The Enemy's Gate is Down: Orientation in Ender's Game and the Relationship Between the Oceanic and the Spaced [presentation transcript]

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Ian McLaughlin (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: [Slide deck and transcript from a presentation given at UNC Charlotte's 22nd Annual English Graduate Student Association Conference, February 18, 2022.] Orientation is a loaded word. Throughout much of history, the word simply meant "aperson or object’s relative position in space" ("Orientation"). However, in recent times, it hasalso come to mean a person’s tastes regarding the gender(s) of potential sexual partners("Orientation"). In her book Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue upsets the horizontal orientationbrought on by humanity’s primarily land-based habitat. Furthermore, she challenged her readersto imagine what the disruption caused by thinking within the oceanic milieu could mean forfuture societies and technologies. In her book The Black Shoals, Tiffany King expands on theidea of reading a text in an oceanic way by focusing on the shoals, the shallows along a coast thatcreate a liminal space between the terrestrial and oceanic. While the oceanic milieu offers muchinspiration for social activists, scientists, and theorists, suppose the theories developed by Jueand King are taken another step away from the terrestrial (Jue 22). In exploring the spaced milieuas an expansion of the shoaled oceanic, this presentation will show the inherent queerness of aspaced—that is, volumetric and unfixed—physical and social geography using examples fromOrson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.

Additional Information

Publication
Language: English
Date: 2022
Keywords
Ender's Game, literary criticism

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