Towards a Queer Genealogy of SF

Summary

Genealogy as an analysis of descent is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.

— Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ 148

Genealogy makes no presumptions about the metaphysical origins of things, their final teleology, the continuity or discontinuity of temporally contiguous elements, or the causal, explanatory connections between events. Instead, genealogy can be seen as the study of elements insofar as they are already interpreted, a study aimed at unsettling established models of knowledge and epistemological presumptions involved in the production of history, philosophy, and morality.

— Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism 145

A Livable Life?

It comes down to this: in a world where so many of us are unable to find a home, a place which is both materially and affectively livable, should we not all be able, at the very least, to find a home amongst the seemingly infinite planes of the imagination? And where else are such imaginative worlds to be found – the air breathable, the water potable, the crops edible, the houses built, and the furniture waiting to be rearranged – if not in science fiction? And if what is making our lives unlivable in the present has to do with the construction, regulation, and normalization of sexuality, with its concomitant effects upon sex, gender, race, and so on, then surely we may look to sf to posit worlds in which it is possible both to live differently and to think differently about how we live.