Computer science.

The 1990s ushered in what historian Susan Stryker describes as “a tremendous burst of new transgender activism” in the United States. Concomitantly, the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation led to a renaissance of US science fiction television. This dissertation asks, what is the relation between transgender (trans) politics and US science fiction (sf) television from 1990 to the present? The theoretical framework is Trans/Elemental feminism, a new paradigm developed in the dissertation. The method is multiperspectival cultural studies, which considers how the production, content, and reception of media texts and their metatexts collectively determine the texts’ meaning. The data include trade articles about the television industry; published interviews with producers; 3,175 hours of televisual content; commercial advertisements for television programs; films, novels, and webisodes (Web episodes) in selected media franchises; professional reviews; online discussion boards; fan fiction; and fan videos.

The novel Animalia is the representation of not just human relationships, but
also, of human beings’ relationships to other animals. While the story revolves around
a family, the narrative as a whole is meant to bring the reader into a microcosmic
ecosystem. Essentially, I am examining an ecosystem. An ecosystem, not in the
traditional sense, but an ecosystem nonetheless, because the narrative is a study of how
varying species of heterotrophs interact with one another for both physical and
emotional sustenance. Russell Water’s story is paramount, but the animals’ affect on
one another is what lies below the peak and forms the mountain (an unintentional
Hemingway reference). “It has often been observed that an object in a story does not
derive its density of existence from the number and length of descriptions devoted to it,
but from the complexity of its connections with the different characters” (Sartre 1210).
Essentially, through complex and multiple connections between the human species and
other species within Kingdom Animalia, I am attempting to develop an “ecosystem” that allows for narrative progression and the interconnection of relationships and
thematic elements which range from the capitalistic class system to natural selection.

The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow is a satirical post-apocalyptic novel that
examines the personal and social ironies that occur in a society that is unbalanced by
an unexplained apocalyptic event. Working with a combination of dark humor and the
terrifying realities of an apocalyptic event – in this case: a blackout – the novel aims to
challenge the machinery established by this particular subset of the science fiction genre.