ABSTRACT
This opening chapter introduces the gender, anti-racist, queer, and geocritical theory that underpins this monograph. It explains why Butler, Braidotti, Spivak, and Gilroy’s anti-racist and feminist work is complementary. It briefly clarifies, with the addition of Halberstam, how these theorists and philosophers define and navigate the terms “race” and “gender”, why the book focuses on these concepts, and how this relates to its methodology. It explores where the value might lie in an analysis of Butler and Braidotti’s antithetical formulations of affective entities that are driven by an impetus to ethically encounter other beings and actants and provides an overview of key concepts from Halberstam’s queer. The author introduces the relationship between Spivak’s and Gilroy’s works on issues of race and gender, explaining how they hold similarly constructive differences. Their respective theorisations of “planetarity”—which is for Gilroy also a “planetary humanism”—are founded in an intersectional interrogation of global systems of race and gender. This chapter also explains why the spatial discipline of geocriticism informs the book’s orientation towards new forms of planetary humanism by demonstrating how how SF evades the fixity of regulated spaces.
