Try This at Home

Abstract

The second wormhole connects part 2’s chapters on black queer science fiction with the media cultures that part 3 analyzes through an exploration of sexual fantasy as a speculative world-making practice. This short and somewhat personal chapter reads a particularly queer and sexy scene from the science fiction TV show Sense8 (Netflix, 2015-2018), in which telepathically linked characters join sexually from disparate global locations. Sensate sex is a potent metaphor, the hybrid progeny of two sometimes-utopian fantasies: the queer world of public sex (where bodies come together, which anyone can join) and the science fiction of intimate technological connectivity (where physical and spatial boundaries lose their meaning). It functions here to map correspondences between the depictions of gendered spectatorship in Delany’s writings about male public sex cultures and the mostly female fan communities whose erotic fiction-writing practices form a speculative kind of sexual public.