Abstract
This chapter examines the construction of multiple identity, and the technologies that enable it, in two science fiction novels: Laura Mixon’s Glass Houses (1992) and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl In the Ring (1998). These novels present a vision of a queer and multiple subject that embraces and reclaims monstrosity, cutting apart the constraints of common language in the process. These two central texts are read through Allucquére Rosanne Stone and Susan Stryker’s writings on trans-studies and Homi K. Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldúa’s respective postcolonial work on interstices and borderlands. The chapter’s theoretical and fictional threads are stitched together with Donna Haraway’s explorations of the monster and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia.
In truth, it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made […] (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6.)
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that while both Stryker and Stone write from a trans-perspective, and that their works are often placed into the category of trans-studies, the work of both writers engage with technology and postmodernism in broad and diverse ways. By my use of this label, I do not mean to confine these texts to this field, but to highlight that this tradition informs their perspectives.
- 2.
This shift in terminology is detailed in Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 17.
- 3.
In colonial Haiti, slaves abducted from Africa syncretized elements of varied Western African religious practices with Catholicism. Spirits, or loa, often have multiple aspects and names. This practice is often called vodou, and similar but distinct practices can be found in Louisiana and Cuba. Jeffrey E. Anderson, Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 30–35.
- 4.
While Western discourse often disparages the practices of indigenous and colonized communities as “primitive,” in her introduction to the Walking the Clouds anthology, Grace Dillion demonstrates that these communities and their practices can be interpreted as scientific and contribute to the transmission of such knowledge. Grace L. Dillon, “Imagining Indigenous Futurism,” in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 7–8.
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Myerson, S. (2022). Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk 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_11
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