Date of Award

Summer 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Program/Concentration

Humanities

Committee Director

Myles McNutt

Committee Member

Amanda Petersen

Committee Member

Kate Mattingly

Abstract

Popular science fiction film and television media commonly deploy narratives and images of prisons and policing, and these discourses in turn are inseparable from racial formations. At the same time, many fans and theorists view science fiction as a genre with immense potential for offering critical consideration of the difference between the fictional and the real world. This thesis examines a range of case studies from popular film and television exemplifying this tension between the perceived generative critical potential of science fiction media and apparent tendency of popular media productions to nearly always fall back on well-worn white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist tropes upholding dominant power structures. Through its analysis, the project interrogates the subversive, critical sensibility that undergirds much science fiction media and that is often at odds with the hegemonic ideologies embedded in their representations of the carceral future.

Case studies include imprisonment narratives in the utopian universe of Star Trek; racial representation and “copaganda” in the RoboCop movie franchise; and the theme of punishment as a racialized public mass-media spectacle in episodes of the BBC/Netflix anthology series Black Mirror. Examination of each of these sites includes textual analysis, representational analysis, and media industry and production analysis. This research shows how Henry Giroux’s concept of the “disimaginative” offers a productive means of framing the denial––if not eradication––of restorative justice in futuristic crime and punishment narratives. The thesis concludes by considering how independent Afrofuturist media are offering new frameworks for imagining restorative and transformative justice in future imaginary spaces.

Even as fans often celebrate science fiction as a space for challenging hegemonic power, it is simultaneously a space in which those same ideological forces can be bolstered and made to seem inevitable. Highlighting the narrowness of the popular-media future imaginary can facilitate a reconsideration of what that space could be, and by foregrounding Afrofuturist creators, the thesis concludes by highlighting progressive science fiction visions that challenge dominant power structures.

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DOI

10.25777/145q-wy06

ISBN

9798384444268

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