Theorizing Gender, Sex and Sexuality through Speculative Literatures

Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

Editors: Drs. Joshua Horton (Arizona State University) and Sandra Cox (Southeast Missouri State University)

contact emails: jthorto2@asu.edu and scox@semo.edu

Deadlines:

Abstracts (200-300 words) due September 30, 2026

Completed drafts (5000-8000 words, including MLA style citations and minimal endnotes) of accepted chapters due February 28, 2027

Overview:

“Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.”

Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

This proposed collection examines the formal, medial and cultural contexts for critically reading, interpreting and analyzing speculation, extrapolation or world-building done by and for queer subjects within the genres of science fiction, fantasy and speculative realism.

Queer narratives are inherently speculative; the very act of anticipating a future (or of revising a history or inventing a new world) requires writers to write new ways of being into existence, to speculate about possibilities beyond the normative confines of contemporary culture. Writers of science fiction, fantasy and speculative realism all must imagine brave new worlds and populate them with strangers in those strange lands. In an essay on craft, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Samuel R. Delany argues that “The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there.” As Delany notes, ways that world-building are intimately anchored to form and identity in science fiction, fantasy and speculative realism make those narratives inherently queer, as they are produced outside the bounds of normative cultural epistemes and free from the heterogenicity of the symbolic order and its singular transcendental object.

In fact, one of the salient features of gender theory in the 21st Century is a sustained effort by critics using very different methods theorize a divorce of identity from the physical body and to instead see subjectivity as a side effect of various ways of speculating about the nature of space and time. Famously Lee Edelman, in No Future (2006), called upon readers to “withdraw [their] allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” and further noted that queer subjects must “[a]bjure fidelity to a futurism that’s always purchased at our expense” as a way of opting out of symbolic order’s “perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification.”  In refusing the politics of the normative present, speculative literature, media and aesthetics produces a kind of counter-poetics of that often de-centers humans as part of imagining a postanthropocenic setting and identity for their characters.

José Esteban Muñoz expands on Edelman’s notion of non-reproductive futurity in Cruising Utopia (2009), stating, “holding queerness in a sort of ontologically humble state, under a conceptual grid in which we do not claim to always already know queerness in the world, potentially staves off the ossifying effects of neoliberal ideology and the degradation of politics brought about by representations of queerness in contemporary popular culture.” By dislocating characters, settings and places from the here-and-now, writers, artists and auteurs working in futurist narrative media may work to either encourage narrative suture or to interrupt it through disidentification.

J. Jack Halberstam seems to concur about the speculative possibilities of sex, gender and sexuality when read outside the bounds of normative space and time, arguing that that gender “might be thought of more as a climate or ecosystem and less as an identity or discrete bodily location” in the surprisingly apocalyptic lens offered in Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (2013). Whereas Judith Butler, in Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024) suggests that gender is a kind of ghost in a social machine rather than a haunting of sexed flesh. “As gender, functioning now as a phantasm, accumulates fears about the future, it loses any concrete referent but increases its frightening power” and “the critical task under these circumstances is to ask not what gender is but what it does.” Determining when, where and for whom imagined futures are narrated in the present seems to invite a consideration of the significance of the times, places and people who will figuratively inherit the earth.

In the present moment, many gender theorists now see gender, sex and sexuality as modes of identity-formation that permute the here and now and project subjectivity into a there and then, making embodiment necessarily a speculative speech act for queer subjects who must imagine themselves into or beyond the symbolic order (and its attendant heterocentricist family romances). Speculative narrative, artistic, and poetic forms allows the presentation of an intersectional queerness as defined by and for queer folks without aspiring integration into a flawed, capitalist, heteronormative society. Modeling queer utopic and/or dystopic paradigms through science fiction and fantasy provides a space to, as Muñoz suggests, “vacate the here and now for a then and there.”

The editors of this collection seek critical analyses that extrapolated, complicate and vacate the now of gender theory and of speculative settings.

Please, submit short (200-300 word-long) abstracts for chapter-length (between 5000-9000 word-long) analyses of works of science fiction or fantasy, produced in any medium, period or place, that consider how gender, sex and sexuality are queered in imagined worlds and speculated futures.

 We are particularly interested in chapters that address, but are not limited to, the following subjects, theoretical positions and themes:

• Applications of queer theory to speculative literature, comics, art, music, film and popular culture
• Applications of literary, cultural or aesthetic theory to speculative literature by or about queer subjects and queer writers, cartoonists, artists and auteurs
• Histories or historiographies of science fiction and fanctasy across or within specific media (like podcasts, films or comics) or subgenres (like cyberpunk, classical fantasy or hard science fiction)
• Architextual considerations of decolonial reclamations of gender, sex and sexuality, including close-readings of works of Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism and Indigenous Futurisms
• Analyses of a single significant practitioner of science fiction, fantasy or speculative realism (e.g. Ryan Coogler, Ursula Le Guin, R.F. Kuang, Daniel Heath Justice)
• Comparative analyses of cli-fi, decolonial Magic Realist poetry, cyberpunk films or other relevant architextures or subgenres of speculative arts
• Analyses of techno-embodiment in speculative narrative and poetic forms
• Queering cosmic horror genre conventions (e.g. Jeminsin’s The City We Became, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country or Okorafor’s Binti)
• Ethno-musicology and futurism (e.g. Fela Kuti, Sun-Ra, Janelle Monae, ŠUMA)

Although the collection is not yet under-contract, both Bloomsbury and the University Press of Florida have expressed interest in the volume. 

We hope to submit a list of accepted contributors based upon abstracts submitted and a sample chapter in late 2026 for contract consideration, and we plan to move to press in mid-2027.