Publications

Publication details [#45435]

Robinson, Douglas and Svetlana Ilinskaya. 2023. Queering the popular utopia through translingual science fiction: Sense8 as cultural translation. In Baldo, Michela, Jonathan Evans and Ting Guo, eds. Translating the Queer Popular. Special issue of Perspectives. Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 31 (2): 265–281.
Publication type
Article in Special issue
Publication language
English
Title as subject

Abstract

The paper reads the queer utopia fleshed forth in the Wachowskis’ two-season series Sense8 as a heterotopia (Joanne Tompkins, developing an idea out of Foucault), based on a collectivized and shifting identity-assemblage that is neither sheer anarchistic disruption nor a stable identitarian intersectionality (Jasbir Puar, developing an idea that Brian Massumi develops out of Deleuze and Guattari). In support of this reading, the paper explores the Wachowskis’ queer activism in favor of an extremely broad tolerance for difference (in opposition to rigid identity categories), and reads the high-concept sf premise of instantaneous empath travel and interaction with and as clustermates through Hannah Arendt’s observation that ‘we have arrived in a situation where we do not know — at least not yet — how to move politically.’ Building on that observation, Judith Butler reflects on producing a space of appearance or ‘assembly’ as grounding politics in situated social interaction, as a transition to a reconfigured (restaged, respatialized) ‘reality’.
Source : Based on abstract in journal