Batya Weinbaum
Although the journal is currently edited by a robust collective, I am taking my turn at writing the
introduction to this issue. Although we are currently recruiting for our review team—contact us if
interested—we are full up with several reviews covering the gamut of music festival culture and
concerts, two recent texts on Wicca, supernatural horror novels, a religious horror film, and the 2024 horror drama film I Saw the TV Glow. We have a selection from a recent memoir which happens to be mine and invite other submissions in this genre if touching upon utopian ideas and involvement in creating challenges to gender in social and political movements inspired by the speculative.
Other pieces include a piece of creative writing where characters escape through the blue portal of Facebook, seeking a more benign universe. A critical essay explores new approaches to the field of literary food studies drawing on ecofeminism and theories of literary and cultural production as well as studies of eating and the eaten in fantasy and science fiction. Concepts such as gastrofeminism and tradwives are deftly presented and discussed. The focus is on Ainslee Hogarth’s dark fantasy novel Motherthing. Veronica Hollinger looks at writing queer-feminist futures pointing out that the human becomes the other in some speculative fiction. Merry Byrd reads Sexing the Cherry as a text that “revives female agency through its fabulations” (36) through devices like mad/angry women characters, including a Dog-Woman, and emphasis on weight and dreams. She exposes how patriarchal science and politics create an expansion of wealth and power (27). She shows how ancient myth such as that of Artemis the Greek goddess of the moon and the hunt are conjured up (17).
Lastly, we are encouraging folks to write up events they attend or organize on their campuses, such as coverage of the recent Spacefunk event by Lisa Yaszek at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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