Smin Smith

Review: Abolish the Family!

BSFA’s Vector Journal

Collaboratively written by the Beyond Gender Research Collective

“We work, not for inclusion into the family, or a queered version of it, but for a queer mode of being together which retains what Lewis calls the “abolitionist freight” of the word ‘queer’, “signifying resistance to capitalism’s reproductive institutions: marriage, private property, patriarchy, the police, school” (19). This non-contingent, non-privatised way of living is what Abolish the Family offers us, as people and as SF scholars. We hope that those in the business of creating, shaping, reading and tearing apart the imagined worlds of SF texts will take Lewis’ challenge to think more critically about the family to heart. More than this, we hope that they will work to nurture the “latent utopian kernels” of family abolitionist possibility located in our present (82).”.

Editors: Jo Lindsay Walton & Polina Levontin

Feminist Science Fiction Art

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction

“Feminist science fiction is a category most frequently associated with literature, film, and television. This chapter challenges these associations, theorising SF art as a space for queer/trans/feminist resistance. Specifically, SF artworks by Sophia Al-Maria, Sin Wai Kin, Tai Shani, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley are read as feminist theory—a method drawn from speculative and repro-utopian feminisms—which seeks to locate theoretical knowledge both within and beyond academic writing. Subsequently feminist SF artworks are contextualised within wider feminist and/or science fiction traditions, communities, and discourses. Feminist SF art is framed then not as a genre populated by individual auteurs, but as a community of artists engaged in coauthorship. This chapter focusses specifically on artists working with collaborative worldbuilding, a range of artistic strategies which further embed coauthorship and recursivity into SF art production”.

Editors: Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry & Wendy Gay Pearson

Collective Close Reading: Queer SF and the Methodology of the Many

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction

Collaboratively written by the Beyond Gender Research Collective

“Beyond Gender Research Collective are a group researchers, activists and practitioners brought together by a shared commitment to imagining the world differently through collaborative explorations of queer, trans, and feminist science fiction. As Beyond Gender we understand ourselves as an example of what Jasbir K. Puar describes as a queer assemblage; we form, and are formed by, a practice we have developed called “collective close reading” (CCR). We begin this chapter by outlining CCR as a practice of utopian worlding: CCR is our method for reading and enacting science fiction, through which we exercise our capacity for imagining, dreaming, and building together. We apply this methodology to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Shobies’ Story” (1990), particularly focussing on the ways in which Le Guin’s narrative gestates both new modes of art and of kinship, based on celebration of communal activity and politics of affinity. We conclude by connecting this reading of and through Le Guin’s tale to our collective practices of performing science fictionality and of empathetic friendship. In doing so, we demonstrate how––like Le Guin’s Shobies––Beyond Gender’s dedication to communal play and care allows us to insist upon expansive, heteroglossic, and generative possibilities in our collective futures”.

Editors: Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry & Wendy Gay Pearson

Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction

Collaboratively written by the Beyond Gender Research Collective

“Water is frequently associated with a naturalized, trans-exclusionary understanding of womanhood. In this chapter we challenge this association. Focusing on the cyborgs of feminist SF and the waters in which they swim, gestate, and struggle, we theorize water as a technology that plays a crucial role in the self-consciously unnatural politics of queer resistance. In order to navigate these turbulent waters we have deployed the methodology we call Collective Close Reading—a practice of nonhierarchical knowledge production founded on a complex web of interdependence. In this way we seek to model the watery, cyborg collectivity depicted in the strange worlds of feminist sf. We swim together, beyond, against, and into gender”.

Editors: Sherryl Vint & Sümeyra Buran

A future collectively salvaged from the rubble 

Architectural Review, Issue 1486: Where do we go from here?

Collaboratively written by the Beyond Gender Research Collective

Beyond the Binary: Queer Feminist Science Fiction Art

SFRA Review, Volume 51, No. 1, Symposium: Beyond Borders

Transmedia Worlding in Marine Serre’s FutureWear 

BSFA Vector Journal, Issue 292: Speculative Art