Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T07:38:16.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

24 - Queering Desire in American Science Fiction

from Queer Genre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2024

Benjamin Kahan
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
Get access

Summary

The chapter reflects on four approaches to desire present in American science fiction: normalization, displacement, reification, and reimagining. Fanfiction or fanfiction-adjacent novels such as Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) are set in queernormative worlds and as such normalize queer desire. Feminist depictions of separatist women’s communities, such as Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972), Nicole Griffith’s Ammonite (1993) or Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018), displace queer desire, situating lesbian sex and pleasures in the background of the narrative concerned with the social and political implications of a world without men. In Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) desire is reified as it serves as a condition of full humanity. Finally, stories of human/nonhuman encounters seem to lend themselves particularly well to the efforts to reimagine desire. In Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) and Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017), alien and robot characters experience desire and pleasure as diffused and independent of binary sex/gender systems.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×