Gendered Geographies across Time I: <i>Early Researchers’ Seminar for Science and Speculative Fiction</i>, University of Salamanca, Spain, March–June 2023

The first Early Researchers’ Seminar for Science and Speculative Fiction: Gendered Geographies across Time showcased the many and diverse approaches to speculative fiction (SF) currently being pursued within the University of Salamanca’s English Department, which in a matter of years has become an unexpected hotbed of aspiring SF scholars. A graduate student–led initiative organized by Paula Barba Guerrero (University of Salamanca), the seminar comprised six sessions that took place in spring 2023. The series opened with a keynote by Miriam Borham Puyal (University of Salamanca), followed by five more panels throughout the semester. Open to the public and organized in a hybrid format, the event positioned itself as a welcoming, non-commodified space for the exchange of ideas. To that end, the shared philosophy of the speakers was usually to deliver accessible talks, written not exclusively for established researchers and early career researchers (ECRs), but also catering to graduate and undergraduate populations. Questions ranged, therefore, from the most specialized to the most general—though questions such as “What is SF?” or “What is Utopia?” that might sound “basic” are not taken as such, and these led to the most intensive conversations among the diverse audience.In the keynote lecture, titled “From Shelley to Braidotti: Posthuman Maternity in Netflix’s I Am Mother,” Borham Puyal traced a feminist genealogy of the streaming platform’s latest speculative thriller by connecting it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Puyal’s talk occurred on International Women’s Day and, in keeping with the overall seminar subtitle, “Gendered Geographies across Time,” the speaker explored such topics as gendered corporealities, vulnerable bodies, and reproductive justice in a technological world. Through the lens of Rosi Braidotti’s notion of posthumanism, Puyal investigated I Am Mother’s (2019) alternative modes of maternity, belonging, and relationality; the speaker also reflected on the potential of speculative fiction and media to question and to imagine alternatives futures in response to our less-than-perfect present. Puyal’s talk sparked a vibrant debate regarding precarity, surrogacy, and the fight for legal control over women and trans* people’s bodies. Established professors, ECRs and undergraduate students alike debated the meanings of feminist speculation and posthumanism, particularly the nature of posthuman bodies. The audience responded enthusiastically to the nonhierarchical format of the discussion, which established the seminar—with five events yet to come—as a venue welcoming to everyone, regardless of their academic status or their familiarity with science and speculative fiction.The themes of posthuman perspectives and corporealities reappeared in “Beyond the Human: Posthuman and Ecocritical Perspectives,” a panel taking place the following week. Lidia María Cuadrado Payeras (University of Salamanca), and Ana Tejero Marín (University of Salamanca) discussed a set of North American speculative novels that bring together the environmental humanities and posthumanist philosophy, transitioning from the topics of the opening keynote into those of the first thematic cluster. Cuadrado Payeras opened with a methodological discussion on genre and form, drawing from the works of both Braidotti and Margaret Atwood to argue for a queer approach to science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, positioning these categories as porous rather than rigid and separate. Then, Cuadrado Payeras turned to contemporary Canadian authors to explore the nature/technology dyad and its relation to posthumanism. Moving the conversation toward the environmental humanities and the role of capitalism in the current climate crisis, Tejero Marín’s talk addressed themes of worldbuilding, ecofeminism, and the Anthropocene in US-American science fiction. Afterward, she analyzed gendered conceptions of the earth and the nonhuman in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17), focusing on how the vengeful Father Earth of Jemisin’s work subverts traditional associations between femininity and nature. The first panel ended with a lively discussion, during which both speakers had the opportunity to discuss the necessity of understanding the environmental humanities and posthumanism in dialogue with one another, and the necessity of emphasizing the potential of contemporary stories to help us rethink our relationship with the planet and ourselves.In April, the second panel, titled “Speculative Narratives from Comics to the TV Screen,” brought together Lucía Bausela Buccianti (University of Salamanca) and Miguel Sebastián-Martín (University of Salamanca) for a discussion of formal and ideological differences in SF across media, using the Marvel comic House of M (2005–6), and its TV adaptation WandaVision (Disney+, 2021) as examples. These two texts, analyzed by Bausela Buccianti and Sebastián-Martín, respectively, were of particular interest insofar as their “reflexivity” facilitated an understanding of how each medium (re)shaped the same narrative. In this regard, both speakers demonstrated the uses of Pedro Javier Pardo’s narratological framework, which offers an alternative to some common confusions derived from an abuse of “meta” and “self” prefixes. In their talks, Bausela Buccianti and Sebastián-Martín invited the audience to consider questions of conformity and subversion, or estrangement and naturalization. Questions like these, challenge the conventions of SF, dystopias, and superhero narratives in form as well as ideology. As both speakers emphasized, these are texts that contain worlds within worlds so that estrangement is redoubled, bringing readers and viewers away but then back towards the realities of a patriarchal, capitalist culture industry with a greater ironic force. Nevertheless, hedging their interpretations, Bausela Buccianti and Sebastián-Martín ended their panel by reminding us that House of M and WandaVision are still, for better or worse, products of the culture industry. In other words, as both SF narratives and commodities, they are partly critical, but partly complicit with our capitalist reality, an ambivalence that deserves further attention.The third panel, in the following month, “Contemporary Speculative Literature across the Black Atlantic,” moved toward critical race theory, thus adding a key aspect to the series. Carla Abella Rodríguez (University of Salamanca) and Paula Barba Guerrero (University of Salamanca) analyzed SF works by Colson Whitehead and Rivers Solomon, respectively. First, Abella Rodríguez invited the audience to take a ride in Whitehead’s literalized railroad in The Underground Railroad (2016), locating each of the novel’s train stops along a continuum of scenarios of anti-blackness. Each of these was a dystopia, albeit a dystopia where perhaps the only ahistorical element is the train itself, whereas the structural racism found throughout the US was and is very real indeed. Thus, again this was another panel that brought us back to unjust realities through the estranging mediation of speculative fiction. Second, Barba Guerrero guided the audience through the more purely fantastic novels of Rivers Solomon, namely An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), The Deep (2019), and Sorrowland (2021). Contrary to Darko Suvin’s well-known claims in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) that fantasy is noncognitive vis-à-vis “proper” SF, for Barba Guerrero, the “purely fantastic” can be just as radical and estranging as speculative fiction. As such, the talk argued for the critical and subversive potentials of the fantastic in Solomon’s stories—stories of mermaid societies, ghosts, and fungal infections that allegorize the histories of Black people. Inspired too by bell hooks, the panel meditated on the possibility of hope and on how, to paraphrase Barba Guerrero, we can resist the hostility of the world by staying with the hospitality of books.Yet, the hostile reality of late capitalism can make hope seem impossible. Taking up these ideas, the fourth panel, “Disaffected Futures: Gendered Strangeness and Radical Hope,” looked at contemporary fiction and media to answer the question of how we can live “livable lives”—alluding to Judith Butler’s term1—when we are trapped in a state of systemic and perpetual vulnerability. Marta Bernabeu (University of Salamanca) opened the conversation with a presentation on Neflix’s Maniac (2018). She drew from affect theory—focusing on what she refers to as “unruly affects”—to untangle themes of mental health, economic precarity, and technology in the 2018 miniseries. In the diegetic world of the show, mental illness is medicalized and stigmatized, partly because it is seen as interfering with capitalist productivity. Bernabeu argued that speculative media like Maniac allow us to engage with new and diverse affective landscapes from a critical perspective. Moreover, science fiction can be a hospitable space for queer people and stories, as Beatriz Hermida Ramos (University of Salamanca) maintained in their talk. They focused on the representation of trans* bodies, spatial movement, and vulnerable subjectivities in Ryka Aoki’s speculative novel Light from Uncommon Stars (2021). To Bernabeu’s affective approach, Hermida Ramos added perspectives by WG Pearson, and argued for the need for queer solidarity in a cis-heteronormative system. This was described as a speculative practice of creating new, better worlds. Before closing the session, attendees were passionate to know more about how, by acknowledging vulnerability and pain, fiction may create hopeful futures, and about the role of utopian thinking in this.The fifth and final panel, entitled “From Terror to Trauma: Utopian/Dystopian Worlds,” focused on the overlap between dystopia and utopia across different texts in a way that reflected back upon the intersectional perspectives of earlier panels. Alessandra Martín González (University of Salamanca) opened with a talk on gender, technology, and race in the work of Octavia Butler. She emphasized Butler’s pivotal role in the development of American science fiction, and how her reflections on otherness remain relevant today. Alejandro Sánchez Cabrera (University of Salamanca) followed with a look at contemporary pop lyrics and videoclips of artists such as Janelle Monáe. These cultural products, he argued, create sites of identity-redefinition that negotiate between societal pressures and the utopian impulse of finding oneself. During the Q&A, both panelists discussed the similarities between their research with the audience, and the audience commented on how each allowed for unique opportunities to discuss and think about trauma and its ramifications, particularly regarding gender and ethnicity.Overall, the first Early Researchers’ Seminar for Science and Speculative Fiction was a welcoming forum for dialogues between students, young researchers, and established academics. In a happy coincidence, within less than a decade a great number of emerging SF scholars have begun to converge at the University of Salamanca. The first iteration of this seminar series already demonstrated the buoyancy, diversity, and potential of the field’s recent growth in an academic microcosm—reflective of the field’s growth across Spain. In the future, as this generation of students continues their careers in Salamanca or elsewhere, it is clear that a new academic network is in the making, one that promises to be a worthy inheritor of the diversity of approaches to SF and utopian studies that keep flourishing worldwide, as well as—much more importantly—a network that seems interested not only in thinking about utopia, but, to echo Tom Moylan, in collectively becoming utopian.2

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