Feminism and Time in Recent Speculative Fiction
Elisabeth Bell
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 2
Abstract
This paper examines the possibility of a meaningful “feminist” science fiction, partly in response to popular media descriptions of Naomi Alderman’s The Power as a feminist text. It contends that feminists must in some way support the possibility of difference from domination and violence. Reading with feminist ethicists, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Karen Barad, and considering the very linear and limiting time of The Power, the paper questions whether opposition to dominating power might also require an experience of time and being in which the self is not clearly separable from all other(s), in which non-domination and mutual responsibilities proliferate in a “hauntology” that differs from both linear and static conceptions of time. As an alternative to The Power, Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of stories, Her Body and Other Parties, serves as a compelling example of the feminist possibilities of haunted time.
Keywords: Feminism, Ethics, Futurity, Time, Entanglement, Hauntology, Anti-anti-utopian, Capitalism, Neoliberalism
Elisabeth Bell (ebell@western.edu) is a Lecturer of English at Western Colorado University, USA. She earned a Ph.D. from Duke University in 2013. She teaches and studies the intersection of pedagogical theory, speculative fiction, and critical race theory. She is currently scouring Science Fiction texts for imaginaries of interracial communitybuilding that might inform her classroom.