Speculative Feminist Ecologies: World-Making and the Archive in Science Fiction

Speculative Feminist Ecologies: Worldmaking and the Archive in Science Fiction will be published by NYU Press. This book is rooted in years of work in the environmental humanities and in archives in California, Oregon, and Canada. In Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Activism in Science Fiction (2018), I used a small part of my research in the Octavia E. Butler Papers to make the case for Butler as a major climate change intellectual in a short teachable book. Speculative Feminist Ecologies is based on over a decade of archival research on the literature and memory-work of Butler, Judith Merril, and Ursula K. Le Guin, three science fiction giants who left behind massive collections of archival materials. All three creatively documented ecological struggles, dreams, and movements while connecting environmental problems to war, militarism, racial hierarchies, and live histories of colonialism and imperialism. They also made these connections in their published writings. If much of what people think of as science fiction, especially the classics of the so-called Golden Age, idealizes white man saviors, scientific techno-fixes, military heroics, and mastery of the more-than-human world, I hope that my book will illuminate a counter-history of three generations of speculative world-making powered by feminist critiques and visions of ecologies and environments.

University of California Multicampus Research and Programs Initiatives (MRPI): “Speculative Futures” ($270,000)

"Queer Hemisphere: America Queer" UCHRI Research Group

Conveners:
Kirstie A. Dorr, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Deborah R. Vargas, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
Marcia Ochoa, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Participants:
Christina Leon, School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Oregon State University
Justin Perez, Anthropology, UC Irvine
Ivan Ramos, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
Shelley Streeby, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Jennifer Tyburczy, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Convened by Professors Kirstie A. Dorr, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego and Deborah R. Vargas, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside, and Marcia Ochoa, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, this residency aims to cultivate an interdisciplinary, multilingual dialogue between Latin America queer theory/sexuality studies and US women/queer of color feminisms. By applying geo-political pressure to ‘queer’ as an analytical category, the goal is to generate more textured accounts of and nuanced dialogues about how gender and sexual alterity are racially produced, lived and circulated in distinct, yet imbricated sites and contexts throughout the Americas. To counter the uncritical mainstreaming of US queer theory as centered site and presumed subject of study, their inquiry will address how current debates within the field concerning tensions between the rural and the urban, the public and the private, the center and the periphery, the productive and the reproductive, or the state and civil society might be differently and differentially articulated from queer and feminist of color perspectives that attend to both the geo-cultural specificities and the geo-historical entanglements that inflect relational scales of racial/sexual management.