Seeger, SA (2025) Speculative Queerness: Non-Normative Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Utopian Studies, 36 (1). pp. 119-136. DOI https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.36.1.0119
Seeger, SA (2025) Speculative Queerness: Non-Normative Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Utopian Studies, 36 (1). pp. 119-136. DOI https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.36.1.0119
Seeger, SA (2025) Speculative Queerness: Non-Normative Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Utopian Studies, 36 (1). pp. 119-136. DOI https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.36.1.0119
Abstract
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.”
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | David Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future, utopia, dystopia, queer |
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, Department of |
SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Date Deposited: | 20 Dec 2024 13:46 |
Last Modified: | 11 Jul 2025 10:04 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/39935 |
Available files
Filename: Speculative Queerness article.pdf