SF Fantasies are in a Mutually Complicating Relationship with Reality

This general paradigm is offered as a theoretical ground for the specific focus and readings of the rest of this book, which analyses in detail the issues of gender, race, and their representation in American SF. For, while the “cognitive” element of SF may not hold in all or even most cases, still SF, as a specular mode, reminds us that its fantasies are in a mutually complicating relationship with material reality. The categories of gender and race, their mutable histories, and the meta-history of the theoretical discussions of them run a course parallel to the theory of SF I’ve laid out above, making SF a perfect tool for reflecting on these identity categories, and vice versa. Gender and race have been considered “cognitive” categories, insofar as both have been viewed through an essentialist lens that posits them as easily defined and as determinative of individuals’ behaviours and of their very beings; both have been considered fantasies—sets of cultural creations that do not find their origin in material reality, but are in fact fictions, scientific and otherwise; and both have been considered “readerly” processes, in that, while they may be fictions, they still have pervasive effects on material reality insofar as people use them for definition purposes, both for self and other, to build and to destroy communities. In his foundational study, John Rieder offers a useful overview of the similarities in the theoretical modeling of the categories of gender and race: “Both gender and racial identity turn on the crucial pivot that articulates biological determination and cultural construction. Both involve the expression of identity in anatomy, on the one hand, and the performance of identity according to culturally and historically variable scripts, on the other.” In other words, both gender and race can highlight the cultural fantasies that underwrite supposed scientific fact, even as those fantasies, in turn, allow for material transformations, the very ontological movement that SF itself narrativizes. SF, therefore, is not only able to illuminate the cultural and social histories of these categories, as with any cultural form that has a significantly long history, but, as meta-culture or culture-in-drag, so too can it intervene in those histories and highlight the fractures and ruptures present within them. If, as Miéville argues, SF is defined by a “fundamental logic of otherness, of alterity,” a logic that implicates it directly in discussions of ideology, then clearly its treatment of these ideological categories of human “otherness” should be central to any discussion of the field, and vice versa. Semiotics and material history here intersect, as they always must.