This special issue of Screen Bodies (5.2, December 2020) on “Queer
Sinofuturisms” aims to explore how artists, writers, and videographers working
in Sinophone contexts use science to envision non-normative gender and erotic
expressions in relation to the corporeal future of humanity. By investigating
visions of the future that incorporate queerness and creative applications of
biotechnology, “Queer Sinofuturisms” on one hand aims to counter pervasive techno-orientalist
discourses that frame “Asian” technological futures as strictly dystopian (and
straight by default). On the other, it responds to a heteronormative
presumption in the recent vogue for Chinese science fiction in translation: While many of these outstanding works
challenge readers to reassess real world problems like neoliberal economic
inequalities and environmental devastation, certain heteronormative values tend
to remain unquestioned both in content and in reception, a structural limit on our
capacity to envision genuinely innovative social formations for the
“future.” What happens, this issue of Screen Bodies asks, if we simultaneously destabilize techno-orientalist
narratives of the future while queering assumptions about the heteronormativity
so often inscribed upon that future in mainstream iterations and embodiments?
One approach to this question might be to engage certain aspects of
North American queer theory, which over the last 15 years has challenged
precisely the problem of heteronormativity in what it calls “reproductive
futures.” According to one
interpretation of the logic of reproductive futurism, the figure of the child
in fiction always represents the future, and therefore any threat to that
child’s corporeal integrity—including the symbolic values associated with the
failure to fulfill the reproductive imperatives of heterosexuality—becomes
implicitly anathema to this future.
Another view by contrast takes queerness itself as the utopia, a
creative home for a positive political imaginary of the future. Here, utopian queerness both enables a way of
criticizing the limits of the (heteronormative) present and anchors the more
recent queer theoretical unsettling of temporality, chronology, and embodiment.
What might this mean in Sinophone contexts?
Consider an example from Taiwan, where recent campaigns around various
voting referenda exploit the figure of the child as a threatened creature whose
“future”—if the associated narratives are to be believed—is jeopardized by the
simultaneous possibilities of being denied LGBT-friendly education and the
right to legalized gay marriage, and being exposed to the purported danger of
contaminated food from Fukushima, Japan (even while being encouraged to embrace
nuclear power). In the imagination of
humanity’s future, this 21st-century Taiwanese techno-progeny thus exemplifies
a unique reciprocity between and among complex expressions of
techno-orientalism and heteronormativity as they are inscribed on the body. In critiquing this figure, can we think of
alternatives? As another example,
consider the videography of Lawrence Lek, who has staged an aesthetic idea of
“Sinofuturism” that turns techno-orientalist tropes in on themselves, featuring
the gradual subjugation of humanity and human bodies to affectless dystopian
machines. How does this futuristic
vision contrast with work by the artist Lu Yang, whose animation “Uterus Man”
casts a superhero whose superpower derives from his “uniquely female reproductive
system,” a system used to alter the hereditary functions, genders, and sexes of
his enemies?
This special issue of Screen Bodies on “Queer Sinofuturisms” seeks to
enlist a range of modalities to address urgent questions about whose future
humanity has been imagined or is imaginable, and how this imagination unfolds.
We seek contributions ranging from critiquing or improving upon—or even
abandoning entirely—the “reproductive future” narratives of embodied selves
associated with North American queer theory, to any topic relating to “screens”
broadly defined, including silk screens, the silver screen, cell phone screens,
body-scans, reproductive technologies, candidate “screening,” screening out,
questions of ability, race, gender, s/creed; and we seek contributions from any
discipline or area, whether relating to (queer) [ethno]Futurisms or to
alternative utopias or to historical imaginings of “the future” in various
contexts, as well as any time period.
Our intention is to bring emerging understandings of Sinofuturism and
corporeality into conversation with queer notions of non-reproductive and
genuinely heterogenous ways of envisioning—and creating—more equitable worlds.
Please send your submission simultaneously to the following three email
addresses: tw@nccu.edu.tw; hhchiang@ucdavis.edu; and LNHeinrich@ucsd.edu.
Submissions should be 4000-6000 words.
We will consider alternative non-fiction formats as well as academic
essays; please contact the editors with any questions.
Please submit materials by October 25, 2019.
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Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of
Screen Studies and Body Studies across disciplines, institutions, and media. It
is a forum promoting research on various aspects of embodiment on and in front
of screens through articles, reviews, and interviews. The journal considers
moving and still images, whether from the entertainment industry, information
technologies, or news and media outlets, including cinema, television, the
internet, and gallery spaces. It investigates the private experiences of
portable and personal devices and the institutional ones of medical and
surveillance imaging. Screen Bodies addresses the portrayal, function, and
reception of bodies on and in front of screens from the perspectives of gender
and sexuality, feminism and masculinity, trans studies, queer theory, critical
race theory, cyborg studies, and dis/ability studies.
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