Sex, Sexuality and Sexual Relationships in Science Fiction Conference

Gender fluidity in its refusal of the male/female binarity comes to question gender assignment and gendered social roles, in a fluid and transverse approach (Albarracin 2020; Medico 2019).

Indeed, science fiction offers us, through numerous works, a great diversity of representations of "other" gender. In this paper, I will be particularly interested in the social impact of this asserted non-binarity (Butler 1990; McKee 1999), but also in the way these individuals interact, both in their love and sexual relationships with others, human, non-human, alien or other (Rogan, 2004). To do so, I will rely on the discourse constructed in science fiction works around the question that allows us to think about the possible mobilizations of language in parallel with the militant proposal (Elmiger 2017; Lescouet 2022).

Through two examples, Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente and the Monk and Robot books series by Becky Chambers, I will analyze two complementary positions. In Space Opera, the queer protagonist is confronted with the diversity of gender expressions of extraterrestrial species, which can pass as much by a uniqueness of gender as by combinatory infinities (which will be detailed in the intervention) in a dynamic of desire and attraction; whereas Dex, neutral protagonist of the Monk and Robot series, is confronted with a freedom of desire, rarer and more sacralized - inscribing itself in a still very majority binary society.

While we will first study the relationship to the self in this neutrality, and the way in which the protagonists tame and assert this identity; I will continue by evoking the relationship of the other to this neutrality: how the discussions are articulated around this question and how desire can be expressed; finally, I will dive into the relationship itself and the representation of other forms of intimate communion than the traditional coitus.