Raquel Hollman, Jeannine Ortega, David Potsubay
Our projects plan to interrogate various potentials offered by the sci-fi genre particularly expressions of artificiality and embodiment. We would like to contend with speculations on the human/non-human dialectic within US society. Our term “artificial other” will contend with sci-fi narratives in both narrative and popular culture norms. We are particularly interested in considering the ethics of artificiality. Asking the questions, “what is human?,” “how can we navigate technology,” and “Are representations of technology inherently pessimistic.” Within this scope we hope to engage with important moments of intersection between technological capability and ethical repercussions. Thus, reflecting on the “possibilities of futurity” we acknowledge the speculative genre as space in which technology is often negatively hued with problematic ideological intention. Our project instead hopes to offer a spectrum of investigation where we will reflect on the role of technology in society.
Speculative fiction allows audiences to experience their own world through alternate realities. Societies’ issues and ideals are replicated back on to us through uncanny representation. This contorted image explores unique possibilities within futurity. The scope of our projects examines this image in both the realities of the current day and the imaginings of sci fi authors. Themes such as race, labor, and ideological constructions will be reflected on. We will explore this cognitive dissonance as part of the aftermath caused by encounters with technology in the late-capital and postcolonial landscape. This contorted image offers new ways of thinking to address the telos of Western ideals of beauty, labor, and embodiment. These reflections on the genre offer a deconstruction of the potential of new technologies, biologies, and means of cultural reproduction. Oftentimes rooted in other worlds with different forms of technology and beings, but what rings as most true is how these works act as a means that allow us to critically engage with social and cultural themes present in our world specifically our projects would like to facilitate the future possibilities of speculative artificiality in fiction and beyond.
Namely “the artificial other” can be considered an avatar for navigating questions of technology. The artificial other can manifest itself as a twisted post racial ideal. This is manifesting as a post racial ideal that results in a boundary blurring and commodified other through cosmetic surgeries. We must also consider the unseen functions and brutalities between technology and human labor. Namely found within the immigrant subject and the racial liminal figure. Also technology can offer a re-negotiation of the possibility of new freedoms and democracies from society in an optimistic, post-human imagining. On one hand the possibility of technology found in the figure of the artificial other can exploited and exploitative, and yet there is also the consideration of hope when grappling with the confines of traditional ideals of embodiment, this artificial other is a future figure who organically, cybernetically, or mechanically deals with the complex task of identity and embodiment. Consequently, the artificial other is in a state of constant temporal flux which is dependant on socio-political contexts. This task deals with a trajectory through future landscapes of economic and racial disparity.
“Shedding Skin: The Emergence of the Artificial Other” – Raquel Hollman
Notions and idealizations of femininity are beginning to cross into the realm of artificiality. Through the cosmetic industry commodifying only the most “desirable” attributes of race and ethnicity, the artificial other emerges as a being rooted in problematic postracial ideals of the embodiment of beauty. This ethically monstrous practice that continues to grow unearths the birth of an unintended and socially violent realization of Donna Haraway’s idealistic notion of the cyborg. While Harraway presents the cyborg as a way of blurring class, gender, and racial boundaries, the artificial other complicates that. This 21st century cyborg still upholds the foundations of Western ideologies through the guise of embracing postracialism. Ethnic plastic surgery, cosmetic procedures that serve the purpose of making an individual look either more or less like a certain race or ethnicity, have been on the rise for quite some time now. One can quite literally, in a Frankenstein-esque fashion, take certain covetable pieces of the body and paste them onto their own. As this reality comes into fruition, a postracial ideal of beauty is beginning to become the new normal. With this new territory, comes murky waters. One can buy the marginalized body without being subject to experience the societal stigmas that come with being a member of that community.
“The Latinx Cyborg: Disidentifying Artificiality within Alex Hernandez’s ‘Caridad’” – Jeannine Ortega
This paper demonstrates how Alex Hernandez offers a re-envisioning of the politics of embodiment through the possibility of cybernetics. Caridad is a text that reassembles the Latinx immigrant as a speculative subject who deals with the ongoing influences of labor, ideologies on race, and the pressures of assimilation. The globalizing forces of the West continue to restructure the local identities of immigrant subjects who are tasked with embodying useful subject and labor positions within industrial sectors, biomedical advancement, and modified production lines. Ultimately this artificial other is produced in the harsh environment of futuristic democracy, late-stage capitalism, and diversity. Technology’s optimistic auspices on cyborg identity becomes a hegemonic structure that exists today as a disastrous byproduct. This byproduct comes about due to the socioeconomic stereotypes of race and gender inequality. All in all, it is far too easy to succumb to the revolutionary potential of technology’s presence as an augmentation to the human condition.
“Technological Optimism in Speculative Fiction (SF) for Imagining Emancipatory Futures” – David Potsubay
This paper’s understanding of the artificial other implicitly operates within the larger theoretical reconsideration of the optimistic potential for technological beings, such as robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems. The speculative fiction (SF) stories from a recent anthology, A People’s Future of the United States, envision futurities that show humans cohabiting with advanced automatic technologies that emancipate, augment, and free all individuals from oppression, discrimination, and the necessity to labor under an exploitative capitalist system. I demonstrate how writers such as A. Merc Rustad, Charles Yu, and Hugh Howey push back against the othering of the artificial in ways that promote a technological optimism that deconstructs ideologies proliferated by American society that further divisiveness, exclusion, and marginalization based on one’s identity. For my argument, to think positively about artificiality means to re-vision our present conceptions of expanding inclusion for nonhuman beings and their potential emancipatory roles in a people’s future.
Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms 