have been supported and/ or undermined by visions of the future in literature. Authors have offered their concerns, hopes, and expectations about possible futures via either utopian or dystopian narratives. In 2007, Ann Brooks talking about a new modality of acknowledging cultural and ethnic identity from a transcultural and transnational viewpoint, states, “[t]hese new cultural and ethnic identities carry with them the need for new conceptions of subjectivity and require the opening-up of new subject positions and new spaces and places from which to speak.” (184). It is our belief that the role of futuristic writings has been key in supporting a transcendence and transformation of subjectivities be they sexual, technological and/or ecological.

This panel brings forth fresh interventions in science fiction studies by focusing on the possible

futures of trans issues–ranging from gender, technology to the environment and ecology.

Shaping “transfuturistic” possibilities for the survival and liberation of transgendered people the book comes as a mandate for humanity, its survival and well-being. Panelists deconstruct traditional sex-gendered notions as they consider issues such as the complex role of Artificial Intelligence in human life.

The contributions address social stigma, inequality, discrimination, moral dilemmas,

and precarious positionings of individuals and issues, by appraising speculative fictions to seek

an interconnectedness between science fiction and everyday issues regarding transgender. This session invites reflection and conversation on the distinctive insights we gain from attending to cultural, regional/geographic, and national differences as well as the potential resonances and frictions that might come from bringing their work together.

Hammes considers three contemporary works of transgender speculative cis/dystopic fiction,

examining how the speculative literary production of the minoritarian is radicalized through its

uses of tropes and forms borrowed/stolen/repurposed from phobic majorities and their institutions. Their contribution details trans speculative stratagem to challenge futurity while being unwilling to sacrifice it altogether. The decisive distinction is often sex-gender itself: what kinds of cis/heteronormative presumptions undergird speculative fiction? And how does trans speculative fiction contour its future worlds, and how do those contours (rules, capacities, politics, identities, embodiments) present radical hope for revolutionary (anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-carceral, anti-queerphobic and transphobic, borderless, and status-free)

tomorrows?

Nanda analyzes Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Imago, both written in the 1990s, as instances of

speculative fiction’s ability to presage changes in discourse around transgender issues. Nanda’s

presentation tracks challenges to cis/heteronormative assumptions about sex and gender through Butler’s protagonists and their transgressions of presumptions common to speculative fiction. In addition to closely reading transness and gender transgression in the fiction, Nanda deploys Marquis Bey’s “fugitive praxis” to track ways in which Butler’s sense of the speculative

underscores an excess or spillover that keeps alive the possibility to disrupt cis/het norms.

Yoo’s presentation explores Asian American science fiction literature, examining how it incorporates elements of Asian religions and myths to challenge Western transhumanist perspectives on the human-android nexus. Yoo’s reading of Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl provides an alternative philosophical perspective to the Anglophone transhumanism that revolves around the bio- and mechanical enhancement of human bodies as a way to attaining immortality.

Finally, Meyer tracks characters in contemporary Australian speculative fiction engaged with the

notion of living among escalating loss. In recent novels of Grace Chan and Claire Coleman the protagonists’ transcorporeality, “the physical fact of our co-constituted embodiment with other flows of life, matter, and energy” is essential to their agency and their resistance to the

oppressive systems that perpetuate the climate crisis (Greta Gaard). Through literary techniques of embodiment, this presentation potentially facilitates the reader’s own material and transcorporeal agency to better understand some of the contemporary consciousness around climate change.

This session speaks to the MLA 2025 presidential theme of “Visibility” through its multifaceted

sense of fiction’s ability to visibilize transness beyond simply featuring transgender and gender

nonconforming characters. Speculative fiction and sci fi are genres often valued primarily for

their flexibility with futurity—different universes and ways of being, whether utopic, dystopic,

and/or uncannily similar to the present. These presentations ponder visibility as itself

speculative, from the pitfalls and promises of transgender representation and narrative to social

problems which are all-too-easily elided, ignored, or removed from view. The body of literature

considered in this panel addresses strategies of resistance to anti-trans violence, technological

antihumanism and alienation, the repression of cisheteronormativities, migrant experiences in

phobic new territories, and mass extinction and climate change, all through the lens of

transhumanist futures.