Speculative destabilization

doi:10.3828/sfftv.2025.24

Speculative destabilization

2025-11-01

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Chelsea N. Bouldin

DOI：10.3828/sfftv.2025.24

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Using Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's Dark Fantastic Cycle as a methodological tool, this article examines character Ruby Baptiste's central role in episode 5 of Misha Green's Lovecraft Country (2020). This article describes the Dark Fantastic as a practice Green exercises to expand the windows and mirrors (Toliver 2018) afforded to Black women in order to explore Ruby as an uptake of Thomas's Dark Fantastic Cycle. Paying attention to magical blurring and to the shifting of social categories, I argue that Ruby displays the generative possibilities of fantasy. By drawing attention to the ways that Ruby negotiates the Dark Fantastic Cycle and her own inner self, this article exercises the Dark Fantastic Cycle's capacity to critique violent, restrictive depictions of Black girls and women in speculative fiction, transfigure existing stories, and build new ones. I discuss categorical destabilization as a function of Ruby's unsettling of the categories of race, gender, and sexuality. This article makes the larger argument that privileging the story of the Dark Other demands that we not take social categories for granted or as fixed.

Keywords:

Dark Fantastic

Lovecraft Country

Ruby Baptiste

Afrofuturism

Black feminist theory

self-making

Speculative destabilization

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