Rejecting Normalcy, Queering Utopia: Fantasies of Inclusion in Contemporary North American Science Fiction
Rejecting Normalcy, Queering Utopia: Fantasies of Inclusion in Contemporary North American Science Fiction
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED DUE TO A SNOW DAY.
The Harriet Tubman Department is excited to invite your to Rejecting Normalcy, Queering Utopia a graduate research talk with Beatriz Hermida Ramos, a student of Universidad de Salamanca in Spain who participated in a research fellowship with WGSS in summer of 2024.
In this presentation, science fiction is theorized as a form of queer world-making that holds the potential to craft hospitable narratives where the violence of the normative can be interrogated and rewritten. Through speculation, I unsettle the gendered, sexual, and racialized components of the normal and its entanglements narratives of belonging and acceptance. Through a speculative reading practice, I expose discourses of differential inclusion and assimilation that are often concealed as utopian promises of a more equitable future by examining two contemporary texts: Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars (2021) and Carmen María Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), to think through representations of community and belonging.
Beatriz Hermida Ramos (they/she) is a PhD candidate at the English Department of Universidad de Salamanca, where they have been granted a research fellowship financed by the regional government of Castilla y León and the European Social Fund. Their doctoral thesis revolves around narrative representations of identity, queerness and space in contemporary ethnic American science fiction
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED DUE TO A SNOW DAY.
The Harriet Tubman Department is excited to invite your to Rejecting Normalcy, Queering Utopia a graduate research talk with Beatriz Hermida Ramos, a student of Universidad de Salamanca in Spain who participated in a research fellowship with WGSS in summer of 2024.
In this presentation, science fiction is theorized as a form of queer world-making that holds the potential to craft hospitable narratives where the violence of the normative can be interrogated and rewritten. Through speculation, I unsettle the gendered, sexual, and racialized components of the normal and its entanglements narratives of belonging and acceptance. Through a speculative reading practice, I expose discourses of differential inclusion and assimilation that are often concealed as utopian promises of a more equitable future by examining two contemporary texts: Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars (2021) and Carmen María Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), to think through representations of community and belonging.
Beatriz Hermida Ramos (they/she) is a PhD candidate at the English Department of Universidad de Salamanca, where they have been granted a research fellowship financed by the regional government of Castilla y León and the European Social Fund. Their doctoral thesis revolves around narrative representations of identity, queerness and space in contemporary ethnic American science fiction
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