No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Fictions of Immanence: Gender-Fluidity in the Science Fiction of Angela Carter and Octavia Butler
Abstract
This paper reads Deleuze-Guattarian and new materialist theories alongside two landmark works of speculative science fiction by Angela Carter and Octavia Butler that queer normative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. These theoretical and fictional explorations argue that subjectivity should be reconceptualised as immanent rather than fixed. Utilising uncanny affective registers, they attempt to push rigid ideas about gender/sex toward more fluid configurations that affirm a heterogeneity of lived experiences, situating subjectivity along lines of becoming. To execute such moves, Deleuze and Guattari propose a kind of experimental and experiential rupturing process; a mechanism for accessing what is immanent to everyday experience, rather than governmental. This is particularly useful for exploring transgender and other minoritarian subjectivities. By invoking breaks or ruptures from habituated ways of thinking and feeling, as these philosophers suggest, writers, artists and theorists might succeed in creating points of emergence around which new configurations and relations of gender-fluid identities might coalesce. I will investigate how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Carter and Butler, who wrote before the emergence of transgender studies during the 1990s, paved the way for nomadic conceptions of sexuality, gender and lived contradiction.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Horror is not what it used to be. Nor are its Gothic avatars. The meaning of monsters, vampires and ghosts has changed significantly over the last 200 years, as have the mechanisms (from fiction to fantasmagoria, film and video games) through which they are produced and consumed. This book, moving from gothic to cybergothic, through technological modernity and across a range of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts, critically examines these changes and the questions they pose for understanding contemporary culture and subjectivity. Re-examining key concepts such as the uncanny, the sublime, terror, shock and abjection in terms of their bodily and technological implications, it advances current critical and theoretical debates on Gothic horror to propose a new theory of cultural production based on an extensive discussion of Sigmund Freud's idea of the death drive.
An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe.
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.
Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.
Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
Explains how the work of Deleuze and Guattari speaks to feminism and other progressive movements. In Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics, Tamsin Lorraine focuses on the pragmatic implications of Deleuze and Guattari's work for human beings struggling to live ethical lives. Her bold alignment of Deleuze and Guattari's project with the feminist and phenomenological projects of grounding human action in lived experience provides an accessible introduction to their work. Lorraine characterizes Deleuze and Guattari's nonfoundational approach to ethics in terms of a notion of power that comes into skillful confluence with the multiple forces of life and an immanent principle of flourishing, while their conception of philosophical thought is portrayed as an intervention in the ongoing movement of life that she enacts in her own exploration of their ideas. She contends that Deleuze and Guattari advocate unfolding the potential of our becoming in ways that enhance our participation in the creative evolution of life, and she characterizes forms of subjectivity and cultural practice that could support such evolution. By means of her lucid reading taken through the lens of feminist philosophy, Lorraine is not only able to present clearly Deleuze and Guattari's project but also an intriguing elaboration of some of the project's practical implications for novel approaches to contemporary problems in philosophy, feminism, cultural theory, and human living.
Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
This study explores the radical potential of feminist science fiction to question dominant cultural definitions of difference and identity, self and other. It examines the way in which the generic conventions of science fiction are subverted so that notions of both genre and gender identity are redefined. The book also considers the ways in which both feminism and postmodernism have enabled women science fiction writers to challenge the "common sense" nature of social and cultural practices and institutions. postmodernism's sustained critique of the grand narratives of western culture is paralleled by feminist analysis of the patriarchal nature of the dominant discourses of that culture. While these are not the same projects, they are nevertheless connected, both by their mutual recognition of the partiality of dominant cultural practices and by their potential to develop an interventionist cultural politics.
Anthropology is a disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social. Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern.
Paganism, like many other religions, has generated a growing literature. While Pagans have not (yet) elevated any work to the status of scripture, and while no single text is read by all Pagans, the construction and narration of Pagan identity commonly entails reading. It is argued here that the academic study of Paganism is vitiated if it ignores imagination and humour, especially as manifest in fantasy literature. Terry Pratchett's Discworld corpus provides prime examples of such significant stories and images.
The Great Transformation
- K Armstrong
Armstrong, K. 2007. The Great Transformation. London: Atlantic Books.
Gender Terror, Gender Rage
- K Bornstein
Bornstein, K. 2006. "Gender Terror, Gender Rage." In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan
Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 235-243.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
- J Clute
- P Nicholls
Clute, J., and P. Nicholls. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit.
We've made it to … Magrathea? Why we as QTPOC Need to Hack Science Fiction's Improbability Drive
- J Cross
Cross, J. 2015. "We've made it to … Magrathea? Why we as QTPOC Need to Hack Science Fiction's
Improbability Drive." Lightspeed Magazine: Queers Destroy Science Fiction. September, 61: 349354.
There Goes the Neighbourhood: Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias
- M E Green
Green, M. E. 1994. "There Goes the Neighbourhood: Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias."
In Utopian and Science Fiction by Women, edited by J. L. Donawerth and C. A. Kolmarten. Syracuse:
Syracuse UP, 137-152.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Pleasure is a weapon
- H Hanra
Hanra, H. 2017. "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Pleasure is a weapon." The Guardian. (Accessed 7 April 2017)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/30/genesis-p-orridge-pleasure-is-a-weapon.
- R Luckhurst
Luckhurst, R. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity.
Postmodernist Fiction
- B Mchale
McHale, B. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Mentheun. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203393321.
Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision
- J Miller
Miller, J. 1998. "Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision." Science-Fiction
Studies Vol. 25.
Zeros + ones. London: Fourth Estate
- S Plant
Plant, S. 1998. Zeros + ones. London: Fourth Estate.
The Decadent World-View
- B Stableford
Stableford, B. 2010. The Decadent World-View. London: Wildsidebooks.
Introduction to the 'Cyborg Manifesto
- S Stryker
- S Whittle
Stryker, S., and S. Whittle. 2006. "Introduction to the 'Cyborg Manifesto.'" In The Transgender Studies
Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 103.
The Body of the City: Angela Carter's The Passion of the New Eve
- N Vallorani
Vallorani, N. 1994. "The Body of the City: Angela Carter's The Passion of the New Eve." Science Fiction
Studies Vol. 21.
The Erotics of Becoming: Xenogenesis and the Thing
- E White
White, E. 1993. "The Erotics of Becoming: Xenogenesis and the Thing." Science Fiction Studies Vol. 20.