IDST 114 Final- Science Fiction/Marginalized Communities Portion

Includes all info on review sheet for Layne and Shields Portion of the Class. For science portion, see other flashcard deck.

Slow Violence

long term damage that’s done gradually and out of sight so that the media ignores it and it isn’t seen as urgent

Vernacular Landscapes vs. Official Landscapes

• vernacular: spaces created over generations that hold historical, spiritual, emotional, cultural meaning for communities

• official: maps that “write the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction drive manner; often discounts local inhabitants

*ties into slow violence

Man 1 vs. Man 2

• homo politicus vs. homo economicus

• in other words, humans in relation to their religion/moral center compared to the post-colonial revision of what it means to be human

Tragedy of the Commons

• any property held in common but that nobody is responsible to maintain will deteriorate

• externalizes cost while internalizing profits

• capitalist mindset that earth is a commodity instead of a system that we need to maintain

What is science fiction?

• a branch of literature that deals with the effect of change on people (Gunn)

• can be projected into the past, present, or future

• often concerned with scientific or technological change

• novum: a new piece of tech that doesn’t exist in our world

Where does sci-fi come from?

• dates back to the 16th century when Copernicus declared that the world revolved around the sun and not the other way around → made people realize that the world wasn’t the center of the universe

• sci-fi was originally thought of as low-brow and primarily for incel men, but this changed during the New Wave in the 60s/70s when more women, queer people, and people of color began elevating the genre

Sci-Fi and Colonialism

• sci-fi started to take off during the age of colonialism because as Europeans felt like that were no new places on Earth to discover, they began to think about other worlds

• thought of travelling to places like Asia and Africa as if they were going back in time because they viewed them as primitive

• alien encounters in sci-fi are really just a metaphor for encountering a racialized Other

Neo-Liberal Model (Michelle Leve)

• a political/economic ideology that promotes individualism, consumerism, deregulation, and transferring state power to the individual

  • markets function unfettered

  • cut social spending

  • deregulate the market

  • privatization/no more state-owned enterprises

• goes directly against the idea of The Commons

Define Power (Lynn Weber)

• ability to achieve goals in the face of resistance, manipulate the rules, win through forces, tell your side of the story, etc.

• three types of power: classical, electoral, and disruptive (Fox Piven)

• interpersonal (how people relate to each other, disciplinary (which rules apply, to whom, and how), cultural (worldview, framing, discourses), and structural (how is something organized; rules, laws, and policies that govern/structure participation) (Bilge and Collins)

  
  

Ideology (Patricia Hill Collins)

• a body of beliefs that reflect the interests of a group of people

• generates a hegemonic social consciousness

• naturalizes asymmetrical relations- for example, why people form radically different classes share beliefs

• the dominant ideology in the US is about blindness (not seeing color, gender, class, etc)

Hegemony (Antonio Gramsci)

• the cultural, moral, and ideological leadership of a group over allied and subaltern groups

• in other words, leadership/dominance of one group over another

• achieved by getting non-elite groups to buy into the elite perspective

How does language shape your thoughts?

• gendered hierarchies are enforced through language

• by defining something as “regular”, we inherently otherize people who don’t belong to that groups (ex: when we consider able bodied people ‘normal’, we otherize differently abled people)

Sex vs. Gender

• sex: traditionally anatomical/biological characteristics that determine man vs. woman

• gender: the non-physiological aspects of a person; the expectations of femininity and masculinity

• gender is one of the ways that we organize society, and we use it to explain differences between men and owmen

  • this is why ambiguity in gender identification can cause great anxiety

  • gender defines how we interact with the people around us

Feminist Views on Gender

• masculinity/femininity are constructs, and can change over time

• gender is a continuum, and masculinity/femininity are the extremes

• whatever is masculine is given more power than what is feminine

• compulsive heterosexuality is the only socially sanctioned form of sexuality

Dominant US Gender Ideology

• Binary: there are only 2 genders, and everyone belongs to one of them- they are opposites

• hierarchical: whatever is masculine is better and more valuable simply because it is masculine

• heterosexual: men should actively desire and sexually conquer women, while women should be a little bit seductive/sexually available to men EVEN if they don’t desire them

Social Location

• represents our position in all the social hierarchies (race, class, gender, and sexuality) within which we live our lives

  • ex: I’m a white, cis gender, straight, American, middle class woman- this is my social location

• ties into intersectionality- the frame from which we view our problems as a result of the overlap of our advantage/disadvantage

Intersectionality (Kimberle Crenshaw)

• a prism/lens/frame from which we view a range of social problems

• argues that disadvantage can be based on the interaction of multiple factors instead of just one- these factors that define our social location overlap

  • ex: I’m privileged because I’m white, but I’m disadvantaged because I’m a woman

• the matrix of domination

Afrofuturism

• a cultural movement blending science fiction, fantasy, and history to reimagine the experiences and futures of the African diaspora (Mark Dery)

  • the African American experience of the world (particularly in the US) has been otherworldly

  • Afrofuturism is an embrace of their “alien-ness”

• different from African futurism b/c afro. is based in the idea of what would happen if their counties had never been colonies and imagines the cultures that have been lost- African futurism dels with already existing cultures

Pigmentocracy

• hierarchy based on pigment/color of skin and phenotype

• in western culture, there’s higher value on lighter skin/western features

Black Experimentation

• J. Marion Sims took enslaved women from plantations and experimented on them without anesthesia and very rudimentary tools- thought that black people couldn’t feel pain the same way that white people could

• Tuskegee experiment: black men with syphilis were “treated” in a study but weren’t told what they had and never received treatment (penicillin)

• Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells were taken from her without her concept, and HELA cells became the basis of many cures

Eugenics and Sterilization

• eugenics: the belief/social practice that certain groups have more right to reproduce than others

• historically, marginalized women have been sterilized without their consent to stop them from reproducing

Miscegenation

• racial mixing in relationships

• melting pot narratives don’t reflect racial discrimination/otherization

Coverture

• the idea that women are “covered” or owned by their husbands (man and wife, not man and woman)

  • meant that women weren’t allowed to own property, enter into contracts, or have credit cards until very recently

• androcentrism: the idea that men are central

Magical Realism

• used to emphasize how magical, fantastic, and strange normal objects can appear in the real world when you stop and look at them

• characteristics:

  • realistic setting

  • magical elements

  • limited information

  • critique

  • unique plot structure

Xenogenesis

• the production of an organism that is unlike the parents

  • xeno meaning alien, genesis meaning creation

Chattel Slavery

• when only one group can be enslaved, and that group’s status is racialized/based on their race

• the slave is legally rendered the personal property, or the chattel, of the slave owner

Paternalism

the policy/practice of people (mainly men) in positions of authority restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to them, supposedly in the subordinate’s best interest

Forced Assimilation

the involuntary cultural assimilation of religious/ethnic minority groups during which they are forced by a government to adopt the mainstream culture

Property

• Women’s legal status as property (coverture) meant impositions on their bodies

  • white middle-class women were constructed as frail needing all their energies for procreation

  • poor White women and enslaved women had to work, and their bodies were treated or CONTROLLED in different ways—often for profit

• state and social control extended to all women’s bodied, particularly their reproductive capacity

• part of the processing of controlling is internalizing the messages we receive about our place in society and our bodies

Lebensborn

• a ten-year program in Nazi Germany and other territories that forced the reproduction of “Aryan” children primarily by single women

• SS officials mandated to have at least 4 children with their wives and as many children as possible with other women

• single women were forced to carry children, or they had to abort defective ones- those who were born defective were killed

Colonial Hyphens

• includes the land, language, and bodies that serve as bridges/links between colonized and colonizer

  • think Pocohontas- she was the link between the Native Americans and the colonizers

Abolition

• seeks to prevents and stop interpersonal violence grounded in accountability, solidarity, collectivity, and loving justice

• seeks to end violence and carceral institutions and instead forward means of accountability, redress, and transformation

Cyberpunk

• a type of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of low-life and high tech

  • pairs futuristic technological achievements with societal collapse

  • rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement from the 60s- when women, queer people, and people of color began writing sci-fi

Rotarian Model

• a four way test of the things we think, say, or do that is used as a moral code for personal/business relationships

• Four Facets:

  • Is it the truth?

  • Is it fair to all concerned?

  • Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

  • Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

• Rotary International is one of the largest service organizations in the world

Posthumanism

• a philosophical framework that questions the primacy of the human and the necessity of the human as a category

• tries to decentralize the human, account for the nonhuman, and examine the relationships between humans and nonhumans

Consumerism

• a theory that states people consuming goods and services in large quantities will be better off and will lead to an economic growth