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SoSe 21: Gender, Race and Class beyond the End of the World? Speculative Fiction and Neoliberal Meritocracy

Maxi Albrecht

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Speculative fiction builds imaginary storyworlds that are alternative realities created through extrapolation, altering or removing those power structures that govern or even determine our real lives. Considering the history of the speculative genre as didactic, political and potentially even revolutionary genres, speculative fiction has been credited with offering visions of humanity beyond our socio-cultural constraints. Some see these narratives as postgender, postfeminist or postracial utopias, while others criticize their failures in terms of formulating progressive identity politics. A dominant streak of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction has marked US-American cultural production during the last decade. These dark speculations often focus intensely on the survival of humanity in general, of individuals and of collective groups of people. While real-world power structures may be absent, or altered, the ethos of survival takes on structural significance in this type of narrative. In this course, we will investigate the interconnection of survival in speculative fiction with the concept of neoliberal meritocracy in order to question this genre’s entanglement in gender, race and class politics in the 21st century. We will focus on different types of media, such as television series, film, and novels, as well as different genres such as dystopia, young adult fiction, post-apocalypse, zombie fiction and others, to tease out the complex negotiations of gender and identity politics in the speculative imagination of the 21st century, while also paying special attention to their historic embeddedness in the socio-economic moment of neoliberalism. ----- This class will be held online, and the first session takes place on April 15. Please make sure to sign up on Blackboard as soon as possible. close