Traverses the
history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving
speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature,
film, and digital media
Old Futures explores
the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people,
and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as
a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer
possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of
imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from
that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time,
breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out
for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the
believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the
possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we
relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead
us to queer the present.
Narratives of
possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our
present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a
singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the
creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological
modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have
sought––with varying degrees of success––to speculate
otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s,
from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which
early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer
science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must
deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly
restrictive hopes for redemption.
Each chapter
chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction
of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics,
utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity,
masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex.
Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as
futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new
insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively
redistribute the future.