The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

This chapter is unusually long and might be best thought of as being made of three subchapters, all of which help explain the ideas that animate this book. In considering how you might use this chapter, it might be worth thinking about how the sections of this chapter answer different sorts of questions, and they may be of greater or lesser use depending on what you’re hoping to get out of the cases. The first section of this chapter (“What Is Neoliberalism”) explains what the authors and editors mean by “neoliberalism” and develops the specific idea of “market imperialism” to explain what exasperates the authors and editors. The second section (“The Problematic Theoretical Underpinning of Market Imperialism”) presents and critiques the arguments that undergird advocates of market imperialism. The final section (“Conclusion: Network of Thinkers and Art of Government”) explains how neoliberalism and market imperialism can operate even though individual people may not explicitly see themselves as advocates of neoliberalism and market imperialism. This last section also summarizes some common attributes of market imperialism and neoliberal thinking.

When life throws you a problem, the solution our contemporary market moment proffers tends to be some sort of phone-based computer program, that is, an app. In this chapter, the authors take a look at apps designed to manage menstrual cycles. In so doing, the authors show that apps tend to individualize a problem, prize forms of efficiency and normative ideas of gender, all with a mystifying veneer of utopian market optimization and self-help. What’s interesting for us is the way that apps can individualize the problems they’re trying to solve and in so doing often seek to assist people in enhancing their human capital. The authors close with a contrast to anticapitalist punks seeking not individual optimization but collective liberation. In turn these punks offer those who menstruate a liberatory relationship with their own bodies.

This chapter introduces the reader to the volume. It presents our conviction that there is a bias toward pro-market, pro-capitalist (which we call “neoliberal”) solutions in how people solve problems nowadays, and how people learn to solve problems in universities. We explain what these default neoliberal biases are, and why they are often harmful. We also explain how the case chapters in this book comparatively lay out a series of alternatives to these neoliberal ways of solving problems.

This broadly conceived introduction discusses recent approaches to the history of capitalism in the United States and Germany and relates them to the findings of economic and business historians of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It identifies four key tensions between the prominence of Kapitalismuskritik and the tacit spread of capitalist practices and attitudes; a focus on capitalism’s concentrated and organized character and the experience of its bewildering complexity; state intervention and the dynamics of the market; and a national framework of viewing the economy and capitalism’s transnational entanglements. The overarching argument is that Nazism became attractive not least for promising to resolve these tensions. It professed to transcend capitalism while harnessing its energies for a racist and imperialist agenda. These and other aspects are treated in the volume’s four sections on debating, concealing, promoting, and racializing German capitalism between 1918 and 1945.

In the interwar period, the issue of how much space capitalism left for human agency preoccupied many Germans. Would they be able to revolutionize or reform this economic order, or were they compelled to work and live within it? This chapter argues that capitalism proved remarkably capable of confining individual, collective, and governmental agency. Therefore, expectations of transformation were often disappointed or scaled back, as the first section shows. The second section examines more tacit ways of adapting to a capitalist logic, while the third turns to the attempts of Chancellor Hermann Brüning’s two cabinets to steer Germany through the economic depression. Brüning was caught between calls for decisive leadership, doubts about the effectiveness of government intervention, and a rapidly shifting situation. Adolf Hitler, by contrast, promised to restore human control over the economy. After 1933, his regime loudly claimed to have transcended capitalism while inconspicuously exploiting its logic.