This panel will feature two academic paper presentations followed by a live Q&A.
Liberation Through Queer Romance in Fembot Narratives Panelist: Faye Lynch (she/her) Abstract: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Ros Anderson’s The Hierarchies (2021) both depict fembots which are subject to forms of suppression or entrapment, and both texts use the romantic and sexual relationships that the fembots have with human women as a metaphorical shorthand for, and doorway to, freedom. This freedom does take the form of a physical escape, but also has mental and philosophical aspects, with the fembots and their paramours both having their perception of the world expanded through their relationship with the other. This paper examines this depiction of queer-coded love in fembot freedom narratives and asks whether it is compelling enough to avoid the tropes of the oft problematic romances depicted between men and the machines built to serve them.
No, We’re Not Too Strong: Asserting Women’s Power in a Time of Backlash Panelist: Nancy Jane Moore (she/they) Abstract: Building on my earlier papers on the relationship of our bodies to feminism, I will focus on the recent misogynistic definitions of appropriate body type and behavior for women, particularly those of international sports organizations and the current United States administration, including bans on participation by transwomen, requirements that some women take hormones because of their genetic makeup, and claims that some athletes are too strong to “really” be women. The paper will also discuss the value to women in discovering their own physical power and address the importance of SF/F as a tool to undermine these attacks.
This panel will feature two academic paper presentations followed by a live Q&A.
The Mothership: Embodiment of/as Domestic Space in Shawl and Little Badger Panelist: Tessa Crosby (she/her) Abstract: This project examines the “colony ship” trope in SF, from its imperialist, heteropatriarchal roots to its queer, feminist, decolonial resurrection. In its mainstream configuration, the colony ship distills and embodies the problematics of social reproduction: “her” raison d’etre is not only to maintain and reproduce humankind, but to maintain and reproduce the structures and hierarchies that “her” programmers believe will afford a productive labor force. This presentation highlights texts that challenge this trope’s logic and, more broadly, the logic of a genre that seems stuck in rigid, overdetermined formulations of love, care, and kin.
Speculative Reproduction in Joanne Ramos’ The Farm and Cherie Dimaline’s Hunting By Stars Panelist: Dana Smith (she/her) Abstract: This talk argues that speculative fiction is a prescient framework through which to analyze the critical and pressing stakes of the contemporary fight for reproductive justice. By analyzing two near-future speculative fiction novels, I demonstrate the inextricable nature of extractive capitalist practices and the state’s prioritization of heteropatriarchal reproductive futurity–and how this is deeply tied to settler-colonial projects which commodify vulnerable populations to reproduce whiteness. Yet, while each text reflects tensions between “choice,” power, and survival–differentially mediated by hegemonic constructions of cultural, gender, and/or racial difference–they also present the powerful potential of reproduction and kinship as resistance.
