Peters, John Durham (Advisor)
Hungerford, Amy (Advisor)
Wang, Arthur (Author)
Peters, John Durham
Hungerford, Amy
Yale University
Physical Details: 216
Language: English
“Minor Theories of Everything” is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the proliferation and circulation of scientific universalisms about human sociality since the 20th century, and their uses by feminists and writers of color. By considering “minor universals” about human behavior, I articulate two related concepts: the imaginative and rhetorical strategies scientific disciplines use to stage claims to universality, and the way that minoritized writers have adapted potentially alienating and exclusionary universalisms to new political and aesthetic ends. Combining literary history, science studies, and race, gender, and sexuality studies, I offer new insights into the cultural work of popular science. Chapter One, “Inventing Rape Ecology: Feminist Science Fiction and the Sociobiology of Sexual Violence” considers the sociobiological argument that the propensity for sexual violence is an adaptive evolutionary trait shared by multiple animal species, including humans, ducks, dolphins, insects, and others. While feminist theorists like Anne Fausto-Sterling and Susan Brownmiller have overwhelmingly rejected this evolutionary naturalization of violence, a popular idea of animal “rape” has nonetheless proliferated since the 1970s, in parallel with the elaboration and consolidation of sexual consent grounded in volition, intention, and other human mental states. The work of science fiction writers Octavia E. Butler and James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), I argue, reveals a feminist countertradition that adopts and extends sociobiological concepts into an expanded theory of sexual harm I call “rape ecology.” While the first chapter focuses on feminist extensions of scientific theory in fictional worlds, the second chapter traces the 20th-century history of the idea that digital media has rendered sex – and other social interactions – transactional and game-like. By reading economic fictions by Mary Gaitskill and Lydia Davis alongside game theoretic texts ranging from academic articles and textbooks to self-help, song lyrics, and other popular media, Chapter Two, “The Game of Love and the Game Theory of Sex” argues that game theory’s curious preoccupation with sexual strategy offers a prehistory of contemporary “gamification,” and illuminates the possibility of a feminist economics grounded in sexual and romantic calculation. In Chapter Three, “Black Box Orientalism,” I examine the orientalist histories of the ubiquitous cybernetic concept of a “black box”: a system whose inputs and outputs are observable, but whose internal mechanisms remain unknown. The black box concept crystallizes and perpetuates the idea that late modernity entails living among ubiquitous, inaccessible things, a world of objects and structures that shape life in incomprehensible ways. I argue that in its formulation of hidden and cryptographic knowledge, the abstraction of the black box historically and culturally mediates ambivalence about technologies of racial formation. Reading fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ted Chiang, I evaluate how the trope of Asian inscrutability and the figure of the Asiatic robot might help us rethink the popular consensus that the violence of structural racism in the digital age can be unveiled and undone through the opening of black box algorithms. Taken together, this work offers a cultural history of the proliferation of social “theories of everything” since the early 20th century, and traces contestations over the common knowledge they generate.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Joanna Radin;
(2019)
The Speculative Present: How Michael Crichton Colonized the Future of Science and Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB956087010/)
Article
Dustin Hellberg;
(2019)
Close Encounters of the Tertiary Kind: Science Fiction as Tertiary Epic
(/isis/citation/CBB184221896/)
Article
Megan K. Halpern;
Jathan Sadowski;
Joey Eschrich;
Ed Finn;
David H. Guston;
(2016)
Stitching Together Creativity and Responsibility: Interpreting Frankenstein Across Disciplines
(/isis/citation/CBB594959934/)
Article
Helen Small;
(2020)
Artificial Intelligence: George Eliot, Ernst Kapp, and the Projections of Character
(/isis/citation/CBB851762854/)
Book
Richard Fallon;
(2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
(/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)
Chapter
Andréolle, Donna Spalding;
(2011)
Impossible Dialogues? Science in American Feminist Science Fiction of the 1970s and 1980s
(/isis/citation/CBB001221557/)
Chapter
Paolo Rossi;
(2003)
Immagini della scienza e mondi immaginari
(/isis/citation/CBB666357903/)
Chapter
Gian Carlo Calcagno;
(2003)
La geografia immaginaria nelle riviste di fantascienza
(/isis/citation/CBB386986647/)
Chapter
Claudio Gallo;
(2003)
Salgari e l'oriente. Geografie del ciclo indo-malese
(/isis/citation/CBB651419585/)
Book
Marco Castellari;
(2014)
Formula e metafora: figure di scienziati nelle letterature e culture contemporanee
(/isis/citation/CBB976488878/)
Book
Andrea Tenca;
(2020)
Dinosauri, demoni, operai. Una storia culturale del sottosuolo tra scienza e letteratura
(/isis/citation/CBB116328239/)
Article
Gorp, Baldwin Van;
Rommes, Els;
Emons, Pascale;
(2014)
From the Wizard to the Doubter: Prototypes of Scientists and Engineers in Fiction and Non-Fiction Media Aimed at Dutch Children and Teenagers
(/isis/citation/CBB001420109/)
Book
John M. Jordan;
(2016)
Robots
(/isis/citation/CBB169573036/)
Book
Messier, Gilles;
(2012)
Our Own Devices: Stories of the Machine Age
(/isis/citation/CBB001321157/)
Thesis
Schmidt, Peter Allon, Jr.;
(2010)
Terraforming: An Investigation of the Boundaries between Science and Hard Science Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001561050/)
Article
Bernard Lightman;
(2014)
Contextualising Conan Doyle’s Ideal Reasoner: The Case of the Reluctant Scientific Naturalist
(/isis/citation/CBB253926574/)
Article
Gepper, Alexander C. T.;
(2012)
Extraterrestrial Encounters: UFOs, Science and the Quest for Transcendence, 1947--1972
(/isis/citation/CBB001211878/)
Chapter
Nadia Minerva;
(2003)
Lo sguardo creatore. Visione geografica e scrittura letteraria: 'En Magellanie' di Jules Verne
(/isis/citation/CBB009341041/)
Book
Carmelina Imbroscio;
(2003)
Il testo letterario e il sapere scientifico
(/isis/citation/CBB822024738/)
Chapter
Claudio Milanesi;
(2003)
Storie di morte apparente: dai romanzi alessandrini all' 'Encyclopédie' passando dal 'Decameron'
(/isis/citation/CBB831042771/)
Be the first to comment!