Utopia/Dystopia, Race, Gender, and New Forms of Humanism in Women's Science Fiction

This thesis intends to uncover new forms of humanism grounded in a critique of the systems that produce and reify race and gender, by staging a conversation between six works of contemporary science fiction (SF) and five acclaimed theorists in gender, queer, postcolonial, humanist, and cultural studies. I engage in a reading of Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium, Nicoletta Vallorani’s Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR, works from Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe series, Elia Barceló’s Consecuencias Naturales, and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of short stories co-authored by Lola Robles and Maria Concepción Regueiro, alongside the critical theory of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. I focus on Butler’s conception of subjects who ‘become’ through affective encounters, Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, Spivak and Gilroy’s respective notions of ‘planetarity,’ and Halberstam’s theory of a ‘queer art of failure.’ These theorisations, chosen for their congruence with key themes from my primary sources of SF, are employed to demonstrate what I view as the complementarity of academic and science fictional enquiries into new forms of humanism that arise through interrogations of systems of race and gender. This thesis contends that women’s utopian SF has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in the dissemination of nuanced debates regarding issues of race and gender to a wider public. I include a genealogy of these texts in the first chapter to support this statement, with a focus on France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and influential texts from the USA. I also introduce the question of why and how SF appeals to the women writers who embrace the genre’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, and humanistic potential. The second half of this thesis argues that my corpus of women’s utopian SF, which I situate within the genealogy traced in the first chapter, engages with new forms of humanism through the critique and reformulation of issues of race and gender, as I read the following narrative elements alongside the critical theory outlined in the second chapter: reparative re-historicisations of events in European history set in science fictional worlds; formulations of hybrid, nomadic, species- and gender- transgressive entities; the queering of normative consequences of sexual intercourse in outer-space; and the failure of certain characters to perform race and gender-based kinship roles. I follow this analysis with an exploration of the way in which SF’s unique spatial attributes can probe the borders of the planetary humanisms or ‘planetarity’ that have been proposed, in particular, by Gilroy and Spivak, and through the lens of which humanity is cast into radical alterity and the Earth can be seen anew. I conclude by assessing the extent to which SF can reassemble and amplify the achievements of these new forms of anti-racist and anti-sexist humanism.