World-Building? Isn’t That a Sci-Fi Thing?
Essay | "We must take power and, as quickly as possible, destroy Power."
Beatrix Kondo, of Brazil, shares a series deepdive into the many layers of a scandal over self-care, girlhood toys, servitude socialization.
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Speculative fiction is where we work out im/possible futures. And why are there so many female and feminist speculative fiction writers? Why was speculative fiction created by a woman? Because the women’s liberation movement is a speculative undertaking.
The tagline of Medusa Rising is ‘world building women'. I chose it because very broadly speaking WIERD nation feminists stopped ambitiously world-building a long time ago: some of us focused on current expressions of patriarchy (domination culture & systems, He/Him/His), some of us acquiesced to patriarchy’ seductions (sex work is work), some of us turned on each other, some of us moved out to womyn’s lands and never come back, and some of us gave up out of need or exhaustion.
The backlash has been everything, everywhere, all at once for a long time. The work of the last 50 years claimed the lives of many feminists of all kinds. The sheer unrelenting onslaught of His loathing and envy broke more than one of us. We owe each other, in all our factions, grace and gratitude just for making it this far. We need to get over ourselves and get back to world-building.
This fracked and factional period has been a boon in very important ways: we have stronger analyses of many issues related to race, class, and sexuality than we did before. We have brought more specific expressions of patriarchy into the mainstream consciousness: like police violence and over-policing, disparities in general and maternal health, more effective approaches to climate and ecological damage, more and less revolutionary ways of inhabiting one’s privilege, clarifying the legacies of empirialism, the rampant abuses of deregulated global corporatism, and so on. We have a much more complete view of The Problem. The Emergency. Him. Patriarchy is the Polycrisis.
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