“Science fiction – like feminism – is a powerful and useful tool for both social analysis and social change.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
This course explores feminist and queer science fiction as a form of world-making and critical speculation. Drawing from writers and theorists such as Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler, and Nnedi Okorafor, the course examines how speculative fiction can challenge dominant narratives of progress and open new ways of thinking about bodies, ecology, technology, interdependency, and social transformation. The course asks how feminist and queer science fiction can imagine alternative social realities and challenge dominant understandings of gender, technology, ecology, capitalism, and the human. Through speculative storytelling, participants will explore how fiction can function as a tool for critique, collective imagination, and new forms of living together on a damaged planet.
Themes include sympoiesis, cyborgs, ecological assemblages, speculative futurisms, posthumanism, cohabitation, emergence, utopias, and dystopias.
The course combines:
- Lectures
- Group readings and discussions
- Writing and drawing exercises
- Workshops
- Durational actions
- Collaborative group work
Through collective reading, discussion, writing, drawing, and performance exercises, students will engage with fiction, theory, poetry, songs, and experimental forms of storytelling. The course includes a visit to the exhibition Rivers of Emotion, Bodies of Ore at Kunsthall Trondheim, as well as an overnight multi-sensory and multi-lingual storytelling sleepover seminar within the exhibition space centered around Ursula K. Le Guin’ fiction work Always Coming Home.
Students will collaboratively produce a sci-fi zine or series of zines using texts and images developed throughout the course, culminating in a public presentation at the end of the semester.
Learning Outcomes
- Develop forms of social critique and analysis through fiction and theory
- Become familiar with literary genres and experimental writing practices
- Engage with discourses surrounding feminist materialism, queerness, ecology and indigeneity
- Learn how to read, summarize, analyze, and discuss theoretical texts collectively
- Experiment with writing and drawing methods applicable to individual artistic practice
- Gain insight into historical and contemporary artistic practices related to speculative fiction
- Collaborate on the development and production of a collective publication project
Reading List
Fiction readings include works by Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, Larissa Lai, and adrienne maree brown. Companion texts draw from thinkers including Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Kyle Powys Whyte, Gloria Anzaldúa, Paul Preciado, Isabelle Stengers, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli.
