The Queer Temporal Contours of Alpha Centauri: Mobilizing Future-Oriented Nostalgia as a Praxis for Imaging Queerer Worlds Through Musical Fan Fiction

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Foucault and Contemporary Theory (Table 16)

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse a song we wrote about the character of Alpha Centauri from the British science fiction show Doctor Who. We think with José Muñoz’s idea of utopic queer futurities to suggest that our song traces a future-oriented version of the affect of nostalgia: nostalgia for a fairer, more just, and queerly utopic world. We suggest that fan fiction, as a speculative act, might be used to propose such alternative futures as a mode of speculative cultural analysis, with implications for how educators might contest white supremacist pedagogy and accounts of history.

Authors

• David Ben Shannon, Manchester Metropolitan University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne
  Presenting Author