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(2019
final exam assignment) Model final exam answers 2019 (Index) Essay 3: Web Highlights |
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Audrey Lange
Just Whose Apocalypse Is This?: Hegemonic Structures in Future Fiction
In the modern world, there are innumerable
factors that shape one’s identity and quality of life. Among the foremost are
wealth (and therefore class), race, and gender. These three traits, alone or in
conjunction, present specific challenges when those traits do not align with the
social mores. Now, we see it as a matter of pay gaps and police brutality, but
something lurks on the fringes, rearing its ugly head in imaginary worlds we
create. The apocalypse looms ever closer, and our fiction seems to represent
that: dystopias and alien contact stories abound, and in these stories, the
pattern seems to be to recreate the hegemonic power structures of our current
reality. Class, race, and gender are influencing factors that remain unaddressed
in many narratives, leaving behind the question of whose apocalypse is it,
anyway?
Race is something our modern society cannot
escape. We cannot ignore the construct of race, because society has been built
around it. Thus, our visions of the future are influence by the hegemonies built
on race. Kimberly Hall addresses disparities in her essay “Conformity or
Freedom: Dystopias and Diversity in Different Visions of the Future.” When
speaking about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, she recounts “systemic
oppression is rejected by the main character and her father, because they
recognize that this would essentially acquiesce to slavery, and they value their
personal freedom.” The non-Black tenants of the neighborhood move to Olivar with
little thought; this provides them with safety. Lauren and her family, who are
Black, refuse to be enslaved once again. As a result, they expose themselves to
more danger in exchange for freedom. This choice reflects what our narratives,
in modernity and in futurism, often imply about race: to acknowledge race means
to sacrifice safety. To be different from the widely considered norm is to
understand that you will not be protected unless you are enslaved, and that
protection is merely a temporary extension.
Laura Wilson addresses the disparities of
gender in her essay, “Subtle Strength: Female Characterization by Women in
Literature of the Future.” She utilizes the literature as a lens through which
to view how women are treated today. “Women written by women,” she says. “Are
much more empowering to a female audience than those written by men.”
Authorship, in the golden age of science fiction, was a boy’s club. Thus, most
female characters from that era were written by men, and that shaped the present
of science fiction. Women are portrayed as “one dimensional and forgettable,” as
tools of the patriarchy, fit only to serve. More recently, there has been
pushback, led by women who write science fiction, to include nuanced,
interesting portrayals of women and gender non-conforming individuals. These
voices have been elevated by an increasingly diverse industry and an increasing
awareness that, as Parable shows us,
the future is nothing without women.
Wealth, and thus, class, directly influence
individuals’ capability of achievement. Wealth and class are directly impacted
by race and gender, and are often wholly informed by it. Greg Bellomy explains
this concept in an essay titled “Class, Identity, Progress, and the Future”
about the impact of class on evolutionary and apocalyptic futures. He notes that
“different classes [of] people [evolving] into biologically different species
probably seems farfetched to most people,” then goes on to explain why that
theme was extremely prevalent in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” one of the most
influential sci-fi texts to this day. This concept of class stratification
leading to advanced evolution or stark destitution still influences our
literature today. Class status gives you access to the up and coming
technologies to help you survive the future. If one’s class dictates how and why
wealth is accumulated, and how easy vertical movement can happen within the
class structure, it’s not far-fetched to say lower-class people (primarily
minorities) will be shortchanged. This is immediately clear in much future
fiction such as Parable, “The Time
Machine,” and others, wherein the poor continue to decline even as the rich get
richer and more secure in their place in this new future.
Literature will, as it always has, reflect the politics, social mores, and
influences of the time in which it was written. To neglect this fact is to
remove a work from context, which is indeed to slight the work itself. The
contexts of race, class, gender, and other such groups are absolutely imperative
to understanding future fiction in a meaningful way, as they can point to what
needs to be changed. If the future that exists is one where only privileged
people survive after the apocalypse, could we really call it an apocalypse?
Doesn’t that sound more like a genocide?
