Cirrus@Austlit

'The Anthropocene looms large in the 21st century, and queer and disabled people continue to be exposed to harassment and discrimination. What do these issues have in common, though? In Ambelin Kwaymullina's speculative fiction novel The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), queer discourse collaborates with, promotes, and diversifies a non-anthropocentric world order, simultaneously implicating a dis-/ability dialectic. This article brings together queer, disability, interspecies studies and literary analysis to explore how Kwaymullina's young adult novel creates links between queerness and interspecies relations and how disability comes into play. The rhetoric used against children with so-called special abilities in the novel, who come to occupy the structural position of the queer in Kwaymullina's narrative at the expense of those living with disabilities, as well as the role interspecies conviviality plays for future community construction are focal points of the article. For the latter part, in particular, this article draws on Aboriginal knowledge systems to explore how The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf weaves these marginalised epistemologies into literature and thus changes the field of speculative fiction.'

Source: ProQuest.

'This essay analyzes queer representations in the context of Indigenous Australian discourses by looking at the two-season Australian science fiction series Cleverman (2016-2017). Cleverman aims to combine the conventions of the science fiction and superhero genres with ancient Indigenous stories. Cleverman's compelling introduction of the Hairypeople, an alternative humanoid species with extraordinary strength inspired by Aboriginal mythology, provides the context to explore queer identities in regards to otherness, marginality, and culturally constructed boundaries between the normal and the abnormal. Through the series engagement with the subjectivity and queering of the monstrous other, the binary construct of good versus evil is challenged. The series representation of boundary creatures highlights the constraints within which racially marked bodies operate, however misses the potential to equally engage with gendered bodies. While the series invites ambivalent readings of the role of community belonging and the nuclear family, the representation of female agency fails to similarly redefine discursively constituted identities and shows less potential to re-write normative codes of sex and sexuality.'

Source: ProQuest.

'This article argues that Australian author Jay KristofTs Nevernight trilogy contests, deconstructs, and subverts gendered restrictions and stereotypes often found in fantasy literature. Protagonist Mia Corvere overcomes both tropes of toxic masculinity and a single-minded focus on revenge by facing her fears, emotions, and embracing her queerness. As this article shows, the heroine's gender performance moves beyond binary constructions and challenges narrative conventions as well as reader assumptions.'

Source: ProQuest.

'This article investigates notions of femininity in light of contemporary debates around anthropogenic climate change in literature. Climate change fiction (cli-fi) specifically considers life in the Anthropocene and the consequence of changing climatological realities for human and nonhuman actors in ecosystems. Seemingly straight-forward dichotomies between human and nonhuman, wild and domesticated, useful and harmful subjectivities are being contested, and literary texts increasingly pick up on and reflect the instabilities of previously undisputed dualisms. Mireille Juchau's novel The World Without Us (2015) explores the intertwined relationships between climate, the animal world, and human subjectivity as it slowly uncovers the multifaceted narration around the Müller family's grief at the loss of their child. As the family's life is repeatedly underscored with symbolism of bees, the narration draws parallels between human life and the lives of bees. The text's elaborate play with multiperspectivity is reminiscent of insect eyes' compound nature and undulates between fragmentation and complexity. This article explores how Juchau's novel offers new ways of exploring femininity within notions of grief and suffering on the one hand and the effects of anthropogenic climate change on the other.'

Source: ProQuest.

'In this essay, I am analysing James Bradley's 2020 novel Ghost Species for its generic make-up and the ways in which this interacts with questions of gender. As I will argue, Ghost Species is a multi-genre mix of science fiction, climate fiction, domestic novel, and coming-of-age story and thus combines realist with speculative fiction. It defies classic genre conventions because of its female focalizers and their representation within the scientific community and society more generally. As a result, a newclear family is constructed, with the NeaHuman and her coming of age in the centre. By bringing together the different genres and their gendered presumptions, Ghost Species challenges traditional ideas of mothers as caretakers as well as of the coming of age as a female.'

Source: ProQuest.