English 293X - S-SpeculativeFict/Race, Gender

This course is not a history of feminist speculative fiction, nor a survey of the genre. Instead, it is a course that takes seriously speculative fiction as a site where commonsense is made strange and, therefore, can be remade. Combining readings in science fiction studies, feminist theory, and the fiction of authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Torrey Peters, and Kai Cheng Thom with our own experiments in critical imagination, we will explore how the tools of speculative fiction can help us to both apprehend how race, sexuality, and gender in the United States have historically been constituted and imagine them otherwise.