art as transforming the commodities sold them by the culture industries into personal, handcrafted objects whose disposability they override. As Regina Spektor sings “They made a statue of us / and put it on a mountain top,” Kirk and Spock appear on screen, their uniforms the only splash of color in a grey and white expanse [figure 14]. The audiovisual juxtaposition suggests that fans’ work with the comparatively unexceptional transforms it into something monumental, shining from a snowy mountain. In its significance for subcultural lives, popular culture’s science fiction futures, forgettable and clichéd from many perspectives, have become statuesque. Later, to the refrain “we’re living in a den of thieves,” we see a reminder of the queer desires that shape these remix histories in a shot of Captain Kirk’s face with Spock’s hand against it, 1980s-style green computer text superimposed on the penciled-over image (figure 15). This image, diegetically a ‘mind meld’ but eroticized in fans’ queer gaze, is one that has been used in many Kirk/Spock slash vids before; one such use is even reproduced by Jenkins as part of his discussion of K.M.D.’s 1980s vid “I Needed You” in Textual Poachers (241). The text, according to Lim, is part of a fan story she was writing at the time she made the vid. This image indexes the communal significance of fans’ appropriative art, of the queer practices that take place through repetition and appropriation. The next shots in 132 These histories are documented by Busse and Hellekson and in Coppa’s “Brief History of Media Fandom.” 229 the sequence underline the connections I am drawing between histories of feminist and queer science fiction writing and science fiction media fandom. Images of books and DVDs––solicited by Lim from fellow fans––come to be superimposed on the Star Trek image, including Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, whose queer world building I discussed in the previous chapter (figure 16). 133 “Us” uses the film V for Vendetta’s revolutionary narrative, which I discuss in chapter two, to frame its celebration, with a connection that has gained in significance since the vid was made. In the last frame, a young, bespectacled woman slips off the mask that has, since the vid was released, come to be associated with Anonymous’s digital protests (figure 17). She appears to be a figure for the often-anonymous, geeky women of fandom who craft their own art with corporate media’s materials, whose various groupings constitute the “Us” the vid addresses and commemorates. Unmasking at the end of the vid, it is as though she were taking a bow–– and reminding us that the everyday practices of digital copyright infringement belong to feminized pleasure as well as piratical rebellion. 133 Books depicted in the following images include feminist science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin and a variety of cultural studies scholarship. 230 Figures 14-17 (l-r by row): Star Trek and V for Vendetta reconfigured in Lim’s “Us”: “We’re living in a den of thieves” Through the processes of juxtaposition, repetition, and audiovisual suturing by which they make meaning within their subcultural community, vids have the capacity not only to comment on science fiction cultures but to reinscribe, reimagine, and queer media histories and temporalities. The 2005 vid “Walking on the Ground,” by Flummery, highlights fan video’s relationship to media change and digital futurity. It was made for the vid fan convention Vividcon’s celebration of 30 years of history in 2005 (the same year YouTube first went live). Placing imagery of fannish vid creation to the tune of a comic Sheldon Allman song about the temporality of technological progress, Flummery’s vid writes subcultural history in to an evolutionary narrative of technological obsolescence, angst, and 231 renewal (figure 18). It suggests that for as long as there have been media futures, fans have been remixing them. Flummery’s documentation of vidding’s pre-Youtube history, from Kandy Fong’s clips from the Star Trek cutting room floor, to the dual-VCR duplication of the California Crew, to the early adoption of consumer video editing software, reminds us that media’s remixability did not begin with the digital (figures 19-21). Figures 18-21 (l-r by row): The evolution of vidding in Flummery’s “Walking on the Ground” Rendered in a less visibly transformative fashion than “Us,” “Walking on the Ground” brings together a seemingly random collection of clips, chosen for their meaning to specific fan communities who pioneered the pre-digital form of vidding. Through labors of piracy, bootlegging, filesharing, and informal education to teach the tech skills that make video 232 remix possible, television becomes a shared archive, its images as cathected to personal lives as family photographs. Lim and Flummery insist that the aggregated moments of popular media, far from being transient or disposable, can remain current forever if their viewers only love them enough. The climax of Flummery’s vid tells a story of apocalypse and renewal that my explorations of utopian, dystopian, and reproductive time have made familiar. To the lyrics “There’s just a handful of us left / to start the world anew / and we’ve agreed on one thing that we all are gonna do,” we see a world explode (figure 22). In the next shot, this becomes a symbol for the danger of Macrovision copy protection and other digital rights management technologies (figure 23). These have often made it difficult for remix creators to make their art, but a “handful” will persist, the vid assures us with the image of a tough few at their computers (figure 24). Casting vidders as the potential germination of a resistant new media future, an old-fashioned projector next screens an egg and sperm as we are invited to “start the world anew” (figure 25). Then, shots familiar to anyone who knows the work of fan favorite TV auteur Joss Whedon invite the vid’s viewers (who were, at the first screening, a convention audience of vidders and vid fans) to participate: Buffy the vampire slayer calls on her high school colleagues to fight Season Three’s evil authority figure, the Mayor who ascended to demon status (figures 26-27). 233 Figures 22-27 (l-r by row): Telling a story of apocalypse, rebellion, and renewal in Flummery’s “Walking on the Ground”: “There’s just a handful of us left / to start the world anew / and we’ve agreed on one thing that we all are gonna do” This weaving of anti-corporate, anti-copyright critique with science fiction TV tells a great story about recovering the commons for subcultural art and building a politicized 234 futurism out of fannish love and creativity. It resonates not only with Lim, but with the activism of groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and with the widespread and growing activism against intellectual property legislation that completely fails to account for the range of creative and critical ways that ordinary people engage with digital media’s archives. 134 However, it is also important to think through the audiovisual workings of vidding in a way that complicates the logic of this sperm-and-egg revolution, of remix as critical new media future. Viewed queerly, vidders’ processes are as important as the products, like this sequence, that they create. In the collective or individual archives of vidders, the organizing principle is not usually revolutionary activism. Nor is it historical rigor, accuracy, fashion, narrative, or flow. Instead, as Lim’s loving monumentalisms demonstrate, it is feeling: usually, but not always, love. As I have had brought home to me when I have screened vids to those trained in film production, vidders’ editing practices are almost unbearably earnest. In their dense audiovisual synchronization, vids are fixated on literalisms and surfaces, drawing on gesture to create arguments that merge the obvious with subtleties only visible to those who share an obsessive familiarity with any given media image. As vids fixate, they create affective continuities similar to the queer artistic forms Freeman describes as finding new ways of “moving through and with time, encountering pasts, speculating futures, and interpenetrating the two in ways that counter the common sense of the present tense” (xv). Changing the narrative order of stories and unsuturing images in order to reformulate them according to a sonic temporality appropriated from somewhere else demands a creative and 134 See Rebecca Tushnet’s “Legal Fictions” and “Hybrid Vigor” as well as Siva Vaidhyanathan’s work. 235 counterintuitive relationship to media flows. It counters their common sense––whether that is the meaning attributed to the ending of a story, or the idea that we should invest only a limited amount of our emotional and intellectual energy in popular culture. When we talk about being a fan, we are talking about love as part of the machinery that keeps us invested in whatever we are a fan of. More often than not, that means keeping us invested not just in corporate capital but in white supremacy, heteronormativity, US imperialism, neoliberalism, and other structures embedded in media representation and production. But queers know, as Alexander Doty and many others have shown us, that overinvestments in cultural objects are usually about much more than the objects themselves. There is a danger of too easily writing off what happens and what is created within these already compromised spheres. Fan practices highlight the ways in which new digitally enabled relationships between production, consumption, and connection offer means to create and to live within deviant futures. Lim’s creativity is a particularly resonant example of the way that fans’ creative practices do the work Henry Jenkins described, in 1992’s Textual Poachers, as loving the commodified products of corporate media enough to give them a use value. Jenkins, Camille Bacon-Smith, and other early proponents of fan studies spoke of this in terms of resistance to media industries’ dominance of popular pleasures and desires, but later scholarship has pointed out that fan creativity often runs neatly along the lines laid out for it by industry, whether that means the cult television logics Sarah Gwenllian Jones discusses in “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters” or the convergences and overlaps between media industries’ and consumers’ transmedia practices that emerge in Jenkins’ hugely influential work on media convergence. Slash’s subtexts can be as much part of TV and film’s marketing strategies as media companies’ encouragement 236 of online participation. 135 The negotiations between fans and the ecosystems of media properties to which they are attached are complicated and conflict-ridden, as Derek Johnson and Julie Levin Russo’s work has explored. The temporalities of “Us” and “Walking on the Ground” have recently been taken up in an emergent genre of fan works that traffic in and through networked knowledges around race, gender, sex, and transnational feminism that are rarely considered to be part of media fan culture even in the most utopian depictions of its resistances. To consider these works only in the context of fan culture, of industrial production and its circulation, is to risk obscuring the critical work they do and the deviant media futures they portend. Like the feminist utopians of my first chapter, who worked with received imagery of patriarchial futures and imagined their own possibilities within it, vidders may not break with the conventions of media time––as participants in more avant-garde ideologies of remix culture might be more likely to do––but they turn and twist them in ways that matter. I am interested in (and one of) the relatively small sub-subculture of vidders who operate their creative work to explicit ends of queer, feminist, and racial critique. If vidding enables forms of radical democracy in media engagement, reconfiguring what the digital future might embody through its relationship to the archives of the media past, what are its possibilities and what are its limitations? One of my own projects for the future is to conjoin the critical tools and editorial frames of vidding with cultural theory, to unpack and explore the recombinant facets of our contemporary media landscape and its speculative precursors. In 2008, exploring the ideas 135 Lim’s vid nods to Joss Whedon’s acknowledgement of fans’ erotic investment in Angel and Spike with a shot of the two men holding hands. 237 about reproduction and eugenics that would be central to this dissertation, I created a remix video that edited images of Children of Men’s Kee with female figures who represent futurity in other science fiction films (“The Future Stops Here”). I sought to explore what it would mean to break down the narrative temporalities and reproductive orders in which these figures were variously encoded, to not only describe but also make visible the ways in which those images traffic beyond their original context: the ways a queer or feminist or antiracist audience fascinated against its better judgment might be likely to take those images and run with them. Delving into and cutting through the film footage led me to develop my reading of Kee; to understand the ways in which, though she is not a queer character in any obvious way, there is nevertheless something queer about the way she fails to synchronize with the narrative in which she is situated. Making the vid shaped the way my argument about Kee and her precursors (who include Stella in Woman Alive, Edith in Swastika Night, and the unnamed black woman in Du Bois’s “The Comet”) developed, giving me a sense that I could move queerly through time into archives to touch them. When I first began to share my project of scholarly vidding in digital humanities contexts, fellow scholars would frequently ask me why I had chosen to adopt this kind of music video; why would I not work with more established radical models like detournement or anti-narrative collage? While I would never wish to detract from what is important about those forms, and while I may use them in future, I hope that this discussion has shown why vidding’s affective histories suggest that there may be something about the form of the music video that makes a difference. Like the sugar-coated deviant futures of popular science fiction, vids are simple to watch, once you have learned the genre’s conventions. But they demand ways of seeing and hearing that go against the flow. 238 5.3 | Battlestar Galactica, Critical Fandom, and the Refusal of Closure The last case study I offer in this dissertation gathers its multiple themes together through the television series Battlestar Galactica, which embodied many themes about technological, and racial futurity. Aired simultaneously on the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel in the USA and on Sky One in the UK beginning with a 2003 miniseries that was followed by four seasons between 2004 and 2009, the series reimagined a 1978 space opera featuring human/lizard warfare as a story about a remnant of the human race trying to stay alive while at war with the robots who destroyed them. Deeply engaged in emergent processes of television/digital convergence through its webisodes, sponsored fan activity, and many active online communities, Battlestar offered a prime example of contemporary anxieties surrounding media’s industrial futures: what Julie Levin Russo describes as “the reproduction of television itself” (Indiscrete Media 99). The show, and the range of responses fans have made to it, resonates with the futural forms I have gone back in time to uncover throughout the dissertation: eugenic reproduction; feminism and femininity in multiple forms; fascism and crypto-fascism; racialization; slavery; alternative modalities of pleasure and desire. As Anne Kustritz argues in her article “Postmodern Eugenics,” the show restages all these futuristic ideologies for an audience presumed to have long forgotten the histories this dissertation has sought to trace. 136 To give a fully detailed analysis of Battlestar’s conditions of production, strategies of representation, and complexities of reception would take me far from this project’s overarching argument, but I hope that the suggestive analyses 136 Forthcoming in Camera Obscura. 239 offered here will suggest how my theoretical ideas might travel into varied areas of media and culture. 137 Deviant futures continue to be produced, erased, rediscovered, and recombined through marginal subjects’ and networks’ speculative negotiations with dominant media. The first episodes of Battlestar Galactica dramatized the end of the world, as Cylons blew up the main human planet of Caprica. As the show’s vaunted realism combined speculative anxieties about humanity’s future with interpersonal conflict and analogies to post-9/11 US imperial politics, it was downhill from there for humanity. 138 Overdetermined narratives of Cylon/human conflict combined a range of racial allegories with anxieties about media and technology, sexual pleasure, and reproduction. In the tradition of science fiction robots since Karel Capek’s socialist RUR coined the term in 1920, the Cylon cyborgs were created to do humanity’s manual labor, but turned out to have too much in common with the dehumanized yet rebellious downtrodden subjects who had been relegated to subordinate roles before them. Product and symbol of the human “Colonial” technological future, the Cylons emerged from an implied past (later depicted in the far less successful 2010 spinoff Caprica) where they did the background labor of “Colonial” civilization, enslaved because their consciousness could not be recognized. 139 The long history of 137 For analyses of Battlestar Galactica’s production history at a crucial transatlantic intersection of old and new media, see work by Tom Abba and Mark A. McCutcheon. Conflicts around its status as an adaptation are considered by Derek Johnson in his essay “Devaluing and Revaluing Seriality: the Gendered Discourses of Media Franchising.” 138 McCutcheon discusses Battlestar Galactica’s marketing as a realist science fiction show, and the role of 9/11 allegory in making this framework convincing. 139 This ground is familiar from my discussion of black futurity in chapter three. Andrea Hairston traces the lines drawn between robots, humans, and racialization in science fiction in her essay “Romance of the Robot,” while analogies between cyborg and slave labor are explored extensively in Tavia Nyong’o’s short but complex essay “So Say We All.” Nyong’o writes that the Cylon activate “an ur-conflict between masters and slaves, the outcome of which, in proper Hegelian fashion, could leave neither position untransformed”; the Cylons “were not ‘aliens’ at all, but the triumphant remnants of a slave insurrection returned to wreak havoc upon their 240 speculative allegory on which this trope could implicitly draw is made clear in the succinct opening phrases of the first season’s title sequence: all an audience needs to remember robot-slavery from Blade Runner and Terminator if not from the less commonly remembered sources in history and politics that I have been exploring in this project: The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan. (Battlestar Galactica Series One credits) Like terroristic figures from Lucifer to Frankenstein and beyond, the Cylons were made by those who they came to terrorize, creators reaping what they sowed. They only treated humans the way humans treated them and themselves: they were Caliban to to the humans of “Colonial” civilization, given consciousness, bodies, and language only to turn it against those who made them. And their language, which, as the series progresses, they use for many things other than killing and cursing, is wireless networks. Cylon imagery suggested links between technological futurisms and erased histories––and presents––of digital labor in the margins, aligning the connectivity of digital networks with the sentient labor that produces them and enables their use [figures 28-9]. former oppressors.” “Placing that insurrection outside the main storyline kept Battlestar from resonating with the long history of slave and plebeian insurrection,” but Nyong’o writes that Cylonicity continuted to be inflected with multi-purpose racialized alterity. He finds that some of the later seasons’ religiously inclined “inscrutability” (the Cylons’ motives for pursuing and sometimes sparing the humans are never clear, and this is multiplied when some Cylon characters begin to seek death and rebirth for spiritual reasons) followed logically from this, insofar as the full consciousness and history of the slave cannot be admitted into the order of recognition without confronting that order with its foundational trauma. 241 Figures 28-9: Humanoid wireless networks and digital connections in Battlestar Galactica While its representations of digital futurity were figured through the dangerous alterity of the rebellious Cylons, Battlestar Galactica was much heralded for its uses of digital media, especially in the transmedia strategies that aimed to increase fans’ investment. Webisodes brought viewers to the SciFi Channel’s website, competitions encouraged creative use of the show’s material, and even years after the last episode aired, the since-rebranded SyFy website still hosts a Battlestar-themed massively multiplayer online game. 140 As Julie Levin Russo and Suzanne Scott have written, however, such acclaimed invitations to fan creativity only allowed very narrow forms of engagement, and those forms were largely gendered male. 141 In unlicensed online realms, however, Battlestar had an incredibly active fan fiction and fan video community that built on largely-female practices of science fiction audience creativity to realize at least some prospects of critical, deviant, queer futurity at which the show could only hint. While the show often worked through reductive racial analogies, cliched techno- anxieties, and heterosexual male gazes, critical fan production liberated the show’s overdetermined possibilities for deviant futures. 140 For discussion of SyFy’s rebranding in the context of changing market relations between cable television and digital media, see Barbara Selznick’s “Branding the Future: SyFy in the Post-Network Era.” 141 See Scott’s “Is Fan Production Frakked?” and Russo’s “User-Penetrated Content.” 242 A vibrant vidding culture developed around the show as it aired, and many vids explored intersections of reproduction, technology, violence, and sexuality. Some brief examples will give a sense of the scope of the show’s interlocutors. Luminosity’s vid “More Human that Human” used a White Zombie track to map the convergence of Cylon sexuality and destruction, splicing explosions and Six’s seductions with an even closer interleaving than the show offered. SDWolfpup’s “Fix You” worked with the gentle tones of the Coldplay ballad to insinuate the Cylon’s genocidal intentions into an unsettling narrative of redemption via the murder of symbolic and actual children. In a vid that recuperated the Cylons’ longing for heterosexual reproduction, which created the child Hera, Tallulah71’s “Hera Has Six Mommies” (commissioned by Julie Levin Russo in accompaniment to her essay of the same name), the cross-species, polyamorous connections between human and Cylon female characters played out to a mashup of feminist and queer-friendly singers Bjork, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey. In my own vid “Sons and Daughters” (as Lila Futuransky), I reframed a song by The Decemberists, whose lyrics implied a post-apocalyptic rebuilding (“When we arise, sons and daughters / we’ll build our homes on the waters …. all the bombs fade away”), to narrate the conjoined perspective of Cylon metal robots and humanistic cyborgs, linking their rebellion with a narrative of hope through their disturbing experiments with antihumanist reproductive futurism. In her crossover vid between Battlestar Galactica, the Terminator spinoff series Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Darwin’s Origin of Species, Charmax transposed the temporalities of evolution and eugenics onto the technology stories of both those robot apocalypse narratives. In figure 30, Darwin’s subtitle “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” appears superimposed on an image from Battlestar 243 Galactica, a flashback of human prisoners being experimented on as the Cylon turned the tables on their creator to develop into humaniform cyborgs. Figure 30: Darwinism revised into Cylon genetic experimentation in Charmax’s vid “Unnatural Selection.” Even as vidders explored multiplex possible interpretations of Cylon reproductive metaphors and futures, the next instalment of the authorized narrative would always be there to cause trouble. The serial temporalities of television give creative fandom’s interventions an interesting obsolescence. The final season’s events particularly underline this, and I will end this section by looking at how queerly critical fans found it possible to resist that story’s closure. After five post-apocalyptic years of machinic challenges to the human, sympathy for the toaster, and a range of Oedipal and anti-Oedipal dynamics between humans and their cyborg enemy kin, the show’s overarching plot of the search for an “earth” nobody ever thought existed was at last complete. What had seemed, though complicated by retro production design that nodded to the 1970s series, to be a futuristic story, folded back on itself as the humans and Cylons came together to colonize earth––20,000 years in the past. In preparation to be our ancestors, the convergent Cylon/human colonists threw out all 244 technology and medicine and made plans to teach the indigenous population to be human their way. In figure 31, they are viewed at a safe distance through military binoculars functioning as a paradigmatic colonial technology. This restaging of settler colonialism was a depressingly perfect example of the way straight, colonizing forms of time shut down openings to different histories or queerer futures. Evolution became an alibi for straightening out the queer technological possibilities that Battlestar’s science fiction setting could have opened up; the show’s refrain, “All this has happened before and all this will happen again,” became boringly literal. Figure 31: Colonizing humanity’s ancestors in Battlestar Galactica Edelman writes that the heteronormative politics of reproductive futurism, where ‘saving the children’ becomes an excuse for avoiding the dangers of real change, guarantee that projections of futurity will be “just as lethal as the past” (31). Battlestar Galactica developed a literal figure for this: Hera, the half Cylon, half Asian child who begins her life as a symbol for Cylon longing for reproductive monogamous heterosexual love and ends it as as mitochondrial Eve, the ancestor of the present-day human species. She is last seen 245 romping on the newly discovered Edenic grasses of Earth (figure 32). But this will not last long, given that the skeleton of Eve was a body only seventeen years old. Hera’s transferral into everyone’s past in the finale clarifies and exemplifies the conservative politics Nyong’o has elsewhere identified as the racialization of reproductive futurism, wherein “[h]eterosexuality has been a preeminent metaphor through which a heterogeneous, mongrel past is recuperated as both a stable racial binary in the present and a possible hybrid utopia in the future” (Amalgamation Waltz 172; see also the last section of chapter three). Her figuration, as manifestation of her parents’ love story, defuses any radical power the Cylons might hold as metaphors for racial alterity. It suggests that posthuman connections are only valuable insofar as they can translate into possibilities for an already achieved eugenic future. Science fiction’s suggestive futurity becomes just another iteration of heteronormative cliché, where liberal multiculturalism serves as an alibi for white supremacy. Figure 32: Hera as an icon of prelapsarian childhood in Battlestar Galactica As Hera and her parents settled down for a short life on earth, the humans waved goodbye to all their technology and sent the ships that had brought them there into the sun. 246 And a queer fan collective decided that enough was enough. Cylon Vidding Machine is a loose collective of fan artists and theorists of which I am an occasional part; the group makes queer art with and from Battlestar Galactica. Alert to the show’s queer possibilities, the group’s artworks developed an expanded notion of critical Cylonicity to play through possibilities for different gendered and racialized narratives that would deviate from the future the show suggested. These included an attempt to refashion the show’s finale entirely, Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-Edited Mutiny and Resurrection, which tried to retell the ending in a fashion fit for a queer and decolonial cylon future. The fan-edited finale closes with sweeping music and an montage of earth, sky, and robots: less an alternative than an insistence that the viewer continue the work of imagination. On a DVD-commentary track that the creators of Redactica made available, they stated that they wanted “the ending to be open, not bland, reductive, and unempowering for women,” that viewers should finish on “the edge of something big”––something that is not the too-easily-predicted reproduction of an earthly past toward which the show had arguably been marching since its very beginning, something that would build another time and space out of the archives of that industrially produced future. Yet it is difficult to watch Redactica without seeing the extent to which its narrative is determined by the lack of resources critical fans can have in comparison to the media industries. 142 The short, playful form of fan video still offers more engaging deviant media futures. 142 The FBI’s 2012 shutdown of MegaUpload.com, on whose servers the files of Battlestar Redactica were hosted for download, mean that the creators’ lack of resources now mean the fan edit cannot be watched at all at the time of submission. 247 As Battlestar Galactica marched toward its close, women, queers, and most of the racially marked humans were erased one by one. Videos created by members of the Cylon Vidding Machine not only made the show’s marginal queer characters central but exposed or rerouted its reliance on reproductive and colonial temporal narratives. The collective’s video “The Enemy Within” (figure 33) digitally casts a queer fandom that lives on as a threat to the Colonial hierarchy that eventually wins. Figure 33: Title card for “The Enemy Within” by Cylon Vidding Machine Linking to contexts and histories well beyond the show it remixes, this vid has a theoretical diegetic context as a warning video, riffing off cold-war-era propaganda. Depicting the Cylon women, eye candy for a straight male target audience in the original show, as queer female figures who “recruit”––and splicing in some explicit lesbian sex to get the point across (figures 34-36)––the vid moves from images of desire and seduction to violence and death, organizing narrative temporalities so that shots of the walking wounded appear after death and bring lost female characters back to life as lesbian zombies. In case the editing was not enough for viewers to get the point, a title card declares that “These 248 monstrous women pay a price for cheating death.” Announcing that “No one is safe,” the vid comically reanimates the violence that Battlestar’s patriarchal, heteronormative, colonial conclusion enacted on the bodies of women, especially women of color, making it explicit and suggesting a counternarrative (figures 37-39). Figures 34-39: Queerly remixing Battlestar Galactica Nodding to a viewer who will enjoy identifying with this “enemy within” and regarding the cyborg femmes fatales through what Russo has called “girlslash goggles,” (“Hera Has Six Mommies”), the vid interjects queer pleasures into what was a grindingly oppressive set of storylines for any viewer invested in queer female possibility. There is 249 much more to say about these critical queer fan creations, whose pleasures offer suggestive prospects for theorizing the power of dominant media and capital while acknowledging the pleasures that might be available within them, for better and for worse. But in the larger framework of the deviant futures this dissertation explores, this sketch of their possibilities may be enough, I hope, to leave readers beginning to speculate about emergent digital ecologies of deviant media futures. 5.4 | Queer Geek Politics After the Future Is the future ancient history? In his 2011 book After the Future, Italian autonomist Marxist theorist and activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi laments the state of life now that the twentieth century, “the century that trusted in the future,” with its dominant narratives of capitalist expansion and technological development, has ended (25). In its place, he calls for recognition of “the infinity of the present” (165). Berardi’s analyses of capitalism’s contours are exciting and his critique of modernist futurity rings true, but the creators of the deviant futures I have traced in this dissertation know that the infinite possibilities of past and present can also be contemplated from the perspective of a future that we might seek to occupy even while knowing it to be untrustworthy. When I began to conceptualize this project, I thought the future might well be over. Moving to the USA just as Bush was re-elected, I girded myself with both hope and cynicism as I set off to take up my place. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, my hopeful, anarchistic fascination with transformative change and radical political futures seemed faintly naive and embarrassing even to me. I discovered a new cynicism when I started writing in earnest in the first flush of Obama’s presidency, keen to counter the narratives of liberal, normative 250 hope he put forward when it was so clear to me and plenty of others that the future he promised was more of the neoliberal same. Yet, as I continued to unpack deviant temporalities and the histories of complicated futures, the public political currency of hope and speculation began to outpace my attempts to understand where it all might be coming from. Even as neoliberal policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic seem set to eradicate the public educational and welfare systems that have allowed me the privilege to write a dissertation, even as the ravages of speculative capital are everywhere evident in the permanent, ubiquitous, and expanding presence of crisis, futures for radical and anarchistic alternatives are becoming real in more than a few marginal communities and the pages of science fiction. When I left off writing it was to gulp down news of anti-cuts protests and student occupations in the UK and in California; the movements that became known as the Arab Spring; London’s summer 2011 riots; the setting up and eviction of Occupy camps; and a constant stream of violent reaction to anarchistic uprising in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. I have wondered what the point of coming back to science fiction and its cultures, to the small-scale contestations of geeky pages and screens, might be, when worlds and futures away from those protected zones have been constantly falling apart and occasionally coming together. If I have found any answers in writing this dissertation, it is that science fiction, like queer critique, has been one among many sites for speculative organizing, anarchistic possibility, and queer love, even as it may have equally often worked against such impossible possibilities. Those imagined futures, especially their conflicts and failures, provided me with the terms and the frameworks to understand the importance of hopes and dreams impossible within conventional political frames. Within and around queer theory and science 251 fiction’s speculative, retrogressive, transformative temporalities, there are possibilities for making worlds, producing knowledge, living pleasures that remix, reorient, and re-envisage futures both in the world and in shared imaginations. On the one hand, queer science fictions, like other histories of speculative futurity, are the projects of dreamers against power who are struggling for––and sometimes against––different futures now: in the digital, on the street, in classrooms, in lasting ephemeral pleasures of dancing and sex. On the other, they and we will inevitably end up reproducing old troubles while holding out new and not so new dreams. I have tried to better comprehend the history of hoped-for, daydreamed, and warned-against futures by delving into some specific examples, in lingering with with the compromised pleasures and critical failures they involve. I have explored the specificities of marginal, quiet moments in conversations about technological and political possibility that are often overlooked but that suggest alternative speculative engagements with the present. They may not find an outside to systems of colonialism, capitalism, racialization, and gender, but in working with and through them, they produce deviant alternatives, territories, and temporalities: speculative queer remixes of dominant time. To explore the possibilities of remixing the future and to experiment with them for myself was to learn methodology from unexpected places. It took me from theory-rich analyses of narrative and image into thinking about how media temporalities have been shifting and changing as digital technologies make it easier to mix up and mash up media production and consumption. Since I first began to engage with remix culture as a vidder, I have found its work to be experientially similar to the labor of producing scholarship in cultural theory. In both cases, finding one’s archive and articulating connections between the creative and/or scholarly work of others is central. I have often wished to use the 252 juxtapositional logic of a vid, rather than the explanatory and linear flow of textual argument, to demonstrate how imaginary futures created at particular historical moments both consolidate and undermine the the ways power structures are embedded in temporal narratives. Inasmuch as it is possible in textual form, that is what I have sought to do here. 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Creator Lothian, Alexis (author)

Core Title Deviant futures: queer temporality and the cultural politics of science fiction

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 04/26/2014

Defense Date 03/20/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag dystopia,Future,gender,media,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer,Race,remix,Science fiction,speculation,Time,utopia

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Halberstam, Judith (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email alexislothian@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-13788

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