About

Christian P. Haines is an associate professor of English at Penn State University and currently serves as a Faculty Fellow with the Humanities Institute at Penn State. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature with a graduate minor in English from the University of Minnesota in December 2012, and his B.A. in English with a minor in History from the University of Florida, graduating Summa Cum Laude in May 2006. His scholarly work includes the publication of his book, A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons, by Fordham University Press in 2019. Haines's research and teaching focus on literary and critical theory, American literature, lyric poetry, political economy, environmental humanities, game studies, and utopian studies. He has contributed to various academic journals and edited volumes, and serves as Associate Editor of Utopian Studies and Contributing Editor for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Additionally, he co-edited special issues of Cultural Critique and the Minnesota Review. Haines is engaged in ongoing projects, including a book on speculative fiction, critical theory, and ecology titled Fear of a Red Planet, as well as articles on contemporary capitalism, logistics, and the literary genre system. He also publishes non-academic criticism on literature, games, and popular culture for several magazines and websites.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Philosophy
• Literature

Selected publications

• EDITORS’ MESSAGE

  Utopian Studies · 2026-04-01

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• Introduction: Utopian Futures in an Authoritarian Present

  Utopian Studies · 2026-04-01

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• EDITORS’ MESSAGE

  Utopian Studies · 2025-06-01

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  It is impossible not to acknowledge at the outset that we lost one of the intellectual giants in our constellation, Fredric R. Jameson (Duke University) on September 22, 2024, at the age of ninety. It is hard to imagine what “utopian studies” would be without his decades-long interventions in Marxist political and literary theory and narratology, and his particular devotion to the now vibrant state (and to the status, finally) of science-fiction studies and utopian studies, to which he contributed such deep theoretical heft. In the next year Utopian Studies is planning a special issue on the legacy of Jameson to utopian studies specifically. The guest editor of this issue is Editorial Board member Phillip E. Wegner (University of Florida), a one-time student and long-time friend of Jameson, who is also one of most nuanced critic-historians of Jameson’s work. Phil is already gathering the tunes, as it were, from just a few of the scholars and writers who learned so deeply from him. Welcome to this special issue of Utopian Studies, which celebrates the legacy of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz fifteen years after the publication of the now-classic Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. The essays in this issue, some from well-established scholars, others from emerging scholars, take on a range of topics and approaches, while together asking how Muñoz’s conceptual linking of utopia and queerness plays out in contemporary culture. Behind this linkage lies a gauntlet thrown down by Lee Edelman’s decisive No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), which condemned the contemporary politics favoring queer “accommodation” as a form of what we could now call neoliberal inclusiveness. Moreover, Edelman rejected the (hetero)sexuate figuration of futurity as “The Child,” disjoining the notion of a queer futurity from what Lauren Berlant, on the back cover of the first edition of No Future, described as “reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death.” The anti-utopian thrust of Edelman’s refusal of reproductive futurism and of his insistence on a radical acceptance of Queer as an expression of the death drive, proved one of the more controversial aspects of that book. Just five years later, Muñoz answered Edelman’s challenge with Cruising Utopia, working a positive vision of queer futurity through a re-figuration of spacetime as nothing less than an ongoing utopian novum, a dialectical encounter with radical alterity.But this is all covered ground. The purpose of this issue is to retrace not just where Muñoz has taken queer theory but also, and especially, conceptualizations of utopia itself. I myself have argued in print that utopia is “essentially queer,” though my claim is grounded in a Malabou-ian theory of plasticity, not in Muñoz. I have learned, therefore, from this set of essays’ articulation of queer utopia in a different, though importantly related, theoretical idiom. These articles attend to Muñoz’s version of speculative spatio-temporality, and his insistence on the performative dimension of queer utopia, particularly in and as aesthetic experience. It is no accident that nearly all the selected essays become Muñozian meditations on specific works of art, literature, and film, connecting pasts, present, and futures, while disrupting temporal linearity. Nearly all also speak to the impact of this theorist on the contemporary flourishing of trans subjectivity, articulating distinctive extensions and revaluations of Muñoz’s work. This begins with K. Allison Hammer’s “Exuberant Embodiment: A Trans Utopia for an Unbearable Present.” Extending their work on the “unruly alliances” from their recently published Masculinity in Transition (reviewed in this issue, pages 324–330), Hammer (Southern Illinois) defines such energetic forms of resistance as the performance of “exuberant embodiment”: a “cross-identity concept connecting the present realities and potential futures of those denied bodily autonomy.” Drawing not only from Muñoz but also from Eli Clare, Francesca Ferrando, and Herbert Marcuse, Hammer argues for the necessary “dismantling of the nature/human, nature/culture, and nature/technology dualisms . . . used relentlessly to justify capitalist exploitation of the body.” Theorizing a kind of trans energeia, Hammer turns to works of sculptural, visual and textual art that stage that deconstructive process while also embodying, as “the work” of art, the plastic (re)figuration of trans embodiment as a generative life-drive.This theoretical bend toward exuberance and queer potentiality of art’s expression of utopian desire sets the bearing of the next five articles. Alexis Lothian’s “Captain America, Genderqueer Socialist: The Utopian Politics of Queer Fan Fiction” is similarly inspired by Munoz’s pursuit of “a way of being in the world that is glimpsed through reveries in a quotidian life that challenges the dominance of an affective world, a present, full of anxiousness and fear.” Lothian (University of Maryland) addresses the exuberant imaginative and generic resources of contemporary queer fan fiction. Lothian opens by asking whether queer fan fiction, as a cultural formation based in fantasy and desire, is able to “live up to its formal utopian potential” in creating and holding space for the complex and contradictory relationships between pleasure and power? The influential fan fiction, Known Associates, a queer retelling of the Marvel Comics Universe’s “Captain America” superhero narrative, does just that, according to Lothian. In the time-travel reappearance of Captain America as, fantastically, a “queer femme socialist sympathetic to [early twentieth-century] Black social movements” Lothian finds “an eroticized articulation of American feminist, queer, trans, and left social movement history.”Stephanie Kang (University of Denver) brings us into the queer worldings of contemporary digital artist Jacolby Satterwhite. In “Jacolby Satterwhite’s Blessed Avenue: Digitopian Reformulations of Queer Futurity,” Kang explains how Satterwhite’s 2018 work, manipulating video, virtual reality, 3D animation, installation, and performance, effectively reframes José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity “within the logics of digital technologies.” Satterwhite’s digital mediation of the “critical themes of queer joy and resistance,” particularly through the “strategic employment” of the glitch and the cyborg, “reroutes pathways” to a (queer) liberatory future: a digitopia. The utopian potentiality of new media is featured as well in Madison Johnson’s “Tune Out, Tune In: Cruising for Queer Utopian Reprieve in Welcome to the Night Vale,” a fiction podcast that like others in this genre, according to Johnson (Western Sydney University), offers “new methods of identifying and finding utopia [and] has led to texts constructing themselves like a cruising ground.”Muñoz’s articulation of queer utopianism and strategies of resistance similarly informs Miasol Eguíbar-Holgado’s “Queer Utopia, Transfeminism, and Solidarity in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer Universe.” Monáe’s multimedia creative work (in music, film, and writing) has proven itself a biting critique of inflamed queer- and transphobia throughout the years of the first Trump regime, and already reignited during contemptuous campaign ads and speeches leading to the second. In the short story “Nevermind,” Eguíbar-Holgado (University of Oviedo) argues, Monáe returns to her earlier work’s sketch of a dystopian world in which race and gender difference is flattened to a “homogeneous ideal by means of enforced memory erasure”: any surviving nonconformists (dubbed “dirty computers”) are hunted down and supposedly “cleansed” of the cognitive “virus” that understands difference as a positive aspect of their selves. In response, the dirty-computer resistance materializes in “off-the-grid” spaces. Though these comprise a virtual world, Eguíbar-Holgado argues, this “Afrofuturist, queer and transfeminist form of speculative world” offers “visions of alternative ethical routes and outcomes that inspire both critique and a call to action to fight for justice and liberation in the present” (emphasis added).We remain in this realm of speculation and/as political resistance in Sean Seeger’s “Speculative Queerness: Non-Normative Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022).” Seeger (University of Essex) offers a “reparative reading” (Sedgwick) of Cronenberg’s filmic dystopia, tracing in its portrayal of non-normative bodies and affiliations the signs of its implicit utopianism. Drawing further from andré m. carrington’s work on speculative blackness and from Muñoz’s theorization of queer futurity, Seeger concludes with a conceptualization of “speculative queerness”—a conclusion which indeed connects back through the previous articles in this issue.The question of theory and praxis in the face of persistent, virulent violence against queer and otherwise nonnormative people is at the heart of Brendan Brown’s “Queer Anarchy: Muñoz and Schürmann Go on a Date.” Brown (University of Western Ontario) proposes a philosophical corrective to Muñoz’s stated investment in the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose “paradigm of (im)potentiality” does not account sufficiently, according to Brown, for Muñoz’s “queer anarchist (non)politics of disidentification”; nor for its strategic praxis toward a figure of utopia as “a new space outside of heteronormativity,” indeed outside any form of totalizing limits. Carefully deconstructing Muñoz’s “misreading” of Agamben’s notion of (im)potentiality, Brown turns to the influence of Martin Heidegger on temporality and potentiality—but through Reiner Schürmann’s anarchist reading of that philosopher. Brown also touches on the influence of Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trace, an essential (non)defining aspect of Muñoz’s understanding of utopia as prefigurative, yet “actual,” a “programmatic openness to potentiality as futurity,” Brown concludes, “which makes possible the queer hermeneutics of queer anarchist (non)politics.” This piece ends with a “real-life” instantiation of a Muñozian queer political praxis, in the example of the AIDS-era San Diego Blood Sisters, whose successful national proliferation of blood drives to help the treatment of gay men and other victims of HIV-AIDS constituted a “cascading chain of strategic (dis)identifications.” The Blood Sisters, Brown concludes, enacted an anarchist “praxis of survival” designed “to make possible the conditions of queer time.”Gretchen Murphy’s “Hopeful Apocalypse: Trans Speculative Figuration and Climate Change” essay returns us to a central theoretical problematic in queer and trans theory: how to mediate “between optimism and pessimism, futurity and negativity”—particularly now, under the signs of environmental collapse and presumed social breakdown. The popularity of postapocalyptic fiction, Murphy (University of Texas–Austin) observes, registers a general interest in “entertaining” possible “blank-slate” futures, some hopeful, some not; but, they ask, is the simple “erasure” of the slate sufficient to “undo” the racist, sexist, queer- and transphobic foundations of contemporary capitalist societies? The resources of Tom Moylan’s notion of the critical utopia as a self-reflexive and in a certain sense self-generative narrative imaginary, Murphy proposes, offer the possibility of such a mediation, building from a methodical framework for “tell[ing] and appreciat[ing] hopeful stories without occluding the traumatic history that brought us here.” Featuring Charlie Jane Anders’s short story “Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy” (2015), Murphy’s complex and nuanced reading concludes that “the story’s titular emphasis on change invokes both cultural meanings of transness and Anthropocenic experiences of climate change.” The ARTICLES section closes with a performative essay, “Thinking-with Muñoz: A Posthuman Queer Ecological Cruise,” by Başak Ağın and Güvenç Arman Arı (TED University), which brings a posthumanist perspective to Muñoz’s work. Reading Muñoz and Karen Barad through one another grounds the authors’ own conversation with not only these theorists, but also with several contemporary Turkish artists whose work engages both human and nonhuman actors.This issue’s CRITICAL FORUM features contributions from a group of notable contemporary scholars whose own work deeply engages or extends Muñoz’s theoretical contributions to queer and trans theory. Rather than detail their arguments here, I refer you to Christian Haines’s introduction to this section (pages 205–209), which frames commentaries from Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University), Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University), Jonathan Alexander (UC Irvine), Michael Snediker (University of Houston), and Jack Halberstam (Columbia University). These essays collectively touch on many of the same theoretical issues as the articles: “cruising,” temporality, performativity, aesthetic responsiveness, and, of course, queer utopia in a dystopian world—but in some cases from a personal standpoint that also registers affectively the loss of a friend, colleague, or intellectual sparring partner.This special issue includes three DESIRE LINES essays that share an emphasis on the role of the experiential and the experimental, theorizing both queer identity and a utopian future that embraces queerness. Whether protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza through a refusal to take HIV medication, building a sauna that fosters community on the campus of a liberal arts college, or microdosing with friends to cultivate mindfulness, each of the embodied performances examined by Nishant Shahani, Coco Gagnet, and Benjamin Haber and Daniel J. Sander respectively, begins with a state of relationality, climaxes in a state of vulnerability, and concludes in a state of hopeful failure. These performances and their writers not only trace the trajectory of Muñoz’s theory of cruising utopia; they perform cruising. This is praxis—theory in motion.Shahani (Washington State University–Vancouver) opens the section and their essay, “To Desire Differently: Contagion, Occupation, and the Threading of Crises,” with a recounting of playwright Victor I. Cazares’s timely yet urgent protest against the ongoing genocide in Gaza: in solidarity with Gazan victims, Cazares stopped his medication for HIV therapy on Worlds AIDS’ Day, December 1, 2023. This “pill funeral,” as it came to be called, does not simply highlight one crisis but rather draws our attention to a crystallization of compounding crises including the COVID pandemic and the AIDS pandemic. Just because an event wanes from media attention does not mean the event ceases to exist. Nor does it mean that the event is “history.” Victims suffer “an outcome of enduring slow death over decades,” Shahani reminds us of the Nakba, AIDS, and COVID. This longue-durée perspective on suffering requires an equally longue-durée perspective on utopia. If queer utopia is defined by assemblage, then the portal to imagining a queer utopian future must involve disappointment, failure, and refusal as much as it involves hope, success, and acceptance because the path toward utopia is nonlinear.The threads of Shahani’s essay on crises productively unravel into Coco Gagnet’s “Gathering Snake Hut: Thermoplay and the Endurance of Queer Futurity” and Benjamin Haber and Daniel J. Sanders’s “Forget the ’60s, Let’s Talk about the ’90s: Reframing the Utopian Imagination,” as Gagnet (University of Texas–Dallas) picks up the thread of campus-based protest and queer bathhouses while Haber (Wesleyan University) and Sander (independent curator and scholar) pick up the thread of cruising ecstasy and drug culture, all of which emanates from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia. Failure remains a familiar companion in this DESIRE LINES journey that ends with calls for practices of self and communal care. “These practices of care for others are also forms of solidarity that engage in queer utopia’s ‘collective temporal distortion,’” Shahani reminds readers as we move from protest against ongoing pandemics into an attempt to build a queer bathhouse. Gagnet weaves autobiographical writing (in italics) and critical reflection ground in a Muñozian framework as she recounts her attempt to build a sauna on the campus of Antioch College alongside co-alumna and visiting professor Liz Flyntz. The product is a failure: no one has experience with carpentry, the rocks never heat, the water remains lukewarm, the neighbors call the people take up in the over Gagnet the of as the is called, in its to “To the of is to Gagnet on the a short Snake brings together who and alongside one the of Gagnet the of and Snake as in utopian because of the it offers to a in the of an already future for queer Shahani and Gagnet, Haber and to of queer in the of a future (and In so they the conversation full for of Victor I. Haber and a for theorizing the future of queer we to the the has a in American cultural memory for Haber and that the offer a for the future of because the of microdosing in the out of queer solidarity and during the and into the that the of Haber and for it is only we out that we be present in our This is a means of one not Haber and Muñoz’s to ecstasy with Queer utopia, is defined by a state of whether in the form of an or a this issue of Utopian Studies closes with selected for their or the legacy of Muñoz. The first group of the to queer futures, queer Black queer trans and alternative The new on and fiction, utopian and and The that you the throughout this first issue of

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• EDITORS’ MESSAGE

  Utopian Studies · 2025-08-01

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  Welcome to Utopian Studies 36.2, with this uncharacteristically short message from the Editorial Team. This is a special issue on the topic of AFROTOPIAS, compiled by Guest Editors Antje Daniel (University of Vienna), Magnus Echtler (University of Bayreuth), and Melina Kalfenis (University of Bayreuth). In following the previous issue on QUEER UTOPIAS (issue 36.1) this AFROTOPIAS issue extends the editors’ welcoming of contemporary critical perspectives that assess and challenge utopian studies as a field. QUEER UTOPIAS featured work that reconceptualizes traditional models of utopian community and of both utopian political and aesthetic theories, in light of contemporary understandings of sex, gender, the body (both gendered and racialized) and the body politic. The articles also offered alternative conceptions of temporality and history.This special issue shares these concerns. In proposing this topic, the guest editors are explicit in their hope to disrupt the strong Anglo-European bent of academic publishing on utopia. As social scientists they wish to highlight both empirical studies of Africa-oriented communities and utopian social movements, and to theorize new conceptualizations of utopia and African modernities. In this, these editors align with Turkish literature scholars who put together last year’s special section (issue 35.1) on speculative writing from the Mediterranean basin. Those articles touched on Iberian, European, Middle Eastern, and northern African countries and their cultures which, thanks to centuries of (colonial) trade and travel, might suggest a more fluid notion of a utopian political imaginary, aligned with contemporary notions of “transcontinental” or “trans-Mediterreanean” approaches, as C. Ceyhun Arslan summarizes in “Disciplinary Utopias: The Mediterranean as a Context and Artistic Mediations” (35.1: 132–51). Arslan also noted the importance of Black Mediterranean studies, which highlight the region’s overlooked ties with the sub-Saharan Africa. That special section and Arslan’s article in particular set up an interesting segue to this issue. Here, the guest editors similarly invite us to consider different frameworks for understanding the absence, in this case, of utopian studies scholarship on African utopianism. They propose dismantling the Anglo-European presumption that the continent we call “Africa,” as if it were a uniform monolith, is characterized only by corruption and disorder. This image is a remnant of the still active colonial phantasm of “the dark continent” with a less developed and more chaotic “heart of darkness.” Through the essays that follow, we find new theoretical approaches supported by empirical investigations that focus on the continent’s own visions of African modernities.The issue opens with “Introduction: Reconsidering Afrotopia,” in which the special editors propose “stimulat[ing] a debate on the decolonization of utopian studies and to provoke more inquiry into utopias of the Global South.” Following the issue’s seven essays, the BOOK REVIEWS section opens with four books directly related to aspects of Africa-oriented utopian studies, including Afrofuturism, Pan-African speculative literature, and the “Black Fantastic.” The remainder of the reviews feature texts more broadly concerned with settler colonialism and with environmentalism, as well as utopian pedagogy. The issue concludes with one CONFERENCE BRIEFING, covering Comic Con 2024.We hope you enjoy the issue, and if you have comments feel free to submit them on the journal’s submission link, under “Letters to the Editor.”

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• Critical Forum Introduction: Muñoz’s Ghost, or, The Sparks of Other Tomorrows

  Utopian Studies · 2025-06-01

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  It is tempting to write of José Esteban Muñoz’s death in December 2013 as if it coincided with the historical fate of queer theory, as if the passing of Muñoz were the harbinger of the latter’s extinction. It’s not that queer theory has stopped being written, of course, nor that it’s gone out of fashion, but rather that its historical mission has been called into question by its own proponents and practitioners.1 To what degree has queer theory trapped itself in whiteness (corrected for, if not solved, by queer of color critique) or humanism (though Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, among others, have asked whether the queer has ever been human)?2 At what point, does antinormativity become its own norm (homonormativity, as Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar have named it)?3 Has the materialist turn—the broad turn in the humanities away from prioritizing language or the symbolic as constitutive of self, society, world—suspended the critical value of performativity, the discursive constructivism at the heart of so much queer theory? I won’t pretend to offer a definitive answer to these questions, though I will say that if queer theory has died a certain death, if it’s no longer what it once was, then its passing is like that of theory (or “Theory”)—not final like the punctuation of a period, but open like a question mark, vibrating like an exclamation point. Only look, for example, at the intense energy of work in trans studies or in queer ecology.4 Queer theory hasn’t so much passed on as passed into a plurality of vibrant critical theories and practices. And I would say the same of Muñoz, acknowledging the obvious difference of Muñoz’s all too human finitude: Muñoz’s writing and thinking, especially his 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, lingers on within literary and cultural studies; gender and sexuality studies; critical theory; and utopian studies. Muñoz, the person, died, but Muñoz persists as lively ghost, as collective memory, as world-maker, as “the performance of queer utopian memory, that is, a utopia that understands its time as reaching beyond some nostalgic past that perhaps never was or some future whose arrival is continuously belated—a utopia in the present.”5With Cruising Utopia, Muñoz insisted on the positivity of queer theory. He renewed its commitment not only to the subversion of heteronormativity (or, more generally, the revolt against dominant subject formations) but also to the task of building new worlds in the midst of this one.6 “Queer world-making,” he writes, “hinges on the possibility to map a world where one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in any map of the social.”7 Muñoz recovers a dimension of the utopian too often neglected, namely, Ernst Bloch’s conceptualization of utopia as impulse and anticipatory illumination (das Vor-Schein)—as embodied in the present and reaching into the future.8 “Utopia,” Muñoz writes, “is a stage, not merely a temporal stage, like a phase, but also a spatial one.”9 The metaphor of the map or the bluprint—utopia as drawn-out plan for the future or as the void (the “something missing”) in the map of the present—is too two-dimensional, too disembodied. Muñoz wants to concretize utopia, to give it flesh and blood, meaning not only that he locates its potential in the embodied subjects of the present but also that he recovers it in historical images, in moments of possibility that passed too soon, yet still sent off the sparks of other tomorrows. Muñoz doesn’t devise a singular methodology in this pursuit, nor does he rely on a small set of concepts. While Bloch is a touchstone in Cruising Utopia, Muñoz’s theoretical practice is more promiscuous, flirting with concepts from numerous theorists, tarrying with heterogeneous artistic and social practices. As befits a thinker for whom utopia is a stage, it is perhaps the notion of utopian performativity that is his signature: “The performance in its incompleteness, lingers and persists, drawing together the community of interlocutors. Utopian performativity is often fueled by the past. The past, or at least narratives of the past, enable utopian imaginings of another time and place that is not yet here but nonetheless functions as a doing for futurity, a conjuring of both future and past to critique presentness.”10Has utopian studies learned Muñoz’s lessons? Perhaps. There have long been queer utopias and utopianisms, preceding even the revolutionary foment of the 1960s, as, for example, in Charles Fourier and Walt Whitman’s respective sexual experiments in poetry and social planning.11 Utopian studies has mined such experiments for their world-making potential, but it surely hasn’t exhausted the archaeological, architectural, or ontological powers of queer social life.12 Muñoz enriches utopian studies not only by presenting and representing queer lives, in all their historicity and potentiality, but also in drawing out the performativity of utopia—utopianism as embodied action that exceeds the imagination, even as it also inhabits, sustains, and extends it.The essays in this CRITICAL FORUM honor the fifteenth anniversary of Cruising Utopia with their own performances. Tavia Nyong’o turns our ears toward the music of utopia, drawing out Muñoz’s revision of Bloch and connecting it to the “unheard notes” of the Black utopian and ecstatic tradition in music and social practice. In conversation with Jayna Brown (Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds), Nyong’o suggests that we continue to glean utopia even in the darkest times: “We are like gleaners in the fields after a terrible harvest, seeking to undo, in our small gestures of provision, the mountains of waste and despoliation that racial capitalism is leaving in its wake.” Rebekah Sheldon reads the magic in Muñoz’s utopian performances; she shows how the occult vocabulary of Cruising Utopia—terms such as casting, conjuring, and calling—introduces “the process of enacting a future through telling the past.” “Futurity,” Sheldon reminds readers, “has its own performative force, which is what queerness performs on, engages with, makes into a doing that is a kind of bending of a vector already in motion.” Jonathan Alexander looks at the photography of Mark Morrisroe, as well as Muñoz’s interpretation of Morrisroe, to develop a queer utopian hermeneutic attuned to “the beautiful trashiness of our existence.” What does it mean not to recover utopia from the damage of everyday life but to find it in that damage, to make utopia out of the hurt? “Through Muñoz,” Alexander writes, “I imagine Mark in that hospital bed, marking those objects, his XRays, and thinking of us, thinking of those future moments in which we would see this queer man, this piece of trash, this refuse who refused to be anything other than the beautiful person he was.” Michael Snediker teases out the difficult indeterminations of cruising as critical practice. Cruising moves into, out of, and across landscapes, bodies, and texts “in the redounding of utopia’s own complicated promise of a place and not a place scored to the self’s diminuendo, briefly galvanized as relational potential dissolving in cruising’s suspensive hold.” There is a vibrating suspense in Muñoz—not only the tremor of the future in the present but also tense and exciting relations among bodies—that cuts across too easy oppositions between relational and anti-relational positions in queer theory (usually abbreviated as Muñoz versus Edelman or Bersani). Finally, Jack Halberstam closes this CRITICAL FORUM by cautioning readers against confusing utopianism with pure positivity. Halberstam argues that whatever we might make of this world, we need to reckon with negativity and nothingness in social and ontological senses. We might learn from Muñoz not only how to make new worlds or repair the harms inflicted by this one but also how to break structures apart, how to sabotage the status quo, “how to unmake a world.” To make in unmaking, to unmake in making, perhaps this is what Muñoz had in mind when he wrote of “brown punks and queers” that they “they perform an insistence on wanting more in the face of scarcity, which does more than simply reject negation, but instead, works through it to imagine a being-in-common within the negative.”13

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• The Anthropocene Interregnum: Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2025-01-01

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  This essay argues for an understanding of the Anthropocene as both historical impasse and historical transition. It is an impasse insofar as there is a conceptual and practical gap between human history and planetary history, or politics and ecology. It is a transition insofar as it marks the passage from one geological epoch to another and from one dominant social formation (capitalism) and the possibility of another. The author makes the case that ecopoetry and ecological Marxism operate a dialectical reversal from historical impasse to transition by mediating between ecology and politics. The author reads a poem by Stephanie Burt, “Advice from Rock Creek Park,” as an instrument for sensing and conceptualizing the present as a complex coordination of contradictory social and ecological temporalities. The author then looks to ecological Marxism for how it historicizes capitalism as a transformation of human and nonhuman natures. Marxism and Karl Marx's writing contain insightful meditations on the historical realities of the human species, the social production of subsistence, and the metabolism between society and nature. Marxism offers a rich conceptual apparatus for historicizing the climate crisis as the transition to a new epoch—one that may yet hold a place for human civilization.

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• Imagining and Occupying Wall Street

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-07-03

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• EDITORS’ MESSAGE

  Utopian Studies · 2025-11-01

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  This final issue of Utopian Studies 36 (2025) offers topics ranging from early Islamic utopianism to Soviet-era urban design, and from prison abolition to “trans excess.” Shea Hennum’s “Abolitionist Speculation” opens the ARTICLES section, theorizing the practice of imagining a world without prisons and the conditions that would make such a world possible. Hennum locates this concept in the history of utopian and dystopian literature’s attention to carceral logics and some texts’ proposals for alternatives to imprisonment. Conversely, the author also recovers a tradition of utopianism within abolitionist thought, interweaving histories of anarchist and communist politics. The article concludes with a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), fleshing out Hennum’s concept of abolitionist speculation.Alexander Rienerth’s “Reading Trans Excess into Toni Morrison’s Beloved” similarly places the reading of a classic American novel at the center of an analysis of the emancipatory urges of utopian speculation. Rienerth proposes that we understand Morrison’s early masterpiece as a “narrative act of transition” that models an alternate, intersubjective Black female subjectivity as a trans-feminine subjectivity. This new model is shaped in the relationship of characters Sethe and Beloved, thus “lay[ing] a foundation contrary to normative literary modes [that] contain and condemn Black trans women.” Instead, Beloved “open[s] an affective space [for theorizing] how queer utopia and the Black trans-feminine body may be constructed in tandem with one another.”The next two articles lead us to very different historical moments. “Soviet Urban Planning’s ‘Great Debate’ (1929–31): Modernity, Utopia, and the ‘Ideal Socialist City,’” by Dimitris Margaritis Moschos, contends that the debates between the so-called Urbanists and Disurbanists over the design of “the ideal socialist city” reflected a problematic inherent to the country’s shifting notions of modernity: namely, the conflict between the priorities of the individual and of a socialist mass society. The article proposes that the Urbanist-Disurbanist discussion regarding socialist modernization and society reflects divergent utopian responses to the political and economic challenges of the USSR. Furthermore, the debate was more than just an argument between technical specialists, argues Moschos, as these city planners worked consciously within (and sometimes against) the context of a broader, European reconceptualization of modernity following World War I.“Keys to Paradise: Imāmate and the Utopian Longings of the Shiʿi Devotional Text of Mafātīḥ al-jinān,” by Babak Rahimi and Mohammad Nasravi, takes us to debates among Islamic religious scholars regarding the utopian content of the Shiʿi doctrine of the Imāmate manifested in devotional practices. The article offers a Blochian understanding of such religious devotional practices as performative expressions of utopian longing. Rahimi and Nasravi understand Shiʿi devotional performances to be intimate, everyday longings as forms of Blochian “daydream.” These dreams present the absent, divine-like figure of Imām, whose authority lies in concealed transcendence, while being experienced concretely through textual performances of devotion and prayer at dedicated shrines.We return to more or less contemporary times in Ryan R. Kerr’s reading of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange. Kerr contextualizes this unsettling novel in the decline of British hegemony following World War II, and in the rise of what we now call capitalist realism. The novel, Kerr argues, confirms the hypotheses of Fredric Jameson on postmodernism and of Mark Fisher on canceled futures: namely, that alternatives to the dominant social order are reincorporated into the logic of late capitalism. Kerr interprets the novel’s linguistic pastiche, as well as its referencing of a postwar “mugging crisis” and other forms of criminality, as an ironical commentary on Britain’s (vain) insistence on its continued dominance in contemporary global politics—despite its evident post-imperial decline. Burgess’s novel suggests, says Kerr, that (re)imagining the country’s future means “abandoning the hopeless nostalgia that is easily co-opted by nationalist supremacy”—an abandoning which the novel’s protagonists embrace with, well, considerable abandon.This issue features an important REVIEW ESSAY by one of the long-time members of the Society for Utopian Studies, Kenneth M. Roemer. As a longtime friend and correspondent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Roemer’s review of The Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems (2023) is a welcome introduction. Roemer admits he is not a poetry critic, but he is a career-long scholar of utopian fiction who also possesses decades worth of personal letters and emails between Le Guin and himself. Considering that many readers of this journal will know Le Guin’s novels backward and forward but may have never read a single one of her stand-alone poems, Roemer offers a rich introduction to the lesser-known work of an otherwise legendary fantasy and SF writer. Roemer’s intention is simply this: to “offer an overview of the astonishing variety and scope of Le Guin’s poetry and because I believe that, for readers unfamiliar with her poetry or even those who know some of the poetry, this collection will reinforce, expand, and even change perceptions of Le Guin the writer and the person.”The issue concludes with the BOOK REVIEW section, featuring ten recent publications, including three new handbooks from Oxford and Routledge, as well as a stimulating variety of scholarly monographs.We close this issue with the news that a longtime Advisory Board member, Artur Blaim, Professor of English at the University of Gdańsk, died on April 25, 2025. Blaim was the author of numerous monographs, including Utopian Visions and Revisions or the Uses of Ideal Worlds (2017), Gazing in Useless Wonder: English Utopian Fiction 1516–1800 (2013) and Robinson Crusoe and His Doubles (2016). He coedited several volumes on utopian/dystopian fiction and cinema, such as Spectres of Utopia: Theory, Practice, Conventions (2012) and Mediated Utopias (2015). In addition to his prolific career of publication, Blaim served as an officer and Executive Committee member of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe) and was a regular contributor to this journal.

  PublisherDOI

• Response 3: “Unshakeable Want”: Solarpunk, Petromodernity, and the Death Drive

  Utopian Studies · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Dex escapes the city: “Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.” They change careers, become a tea monk, a vocation blending botanical remedy with therapeutic conversation. Dex embraces a new form of life; they learn to occupy time and attune to nature in a different way. They also repeat the foundational reconciliation between civilization and nature that is the signature of solarpunk and of Becky Chambers’s “Monk and Robot” novellas, exemplars of that sci-fi subgenre:The aesthetic, here, is not the sublime but the beautiful—harmonious accord that softens the edges of things. The passage describes this aesthetic disposition as “ease.” It’s the “humming mildly” that comes from the minimal friction between machine and nature. It’s the sunlight that lubricates the landscape, that coats the surface of every object with evidence of their solar origins. This ease is only possible because the sun donates its energy to the solar panels that recharge the motor of Dex’s ox-bike, to the plants that constitute Dex’s diet, to the myriad forms of life that make the moon Panga their home. At the same time, this reconciliation between civilization and nature bears the historical trace of crisis in “[t]he infrastructural delineation between human space and everything-else space.” This line does more than signify; it effects the “crazy split” (“the Transition”) through which humanity subtracted itself from planetary mastery—it marks the negation of the Anthropocene.Chambers never describes the Transition in detail, but she alludes to it as the resolution of something akin to Earth’s contemporary climate crisis. It names the exodus from a time of heavy industry, polluted rivers, carbon emissions, and general ecosystem disruption. The coziness of Chambers’s prose presupposes its inverse, a period of discord and dissonance, a moment when machines overwhelmed and consumed nature. In other words, the positivity of solarpunk—its optimism, its utopianism—maintains a connection to its opposite, to the negativity that defines our present-day relationship between civilization and nature (what some Marxists term the metabolic rift).1 It’s the line between positivity and negativity, between ease and crisis, that enables solarpunk to constitute, in Phoebe Wagner’s words, “a narrative method for survival and thriving,” “a response to the climate crisis and its attendant social justice issues” (“An Introduction”). Without this coupling of ease and crisis, solarpunk would be what Ernst Bloch criticizes as abstract utopianism: a too easy sort of wish fulfillment that sidesteps social problems instead of responding to them (223). Solarpunk’s critical utopianism—its “punk” quality—lies in “infrastructure as a form of resistance” (Flynn). Infrastructural delineation constitutes resistance, because the halving of human influence (“half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others”) doesn’t just achieve balance or equilibrium (a restoration of natural homeostasis), it invents novel forms of human life, new ways of negotiating the fact of being in and of nature, while at the same being able to throw the world out of whack. Infrastructure signifies the historical present of fossil fuel-driven capitalism and climate crisis (even clean energy infrastructure requires carbon-intensive materials like steel and concrete), but infrastructure might also be something like Dex’s ox-bike: “double-decked, chunky-wheeled, ready for adventure”—an imaginative means of cruising into sustainable futures (Chambers, Psalm 10). Solarpunk is a rich fantasy. Its visions of sustainable worlds interrupt the dominant dystopian imaginary of the present—Anthropocene history as slide into extinction: ecopessimism, climate anxiety, apocalypse fetishism—generating the hope that a different relation to nature remains possible. In this CRITICAL FORUM’S central article, Alexa Weik von Mossner explains that “the task that solarpunk has set itself as both movement and speculative fiction genre is nothing less than bringing about attainable, sustainable, and equitable futures worth living in.” Weik von Mossner reframes solarpunk in utopian terms, supplementing solarpunk’s “realist audacity” and “radical hope” with the “education of desire.” “The question that poses itself,” Weik von Mossner writes, “is how exactly do we get from hopeful imagining to the courage and determination to act, and what role does desire play in this process as the motivating force that makes us strive for the things we are hoping for?” This is the question of praxis, of the circuit between theory and practice. It’s the question of how the imagination actualizes itself in and as material reality. Weik von Mossner pursues this question through cognitive narratology. Bracketing off psychoanalytic approaches to desire, she sketches a mimetic itinerary of utopia through solarpunk. Character desire and narrative desire model possibilities that constitute alternatives to present-day habits. They don’t close the gap between imagination and historical reality, but they educate desire by attuning it to other objects of care and to different ways of pursuing those objects. This education in desire keys itself to three central values: care, cooperation, and attachment to place. Solarpunk leavens utopian desire with the knowledge that “[f]eeling at home . . . is a willingness to care for one another” and that this care not only traverses species (“embodied interaction with a multispecies community”) but also encompasses the natural environment. Solarpunk sustains readers with demonstrations that a sustainable world is not just desirable but feasible. It lets us desire utopia again by detaching futurity from the ongoing disaster that is capitalist progress, petromodernity, human dominion.But desire isn’t so simple and its logic isn’t solely mimetic. It is constituted by the obstacles it encounters as much as the object it pursues. Desire frustrates emulation not because it belongs to the inner truth of individuals but, to the contrary, because its social dimensions—its constitutive mediation by social and symbolic orders—are inextricable from antagonism and contradiction. Even the most normative desires don’t follow a straight line; they zig, they zag, they swerve in response to obstacles and conditions. Weik von Mossner worries that solarpunk stories are “also an expression of desire in that they omit—deliberately, perhaps—any kind of friction or competing interests within the communities they portray.” Solarpunk’s omission of friction is not synonymous with the bracketing off of psychoanalysis, but it’s related insofar as psychoanalysis takes the friction of desire as its object. The richness of solarpunk fantasy lies in the ways that the omission of friction rebounds, that the complications of community haunt the cozy landscapes of solarpunk, like so many rusted relics of petroleum-powered modernity.Solarpunk fantasizes sustainable futures. Fantasy, in this context, doesn’t mean the opposite of reality, nor does it imply the elimination of desire’s obstacles in some smooth scene of fulfillment. Instead, fantasy names the scene of desire playing out in encounters with obstacles. It also names a kind of imaginative work that retroactively constitutes subjects as beings that desire, with and alongside others, in a certain way. “Fantasy,” Lauren Berlant clarifies, “is the place where the subject encounters herself already negotiating the social. The origin of fantasy may still be the trauma of infantile separation—that’s one theory. However we account for its origins, though, it’s clear that the subjectivity desire makes is fundamentally incited by external stimuli that make a dent on the subject” (Desire/Love 75). In the case of solarpunk, the fantasy of sustainability reconstitutes reading subjects not just through imaginary scenes of fulfillment—sun-soaked dreamscapes of civilization cozy with nature—but through encounters with the repressed materials of petromodernity: the creative destruction of capitalism and its libidinal economy, the drive to mass extinction in the name of endless growth, the compulsion to consume the planet for the sake of luxury.2 If solarpunk offers more than relief, it’s because it reckons with the bad attachments and social limits that fuel the ecological pathologies of the present. “All attachments are optimistic,” Berlant reminds. “When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us” (Cruel Optimism 23). And not all objects are good for us: “[S]ome scenes of optimism are clearly crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24–25). What is petromodernity but a cruel object? What does it name but an attachment to endless growth, to capitalist futurity, that wears us down by destroying the planet on which we depend and of which we are an element?The sustainability fantasies of solarpunk remain tethered to the material realities of the present by staging human attachments to petromodernity. Solarpunk invites readers into a cozy scene, but there’s a scene behind the scene, a shadow scene: historical objects that endure in, but are not of, solarpunk’s future present. In Cory Doctorow’s short story “Materiality,” for instance, recycling, composting, and multi-use design are the orders of the day, but the tale Doctorow tells is one of a school class visiting a model “Twenty-First Century Town,” a field trip to reenact our Anthropocene present in all of its overbuilt and ill-considered material weight. On the way to the town, the protagonist (Artemio) notes that, for all its virtues, solarpunk futurity doesn’t vanish the fossils of historical folly:The instinctive revulsion Artemio feels toward these historical remainders, his repulsion from the odds and ends that “refused to break down,” suggest an estranging rather than imitative aesthetic logic: what’s utopian in this example of the solarpunk imaginary is not Artemio as model of the post-Anthropocene citizen, living in a post-material world, but rather the gap, the impasse, that makes it difficult to put ourselves in his shoes. We’re not only surrounded by the “insoluble, terrible objects.” We are those objects, “too badly made to love, but too overbuilt to fall apart gracefully,” because for all our dreams of sustainability, we remain the subjects of petromodernity, our futures still powered by combustion, solar panels and composting, still ornaments of green capitalism instead of the principles of a different social world.3The value of solarpunk fantasy is twofold. It consists not only in its staging of scenes in which technology and nature reconcile (call it the solar, or speculative, element) but also in the interruption of these scenes by the stubborn remainders of capitalist modernity (the historical element, the obstacle to futurity, the junk moment). Desire traverses and connects these elements. To be precise, the narrativization of desire sequences these elements such that history not only precedes but follows speculation, consecrating solarity through its interruption. The future composts the past, yes, but something in the past is insoluble, resists incorporation into solar ease. Conversely, solarity only appears, becomes something concrete—an object of desire—against a background of historical remnants. In short, what makes solarpunk utopian, what gives it more than ideological appeal as yet another solution to the present’s social pathologies, is that it tarries with historical negativity, with obstacles to desire.In psychoanalytic terms, what’s at stake here is less pleasure than the extremes of desire limned by the death drive. For Freud, the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip) involves detours through, not to mention compromises with, social reality; you can’t always get what you want, but, as he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, “The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed, we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other” (34). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud wonders whether the pleasure principle might not be aligned with the death drive (Todestrieb), an instinct for life to return to an inanimate state. After all, happiness implies not only intensities of pleasure but also the avoidance of pain, and what purer absence of pain is there than death? Freud’s emphasis, however, is not so much on the return to inanimacy—happiness as still life—but on the tension between the life and death instincts, the push and pull between creation and destruction: “It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life [death] as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 49).Jacques Lacan pushes Freud’s speculations to their logical, linguistic, and historical endpoint. The death drive, he explains, should be distinguished from “the Nirvana or annihilation principle,” for it is “situated in the historical domain; it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain, that is to say, insofar as a reference point, that is a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the functioning of nature” (211). The death drive doesn’t return human beings to the cyclical time of primordial nature, rather it recalls and replays the emergence of culture (the social and symbolic order; the domain of language) as the advent of history. The death drive doesn’t put to rest, it erupts and interrupts, it breaks (with) nature: “The drive as such, insofar as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be but a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration? [. . .] Will to destruction. Will to make a fresh start. Will for an Other-thing, given that everything can be challenged from the function of the signifier [‘the historical chain’]” (Lacan 212). Lacan’s emphasis on destruction doesn’t simply represent human aggression, even if petromodernity, with its hunger for natural resources, testifies so well to that aggression. Instead, it speaks to the will to overturn the order of things in the name of a “fresh start,” an “Other-thing,” that transgressive pleasure that Lacan calls jouissance (184). In sum, the death drive describes how the pursuit of pleasure defines itself not by its object or aim but by the detours of its obstacles, the friction of historical encounters.There is something utopian in the psychoanalytic meditation on the death drive. It implies that desire need not be reduced to the terms of the social and symbolic order, that desire may yet turn into disruption of the status quo, “disruption as Novum, as restructuration and the unexpected blasting open of habits, as that lateral side-door which suddenly opens onto a new world of transformed human beings” (Jameson, Archaeologies 232 n. 23). At the same time, even though this disruptive desire conjures the beyond, that which lies beyond the present order of things, it nevertheless remains grounded in historical conditions, inserted into the social and symbolic order. It’s a concrete utopianism, working through history instead of wishing it away.What makes solarpunk valuable for the social and political imagination—what makes it properly utopian—is its commitment to working through history. “History is what hurts, it is what desire and limits to as well as praxis, which its turn into and of their (Jameson, The requires the pain of it friction and as much as there’s of pleasure in coziness of a the in social cooperation, the ease of this pleasure only itself in or Solarpunk’s isn’t It doesn’t of a future as of remains by the of petromodernity, and this constitutes its Phoebe Wagner’s of this between history and utopia through the a that one of “a to land or a but both been in the the [. . .] as the some to be some might been that from or appears, or in these not opposite of nature but in its Wagner’s narrative doesn’t on in the but on a with It’s a story of to of social forms in response to the and of historical It’s not The death of a of and the becomes an of a and into a is a form of a of Its in Wagner’s story testifies to the fact that solarpunk a working through of petromodernity, that the of the genre isn’t but its Solarpunk reckons with the “insoluble, terrible that to in solar but it does so with At the of Wagner’s the of the community the in the edges to from bad or They not just history but they the of the Anthropocene into the wonders of a future present. in this context, isn’t the resolution of history but the of historical as a that some new way of in the world might yet if the a new In Psalm for the Dex the fuck out of the but they don’t Instead, they a do The on Chambers’s at the of human They their the their human the to not just their but their to as they Dex’s with is a swerve Dex’s as a tea question about what need implies a more general question about what a post-Anthropocene civilization and feels Dex’s a good world, a It’s not but so We made a good a good And yet every in the I up and . . . and . . . just I something [. . .] And I do do it good at what I I make I make And yet I still up like . . . like In Psalm and its for the narrative the of this the pursuit of some that would this that would still Dex’s desire, but it is the the that gives these their to should be an are not or an And has a The world simply [. . .] work is not and I don’t how to that, because it is to in the world and at [. . .] are to just Dex doesn’t their with the of nature, but they do object to the of the of isn’t for most We’re more than We’re We care of and the world takes care of us, and we care of and it And clearly not [. . .] We and beyond human nature as much as This marks the of solarpunk The that exodus from petromodernity, doesn’t reconcile civilization and nature as if the their It how in, with, and as of nature, but it cannot human social and symbolic the simple of in the of solar it the death drive with it “the same sort of that made them turn off the into the (Chambers,

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Hope Through Action—Solarpunk Blueprints, Desires, and Politics

  Utopian Studies · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What can solarpunk make us believe? What can it make us do? Can it inspire the kind of action that might resolve, overcome, or adapt to climate crisis? These are the questions asked in Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” the feature article of this CRITICAL FORUM on the emergent genre of solarpunk. Weik von Mossner praises solarpunk’s “dynamic of realist audacity and radical hope,” the way that it couples scrutiny of historical material conditions with the insistence that other ways of living, other social formations, remain possible. Solarpunk dedicates itself to action; it wants to incite political action, of course, but also the more general action of building sustainable infrastructure for the future.1 As Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wagner put it in one of the first solarpunk story collections, “Solarpunk emphasizes innovative interaction with both our communities and our environment; socio-environmental thought and creation, rather than merely survival in a decaying world, inspire the solarpunk attitude” (9). But for attitude to become action, for hope to become change, there must be desire. Weik von Mossner draws on utopian studies scholarship by the likes of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, and Tom Moylan to argue for solarpunk as an education in desire, a school in which readers learn to desire differently, to desire something different from the status quo. This pursuit requires an analysis of storytelling as an effective practice, that is, attention to how narrative form acts on readers, provokes affective reorientations, incites action off the page through representations on the page. For Weik von Mossner, such analysis means turning to the discipline of cognitive narratology, so that the transformation of readers is less the hypothetical postulate of literary criticism, more the material aim of literary activism. Ultimately, Weik von Mossner offers up solarpunk as a lesson in the value of fiction for enabling utopian desire: “I believe we need fiction, too—stories that jump off from those real-world efforts [sustainability projects and non-fiction accounts of them] or go way beyond them, not least because that is how ideas take shape and because it helps those who enjoy it to maintain their sanity.”Solarpunk emerges as a science fiction subgenre in the 2010s, first in Brazil, then in the United States and elsewhere. However, before it became a written genre, solarpunk was a Tumblr and Reddit aesthetic, a set of visual art styles implicitly cultivating the hope that humans might respond to environmental devastation in a positive and productive manner. As Tobias Skiveren explains, in the first response to Weik von Mossner’s piece, solarpunk “emerged not to name an existing body of fiction, but to describe a certain type of fiction that would hopefully at some point be written.” Solarpunk began as a collection of images of sustainable futures; it started as a strategy for visualizing the future of climate change beyond the dominant terms set by apocalyptic and dystopian imaginaries. That these images retroactively became placeholders for theoretically sophisticated fictions shouldn’t make us lose sight of these visual origins. Skiveren argues that we shouldn’t assume (as utopian studies is sometimes wont to do) that desire is the essence of utopianism, that images of the future are incidental to some more fundamental impulse to want more than what’s on offer in the present. Blueprints are important, too. Solarpunk’s representations of a future in which civilization and nature have reconciled don’t simply inspire hope, they function as models. “Solarpunks are indeed very occupied with utopia as real programs for more habitable worlds.” Skiveren frames such programs as part of a more general idea of “utopian literacy,” “the ability to imagine a habitable world beyond our current socio-ecological disasters as well as the routes to get there.” How might solarpunk not only exemplify the prospects of utopian literacy but serve as a concrete means for teaching our students to imagine and enact sustainable futures?Solarpunk’s value involves not only cultivating desire and hope but also modeling alternative futures. It’s mimetic and speculative, as well as affective and libidinal. But what about the “punk” in “solarpunk”? In “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction,” Lee Konstantinou (2019) worries that the proliferation of the “punk” suffix in speculative fiction has become, at best, a marketing effort, publishers carving out new niches for fiction consumption, at worst, a hopeless attempt to catch the lightning in a bottle that was cyberpunk, devoid of social or political substance. The occasion for Konstantinou’s article is hopepunk, but he also cites “steampunk, biopunk, nanopunk, stonepunk, clockpunk, rococopunk, raypunk, nowpunk, atompunk, mannerpunk, salvagepunk, Trumppunk, solarpunk, and sharkpunk (no joke!), among others.” These subgenres are the nostalgic efflux of a genre system turning in on itself, cannibalizing its own powers for the sake of replication instead of innovation (let alone social change): “All of these strategies can produce terrific stories. But none seems capable of generating the sort of excitement cyberpunk once did, and none has done much better than cyberpunk at the job of imagining genuinely different human futures. [. . .] If the best you can do is worm your way through gleaming arcologies you played little part in building—if your answer to dystopia is to develop some new anti-authoritarian style, attitude, or ethos—you might as well give up the game, don your mirrorshades, and admit you’re still doing cyberpunk (close to four decades later)” (Konstantinou). Konstantinou’s criticism of science-fiction’s “punk”-fetish suggests what might make solarpunk different, namely, its commitment to community action, its insistence on the collective construction of futures. In Phoebe Wagner’s response to Weik von Mossner, they defend “the ‘punk’ aspect of solarpunk because it provides one answer to this question. Punk music and culture—with all its problems—has also created an ethic of community care. Punk balances the idea-driven manifestos of the music with community action, whereas solarpunk struggles to find this balance.” Maintaining this punk ethos, Wagner reminds, means not getting too caught up in the bucolic dimension of solarpunk: “If gardens are the most attractive aspect of solarpunk [. . .] then we are not going far enough.” It means staying true to the solarpunk proposition of “hope through action,” of fostering the genre’s will to be “more than entertainment but possibility”: “A solarpunk story turns hope into action for community adaptation. A tall order for storytellers, yes, but there is joy found in setting out for such vital work.”Solarpunk brings pleasure. It alleviates the miserable feelings that come from the apocalyptic and dystopian parameters of contemporary culture. At the same time, solarpunk doesn’t ignore the magnitude of the social and ecological crises that define our present. Solarpunk stories “typically critique capitalism indirectly, portraying a world attempting to heal from wounds it has left on its people and its landscape,” but that indirect reckoning with capitalism (and, one might add, settler colonialism and petromodernity) is fundamental to the genre’s hopeful efforts (Sage xi). The final response to Weik von Mossner, by Christian Haines, recuperates the question of desire, reintroducing the psychoanalytical and historical material economies of want. Haines argues that what “makes solarpunk valuable for the social and political imagination—what makes it properly utopian—is its commitment to working through history. [. . .] Utopianism requires the pain of history; it entails friction and frustration as much as satisfaction.” Such pain and frustration motivates the narratives of solarpunk, tying positive images of the future back to the ongoing wreckage of the present. It does so not in order to foreclose hope through action but to reframe that ethos through the logics of fantasy and of the death drive. Solarpunk, Haines contends, fantasizes sustainable futures not by avoiding our attachments to fossil-fueled capitalism but by tarrying with the limits and the ruins of petromodernity. Solarpunk thus responds to Fredric Jameson’s well-known thesis that science fiction thrives on failure, that its “deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth, through apparently full representations that prove on closer inspection to be structurally and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference” (Jameson 288–89). It responds to this thesis with a “yes, but”: yes, solarpunk indexes the difficulty of overcoming petromodernity, of dreaming up futures beyond the Anthropocene, but with its drawing of blueprints, its education of desire, and its commitment to action, it turns speculative meditation on the poverty of the present into something positive: praxis as the shuttle between theory and practice, fiction and reality; critique as the building of worthwhile futures—hope through action.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sean Grattan

  Quincy University

  3 shared

• Peter Hitchcock

  2 shared

• Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor

  2 shared

• Michel Arouimi

  1 shared

• Seth Whidden

  1 shared

• Cyril Lhermelier

  1 shared

• Dana Lindaman

  1 shared

• Victor Gysembergh

  1 shared

Education

• PhD in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

  University of Minnesota

  2012