En mi tesis final de maestría realizé un análisis comparativo entre la filosofía de Paul B. Preciado, principalmente en su Manifiesto Contrasexual de 2002, y la novela de ficción especulativa Woman on the Edge of Time In my master's final thesis I carried out a comparative analysis between the philosophy of Paul B. Preciado — mainly in his 2002 Counter-Sexual Manifesto — and the speculative fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, published in 1976. In this analysis I reveal the role played by the imagination in the interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and theoretical-philosophical products of the past and the present. Starting from two premises, I conceive these cultural products as incubators of representations of possible futures and, therefore, as catalysts of radical changes in the consciousness and imaginary of those who read them. In this sense, I question and affirm that the influence such narratives exert will be subject to the perspectives that precede and germinate them, to how they are told, and to the content and ideas they contribute.
On this basis, I argue that the construction of critical thinking in and from the cultural products of philosophy and literature is essential to producing narratives that deconstruct the imaginary sustaining Western binary epistemology around gender, in order to open up new ways of thinking and imagining the future (in this particular case, a postgender future).
I draw on the elucidations of philosopher and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis on the imaginary institution of society, the social imaginary and the radical imagination. I also analyze Paul B. Preciado in depth, recognizing his contributions to the deconstruction of heteronormative sexuality, the vindication of genitalia outside the power of the capitalist reproduction/production system, the potentiality of pleasure, his analysis of the contemporary world and resistance to the pharmacopornographic regime, identifying throughout this thought the influences of Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway.
This work argues that the entirety of Preciado's philosophical output is an effort of the radical imagination to reform the imaginary institution of modern and contemporary society. I then deepen the analysis of the Counter-Sexual Manifesto to give way to a comparative and qualitative analysis with the novel Woman on the Edge of Time. In this way, I contrast the imperative character of Preciado with the possibilist gaze of Piercy, carrying out a literary analysis of the novel through the categories of Preciado, Foucault, Castoriadis and Haraway. From this analysis, I discover how Piercy, from the radical imagination, creates a postgender utopian narrative ahead of its time and even ahead of Preciado's Manifesto, since the novel resolves social problems related to the sex-gender system such as care work, body technologies and reproduction, government by participatory consensus without power relations, the clinical gaze and orthopedic architectures, the problem of child-rearing and sexual-affective development in childhood, as well as human emotions around sexuality, affection and non-romantic love. I conclude that both objects of study operate in the opening of what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the "cognitive closure", becoming "devices of the radical imagination": detonating tools that activate the reformulation of ways of thinking and perceiving reality and imagining the future.
Keywords: Radical imagination · Postgender utopia · Social imaginary · Imaginary institution · Speculative fiction · Critical thinking · Sex-gender system · Binary epistemology · Heteronormativity · Pharmacopornographic regime · Care work · Body technologies · Cognitive closure · Comparative analysis · Cultural theory · Paul B. Preciado · Marge Piercy · Cornelius Castoriadis · Michel Foucault · Donna Haraway
Thesis advisors: María Morrás Ruiz-Falcó y Camil Ungureanu
Màster en Estudis Comparatius de Literatura, Art i Pensament: treballs de fi de màster
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona
Curs 2022/2023
EN 
ESP