Altering Bodies, Altering Minds: Examining Essentialism, Gendered Discrimination and Violence, Racism, and Colonialism through Speculative Fiction Tropes

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which speculative fiction tropes simultaneously reinforce and challenge ideologies which uphold not only discourses about but also systems of domination, including racism, ethnocentrism, colonialism, and gendered violence. Further, the novum – the element within the text which distinguishes the world of the story from our own – and the resulting distance (Suvin 6) enables profound engagement with the lived experiences of being raced, gendered, and subordinated, while often resisting didacticism. However, it is that same distance which can lead to the repetition and circulation of insidious ideologies. I argue that it is these factors which make the genre of speculative fiction particularly generative as a postcolonialist, feminist literature, and for destabilizing students’ taking pervasive essentialist worldviews as a given so that they can critically engage with and critique the aforementioned ideologies in media. The analysis spans five chapters. The first chapter examines how the tropes of shapeshifting, cloning, transgenerational memory, and extreme longevity in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death operate to center embodied knowledge and alternate ways of knowing and producing, serving as a challenge to Western rationalism as well as patriarchal and colonialist ideologies. Chapter two demonstrates how the speculative fiction tropes of pheromones, advanced brain alterations, genetic modification, extrasensory abilities, and an alien breeding scheme in Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Fledgling foreground the ethics of consent in rape culture, medical care, and colonialism. Chapter three focuses on the role tropes such as shapeshifting, extrasensory abilities, parthenogenesis, and a third sex play in critiquing essentialism, gendered discrimination, and violence, but ultimately failing to imagine a future in which men are able to act beyond their biology or in which caregiving is not exclusive to people who can give birth. The fourth chapter examines and critiques the tendency of speculative fiction film and television to deny racialized alien characters reproduction, and if reproduction occurs, to deny these characters a stable and healthy family life – a denial which mimics cultural genocide and other colonialist practices. Further, the persistence of “scientific” racism, the ubiquitous reproduction of white bodies through a range of speculative fiction tropes such as doubling through cloning and time travel, and the valorization of white parents and children that occurs through speculative tropes is made clear. In the fifth chapter, I apply my analysis of the above to my recommendations on teaching a course which addresses these ideologies in speculative fiction media and invites students to consider the ways in which aspects of their worldview have been influenced by embodiment, the social construction of race and gender, etc.