The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

The celebration of the 100th anniversary of Argentina’s emancipation from Spain (the Centenario, or Centenary) was a cultural milestone. Social and cultural organizations as well as individuals joined the state in its efforts to commemorate the event by planning public festivities, inviting foreign dignitaries and intellectuals, as well as commissioning projects of urban reform, artworks, and book collections. This chapter examines how occasional literature addressed this pivotal moment in Argentina’s history as established and emerging writers discussed the country’s past and future. It discusses how Leopoldo Lugones’ Odas seculares, Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos, Ada María Elflein’s Del Pasado as well as nationalist book collections discussed the country’s cultural traditions vis-à-vis the arrival of millions of immigrants, the introduction of electoral reforms, and the emergence of a dissident form of political, social and cultural engagement. While the occasional literature produced in the year 1910 conveys a sense of optimism about Argentina’s historical ascent as a one of the world’s wealthiest nations, the political and cultural challenges resulting from the continuous flow of foreigners and the expansion of democratic participation after 1910 contributed to darken the triumphant mood that permeated the anniversary.

The book opens with a discussion of a case from Delaware challenging a long-standing requirement for partisan balance on state courts in the Delaware state constitution. The chapter goes on to note that substantively Marbury v. Madison (1803) was a case about the judicial appointment process. After a brief discussion of recent litigation over the appointment of federal administrative law judges, the chapter notes that litigation over judicial selection is consistent with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” The chapter identifies several expectations, describes the data collection process, and briefly outlines the chapters that follow.

The eponymous protagonist of Gwendolyn Brooks’s under-examined 1953 novel Maud Martha becomes acutely attuned to the multisensory dimensions of quotidian experience. As she navigates the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, and color in the public sphere, she begins to conceive of herself as a perceiving subject rather than solely as a perceived object in the private sphere. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, I theorize synesthetic stillness as an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through its exploration of overlapping and intermingling perceptual faculties. In deploying synesthetic stillness, Brooks not only counters dehumanizing sensory stereotypes, but traces a mode of Black resistance that privileges internal sensation rather than external expression.

This chapter explores a line of influence in the architecture of American intentional communities from the Associationist movement of the nineteenth century down to the hippy communes that emerged in 1965, built, after Drop City, around the shape of the geodesic dome. This hippy modernism borrowed freely from the ideas of Charles Fourier and Buckminster Fuller and fostered a community that included Stewart Brand, who went on to think about the shape of space colonies and early models of the Internet.

The first part of Chapter 6 focuses on cases about the nomination process. A large percentage of these cases come from New York where party conventions are the primary method for nominating candidates. The chapter divides nomination cases into those concerning the initiation of candidacy (e.g., nominating petitions) and those concerning choosing nominees. Of more consequence are the cases concerning candidate speech and campaign finance, both of which led to major SCOTUS decisions. The speech cases focused heavily on codes placing limits on what candidates in judicial elections could say. In addition to speech code limitations, there were speech-related cases concerning defamation, misrepresentation, false statements or claims, impugning opponents, and improper promises or statements. In addition to speech issues, the chapter discussed other forms of improper candidate behavior (e.g., improper use of work resources by incumbents running for reelection). Campaign finance issues included those related to fundraising (e.g., solicitation by candidates, reporting requirements, requests for recusal due to parties or lawyers being involved in fundraising for the judge/s campaign), loans, expenditures, and public funding.

Set in the midst of the quotidian anti-Black terrorism that circumscribed Black life in Jim Crow America, the HBO series Lovecraft Country seamlessly combines Black history and graphic horror to tell a story through a distinctly Black creative and reflective lens. A reading of the journey of Hippolyta Freeman in episode 7, “I Am,” reveals how the means of embodiment, speculative fiction, and elements of Black feminist Afrofuturism are used as a fulcrum to shift the critical weight away from the grim reality of oppression and towards the possibility of escape and liberation. The episode offers a revolutionary representation of the Black body as a conduit for self-discovery, a tool for circumventing anti-Blackness, and ultimately a vehicle for affirming a broader spectrum of Black aliveness that reverberates far beyond the realm of speculative fiction.

In contraposition to notions such as “transgression” or “marginality”, the idea of “dissidence” points towards the dismantling of binary figures and concepts that shape canonical readings of Argentinean literature. Literary writings on gender and sexual dissidence—especially after the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of 21st century—not only decenter heteronormative models  (masculine/feminine; hetero/homosexual; transgender/cisgender) but also drag with them a number of constitutive configurations of Argentinean cultural imagination, such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, Peronism/antiperonism, lettered/non—lettered, etc. This essay analyzes a series of literary texts (from Manuel Puig´s El beso de la mujer araña to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron) in which sexual and gender opacity interrupts and displaces normative binarisms—at the same time bodily and cultural—showing the way in which the languages of dissidence set the ground for other cultural, as well as political, imaginaries.

The Argentine crisis of 2001 saw economic collapse, social unrest, and police repression. But if it caused a political and economic fracture with apocalyptic overtones, in literature – and in prose fiction, specifically – it did not mean a complete break with the past nor an eruption of the new, but instead the return or reformulation of the old. Despite everything, the 2000s was a period of productivity and global acclaim for Argentina’s writers. Certain activist uses of literature and its insertion in other areas of social praxis coexisted with a search for a personal voice, namely autofictions, writings of the self, and stories of everyday life. This chapter structures a reading of the literature of the 2000s around three key topics that emerge from this conjuncture: an aesthetic of recycling; an aesthetic of haunting; and the presence of a reinvigorated feminist gaze. After a period of scepticism about the role of literature in social change, these trends sparked a renewal of interest in the activist uses of fiction. At the same time, other writers made abject characters the protagonists of their stories and agitated for a literature that strives to be both autonomous and political at the same time.