NOG Course
Life, Love, Lust. 
Visions of Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Contemporary Speculative Fiction

Since the late 1960s, feminist, queer, Indigenous, and African or Afro-diasporic writers, filmmakers and artists have challenged patterns of domination in the rocket-propelled worlds of speculative or “science” fiction. By developing alternative visions on (re-)production and corporeality, on ideology and belief-systems, they used their imagination to criticize and counter narrative traditions and social conditions that determine understandings of gender, race, and sexuality. Developing alternative worlds thereby becomes a tool to expose the historical conditions that lead to the subordination or exploitation of sexualized, gendered, and racialized subjects, or to explore alternate ideas on life, love, lust.

In this course, we will investigate how recent contemporary works of speculative fiction build up on the critical work done by writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Nalo Hopkinson, or Stephen Graham Jones. We will delve into crucial concepts like Afrofuturism, eco-fiction, Native slipstream, epistemological decolonialization and justice, post-humanism, or vulnerable writing. We will read, watch, and listen to a variety of different formats—from poetry to short stories to (extracts of) novels; from video clips to photography to machinima—, and develop a critical vocabulary apt to capture the chosen artists’ stylistic and narratological inventions and critical interventions into settler colonialist ideas and hegemonic understandings of gender, race, and sexuality.

Course Details

Dates & Time : December 1, December 8, December 15, 2026, 12:15-17:15.
Location: Radboud University (Location TBA)
Coordinator: Dr. Doro Wiese (RU)
Contact: doro.wiese@ru.nl
Registration: this course is for PhD and RMA students. Please email NOG@uu.nl with ‘Registration Life Love Lust’ as a subject line, your name, RMA programme and research school.
Reading: You can find the reading list here

Bio

Doro Wiese is an Assistant Professor at Radboud University. Facilitated by various grants, such as a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie and WIRL COFUND grant from the European Union, she was trained in literature, film, cultural and gender studies at the Universities of Hamburg, Utrecht and Warwick. In her multifaceted research, Wiese investigates how aesthetics is a way of drawing people into an affective and effective relation with the lacunae of knowledges and histories. In The Powers of the False (Northwestern University Press, 2014), she explores how literature can help to represent histories that would otherwise remain ineffable. Faust (Textem, 2018) examines how and to what effect different media affect the human body. In her current project, titled Side by Side: Reading Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Literature, she asks which epistemological, formal and thematic distinctions and connections are present in post-war fiction on Native North America on both sides of the Atlantic. Wiese evinces a strong commitment to the study of colonialism, epistemic injustices, feminist and anti-racist critique, transcultural epistemology, and touches upon research fields including the environmental humanities. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, CLC Web, Comparative Literature and Culture, English Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and American, British, and Canadian Studies.