Abstract
Online news outlets have published a fair amount of journalism concerning Isabel Fall's 2020 science fiction short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” later retitled “Helicopter Story.” Yet the highly polarized reception the story received has made up the bulk of the discourse. This is a tragic oversight, as the most interesting thing about “Helicopter Story” is not the online reaction to its original title but how the content of the story itself serves as an illustration of a dialectical history of gender in the United States. In Fall's story, gender is partially demystified by acknowledging the eradication of Indigenous cross-gender practices, racially imbricated plasticity, and the fusion of state and medical power that determines and shapes gender. Even so, some mystification remains. Gender is a reified social relation whose origins are an attempt to install binary biological sex. However, this reification does not result in the reinstallation of gender as ineluctable truth. Rather, it provides the opportunity for the expression of utopian desire, as theorized in the queer Marxism of Kevin Floyd or the dialectical literary criticism of Fredric Jameson, both of whom draw heavily from Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse when proposing that the only way out of reification is through. A proposed subgenre of science fiction, “speculative gender fiction,” is a literary form uniquely suited for exploring both the reification of gender and the utopian desire to escape from it.
