Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating lifedeath in The Hunger Games

Abstract: It has been a decade since Lee Edelman published his scathing polemic grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis--No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. A lot can happen in a decade. A decade ago, I was a teenager; two decades ago, I was a child. I hope to begin making sense of the ways in which Edelman's work resonates in our contemporary moment, and I mention my decades-long removal from childhood because this is the aspect of Edelman's work with which I am most preoccupied: the Child. Of course--as Edelman repeatedly insists throughout No Future--I am here referring to the Child with a capital "C," not the lived historical realities of any "actual" children; to the social symbolic function of the Child, a figure with a contested history in the field of queer studies. While I will borrow concepts from Edelman's entire work, I will draw primarily on his opening chapter, the significantly titled "The Future is Kid Stuff," which evokes one of the major bonds of signification central to this essay: the signifier of the Child and the signified of the future. Following yet detouring from Edelman, I aim to unpack the oppositional and appositional relationship between this bond of signification and another--the signifier of queerness and the signified of death. After outlining the work of Edelman on the pairings of the Child/the future and queerness/death, I will fuse the two in Kathryn Bond Stockton's conception of the queer child--a figure, I argue, that productively muddles the future with death, death with the future, to become an embodiment of lifedeath, suturing together humanity's perpetuation and demise. I propose then to approach this theoretical conversation through an examination of the contemporary cultural fascination with narratives of the death of children as mass public spectacles--both delight in fictional representations of this manner and horror over media coverage of actual death, as perhaps most haunting in the ongoing epidemic of school shootings. Specifically, I will offer an admittedly cursory reading of Suzanne Collins's highly popular The Hunger Games book trilogy and movie franchise, contextualized through the obsessive American media coverage of the infiltration of fatal violence into the spaces of childhood, from the classroom to the movie theatre. The book series, which features a dystopian alternate reality in which children are selected to fight each other to the death in a televised event, presents a recurring cultural narrative and provides a complication of Edelman's contrasting alignment of children with life and queerness with death. What happens when children die? When they kill? As a series both aimed at children and young adults, and primarily about children, The Hunger Games is an apt point of intervention for this essay. To stay on the note of popular culture for a moment, when I first read No Future, what came to mind was Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons. In an episode about prohibition, the reverend's wife, Helen, shrilly demands, "won't somebody please think of the children?" ("Homer"). According to Edelman, this epitomizes a constant refrain of our socio-political reality--whether coming from the mouths of liberals or conservatives--and one that attempts to inextricably tie the symbolic Child to the perpetuation of the future. In short, all we ever think about is the children. Edelman describes the "oppressively political" (2) "coercive universalization" (11) of the Child, "insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought," binding us in a logic of "reproductive futurism" (2). The Child can be invoked, especially by a reverend's wife like Helen Lovejoy, to do battle with various "social misfits," ranging from pro-choice advocates to homosexuals and other figures of death, in order to defend the future. We must fight "righteous" wars, accumulate wealth and material like proper capitalist subjects, all to preserve a future for our children. …

The Gospel According to Ayn Rand

Abstract: Ayn Rand's dystopian work, Anthem, has primarily been read as a critical response to the communist collectivism of the Russia of her youth. However, a close consideration of the religious allusions in the text reveals that Rand was responding to religious collectivism as much as to the communist variety. In fact, Rand's personal writings reveal that Anthem's apotheosis of man is a response to religion's denial of self, which Rand viewed as the offense of a collectivist society. In Anthem, Rand emphasizes her opposition to religion through the ironic employment of religious themes and images.

What Do You Desire? What Do You Fear? Theorize it! Teaching Political Theory through Utopian Writing

Abstract: Undergraduate students should not just study political theory. They should theorize. Writing-intensive political theory courses can help them do so sooner. By preparing an original political vision, a utopia or a dystopia, throughout the course of the semester, students read and compare the texts of the course against their own emerging texts and move into more critical and systematic political analysis. As a political theorist, my focus is not so much on utopias or dystopias as a subject of study per se , but on tapping into the creative freedom, critical distance, and hard-hitting insights of these traditions while teaching writing. I take seriously Berlin's above-stated concern for the “place and mode of operation” conveyed to the student through the process of learning to write. Visionary writing accelerates students' appreciation of the complexity of another's theory, but also of their own standpoint and capacity for agency and judgment. Khristina Haddad is assistant professor, department of political science, Moravian College. She teaches a writing-intensive course on visionary political writing and is affiliated with German Studies and Women's Studies. Her research interests include politics of time and temporality, Hannah Arendt, political action, fear, feminist theory, women's studies, and, in particular, the politics of women's health. I am greatly indebted to friends and colleagues who helped me along at various stages including (in alphabetical order) Robert Humanick, Eleanor Linn, Bob Mayer, Karla Morales, Laurie Naranch, Gary Olson, Miguelina Ortiz, Martha Reid, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Lyman Tower Sargent, Joel Wingard, and Elizabeth Wingrove. Thanks go also to all those whose dedicated work inspires student writers and teachers of writing at the Gayle Morris Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan, to helpful commentators at the Society for Utopian Studies' Annual Meeting in Toronto, to two anonymous reviewers at PS , and to three groups of students who shared their visions with me.

Organizing the Impossible: Constitutional Law and Practice in Icaria

Abstract: Icaria is one of those rare moments in social history when the Utopian dream has been tested in political and social practice. Based on legal settlements, the Icarian experience at Nauvoo offers a unique opportunity to check the relationship among law, Utopia, and dystopia. The essay scrutinizes the key features of the Icaria’s constitution and analyzes the problems related to the enforcement of a Utopian constitution in a real social and political context.

Memories of Future Masculine Identities: A Comparison of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”, the 1990 Film Total Recall and its 2012 Remake

Abstract: Recent remakes of iconic science fiction films such as Total Recall, far from merely reproducing cultural landscapes from the past, are actively producing new constructions of categories of identity such as gender and sexuality. In particular, in the two filmic adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” by Paul Verhoeven in 1990 and Len Wiseman in 2012, memory is a metaphor for the historical accountability of hegemonic masculinity—or the lack thereof. Dick’s original text and both Total Recall adaptations can be read as revisionist approaches to the past through a dystopian vision of the future, which, in turn, is but a projection of present anxieties of masculinities in crisis. A comparative analysis of the amnesiac heroes presented in these three sci-fi texts will thus offer an insight into the way in which futuristic action men ‘recall’ present and past discourses on power. Indeed, memory constitutes the narrative mechanism that allows collective and individual realities to be questioned and re-imagined through the intra-textual and inter-textual references present in the three texts in question.