ABSTRACT
Science fiction (SF) is a fruitful ground for thinking through queer desires and gender identities because of the ways in which it defamiliarizes these categories. Science fiction (SF) critics and writers ask how non-normative sexualities may function in imagined futures and what this, in turn, reveals about how they are understood here and now (Pearson, Hollinger, and Gordon; Melzer). This chapter examines queer visions of futures that posit lack of sexual desire and/or lack of gender (or biological sex), asking how the two are connected and how they can contribute to reimagining heteronormative desire and the heteronormative gender binary. Focusing on two classic texts of queer SF, The Left Hand of Darkness(1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin and “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1966) by Samuel R. Delany, and the newer, critically acclaimed Imperial Radch trilogy (2013–15) by Ann Leckie, this chapter uses the asexual perspective to show Le Guin and Delany destabilize the gender binary but retain the importance of desire in their visions of future intimacy, while Leckie offers readers a society without gender and a story in which non-sexual intimacies and relations replace desire.
