This article suggests that Malinda Lo’s Adaptation duology (2012-2013) and Cindy Pon’s Want duology (2017-2019) represent empathy as a desirable answer to challenges of the Anthropocene. Set in near-future Taipei, Want follows a group of teenagers who eventually become militant environmental activists. The teenage protagonists’ capacity for empathy distinguishes them from the villainous antagonist and makes them likeable for the readers despite their violent tactics. Lo’s duology features two teenagers who are turned into human/alien hybrids by extra-terrestrial scientists after a nearly fatal car accident. The procedure equips the protagonists not only with an accelerated healing ability, but also gives them access to other people’s emotions through touch. Although the teenagers at first experience their newfound superpowers as a burden, they slowly realise their significant potential for changing humanity for the better. My article will combine close readings from the novels with research from ecopedagogy to explore in how far novels like Lo’s Adaptation and Pon’s Want can encourage readers to treat their fellow human beings as well as more-than-human life forms with more empathy.
In Stephanie Saulter’s 2013 debut novel Gemsigns, a pandemic known as ‘the Syndrome’ has wiped out most of humanity. To cope with the sudden loss of most of their work force, bioengineering companies have modified human genes to create genetically altered workers, the so-called gems. For more than a hundred years, gems have been the property of the company that created them, but as the gems have become more and more advanced in their cognitive skills, calls for their emancipation arose, until gem enslavement is eventually abolished. This article reads Gemsigns as a warning against how bioengineering can be employed to reaffirm racialized hierarchies with racialization working as a technology for oppression. The enslavement of gems does not merely replace older forms of economic exploitation of oppressed groups but is firmly rooted in real-world power structures, thereby addressing the exceptional vulnerability of marginalized people to be commodified by technological progress instead of profiting from it. I further suggest that Gemsigns uses its post-abolition setting to illustrate that the struggles for equality of formerly enslaved people do not simply end with the official abolishment of enslavement.
Nerddom plays an important role in G. Willow Wilson’s superhero comic books series ‘Ms. Marvel’: Its protagonist, Muslim Pakistani American teenager Kamala Khan is a comic loving, fanfiction writing, videogame playing nerd. The nerd community full of likeminded individuals provides her with a nurturing safe haven distracting her from the feelings of loneliness brought about by conflicts with her ambitious parents and by the Islamophobic bullying of her classmates. Reading this idealized representation of the American nerd community as a heterotopia of compensation in the Foucauldian sense, I argue that the diegetic nerds of ‘Ms. Marvel’ work to raise more awareness for the diversity of real-world nerd subculture by normalizing the presence of Muslim women of colour within it. Thus, ‘Ms. Marvel’s’ reimagination of nerddom as an open, welcoming, and egalitarian space debunks traditional stereotypes of nerds as white, socially inept young men and simultaneously celebrates the potential of nerdy interests to encourage mutual understanding between people from diverse backgrounds, as my analysis of exemplary passages from the book series will show.
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