Utopia and the End of Genderlessness in Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X

ABSTRACT

Against a scholarly tendency to read Theodore Sturgeon’s 1960 novel Venus Plus X only in relation to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, this article reframes Sturgeon’s novel by attending to the novel’s imbrication of utopia and genderlessness. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, it attends to the generic discontinuities across the novel’s two narrative strands—the utopian tour of the genderless society of Ledom and the suburban vignettes of Homewood, USA—to argue that, for Sturgeon, genderlessness and utopia are necessary fictions, capable of producing radical transformations but only at the expense of self-abnegation. Building off from Dana Seitler, this article frames the novel’s lack of narrative closure as an example of the queer suicide plot. Through this figuration, this article highlights how the suspended temporality of Ledom allows Sturgeon to reconcile his anti-difference politics with his vision of a utopian genderlessness.