Critical Sexology

Queer Universes - A book reading and discussion with Wendy Gay Pearson

This one-off special event marks the publication of Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction, a collection of writing on science fiction and queer to appear this month with Liverpool University Press, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon.

The event will take place on Wednesday 2nd July, 4-6, at London South Bank University (Room K307/8, Keyworth Centre). See: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/about/maps.shtml

About Queer Universes:

Contestations over the meaning and practice of sexuality have become increasingly central to cultural self-definition and to critical debates over issues of identity, citizenship, and the definition of humanity itself. Some religious authorities today are virulently homophobic, even declaring lesbians anti-human, while public acceptance of some non-normative sexualities is increasing in many places, as witnessed by such changes as the legalization of same-sex marriage. It is hardly suprising that science fiction, in turn, takes up the task of imagining a diverse range of queer and not-so-queer futures. The articles in Queer Universes investigate both contemporary and historical practices of constructing sexualities and genders in science fiction literature. While individual articles examine many different depictions of sexuality in science fiction and its relation to race, gender, class and species, all are informed by some aspect of queer theory and its critique of binary sexual definitions and of sexual normativity.

Queer Universes opens with Wendy Gay Pearson’s award-winning essay on reading science fiction queerly and goes on to include discussions about "sextrapolation" in New Wave science fiction, "stray penetration" in William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, the queering of nature in ecofeminist science fiction, perverse couplings in Québecois sf and in science fiction erotica, the radical challenges posed to more conventional science fiction in the work of important writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna Russ, and the utopian-inflected futurity of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. In addition, Queer Universes offers an interview with writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson and a conversation about queer lives and queer fictions by authors Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge.

For further details, see: http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3814

About Wendy Gay Pearson:

Wendy Gay Pearson is an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She has a PhD from the University of Wollongong in Australia, where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Calling Home: Queer Responses to Discourses of Nation and Citizenship in Contemporary Canadian Literary and Visual Culture." She has published a number of articles on contemporary Canadian film and literature, sexual citizenship and same-sex marriage, as well as on queer theory and its application to speculative and science fiction. She is the recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award in 2000 for “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer.”

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