| Abstract: | Dystopian fiction imagines societies and places in which there are much suffering and injustice, usually by an oppressive government. In the last decade, the genre of dystopian fiction has emerged more forcefully and visibly due to a growing market of diverse readers and concerns about economic and social inequality, climate change, and fascist attacks against democracy. My dissertation argues that queer writers and artists have been central within this surge of dystopian cultural production, and that they have engaged with the dystopian turn by forwarding a radical queer ethics of care. Analyzing dystopian novels, plays, television shows, and music videos, I locate thematic embraces of care, queerness, and softness that reject the privileging of the violences of heteronormativity, individualism, and hardness that is prevalent in the earlier stages of the dystopian genre, as well as American society more broadly. By bringing together scholarship in feminist care ethics with queer of color critique, I rethink concepts of dystopia, queerness, and futurity. Such a rethinking yields a future imaginary for queers that is intimately entangled with past and present, and it puts an emphasis on slow acts of violence that produce "everyday dystopias." Whereas traditional feminist approaches to care ethics have relied on heteronormative and chrononormative models of care that stress ability, hierarchy, and unilateral power--particularly as they have coalesced in the relationship of mother and child as theorized by Virginia Held and Sara Ruddick--I offer a new definition of care that is predicated on alternative kinships and multilateral power. Queer affect and ethics allow me to frame care this way insofar as queer kinships in the dissertation reject the neoliberal nuclear family, in which care is privatized, feminized, and distributed inequitably. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/198811 |
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