Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  Named by NPR as the top album of 2018, Dirty Computer—Janelle Monáe’s third studio album—was showered with accolades by critics and fans alike. Rolling Stone called the accompanying 46-minute film (“emotion picture”) “a timely new sci-fi masterpiece,” exploring the way Monáe deploys classic science fiction tropes of enigmatic identity, fluid reality, and fascist dystopia in service of her own inventive mythology. Image credit: Atlantic Records.

  “I thought science fiction was a great way of talking about the future,” Janelle Monáe told Bust Magazine in a 2013 interview. “It doesn’t make people feel like you’re talking about things that are happening right now, so they don’t feel like you’re talking down to them. It gives the listener a different perspective.”

  But Monáe doesn’t just borrow science-fiction motifs. She rewrites them in Afrofuturistic terms that reflect her own experiences as a black, queer woman trying to survive in a world that sees little value in her. Metropolis and ArchAndroid particularly explore how androids are used as stand-ins for the marginalized and the oppressed. Monáe joins the ranks of other black music artists who have blended science fiction into their works: George Clinton/Parliament, Sun Ra, Missy Elliott. But Monáe stands out as having a single narrative span across several albums—that of Monáe’s alter ego, Android 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather.

  Cindi Mayweather is an android who has committed the sin of falling in love with a human. Monáe tells her story in fragments, in music lyrics, and music videos. Throughout Metropolis, Cindi runs from bounty hunters, gets captured, and languishes in cybertronic purgatory. In the video for the song “Many Moons,” she is programmed to sing at an android auction, where she experiences a strange power that levitates her, then shorts her out. In ArchAndroid, she discovers that she may be the archangel who could save the world. In the video for “Tightrope,” a tuxedo-clad Cindi causes an almost-successful rebellion in The Palace of the Dogs asylum. In The Electric Lady, considered a prequel to ArchAndroid, Cindi is still on the run, known as Our Favorite Fugitive.

  The story is fragmented, and may in some cases contradict itself, but Monáe keeps it going by framing the narrative in suites numbered I through V (much like a science fiction series). She also fleshes out Cindi’s story through music videos, liner notes, Websites, motion picture treatments (music video concepts in written form), and even short films and fan art put out by Monáe and her producers at Wondaland Records. All of this is woven into a cohesive narrative that not only works, but also gives glances into a richer world full of intrigue, drama, love, loss, and revolution.

  Monáe’s use of Cindi Mayweather brings to mind Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie’s alter ego and subject of his fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His album features a bisexual, androgynous being who was sent as a messenger from extraterrestrials and is used by Bowie to explore sexual themes and social taboos. In Bowie’s case, however, he did not want to be continually defined by Ziggy and dropped the persona. Janelle Monáe could have done this as well, but rather than fade Cindi May-weather into obscurity, Monáe chose to continue the narrative of Android 57821 by taking a new direction—utilizing clones of herself.

  Monáe’s clones populate her album covers and videos: strutting at android auctions, serving as waitresses and newscasters, dancing in unison, causing small rebellions that fail. Some of these clones have names—the album cover of Electric Lady is depicted as a painting of Cindi Mayweather and her “sisters”: Andromeda, Andy Pisces, Catalina, Morovia, and Polly Whynot. Monáe can then shift her narrative while remaining in keeping with the android universe she’s created. This is most prevalent in Dirty Computer, where we are introduced to Jane 57821, who shares the same number as Cindi Mayweather, but is older, less naïve, and more of a revolutionary than a messiah. This reflects Monáe’s own change as she becomes more open about her pansexual identity, as well as responding to the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements. Even the music style shifts from the angelic crooning of Cindi Mayweather in ArchAndroid to the throatier rasp of Jane/Janelle in Dirty Computer.

  Janelle Monáe’s work reinvents the boundaries of identity performance with herself as the fictional and ever-evolving character at the story’s center. (The comparisons to David Bowie are unavoidable.) In The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix wrote in 2018 that the artist “has taken the concept album to complex heights.”

  It’s a brilliant strategy. In having multiples selves, Monáe can expand upon the worldbuilding of her narrative, told in multiple viewpoints but all originating from herself. She is not locked into a single narrative, but is able to explore all facets of her self-identity, from her queerness to her blackness to her religious faith. This makes Monáe not only an excellent musician, but also an amazing storyteller, one who is telling a science fiction story in real time.

  In her SyFy Wire article “Octavia Butler and America as Only Black Women See It,” Tari Ngangura wrote, “It is a rare writer who can use sci-fi not simply to chart an escape from reality, but as a pointed reflection of the most minute and magnified experiences that frame and determine the lives of those who live in black skin.” Through her music, the story of Cindi Mayweather/Django Jane/Janelle Monáe is bringing people who have been in separate worlds—science fiction enthusiasts, the hip-hip community, queer folk—and uniting them in a shared universe just as diverse as her musical styles.

  A model on the runway at Alexander McQueen’s fall 2006 show at the Palais Omnisport de Paris Bercy. Photo credit: Giovanni Giannoni/Penske Media/Shutterstock.

  FASHION

  Can a costume tell a story? Can clothes be “science fiction?” And what mark have textiles made in the grand tradition of SFF worldbuilding (aka the art of imagining the day-to-day details of life in other dimensions)? As a traditionally feminine craft, textile arts have been even more neglected within the pantheon of science fiction—and sometimes intentionally made secret—than have other crafts such as design and architecture. And yet, like every lost thread, the way we dress has plenty to say about the way we live, in our imagined futures and imaginary pasts.

  In this chapter, we explore the contributions of forward-thinking fashion designers who defined the look of The Future. Though their art was showcased on the catwalk instead of cosplay conventions, their expansive visions nonetheless seeped into fiction, film, and television, seeding and crosspollinating with the work of costume designers (and sometimes they were one and the same).

  In the vein of costume design, we take a closer look at a lost aspect of SFF worldbuilding: the mundane yet crucial question of what people wear, and where they get it. In some lands, the women have plenty of pockets. In others, they craft with magic threads. In our own dimension, contemporary fashion icons engage in uncanny creations, weaving images with apparel that are both savage and strange.

  PENNY A. WEISS and BRENNIN WEISWERDA

  Plenty of Pockets:

  Fashion in Feminist Utopian SFF

  Compliment a woman on her outfit and she’s likely to tell you three things: she’ll thank you; she’ll share where she got it from, and the deal she got if it was on sale; and, if it has pockets, she’ll tell you about them. These three elements—pleasure in appearance, availability and sustainability of fashion, and functionality of design—are creatively and purposefully utilized in the feminist utopian visions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (see this page) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.

  In Gilman’s utopian novel, three male visitors are approaching the hidden community that they’ve named Herland, musing about the fashion they will find:

  “Suppose there is a country of women only,” Jeff had put it, over and over. “What’ll they be like?” . . . We had expected them to be given over to what we called “feminine vanity”—“frills and furbelows.”

  Yet what they find overturns their preconceptions and ultimately pleases them. The women had “evolved a costume more perfect than the Chinese dress, richly beaut
iful when so desired, always useful, of unfailing dignity and good taste.” The men begrudgingly admit that “[t]hey have worked out a mighty sensible dress.” One of the things that make the dress “sensible,” in addition to layers that change with temperature and task, is a stunning array of pockets:

  “As to pockets, they left nothing to be desired. That . . . garment was fairly quilted with pockets. They were most ingeniously arranged, so as to be convenient to the hand and not inconvenient to the body, and were so placed as at once to strengthen the garment and add decorative lines of stitching.”

  Women’s clothing in Gilman’s time was characterized by restrictions. Their traditional dress—corsets, fanciful hats, layers, ruffles—meant a mincing step, and preoccupation with what men deemed the “frivolities” of fashion—was used as justification for dismissal. The implications of clothing, Gilman knows, are political and omnipresent. The garb in Gilman’s utopian Herland has a functional, graceful simplicity, and especially emphasizes freedom of movement.

  Gilman suggests that a society free from men for millennia would also be free from the patriarchal norms and limitations of masculinity and femininity; in their place is Gilman’s nuanced reimagining of motherhood. As one of the visitors notes:

  “These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call ‘femininity.’ This led me very promptly to the conviction that those ‘feminine charms’ we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.”

  This link between patriarchal pressure and toxic femininity in fashion is revelatory both to the outsiders and to Gilman’s readership. Performative femininity results from patriarchal pressure; in the absence of a male gaze, women don’t much care what they look like.

  Fashion is also a means to display wealth, especially for the upper-class visitors. The visitors attempt to bribe the Herlanders with jewelry and expensive trinkets, but the Herlanders’ instinct is to put the pieces in their museums for study, not on their bodies for display. There are no class divisions in their utopia, and that carries through their fashion. There are no cheap, ill-fitting garments, and no ornate ones, either.

  If there is fashion in Herland, there is a fashion, with changes dictated more by functionality or efficiency than by changing tastes or personal preference. There is no profitable industry manipulated by capitalist and patriarchal interests. The only changes or variations to clothing are to improve it; the same way their ecosystems become more balanced, or their educational games become more sophisticated, so their clothing might become ever more comfortable and practical. “In [fashion], as in so many other points we had now to observe, there was shown the action of a practical intelligence, coupled with fine artistic feeling, and, apparently, untrammeled by any injurious influences.” Gilman is finely attuned to functionality in fashion, and also pays attention to aesthetics. There is equal access to good clothing and, of course, pockets.

  We find another critique of traditional women’s fashion and the fashion industry in Marge Piercy’s classic Woman on the Edge of Time. In Piercy we especially see the costs to disadvantaged women, centering the financial burden more than the physical discomfort of fashion. Unlike Gilman’s single-sex community, Piercy’s utopia, Mattapoisett, offers multiple options for individual expression irrespective of sex or gender.

  Woman on the Edge of Time takes place partly in the present and partly in the future. At its center is Connie, a thirty-seven-year-old Hispanic woman living in 1970s New York, a quasi-dystopian reality that still exists today—especially for poor women of color. Connie, who struggles to get by on welfare, prizes her muchpatched purse, single tube of lipstick, and precious plastic comb. She strives to be visually acceptable and appropriately feminine to her social worker, who holds Connie’s fate in her hands, and to her well-off brother, who is another key to her freedom. The task can be overwhelming.

  Connie’s niece, Dolly, is a prostitute, and fashion places similar demands on her. In order to please her pimp and attract clients, she spends her hard-earned money on the clothes, shoes, makeup, and the plastic surgery needed to meet their standards.

  Piercy, and Connie, are both explicitly and eloquently critical of prostitution. Geraldo, Dolly’s pimp, “took away the money squeezed out of the pollution of Dolly’s flesh to buy lizard boots and cocaine and other women.” Geraldo’s ostentatious if “elegant” display of wealth from questionable sources is meant to increase his power, and feeds an industry that exploits divisions of wealth. Here we see the struggles that poor women have in keeping up with the demands of fashion—demands laid out not only by the fashion industry but also by welfare workers and johns, and anyone else with power they have to please.

  Connie stands up for Dolly, intervening in Geraldo’s physical assault of her niece by striking him. Geraldo, seeing Connie as a threat to his control, commits her to a mental asylum. Women in the insane asylum long for their own clothing, makeup, and hair products, but such items are privileges often withheld. This dehumanizing means of control lays out with stark clarity how precious that self-sufficiency and self-expression is. “She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine.”

  It’s from inside the dreary, unrelentingly gray walls of the asylum that Connie forms the mental link with Luciente, a “sender,” and travels to the colorful future of Mattapoisett. Piercy imagines—for us and for Connie—a utopia free from the constraints of class and sex roles dictated by the capitalist patriarchy.

  Individual expression is found in everything from the style of someone’s hair to the tattoos on their bodies. Importantly, everyone has access to what they need: “We all have warm coats and good rain gear. Work clothes that wear well.”

  The opportunities for fashion beyond function are limited only by imagination and responsible use of communal resources, and take the form of “flimsies” and costume pieces. As Luciente explains, “A flimsy is a once-garment for festivals. Made out of algae, natural dyes. We throw them in the compost afterward. Costumes you sign out of the library for once or for a month, then they go back for someone else.” Flimsies can be sensual, theatrical, or fantastical—there is no fashion industry, yet every party could be another fashion show. “Part of the pleasure of festivals is designing flimsies—outrageous, silly, ones that disguise you, ones in which you will be absolutely gorgeous and desired by everybody in the township!” For Gilman, the absence of both men and the male gaze correlates with an absence of sensuality; Piercy imagines a sensuality for all genders that is still free from the oppressive male gaze.

  There is also more variety of self-expression in Piercy; in one small village we see shaved heads and intricate braids, for example, as well as men in dresses. Luciente explains what fashion can mean for her: “Sometimes I want to dress up beautiful. Other times I want to be funny. Sometimes I want to body a fantasy, an idea, a dream. Sometimes I want to recall an ancestor, or express a truth about myself.”

  A common theme in Piercy and Gilman (and feminism overall) is sustainability. In Herland, resources are limited by their constrained geographical ecosystem, while in Mattapoisett people are still recovering from and making reparations for the damage caused by generations past. Sustainability comes through on all levels, in fashion as in food as in energy—everyday clothing is made to last, and everyone has enough; in Piercy, the flimsies are compostable and costumes are shared.

  Fashion is more integral to feminist SFF than one might expect. Its minor role in Herland is as notable as is its vivid presence in Mattapoisett. Both Herland and Woman on the Edge of Time contain poignant critiques of contemporary femininity and the fashion industry that feeds it—and feeds on it. They come up with creative solutions to problems that continue to plague women—our pants are still not adjustable, our dresses still don’
t have pockets, and fast fashion takes precedence over sustainability. Gilman and Piercy designed better futures, and better fashion, for us to work toward.

  EKATERINA SEDIA

  The Fashion Futurism of Elizabeth Hawes and Rudi Gernreich

  Science fiction is a genre offering visions of potential futures, and it is apparent that pretty much every medium of artistic expression has produced some version of futurism, either as a purely esthetic conceit or a more deliberate extrapolation. It is somewhat surprising to see, however, that we rarely treat fashion as a legitimate form of futuristic exploration, especially of the latter kind.

  The boundary between art and fashion is at least permeable and in many cases nonexistent, so it is perhaps not surprising that the imagination finds expression through fashion—be it the Steampunk costuming community, or the surreal creations of Elsa Schiaparelli and Alexander McQueen, or the phantasmagoria of Rei Kawakubo. And yet, when it comes to science fiction, there is a notable divergence between space-era inspirations of the likes of Paco Rabanne that seem to treat the futuristic stylings and materials as mostly esthetic, and the true futurism embraced by Elizabeth Hawes and her protégé Rudi Gernreich; that is, they did not merely embrace the futuristic trappings, but genuinely grappled with what the future of humanity will be, and what will we wear when it finally arrives. What especially sets them apart is their understanding of fashion as the ultimate convergence of the human body and its role in societal change, from the labor movement to the sexual revolution.