Myth is often figured as an artifact of bygone eras and a nuisance to the present. The modern world knows itself too rationally to sustain the elaborate pretense of myth; we have no need for fantastical origin stories in the face of factual histories, no room for folkloric morality on the courtroom floor. My thesis contends that myth, in fact, has made and continues to make the worlds we inhabit and understand as worlds. This thesis contains two parts: in the first, I lay out a theory of myth and counter-myth, and in the second, I read three prominent works of science fiction through this lens of myth and counter-myth. I build on the work of Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy to define myth as a particular type of speech that, in its very utterance, citationally produces the normative world in which it is intelligible. I argue that myth can function hegemonically, obscuring its own production and presenting itself as simply the way things are, consequently shaping our material actions. However, taking inspiration from Hortense Spillers, I am invested in laying out the possibility of counter-myth as a counter-hegemonic practice that might make worlds otherwise, disrupting the mechanisms of hegemonic myth in order to lay the grounds for new norms and radically reimagined futures. From this theoretical ground, I investigate the hegemonic mythos of \"the West\" in the 20th century and its entanglement with the emergence of transsexuality as a publicly knowable entity. Taking inspiration from Susan Stryker's counter-mythologization of Frankenstein's monster as a site of articulation and identification for trans people, I propose science fiction as a particularly prolific mythological and counter-mythological site.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Myth","Counter-myth","Science fiction"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24139