Drowning in the cloud: water, the digital and the queer potential of feminist science fiction

Butt, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1762-2768, Delany, A., Dillon, T., Hill, R. C., Kabo, R., Kawitzky, F., Lee, S. Y., Murphy, S., Myerson, S., Eleonora, R., Smin, S. and Katie, S. (2022) Drowning in the cloud: water, the digital and the queer potential of feminist science fiction. In: Vint, S. and Buran, S. (eds.) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction:. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, pp. 197-221. ISBN 9783030961916 doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_10

Abstract/Summary

Water is frequently associated with a naturalized, trans-exclusionary understanding of womanhood. In this chapter we challenge this association. Focusing on the cyborgs of feminist SF and the waters in which they swim, gestate, and struggle, we theorize water as a technology that plays a crucial role in the self-consciously unnatural politics of queer resistance. In order to navigate these turbulent waters we have deployed the methodology we call Collective Close Reading—a practice of nonhierarchical knowledge production founded on a complex web of interdependence. In this way we seek to model the watery, cyborg collectivity depicted in the strange worlds of feminist sf. We swim together, beyond, against, and into gender.