58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?

This panel offers an important intervention into feminist science fiction studies, which remains deeply enmeshed with critical frameworks that assume the genre’s speculative practice is distinctly immaterial. Dominant theories of cognitive estrangement and subjunctivity are well equipped for understanding these speculative imaginaries. At its best, trans, feminist, and queer accounts of speculative fiction help us understand how these texts make visible “impossible-possible people” (Keegan and Samer 2026). These encounters produce a sort of reading protocol (to borrow from Samuel Delany) where “readers cannot take any interpretation for granted” and therefore have to recognize that both mundane and speculative reading is a matter of social construction (Lothian 2018). 

And yet, they risk reproducing a certain theoretical ambivalence about the im/materiality of nonbinary identity. That is, there is an unexpected consonance between trans feminist accounts of  speculative fiction’s estranging ability and the claim that nonbinary is the mistaken reification of gender politics into gender identity (Amin 2022). Indeed, in this account, nonbinary becomes a sort of speculative fiction in itself. 

In this panel, we ask what other methods for understanding the work of trans and nonbinary speculative fiction authors are available? What different insights might they offer? And how do they speak to the material and relational structures which make nonbinary more than an impossible-possible? 

This panel seeks alternative methods for analyzing gender variance in speculative fiction beyond theories of defamiliarization, asking instead what happens when we take these speculative forms of gender seriously. This panel is especially interested in works that extend recent works considering capitalism's role in producing new gender classes (Liu 2023; Ho 2024), which extends current discussions of literatures ability to produce trans subjectivities (Brostoff and Goldberg 2025), and/or analyses texts from beyond the United States. 

Submissions should be made through NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22323