Swapping Heels for Capes: Black Womanhood, Speculative Fiction, and the Black Imaginary

In a moment where we’ve seen Wakanda on the big screen, Octavia Butler is a household name, and Colson Whitehead has won two Pulitzers, Black Speculation is officially mainstream. While this moment has its excitement, it has its perils as well. What is lost when a historically marginalized genre like Black Speculative fiction is mainstreamed into a hot commodity? How do we re-center the transformative Black Feminist vision that characterizes so much of Black Speculation that is sometimes less popular? What about the nuance it represents? This dissertation examines how Black writers and creators have utilized the power of speculation to blur categorization as we know it, moving through and outside of the parochial confines of the white imaginary to expand our perception of everything from what we make of Blackness and Black womanhood to what Speculative Fiction is.

I focus primarily on Black Femme-centric speculative narratives that combine the Black Femme body with non-human elements to illuminate both the way Black womanhood is assumed to be less than human and how it provides us with new political allegories by way of characters that redefine and reclaim themselves using their own agency. I also read these texts and characters through a critical lens that not only acknowledges the epistemological barring of the Black Femme subject from the category of human, but also overlaps the lenses of Afro-Pessimism, Afrofuturism, and other lines of Black thought in a way that highlights their importance as a collective body of work that informs Black Speculation now rather than posing them against each other. Reading characterslike Cora from The Underground Railroad, Maeve from Westworld, and even the infamous Marvel comics hero Storm, I attempt to read various types of Black womanhood through the lens of Black Speculation to demonstrate not only its breadth and meaning, but also how it is further complicated by gender and medium.

This project not only examines how Black Speculation has transformed itself and its meaning in the wake of its mainstream success, but also explores what the interaction between Blackness and technology in the genre means regarding the phenomenology of the Black body. By focusing on a variety of cultural texts—fictional novels, television, film, comics, and visual art—I aim to create a sense of how these narratives work together to construct a new sort of Black Imaginary in popular culture, unburdened by an emphasis on white authorship. The interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry highlights the interrelationship between these popular cultural modes to create a valid site from which Black women can fabulate their own identity for themselves.