Speculative Queerness: Non-Normative Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future

This article explores how David Cronenberg’s outwardly dystopian science fiction film Crimes of the Future (2022) can be interpreted as an implicitly utopian queer text. After surveying some of the main trends among critical responses to the film, a reading of its queer cinematic, thematic, and narrative elements is developed, with a specific focus on the film’s treatment of non-normative bodies, genders, and sexualities. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, the approach adopted is that of reparative reading, meaning in this case an attempt to recover resources from Cronenberg’s film that may help to hold open the possibility of a queer future at a time when gender and sexual minorities are subjected to pervasive discrimination, demonization, and violence. Drawing on andré carrington’s work on speculative blackness, the article concludes by introducing the concept of “speculative queerness,” which it compares and contrasts with José Esteban Muñoz’s “queer futurity.”