Title: “Science fiction and queer theory”
Author(s): Wendy Pearson
Date: 2003
For many people, however, sexuality—and particularly heterosexuality—can be envisioned only within the category of the ‘natural’. To these people, sexuality is quite specifically not an idea; it is the very reverse of the ideational—instinctive, sensate, animalistic. It as at once both ‘common sense’, as in the apparent logic of procreative sex, and unthinkable, since even apparently procreative sex calls into play emotions, positions, actions and desires whose potential for perversity, even if it is merely the perversity of pleasure, are too frightening to contemplate.
whether or not sf is or has been a field in which the full range of human imagination can be brought to bear not merely on the technologies of human existence, but on human sociality in all its complexity.
It is worth noting that the portrayal of sexuality is not absent in much early sf (despite claims that there was no sex in sf prior to the 1960s), merely an unreflexive reproduction of contemporary norms.
looking at issues of sexuality in sf is not simply a matter of looking for positive or negative portrayals of homosexuality, but also of understanding the discourses that inform the depiction of sexual relationships in sf. Indeed, stories which are sympathetic to homosexuality do not necessarily involve any sort of unsettling of a heteronormative regime; at the same time, stories which interrogate alternative possibilities for sexualsocial structures are not necessarily sympathetic to alternative sexualities.
There are thus a number of important questions that can be asked, using queer theory of a guide, about representations of sexuality and especially of alternative sexuality in sf. We might ask what sorts of sexualities have been depicted in sf and how have these depictions been constructed—are they allegorical, expository, extrapolative and so on. We might also interrogate whether depictions of heteronormative sexualities are indeed conscious extrapolations of the future or failures to imagine a world with a different social set-up at the basic level of sex. We might investigate the relationships between sexuality, sociality, and biology. Additionally, we might consider in which directions contemporary sf is headed in its portrayals of sexuality.