The Mythical Real Transboyhood: Re-Mapping Worlds of Queer Masculinity in English Speculative Fiction

This dissertation proposes to closely study writings on queer masculinity in English science fiction and fantasy, forming a trajectory of queer transboy representations from 1930s to the beginning of 21st century. By this project, I embark to articulate multi-layered historical contexts between speculative literature, sub-cultural sites, transgender politics, and constructions on marginal queer-gendered bodies. Through intertextual dynamics embedded within and among theoretical frameworks such as sf study, paraliterary interaction, penumbra sub-subjective tactics, post-human/trans-species writings, I will conduct articulations to generate forms and genealogies of queer masculinity in sf realm, building their continuum and ruptures, agency and subversive power.;My thesis provides three different approaches to re-read non-realistic, fantasmatic queer gender formations and trans-masculine sexualities. From these positions and perspectives, I will argue for the emergent force of queer transboyhood and gradual recognition given to several non-normative transgender masculine presences, starting from their connections and disagreements with old-guard lesbian feminist agenda and homo-normative les-bi-gay politics. This multitude built by trans-masculine affects not only greatly disturbs hetero-normativity and homo-normative discourses, such charismatic inscriptions which link into marginal territories also have created a persistent intervention to interfere and even convert/pervert canonized texts and representational modes. In these chapters to extrapolate this queer masculine sf heterogenesis, I focus on analyzing three archetypes of trans-masculine personalities and their highly different subjectivities. My aim for these analyses is to theorize how these marginal genders and bodies counterattack, infect, and thus re-write mega-historical narratives by their cultural momentum and anti-human poetics/politics. By performing these "infections", queer masculine subjectivity twists and transforms a seemingly liberal hegemony devoted to excluding the non-normative in the name of single-minded progress and bi-polar gender dichotomy.;Another major endeavor of this thesis concentrates on self-formulations of these queer sf bodies and textualities. My elaboration concerns their delineation of ontological pursuit, multi-hybrid post/non-humanity, and a highly self-aware appropriation of obscene, ambivalent and amoral performatives to constitute deviant cultural strategies which have by far successfully counter-written dominant politics' desire to assimilate dissident voices and recalcitrant sites.