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Works of Indigenous speculative fiction (SF) depict a perspective of temporality that differs from the mainstream Western conception of time as linear and teleological. Novels such as Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow portray settler colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a historical event; in doing so, they challenge hegemonic notions of settler futurity by asserting an Indigenous presence and affirming the inevitability of Indigenous futures. This thesis analyzes Dimaline’s and Rice’s works to examine how Indigenous SF reorients readers into Indigenous temporalities and critiques assumptions of Indigenous disappearance or victimry through their portrayals of settler colonial violence and environmental destabilization. These authors use apocalyptic and dystopian settings to demonstrate how Indigenous peoples will survive the end of colonial capitalism through self-determination and a reliance on their own epistemes. Both the characters in and readers of Indigenous SF are motivated to generate Indigenous futurisms from within the present through a revitalization of Indigenous languages and practices. This critical examination of Indigenous SF situates the genre within the contexts of ecocriticism, decolonization (or biskaabiiyang), and futurity to showcase how different perceptions of time alter the possibilities for the future.

Works of Indigenous speculative fiction (SF) depict a perspective of temporality that differs from the mainstream Western conception of time as linear and teleological. Novels such as Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow portray settler colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a historical event; in doing so, they challenge hegemonic notions of settler futurity by asserting an Indigenous presence and affirming the inevitability of Indigenous futures. This thesis analyzes Dimaline’s and Rice’s works to examine how Indigenous SF reorients readers into Indigenous temporalities and critiques assumptions of Indigenous disappearance or victimry through their portrayals of settler colonial violence and environmental destabilization. These authors use apocalyptic and dystopian settings to demonstrate how Indigenous peoples will survive the end of colonial capitalism through self-determination and a reliance on their own epistemes. Both the characters in and readers of Indigenous SF are motivated to generate Indigenous futurisms from within the present through a revitalization of Indigenous languages and practices. This critical examination of Indigenous SF situates the genre within the contexts of ecocriticism, decolonization (or biskaabiiyang), and futurity to showcase how different perceptions of time alter the possibilities for the future.

Works of Indigenous speculative fiction (SF) depict a perspective of temporality that differs from the mainstream Western conception of time as linear and teleological. Novels such as Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow portray settler colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a historical event; in doing so, they challenge hegemonic notions of settler futurity by asserting an Indigenous presence and affirming the inevitability of Indigenous futures. This thesis analyzes Dimaline’s and Rice’s works to examine how Indigenous SF reorients readers into Indigenous temporalities and critiques assumptions of Indigenous disappearance or victimry through their portrayals of settler colonial violence and environmental destabilization. These authors use apocalyptic and dystopian settings to demonstrate how Indigenous peoples will survive the end of colonial capitalism through self-determination and a reliance on their own epistemes. Both the characters in and readers of Indigenous SF are motivated to generate Indigenous futurisms from within the present through a revitalization of Indigenous languages and practices. This critical examination of Indigenous SF situates the genre within the contexts of ecocriticism, decolonization (or biskaabiiyang), and futurity to showcase how different perceptions of time alter the possibilities for the future.

Works of Indigenous speculative fiction (SF) depict a perspective of temporality that differs from the mainstream Western conception of time as linear and teleological. Novels such as Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Hunting by Stars and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow portray settler colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a historical event; in doing so, they challenge hegemonic notions of settler futurity by asserting an Indigenous presence and affirming the inevitability of Indigenous futures. This thesis analyzes Dimaline’s and Rice’s works to examine how Indigenous SF reorients readers into Indigenous temporalities and critiques assumptions of Indigenous disappearance or victimry through their portrayals of settler colonial violence and environmental destabilization. These authors use apocalyptic and dystopian settings to demonstrate how Indigenous peoples will survive the end of colonial capitalism through self-determination and a reliance on their own epistemes. Both the characters in and readers of Indigenous SF are motivated to generate Indigenous futurisms from within the present through a revitalization of Indigenous languages and practices. This critical examination of Indigenous SF situates the genre within the contexts of ecocriticism, decolonization (or biskaabiiyang), and futurity to showcase how different perceptions of time alter the possibilities for the future.

Intersex is a diagnosis of atypical sex reclaimed as an identity marker for bodies so diagnosed. Intersex is located in the genitals, chromosomes, gonads, hormones, or secondary-sex characteristics of the person named as such. Intersex throws into sharp relief the biopolitical imperative to discipline human and many non-human bodies into uncomplicated categories of male and female. The artistic production about, by, and for intersex people has been understudied. This dissertation enters into the emerging field of intersex studies by providing an imaginative and interdisciplinary response to literary fiction about, life-narratives by, and experimental poetics and film for and about, intersex people. Chapter One examines the erasure of race in Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel about the coming of age of an intersex teen entitled Annabel. Building on critiques of Jeffrey Eugenides’s oft-studied Middlesex, I apply existing scholarship on the eclipsing of race by attempts to incorporate a mythical and metaphorical intersex body into the space of the nation to Winter’s text. Chapter Two turns from fictionalized intersex experiences to life-narratives written by intersex people. In this chapter, I centre the object of the scalpel and the medical chart in the life-narratives I study – Thea Hillman’s Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) and short pieces from the 2015 issue of The Journal of Narrative Bioethics – in order to trace the affective narrative strategies the authors deploy in an effort to end the biomedicalization of the intersex body. Chapter Three pivots towards the non-human animal intersex body, and their use in public panics about the increasing environmental toxicity of our world. In an effort to counter this “transsex panic,” I read Aaron Apps’s 2015 book of poetry Intersex: A Memoir and Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 film XXY as examples of texts that see sex not as a static or “natural” category, but as a process. The brief Coda that concludes this dissertation expands on

Intersex is a diagnosis of atypical sex reclaimed as an identity marker for bodies so diagnosed. Intersex is located in the genitals, chromosomes, gonads, hormones, or secondary-sex characteristics of the person named as such. Intersex throws into sharp relief the biopolitical imperative to discipline human and many non-human bodies into uncomplicated categories of male and female. The artistic production about, by, and for intersex people has been understudied. This dissertation enters into the emerging field of intersex studies by providing an imaginative and interdisciplinary response to literary fiction about, life-narratives by, and experimental poetics and film for and about, intersex people. Chapter One examines the erasure of race in Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel about the coming of age of an intersex teen entitled Annabel. Building on critiques of Jeffrey Eugenides’s oft-studied Middlesex, I apply existing scholarship on the eclipsing of race by attempts to incorporate a mythical and metaphorical intersex body into the space of the nation to Winter’s text. Chapter Two turns from fictionalized intersex experiences to life-narratives written by intersex people. In this chapter, I centre the object of the scalpel and the medical chart in the life-narratives I study – Thea Hillman’s Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) and short pieces from the 2015 issue of The Journal of Narrative Bioethics – in order to trace the affective narrative strategies the authors deploy in an effort to end the biomedicalization of the intersex body. Chapter Three pivots towards the non-human animal intersex body, and their use in public panics about the increasing environmental toxicity of our world. In an effort to counter this “transsex panic,” I read Aaron Apps’s 2015 book of poetry Intersex: A Memoir and Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 film XXY as examples of texts that see sex not as a static or “natural” category, but as a process. The brief Coda that concludes this dissertation expands on

Intersex is a diagnosis of atypical sex reclaimed as an identity marker for bodies so diagnosed. Intersex is located in the genitals, chromosomes, gonads, hormones, or secondary-sex characteristics of the person named as such. Intersex throws into sharp relief the biopolitical imperative to discipline human and many non-human bodies into uncomplicated categories of male and female. The artistic production about, by, and for intersex people has been understudied. This dissertation enters into the emerging field of intersex studies by providing an imaginative and interdisciplinary response to literary fiction about, life-narratives by, and experimental poetics and film for and about, intersex people. Chapter One examines the erasure of race in Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel about the coming of age of an intersex teen entitled Annabel. Building on critiques of Jeffrey Eugenides’s oft-studied Middlesex, I apply existing scholarship on the eclipsing of race by attempts to incorporate a mythical and metaphorical intersex body into the space of the nation to Winter’s text. Chapter Two turns from fictionalized intersex experiences to life-narratives written by intersex people. In this chapter, I centre the object of the scalpel and the medical chart in the life-narratives I study – Thea Hillman’s Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) and short pieces from the 2015 issue of The Journal of Narrative Bioethics – in order to trace the affective narrative strategies the authors deploy in an effort to end the biomedicalization of the intersex body. Chapter Three pivots towards the non-human animal intersex body, and their use in public panics about the increasing environmental toxicity of our world. In an effort to counter this “transsex panic,” I read Aaron Apps’s 2015 book of poetry Intersex: A Memoir and Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 film XXY as examples of texts that see sex not as a static or “natural” category, but as a process. The brief Coda that concludes this dissertation expands on

Intersex is a diagnosis of atypical sex reclaimed as an identity marker for bodies so diagnosed. Intersex is located in the genitals, chromosomes, gonads, hormones, or secondary-sex characteristics of the person named as such. Intersex throws into sharp relief the biopolitical imperative to discipline human and many non-human bodies into uncomplicated categories of male and female. The artistic production about, by, and for intersex people has been understudied. This dissertation enters into the emerging field of intersex studies by providing an imaginative and interdisciplinary response to literary fiction about, life-narratives by, and experimental poetics and film for and about, intersex people. Chapter One examines the erasure of race in Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel about the coming of age of an intersex teen entitled Annabel. Building on critiques of Jeffrey Eugenides’s oft-studied Middlesex, I apply existing scholarship on the eclipsing of race by attempts to incorporate a mythical and metaphorical intersex body into the space of the nation to Winter’s text. Chapter Two turns from fictionalized intersex experiences to life-narratives written by intersex people. In this chapter, I centre the object of the scalpel and the medical chart in the life-narratives I study – Thea Hillman’s Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) and short pieces from the 2015 issue of The Journal of Narrative Bioethics – in order to trace the affective narrative strategies the authors deploy in an effort to end the biomedicalization of the intersex body. Chapter Three pivots towards the non-human animal intersex body, and their use in public panics about the increasing environmental toxicity of our world. In an effort to counter this “transsex panic,” I read Aaron Apps’s 2015 book of poetry Intersex: A Memoir and Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 film XXY as examples of texts that see sex not as a static or “natural” category, but as a process. The brief Coda that concludes this dissertation expands on