SFF MA Alum Tristan Sheridan Publishes "Artificial Intelligence Narratives as Trans Literature" in The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature

Congratulations to BA and MA Alum Tristan Sheridan on publication of a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp. The chapter, "Artificial Intelligence Narratives as Trans Literature" derives from her master’s thesis, and was cowritten with Dr. Timothy Miller.

Sheridan was a graduate of our English Honors program, and earned her MA in English with a concentration in Science Fiction & Fantasy. She is now pursuing a PhD at the University of Washington.

An excerpt from "Artificial Intelligence Narratives as Trans Literature":

In order to introduce his famous 'imitation game,' a test for determining human-level machine intelligence, Alan Turing first appealed to an analogy of gender passing. In this survey of AI fictions, we argue that questions of how to perform humanity have always been intertwined with questions of how to perform gender 'correctly,' and, if to be read as transgender is in many ways to be read as inhuman, artificial intelligence narratives written by both cis and trans authors prove a particularly revealing space for exploring trans issues.