Department or Program

English

Abstract

My thesis seeks to establish the relationship between empire, utopia, and queerness through my reading of the fantasy series The Masquerade by Seth Dickinson. First, I will contextualize this series within the genre of utopian fiction to understand how this genre has approached ideas of queerness and empire. In Thomas More’s Utopia, I will suggest that his imagining of ideality lays the blueprint for how utopia nudges up to ideas of empire, conquest, and domination. Then I will address how Margaret Cavendish, in The Blazing World, addresses some of the internal forms of domination—heterosexual patriarchy in particular—while failing to address the external forms of colonial domination.However, despite its flaws, Cavendish’s Blazing World opens the possibility of queerness as a cataclysm to disrupt empire: if only we can move away from the institutional trappings of our present day, move from the utopian political manifesto to the imagined ideality of queer utopia, then we can fracture the knowledge, and thus possibly the power, of empire. This strain of thought is inspired by José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: there is a feeling, Muñoz argues, that if only we could imagine a better world, no matter how impossible it is, that impulse could propel us towards progress, towards something resembling our ideality.This is Baru’s reckoning in The Masquerade: she is trapped in the thought binaries of a hegemonic empire, and her own queerness is the key that will shatter the knowledge of empire.

Level of Access

Open Access

First Advisor

Bloomfield, Gabriel

Date of Graduation

5-2026

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Number of Pages

72

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