The Founding Fathers expected Athos to be self-sustaining and to grow by attracting gay immigrants fleeing oppression
It turned out that this improvement involved ensuring that vigorously able European bodies could continue the projects of colonial rule and imperial settlement: for these feminists, the ‘human’ race was ideally a white one. Another such society, discovered by three male explorers, appears in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). The women of Herland reproduce through parthenogenesis, or ‘virgin birth’. Much like in Mizora, they are all ‘of Aryan stock’, practising ‘negative eugenics’ by disposing of ‘bad types’ at birth: bodies that function differently, and are racialised as dark, black, and brown.
Set in a distant future, Athos is a planet exclusively populated by gay men, named after the peninsula in Greece which women are barred from entering to preserve the sanctity of a compound of Orthodox monasteries
In the century since Herland’s publication, science fiction has built countless worlds where new life is created outside a biological interaction between a man and a woman. Some of these are worlds beyond gender, as in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). In Mattapoisett, a village on a future version of our Earth, genetic material is held in communal laboratories and used to create embryos in ‘brooders’, or external artificial wombs. Gene samples are intentionally mixed to eliminate racial difference, and because reproduction takes place through technology, gender distinctions no longer exist, with residents of Mattapoisett defining not as male or female but as ‘pers’. Others feature coupling between humans and aliens, as in Octavia E. Butler’s trilogy Lilith’s Brood (1987-89) where an extraterrestrial race called Oankali is able to mate with humans, and any other species, by means of their own biochemistry. Butler’s suggestion – implicit in her heroine Lilith’s blackness, explicit in the way the Oankali breed humans as humans breed animals, or as white slavers bred black slaves – is that what we call ‘the human’ is not just a biological fact or philosophical ideology, but a fungible concept we use to negotiate the limits of reproduction. Read more “The Founding Fathers expected Athos to be self-sustaining and to grow by attracting gay immigrants fleeing oppression”
