Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Gaston Bachelard states that the “poetic imagination nearly always attributes feminine characteristics to water […] how profoundly maternal the waters are […].” See Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2006), 14.
- 2.
When copying this section of poetry from a PDF to Sweet the “I”s were transformed into “1”s. We have retained this new formatting as a marker of the unpredictable transformations which swimming through the watery medium of digitality can provoke.
- 3.
The term ‘Collective Close Reading’ was suggested to us by Dr. Hanna Musiol at a panel we gave at (Un)Fair Cities Conference, held in Limerick in 2019, as a way of describing our methodology.
- 4.
In an archetypal example of collective authorship, Lewis herself quotes Mario Biagioli: “authorship can only be coauthorship.”
- 5.
Moretti has set up the Stanford Literary Lab to practice “distant reading.” Much of the results, such as “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” published first in New Left Review (2011), are listed as having only one author, often Moretti himself.
- 6.
As Dillon (2012, 8) stresses in her writing on indigenous futurisms: “The environment itself can be autonomous, resilient, and cruel.” “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms,” in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace Dillon (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2012), 8.
- 7.
Water is not the absence of place; it is a site, like land, like air, which can be traversed. As Thomas Gladwin (2018) has noted regarding the people of Puluwat Atoll in Micronesia: “When a Puluwatan speaks of the ocean the words he uses refers not to an amorphous expanse of water but rather to the assemblage of seaways which lie between the various islands… Seen in this way, Puluwat ceases to be a solitary spot of dry land; it takes its place in a familiar constellation of islands linked together by pathways on the ocean.” See Gladwin, quoted in Stefanie Hessler, Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, ed. Stefanie Hessler (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018) pp. 31–81 (34).
- 8.
“Combined and uneven” in the sense of the Warwick Research Collective’s conceptualization of the literary world-system. See: Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development.
- 9.
In the work of the Settler Colonial City Project in Chicago, the ambiguous status of land reclaimed from the water has been used as a legal tool to address critical issues of indigenous land rights. To traverse this land that was once water is to walk on unceded land. Settler City Colonial Project, Mapping Chicagou/Chicago: A Living Atlas, (Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2019).
- 10.
Emphasis added.
- 11.
Emphasis added.
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Beyond Gender Research Collective. (2022). Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_10
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