Abstract

This essay analyzes the various ways in which Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) dramatizes “the notion of a fragmented subject as a ‘natural’ condition” or as a principle of futuristic, social world-building. The essay argues that Stars represents one of Delany’s most direct explorations of the relation between poststructuralist theory and the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and nonnormative family formations. In the novel’s futuristic context, this relation takes the form of a dialogue between ethnicity and technicity, an intersectional concept of race and its mediation by new technologies, that produces an alternative model for cyberpunk science fiction.

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