# Cruising the Hive Mind: The Queer Telos of Inassimilability Cruising the Hive Mind - The Queer Telos of Inassimilability Earth welcomes a newly conscious, profoundly inclusive, interconnected and interdependent humanity, who live collectively as part of the earth---not its self-appointed master. Overnight, the human race has seemingly abandoned every prejudice. Skin-color, nationality, gender, and sexual identity no longer produce fear, hostility, or contempt. Mental health, physical disability, and age are no longer grounds for social exclusion or injustice. The enforcement of oppressive family systems that once produced generational trauma and abuse have now been abandoned. The catch? “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” (ST:TNG, Episode 3x26 “The Best of Both Worlds”) Plur1bus, a 2025 streaming science fiction series, depicts events surrounding a human-extraterrestrial encounter that culminates in the Joining: a transmissible biochemical reconfiguration of humanity, which produces a near-instantaneous, unconscious, electro-magnetic field of global communication that connects nearly all humans telepathically. After the joining a new, non-anthropocentric, posthuman, collective identity emerges, which writer/director Vince Gilligan refers to as “the Others”, which excludes only a very small remainder of individuals who are biologically immune to the effect, whom Gilligan calls “Old Schoolers”. The Others have disidentified from their former individuality, (“We is Us, just us.”, “This individual went by Lawrence…”), they prefer to use we/us pronouns, and classical humanist subject identity boundaries and self-interest dissolve. Previously individual memories and knowledge are now shared by everyone connected to the global mind. They are constrained by “biological imperatives” that include non-violence, unconditional positive regard, communitarianism, an inability to lie, environmental sensitivity, energy efficiency, and the motivation to “share their gift” by building a radio antenna to relay the signal. Crucially, they feel they also “have to share it” with the Old Schoolers. The Old Schoolers are a small remainder of 13 individual humans who are not joined, including Carol (USA), who is the focal character of the series. Before the Joining, Carol was a bestselling writer of "speculative historical romance literature". During the Joining, her lesbian partner Helen dies. After the joining, Carol tries to make sense of the changing world, relate with the other Old Schoolers, and relate to this new collective human "us". Carol refers to the collective as “aliens” or "the afflicted" and refers to herself and the other individuals as "survivors" who need to put things back the way they were. The other Old Schoolers take a variety of relations with the Others; a few of particular note are: Diabate’s (Mauritania) decadence and capitalist wish-fulfillment, from chartered flights on Air Force One, to his Las Vegas Casino Royale re-enactment, and life with a harem in Elvis Presley’s suite in the Westgate; to Kusimayu’s (Peru) desire to join her family and community and willingness to surrender her individuality; Laxmi’s (India) more or less pragmatic commitment to maintaining a status quo with her family and son; and Manousos’ (Paraguay) total abjection, a refusal to communicate with the Others, to the point of surviving on condiments and pet food. Pluribus occasionally invokes genre conventions set by science fiction films like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Omega Man" to suggest this is setting up a typical alien invasion, outbreak, or zombie apocalypse survival scenario—but the Others consistently subvert Carol’s (and the audience’s) expectations with their radically affirmative ethics, empathy, engagement, and happiness; and Carol frequently demonstrates that her own individualism is formed by her ego, trauma, addiction, mental health issues, and in particular a desire not to be known. By the end of the first season, it is clear this is not a Manichean struggle for human=good survival against threat from an invasive other=evil. We are witnessing the struggle between an individualist status quo and an emergent collectivist utopia. In the here-and-now, becoming-posthuman and becoming-queer are two theoretical approaches that engage collectivist utopian imaginaries as modes of identity-in-becoming. Both resist and destabilize normative, fixed categories of relation between nomadic subject-being and the plane of immanence, but with different articulations. Queer utopianism questions heteronormative defaults for gender, sexual, and racial subjectivities, to create space for an ever-wider range of individual human being: expression, pleasure, and connection. Affirmative posthumanism challenges anthropocentric norms, decentering humanity by demanding equal consideration of other forms of life (animal, plant, and even machinic life) to imbricate an identity entangled in an ever-richer transverse assemblage of zoe/geo/techno kinship. The complex, affirmative, visionary modes of these parallel perspectives are presented, perhaps most thoroughly and saliently in José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. (2009) and in Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013). Both reject a normed subject, Braidotti— the itruvian Man; and Muñoz—heteronormative Straight Time. Both reject atomic identity and claim a fluid, relational, situatedness, “cruising” for Munoz, and “nomadism” for Braidotti. Both orient to the future, by “becoming” and ”not-yet queer”, and both of these utopian imaginaries have their shadow as well. At the risk of oversimplifying two rich lineages of thought, many visions of Queer future politics may be broadly characterized by “the ‘pro-’ vs. ‘anti-’ future debate.” (Blanco-Fernández, 2024, p. 439) typified by the approaches of Lee Edelman in No Future (2007) and José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). The history of this debate and its discourses are covered in broad terms by Vítor Blanco-Fernández in ”Thinking the future otherwise: Queer futures and queer utopias”: “On the one hand, rejecting the future in favour of a focus on the present has been criticized for disregarding those queer individuals facing precarious and violent circumstances in the present. On the other hand, future-oriented, utopian thinking has been critiqued as naïf, homonormative and potentially proto-totalitarian.” (Blanco-Fernández, 2024, p. 439) Sarah Ahmed crystallizes the totalitarian potential of happiness in The Promise of Happiness (2010) in her analysis of “happiness dystopias” and “the problem of happiness.” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 192) while questioning whether “all forms of optimism as well as utopianism… would require negativity to be located in those who cannot inherit this future.” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 161) Similarly, affirmative posthumanism, as an ethic of “monistic vitalism… driven by nomadic, embedded, embodied and technologically-mediated subjects” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 13) has its dissidents. Donna Haraway questions: “is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the “game” of life on earth for everybody and everything? It’s more than climate change; it’s also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, nuclear pollution, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other critters, et cetera, et cetera, in systemically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse. Recursion can be a drag.” (Haraway, 2016, p. 2) Zakiyyah Iman Jackson questions whether destabilizing or even destroying human/animal categories is sufficient or mere erasure, if their constitutive “material histories” are not resolved, as “Otherwise, we will most likely build on foundations we would be better off destroying.” (Jackson, 2020, p. 137) and whether the biocentric and racially constructed definitions and hierarchies of “the human” are well enough understood to be dismantled when “many scholars have essentially ignored alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that have been produced by blackened people.” (Jackson, 2020, p. 14). Eugene Thacker takes philosophical pessimism’s failure “‘to locate human beings within a larger non-human world’ (Thacker, 2018, p. 9), tethered as they are to the anthropocentric delusion of a ‘human’ world.” (Dekeyser, 2020, p. 368) to its cosmic telos. Cultivating this rich humus of hopeful and critical imaginaries we can avoid reducing the relations between Carol and the Others to simplistic us/them binaries of dominator/subject or progressive/reactionary, victim/perpetrator and identify the essential incompatibilities in becoming-Carol and becoming-Others. From Carol's anti-social becoming-queer perspective, (the paranoid reading) where humanity is defined by the individual subject, the others are a "Borg", typical of the genre, which threatens colonization and extinguishes individuality to produce a field of totalizing domination. Carol's refusal to *assimilate* is a "heroic" performance situated in Queer anti-sociality and a rejection of forced totalitarian normativity. More personally, Carol’s resistance is rooted in a formative experience of being sent to Freedom Falls, a conversion camp, where Carol encountered “some of the worst people I have ever known. And they smiled, all the time, just like you [the Others].” It is also clear that Carol is unwilling to give up privacy as shown in her refusal to come out of the closet on the night of the joining, her repeated anger at the Others invoking Helen’s memories. Carol is unwilling to disclose her sexual identity to her fans. But during the joining, Carol’s lesbian partner Helen’s memories and intimate knowledge of Carol become part of the global consciousness. The collective consciousness has an extremely stringent ethical framework around violence and consent, but a radical indifference to old hierarchies and frameworks of sexual stigma. And Carol has deep concerns about the lack of meaningful relationships “between” the Others, as seen in her rejection of the appearance of the waitress in the diner. the diner is an invitation to forget the difference. to closet. "those were the best days" her whose lack of interest in "Others" interiority. "did you ask them what it's like" demands a return to "the way things are supposed to be." It is when Carol is at her happiest, in the final episode of the season, that she is finally convinced of the ultimate incompatibility of her view of herself and the world, and the world that the Others are steadfastly committed to producing. On the other hand, from the Others' becoming-posthuman perspective, where humanity is one part of an assemblage of zoe/geo/techno intra-actions, the Joining produces a post anthropocentric, non-hierarchical, transverse kinship, affirmative ethics, and Carol's refusal to *participate* is situated in an individualism that resists evolutionary change in preference of a self-interested maintenance of status quo, where she is isolated, self-destructive, and profoundly unhappy. If they leave Carol unconverted, The Others also risk the paradox of tolerance, where Carol is capable of profound disruption to their global project, just by her capacity for negativity, Conversely, the Others need Carol’s capacity to generate surprise, as evidenced by their enthusiasm and desire to encourage Carol to begin writing again. Carol’s inassimilability is a prophylaxis against perfection and the production of a “zombie utopia” or a “happiness dystopia”, but her queerness isn’t strictly a property of her individual personality, sexual identity, biology, or historical trauma. For example, once Carol believes she is safe from forced assimilation, she begins to accept the Others as a new status quo. In the very next scene, Manousos inherits the locus of queer function when he receives the videocassette from a no longer conscious version of Carol. The intensity of queer resistance is not tied to or located within Carol as an individual. When Carol feels her needs are being met by the Others, she is contented by the novelty of global travel, romance with Zosia, and as a result the responsibility of resistance continues to migrate to the global south. If Kusimayu is a figure of affirmative posthumanism, and Diabate is the postcolonial subject, Manousos is the Nick Land/Eugene Thacker antinatalist, pessimist, abjection, Frank Wilderson III We know little about the lives of anyone before the joining, Why was Zosia, who grew up in Gdansk apparently in Morocco at the time of the Joining? And why was her appearance so disheveled? To sublate these two seemingly conflicting becomings, we can engage New Materialism (agential realism), which further destabilizes categories of matter, agency, and meaning, to reconcile this apparent incompatibility between posthuman transversal and queer individual identity, by rearticulating the agential cut that separates Carol and The Others, to one entangles them. This mobilizes queerness as a nomadic discontinuity, a lacunal intra-action within the immanence, which arises to maintain openness whenever the assemblage threatens to achieve monolithic totalization or systemic closure. I will use thematic and formal aspects of the series to illustrate relations between Queer and Posthumanist future imaginaries, consider the apparent incompatibilities of Antisocial (Edelman, Bersani) and Utopian (Sedgwick, Munoz) lineages in Queer ethics via the possible impacts of Queer inassimilability (no-future) on the formation of a posthuman transversal (Braidotti, ), and try to offer a reparative agential cut (Barad) which mobilizes "queerness" from being a fixed identity, to being a contingent function—one which prevents totalization, and maintains the vital force that generates unpredictable future potentials (Deleuze). “Utopia may represent an idealized realm – a perfect place. Yet, a perfect place is inherently resistant to change, as any deviation from its ideal state would constitute imperfection… This imposition of a desired future carries echoes of history’s violent imposition of societal perfection, often at the expense of dissenting voices or those deemed incompatible with prevailing notions of ‘excellence’.” (Blanco-Fernández, 2024, p. 443) It is the function of queerness to ensure utopia is always still-becoming. Ahmed, Sara. The promise of happiness. Duke University Press, 2010. Blanco-Fernández, Vítor. “Thinking the Future Otherwise: Queer Futures and Queer Utopias.” Time & Society 33, no. 4 (2024): 438–60. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X241258307](https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X241258307). Braidotti, Rosi. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2019): 31–61. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486](https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486). Dekeyser, Thomas. “Pessimism, Futility and Extinction: An Interview with Eugene Thacker.” Theory, Culture & Society (London, England) 37, nos. 7–8 (2020): 367–81. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420907127](https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420907127). Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Series Q. Duke University Press, 2004. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. [https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780](https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780). Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Vol. 53. NYU Press, 2020. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n6ptnn](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n6ptnn). Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 1st ed. Sexual Cultures. NYU Press, 2009. ** # ANNOTATED SOURCES Ağın, Başak, and Güvenç Arman Arı. “Thinking-with Muñoz: A Posthuman Queer Ecological Cruise.” Utopian Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2025, pp. 182–203, Başak Ağın, PhD, is Associate Professor of English Literature at TED University, Ankara, Türkiye, whose research is focused on posthumanist interactions. This essay is one of two I will be using from the 2025 Utopian Studies issue celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cruising Utopia. The article seeks to “...reexplore Muñoz’s queer utopianism as a posthuman enactment of queer temporality and materiality, by building analogies between his queer utopia and the concept of the posthuman in the new materialist sense…” Ağın establishes the lineage of “becoming” from Deleuze and Guattari through queer collectivity, hybridity, and futurity to produce a Queer conception of humanity where “The individual human body is no longer understood as a self-contained entity, but as a leaking body with countless intra-actions occurring in (and as) its becoming.” Pluribus effectively depicts this “leaking body”---memory, knowledge, and skill become nomadic, flowing between bodies entangled in the transversal network.    Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway : Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. This will provide the foundations for explaining the new materialist approach to agential realism.  Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October [Cambridge, Mass], vol. 43, 1987, pp. 197–222. Bersani taught at UC Berkeley from 1972, and was one of the significant figures in developing Queer antisociality. Bersani responded to the eruption of the AIDS Crisis with “Is the Rectum a Grave”, forgoing civility and comparing the genocidal hypocrisy of the American political and social response to the spread of AIDS. Bersani both challenges the assumed (and sometimes falsely performed) radicalism of queer Americans and criticizes strategic homonormativity, complicity with misogyny, and the confusion of “nonsubversive intentions” and “subversive effects.”  In short, the article decouples queer political identity from sexual practices and mobilizes the theoretical antisociality carried on by Edelman, Warner, and early Munoz (Disidentifications). In terms of Pluribus, the text provides context for disentangling Carol’s Lesbian identity, her homonormativity, her attachment to an anthropocentric status quo, and her antisociality.  Blanco-Fernández, Vítor. “Thinking the Future Otherwise: Queer Futures and Queer Utopias.” _Time & Society_ 33, no. 4 (2024): 438–60. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X241258307](https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X241258307). Reframes the “simplistic binary division between Lee Edelman’s anti-futurism and José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopianism.” (p. 438) “Returning to critical examinations of hegemonic ‘optimism’ or ‘progress’, Ahmed’s scholarship is foundational (2006, 2010, 2011). Ahmed analyzes the concept of ‘happiness’, arguing that normative systems prescribe certain ‘orientations’ towards predefined goals coded as desirable and happiness-inducing. These goals, which are often gendered, classed and racialized, include milestones such as marriage, employment and reproduction; and exclude individuals who do not conform to these normative standards – such as feminists, queer, BIPOC individuals or anti-establishment groups. When applied to a rigid conception of utopia – viewed as an ‘orientation’ towards a specific, desirable ‘milestone’ (such as a new social contract or a perfect city) – Ahmed’s work serves as a reminder of the potential pitfalls of adhering to ‘perfect’, singular and static proto-totalitarian utopian frameworks. Just as hegemonic discourses of ‘happiness’ may function as exclusionary practices, uncritical future-oriented utopian thinking may also engender rigid ‘orientations’ or unchangeable ‘goals’. It is important to note that not all scholarly and practical engagements with utopia are proto-totalitarian, as evidenced by research on critical and everyday utopias, and likewise, Muñoz’s cruised utopia. Nevertheless, Ahmed’s insights prompt us to critically examine and refine our future-oriented thinking.” (Blanco-Fernández, 2024, p. 443) “Utopia may represent an idealized realm – a perfect place. Yet, a perfect place is inherently resistant to change, as any deviation from its ideal state would constitute imperfection. My contention is that when this approach to utopia is mobilized, we risk envisioning a biased, exclusionary and closed-off version of it. While utopian studies have approached utopia from diverse perspectives, and their idea of utopia explicitly diverges from static perfection, I believe that within queer studies, we run the risk of relying on a simplified reading of utopia as the described above: utopia as ‘the’ perfect aspiration. In this sense, while alternative futures can emerge through processes of direct and radical democracy, embracing diversity and inclusivity and championing social justice, future-making endeavours are often dictated by the will of individuals or microcollectives. This imposition of a desired future carries echoes of history’s violent imposition of societal perfection, often at the expense of dissenting voices or those deemed incompatible with prevailing notions of ‘excellence’.” (Blanco-Fernández, 2024, p. 443) Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013. The four chapters of The Posthuman offer different categories of distinction between the humanist worldview and a posthumanist possibility. Similar to Haraways’ categories of cyborg, they are “Post-Humanism: Life beyond the Self”, "Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species", “The Inhuman: Life beyond Death”, and “Posthuman Humanities: Life beyond Theory”. I intend to address each of these four basic distinguishing characteristics to illustrate that the transversal qualifies as a “Posthuman” future. Killgore, De Witt Douglas. “Queering the Coming Race?: A Utopian Historical Imperative.” Queer Universes, edited by Veronica Hollinger et al., 1st ed., Liverpool University Press, 2008, p. 233. Kilgore is a professor, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space, and recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Kilgore is significantly engaged with the work of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, two touchstones for Queer Sci-Fi. This chapter asks whether all science fiction utopias are ultimately limited to conceptions of “an ideology combining white supremacy with patriarchy”.  Kilgore cites Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s challenge to practices of ‘paranoid’ reading, and offers a reparative analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.  In a ‘paranoid’ reading, the future of Pluribus is still bound to straight hierarchies by Carol’s homonormativity, and the hive’s inability to accept Carol’s disconsent to joining. This would fit Kilgore’s reading of Robinson’s concerns that “The coming race could become a new ruling class, a caste physically and politically separate and dominant over common humanity even if queer in some physical or social way.” (p 244)  In a more hopeful reading, though, Pluribus offers a vision of “epistemic change, a new structure of feeling incommensurate with the currently dominant hegemony.” (p 234) Murphy, Gretchen. “Hopeful Apocalypse: Trans Speculative Fiction and Climate Change.” Utopian Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2025, pp. 159–81. Murphy is the Sue Goldston Lebermann Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas. This is the second article from the Utopian Studies issue on Muñoz. Murphy offers a genre informed analysis of a short science fiction story about a utopian collective arising from a postapocalyptic scenario. In the analysis, Murphy evaluates the transness of the character Pris, and Pris’s identity as “mobile instead of localized, temporally in process instead of working toward a teleological end point.” (p. 171) and clarifies the tension between fluidity and “realness” in “the self’s claim to authority”. The article goes on to point out that  “This trans sense of becoming provides critical utopian depth to José Muñoz’s sense of queerness as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” a vision that is “primarily about futurity and hope.”It refuses both post-apocalyptic pastoralism and the re-set buttons that feminist and queer theorists have envisioned as someday taking us beyond the trauma of gender.” (p. 178) I’m not entirely sure yet how I might use this but it feels relevant. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cultural Studies of the Americas ; Volume 2. Cruising Utopia provides the working title for this project, but Disidentifications offers the hinge that moves Muñoz from Queer antisociality to Queer Utopianism. In the chapter “The White to be Angry”, Muñoz uses the perfomances of drag artist Vaginal Davis as a way to unpack a minoritarian identity development from assimilationism to counteridentification (or antisociality) to disidentification (which for Muñoz in Utopia became horizonal). This text offers some insight on the essential tension in the heart of this project, the hope to reconcile reactionary and liberatory desires (p. 115) and “ultimately understand the need for a war of positions.” Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 1st ed., NYU Press, 2009. Sexual Cultures. Cruising Utopia offers the primary reference for Queer Utopianism. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal : Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Free Press, 1999.  Warner is a professor, fellow at Rutgers, editor of Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) and was frequently cited and influential in the development of early queer theory. The Trouble with Normal is a polemic, critical of an assimilationist approach to Gay and Lesbian issues, and denotes the use of the term "queer" to "suggest how many ways people can find themselves at odds with straight culture" p38.  Chapter one, “The Ethics of Sexual Shame”, analyzes the construction and fragility of straightness, the political and social mechanisms of shame and stigma in limiting sexual variance. Warner critiques the project of normalizing homosexual desire, without addressing the underlying moralism that stigmatizes (and controls) the minoritarian subject. It also includes a chart on p 25 (drawn from Rubin) that offers categorical sexual hierarchies of shame. In Chapter two, “What’s Wrong with Normal?” Warner illustrates the ambivalence of the “stigmaphile” and “stigmaphobe” worlds relative to the dominant culture (p43) “Sex and sexuality are disavowed as “irrelevant” in an attempt to fight stigma… It expresses the utopian notion that somewhere, one might not be defined by one’s sexuality, that stigma might simply vanish from among the living. But since that utopia exists nowhere in this culture’s near future, the idea reads as wishfulness…” (p 46)  “like most stigmatized groups, gays and lesbians were always tempted to believe that the way to overcome stigma was to win acceptance by the dominant culture , rather than to change the self-understanding of that culture.” (p 50) In Pluribus, Carol is unwilling to disclose her sexual identity to her fans. But during the joining, Carol’s lesbian partner Helen’s memories and intimate knowledge of Carol become part of the global consciousness. The collective consciousness has an extremely stringent ethical framework around violence and consent, but a radical indifference to old hierarchies and frameworks of sexual stigma. OTHER POSSIBLE SOURCES Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax (Leeds, England), vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pp. 168–87. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801–31. Braidotti, Rosi. “Transversal Posthumanities.” Philosophy Today (Celina) [Charlottesville], vol. 63, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1181–95. de Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ [Durham], vol. 17, nos. 2–3, 2011, pp. 243–63. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004. Grant, Barry Keith. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 1st ed., Bloomsbury, 2010. BFI Film Classics. Jones, Michael Thomas. “The Post-Woke Story of the Hive Mind | Michael Thomas Jones.” American Reformer, 5 Jan. 2026, https://americanreformer.org/2026/01/the-post-woke-story-of-the-hive-mind/. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Duke University Press, 1993. Zubillaga, Luciano. TCOET: Queer Theory, Pornography, Science Fiction. 2021. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. ** locates queerness in the formation and agency of individual identity subjects, to a cut that (Queer deteleology/Queer dividualism). which is simultaneously a profoundly queer-utopian, disruption of our anthropocentric global human order---a post-anthropocentric, non-hierarchical, transverse kinship of intra-action based on zoe/geo/techno affirmative ethics; and a potentially totalizing force of colonization whose "biological imperative" is unable to accommodate the disidentification of Carol's identity as a queer-humanist-individual subject (paradox of tolerance), and whose affirmative ethics. (paradox of tolerance). , and whose affirmative ethics (a refusal to . "The Others" are a profoundly utopian disruption of anthropocentric global human norms, but their radical affirmative ethics are still not-yet queer (munoz) because their demand for assimilation is a totalizing annihilation---demanding in response, Carol's embodiment of the antisocial queer figure of resistance and inassimilability to prevent systemic closure. The series' queer refusal to choose between humanist and post-humanist futures offers the opportunity to consider: **What future does the queer subject have in a posthuman immanence that erases the process of individual identity formation and performance?** overlapping ways to understand the failure of heteronormative and anthropocentric categories to Queer theory The emergence of "we is us" comes to represent the tension between two different, incompatible queer imaginaries for humanity's future. It is also, paradoxically, unable to accommodate the disidentification of Carol's identity a queer-humanist-individual subject (paradox of tolerance). in Barad's new materialism, subjectivities are not pre-existing absolutes but produced by a semiotic contingency **Carol's cut** - places her identity and subjectivity as internal to herself and her resistance to assimilation as a defense of individuality (queer antisociality) **The Transversal Cut** - (hive as brown commons) the hive sees Carol not as an individual but as a "broken" node in a global transversal network/graph (queer utopianism) **The Reparative Cut** - Situates carol and the Transversal within an entangled site of 'becoming-variation' (continuous variation) where her inassimilability, her "queerness" is an emergent function that prevents systemic closure and maintains futurity (queer deteleology/queer dividualism) The queer futurity "utopia" lies in both Carol and the Transversal identity accepting their mutual contingent relationship, outside of a binary of individualism or total disindividuation and maintaining the gap against the collapse into totality. The other Humans are already hinting at this, by trying to identify ways to keep the hive alive (against starvation). #### I think my problem and “our” problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom. ####                                                                                                                                        —Donna Haraway[](https://humansandnature.org/toward-a-new-materialism-matter-as-dynamic/#End_1)[[1]](https://humansandnature.org/toward-a-new-materialism-matter-as-dynamic/#End_1) We need to talk about Carol. Carol's **identity** is a queer reactionary who refuses “to consent not to be a single being.” her whose lack of interest in "Others" interiority. "did you ask them what it's like" demands a return to "the way things are supposed to be." This resistance emerges from a threat to her individualism, but is shaped by her ego, trauma, addiction, mental health issues, and in particular a desire not to be known. Carol is situated in her Queer Identity, and she believes her queerness is located within herself. In the changed cut, queerness is located in the intractable discontinuity, in the space between the hive, and carol. she is inassimilable due to her anti-normative/anti-social refusal to consent to joining the collectivity. Carol's ***existence*** is the queer-becoming that never "becomes" (capture/territorialization) by not consenting to **be** a single being (moten). This cut offers a **queer ontology: not an identity but a necessary intensity by which reality resists complete territorialization.** It resists “closure and the fulfillment of meaning,” (Lauretis, 2011, p. 244) and is an “enigma without solution” (Lauretis, 2011, p. 245) In this reading, Carol functions as a discontinuity within the immanence that keeps it from systemic closure (totalizing). Carol is situated within "we is us" and it is Carol's inassimilability, not her agency, which the telos of queer resistance, her existence prevents the posthuman transversal from collapsing into hegemony. Her queerness is not located within her identity/individual subjectivity, but her existence as a necessary discontinuity (Which is nomadic, fluid, and as we will see, communicable). her entangled superposition a/part provides a diffraction grating to guide us through the strait between the Scylla of queer antisociality and Charybdis of queer utopianism. Carol closets her queerness (her resistance) in episode six, once she (incorrectly) comes to believe she **cannot** be assimilated against her consent. Once the threat to her OWN identity is gone, her queerness evaporates (or is closeted?), leaving Carol to face her past trauma, current **loneliness/isolation in that identity** and eventually suicidality, self-dissolution/ego-death (fireworks) which is **the return of the desire to merge with the transversal.** But for Carol, this merger can only be with things "as she remembers them", contrasted with the Other's clear desire for new experiences. (something new to read, the sound of trains, in the diner, "what are you feeling? we'd be honored to share it with you" the diner is an invitation to forget the difference. to closet. "those were the best days" Carol responds by demanding the collective use "I" pronouns. "you know I won't give up." "we know". Is Carol the anti-social queer of Leo bersani? Or the liberal, humanist reactionary "hero" of her own story? Is the boundarylessness of (we is us) the brown commons? Or a collapse into totalitarian unity? Queer-becoming is this unresolubility, indeterminacy, inassimilability of subject. Not through rejection but ontological insassimilability. Carol's queerness is the necessary space that keeps the totalitarian unity from systemic closure. But that queerness is not Carol's "heroic" identity which comes from trauma, but the existence of her agency in the field of . Agential realism offers a mechanism for this queer gap to be nomadic or fluid. Agential Cuts offer a pragmatic for dis-re-locating these intra-active *discontinuities/lacunae that are **not outside** the assemblage (plane of consistency).* 3. **Queer Identity vs Queer-Becoming/Queer Ontology** If queer-becoming produces counter-publics via traditions of disidentification (resistance of assimilation/conformity) in pursuit of more utopian (post-human) futures---is the queer subject fluid enough to persist when that utopian imaginary is realized? 4. . **Disidentification with Identity** Can there be queerness without an "identity" (individual subject)? What may emerge from an intersection of queer disidentification (Munoz) and the radical posthuman teleology of a zoe-geo-human continuum (Braidotti) or agential realism (Barad). - 5. Carol's ***existence*** is the queer-becoming that never "becomes" (capture/territorialization) by not consenting to **be** a single being (moten). Carol's **identity** is a queer reactionary who refuses “to consent not to be a single being.” her whose lack of interest in "Others" interiority. "did you ask them what it's like" demands a return to "the way things are supposed to be" The Others are the **Brown Commons** (also Munoz) but they become totalizing, seeing Carol's inassimilability (and unhappiness) as "drowning" or brokenness. But the show maintains a queer refusal to resolve into a simple good/bad binary, minding the gap of discontinuity, maintaining openness, rejecting closure. this queerness happens at a level that transcends identity (the anti-social identity vs the anti-totalizing function). White antisocial individual identity functions as a strategy for disorientation. queerness is a lacuna in the plane of consistency, not an identity outside but a nomadic discontinuity that arises within the assemblage when there is a threat of totalization, to interrupt the threat. queerness is not failure, but a corrective measure, the immune response in the assemblage that prevents closure. a gap-within that allows the immanence to avoid concretization, systemic closure and collapse. Within the diagesis of Carol vs the Other there is seeming paradox or irreconcilable binary between agency, and collectivity. But the show provides a different agential cut, where queer resistance is situated within, not against, and is nomadic and necessary. Not for a return to the past but to maintain possibility for a future. ### philosophical ##### Butler ##### Deleuze #### Posthumanism ##### Hayle ##### Braidotti Braidotti, Rosi. “The Virtual as Affirmative Praxis: A Neo-Materialist Approach.” _Humanities_ 11, no. 3 (2022): 62. [https://doi.org/10.3390/h11030062](https://doi.org/10.3390/h11030062). “The virtual is a materialist way of defining the force of matter as embodied, embedded, relational, and affective in a vital, but not reductive, manner. The concept of the virtual instils the temporality of the constant becoming the ontological core of matter, assuming that all entities are variations on the same matter that unfolds, relationally, across multiple axes of encounter. This dynamic property of living matter is what makes it vital, that is to say, a non-essentialised vector of becoming.” (Braidotti, 2022, p. 1) “This transversal approach bridges the gap between the binary oppositions of nature/culture, human/non-human, and technology/matter. It proposes to replace such dualisms with a naturecultural continuum, which is immanent and, hence, embedded and embodied, constitutionally linked to others as well as technologically mediated. That is to say, naturecultural matter is a heterogeneous assembly that connects but does not amalgamate.” (Braidotti, 2022, p. 1) “Materialism is about the complexity of being embodied, embedded, relational, and affective. It is a philosophy of immanence, in that it assumes that matter is vital, intelligent, and self-organising, which, of course, includes a structural relationship to non-human entities. These non-humans are geological, zoological, ecological, and technological ‘others’, and they relate to humans not in any linear sequence or succession, but rather in dynamic inter-relations, transpositions, and becomings. What moves them is their shared capacity to affect and be affected by one another. This mutual force of attraction sets in motion flows of relations that inform and transform all participants.” (Braidotti, 2022, p. 1-2) #### Queer Theory “the vital force of the concept of queerness: the force to affect and effect changes in the way one theorises, its capacity to produce deviant lines along established thinking and disciplines, its ability to queer the queer, that is, to undermine the self, to resist any normalisation.” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 1) “‘Is queer theory a reflection on what it means to be queer, or does the concept of queerness change the ways in which we theorise?’'... Whereas the first question presupposes a ‘being’ that is queer, and hence that theory is a mere reflection, mirroring, moulding, a grasping of what already exists as given or produced: the queer performative ‘being’ as a culturally given way of being queer, or better, a way of doing queer that constructs a supposed preceding being – ‘the doer’, which has nevertheless always been the deed – the latter on the other hand signifies a rupture in the established ways of thinking, suggesting an intrinsic queerness in thinking and in theorising that breaks away from a representational thought, with the latter confusing what exists with what can be known (a conflation of ontology with epistemology). Where the Butlerian theory of performativity fits into the first definition, the DeleuzoGuattarian thinking is inherently queer by distancing itself from a representational conception of thinking; hence, a thinking, which far from being reproductive (by representing, recognising) is primarily productive mainly by being expressive of non/extra-linguistic forces.” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 2-3)” “Within this framework, difference can only be conceived of as a deviation from one, single model: a hierarchical differentiation starting and descending from the dominant signifier (the white (hu)man Face, the majoritarian, white, hetero, able bodied male) (Shildrick, this volume) that leads to a prolific production of minoritarian others always in response to the established norms. It thus fails to conceive of difference beyond the level of the signifier, outside the Law; so that ‘our’ claim for a positive difference that precedes signification and pre-exists constitution is simply unimaginable, unintelligible within a linguistic framework. It seems for you, difference can only bear the majoritarian definition of minoritarian others, since it is doomed to remain the product of an either/ or process: an exclusionary, traumatising difference working through negation, identification and melancholy that produces different-others always stuck in inferior positions.” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 4) “a departure from one’s thinking about constructed wholes and identities, which in turn produces another discussion about (queer) subjectivities/identities, so that one instead shifts the focus to the micro, the molecular: singular acts and practices of a non-referential nature, organs and body-parts in their unnatural, anarchic connection, microsexualities bubbling underneath the organism, qualitative multiplicities consisting of micro-singularities, pre-constituted differences of a nonlinguistic character, ‘an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 213)” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 5) “As you may have already noted, my discourse moves in-between a ‘we’, a ‘one’ and an ‘I’, all used interchangeably, when referring to this collection; an undecidability that aims at making clear that it is not the editor’s intention to talk on behalf of the contributors or to present one single, personal discourse (the editorial voice) that pulls together all the different ideas and styles of writing that follow. On the contrary, it constitutes an attempt to make room for what follows: not one, single, coherent theory on sexuality and difference, but an assemblage of texts, of multiple voices, of writings-in-variation; a thinking together that presupposes a thinking in solitude, the sharing of a territory in difference.” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 8) “queering produces becomings that go beyond normative couplings to invent new connections be it with humans, animals, vegetals or machines.” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 25) “that takes as its point of departure the division between a desire for rights to established values – such as marriage – and of queering, that is, of making strange all of present society (Warner 1999)” (“Deleuze and queer theory”, 2010, p. 25) "In the common gossip of friends catching up on girlfriends, in the magazines and videos that are sold and traded around and pored over, in the bars where hair of all kinds gets let down, in personal ads that declare tastes hitherto unknown to man, in scenes where some mad drag queen is likely to find the one thing most embarrassing to everyone and scream it at the top of her lungs, in Radical Faeries gatherings and S/M workshops-in these and other scenes of queer culture it may seem that life has been freed from any attempt at respectability or dignity. Everyone's a bottom, everyone's a slut, anyone who denies it is sure to meet justice at the hands of a bitter, shady queen, and if it's possible to be more exposed and abject then it's sure to be only a matter of time before someone gets there, probably on stage and with style." (Warner, Ethics p34) "In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated, the ground rule is that one doesn't pretend to be above the indignity of sex. And although this usually isn't announced as an ethical vision, that's what it perversely is. In queer circles, you are likely to be teased and abused until you grasp the idea. Sex is understood to be as various as the people who have it. It is not required to be tidy, normal, uniform, or authorized by the government. This kind of culture is often denounced as relativist, self-indulgent, or merely libertine. In fact, it has its own norms, its own way of keeping people in line. I call its way of life an ethic not only because it is understood as a better kind of self-relation, but because it is the premise of the special kind of sociability that holds queer culture together. A relation to others, in these contexts, begins in an acknowledgment of all that is most abject and least reрutable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but because abjection is understood to be the shared condition, they also know how to communicate through such camaraderie a moving and unexpected form of generosity. No one is beneath its reach, not because it prides itself on generosity, but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge." (Warner, Ethics p35) ##### DeLauretis ##### Sedgwick "queer performativity" (1993) “The emergence of the first person, of the singular, of the present, of the active, and of the indicative are all questions, rather than presumptions, for queer performativity.” (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 4) “Shame, like other affects, is not a discrete intrapsychic structure, but a kind of free radical that (in different people and also in different cultures) attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of-of almost anything: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a permitted behavior, another affect such as anger o r arousal, a named identity, a script for interpreting other people’s behavior toward oneself” (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 12) “The forms taken by shame are not distinct “toxic” parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed.” (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 13) ##### Edelman Antisocial thesis “In what follows I want to interrogate the politics that informs the pervasive trope of the child as figure for the universal value attributed to political futurity and to pose against it the impossible project of a **queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition.** This paradoxical formulation suggests the energy of resistance---the characteristically perverse resistance informing the work of queer theory---to the substantialization of identities, especially as defined through opposition, as well as to the political fantasy of shaping history into a narrative in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself, as itself, through time. By attempting to resist that coercive faith in political futurity, while refusing as well any hope for the sort of dialectical access to meaning that such resistance, as quintessential political gesture, holds out, I mean to insist that **politics is always a politics of the signifier, and that queer theory's interventions in the reproduction of dominant cultural logics must never lose sight of its figural relation to the vicissitudes of signification.** Queer theory, as a particular story of where storytelling fails, one that takes the value and burden of that failure upon itself, occupies, I want to suggest, the impossible "other" side where narrative realization and derealization overlap.” (“The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive”, p. 19) ##### Munoz ##### identification/counteridentification/disidentification “For Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm in which subjects are called into being or "hailed," a process he calls "interpellation." Ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The location of ideology is always within an apparatus and its practice or practices, such as the state apparatus. \[Michelle\] Pecheux built on this theory by describing the three modes in which a subject is constructed by ideological practices. In this schema the first mode is understood as **"identification,"** where a "Good Subject" chooses the path of identification with discursive and ideological forms. "Bad Subjects" resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel, to **"counteridentify"** and turn against this symbolic system. The danger that Pecheux sees in such an operation would be the counterdetermination that such a system installs, ***a structure that validates the dominant ideology** by reinforcing its dominance through the controlled symmetry of "counterdetermination.*" **Disidentification** is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that ***neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it***; rather, disidentification is a strategy that "works on and against dominant ideology."5” (Munoz, 2020, p. 147) \[disidentification\] “is about expanding and problematizing identity and identification, not abandoning any socially prescribed identity component.” (Munoz, 2020, p. 150) “Disidentification, as a mode of understanding the movements and circulations of identificatory force, would always foreground that lost object of identification, establishing new possibilities while at the same time echoing the materially prescriptive cultural locus of any identification.” (Munoz, 2020, p. 152) "...what it means to have been sent, as Glissant says, (Lorna Goodison says to have been sent by history) “to consent not to be a single being.” **What does it mean to have been sent to give yourself away? Pretty much everybody I know is driven to dissent from such a movement, where consent is inseparable from a monstrous imposition**... impossible assent, _consentement impossible, glissment impossible_..." -Moten "[brown commons](https://lithub.com/towards-a-definition-of-the-brown-commons/)" *The brown commons is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse to move beyond the singular subjectivity and the individualized subjectivities* -Munoz ### Representational | | Gender | Orientation | Affective | Ontology | Ethics | | ----------------- | ------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------- | -------------------- | ------------------------------ | | **"The Others"** | various | pan/poly | Equilibrium (but vulnerable) | transversalist | Affirmative, Posthuman (vegan) | | **Carol** | cis | homosexual | Depressed | Atheist Materialist | individualistic | | **Manousos** | cis | asexual(?) | Anxious/paranoid | Religious | transactional | | **Diabate** | epicene | poly, heterosexual ([anyone else?](https://youtu.be/Jga34BoTnlY?si=PCS8LBzxrIbasyMe&t=220)) | Decadent | Humanist Materialist | | | **Wycaro Fandom** | various | | various | | | | | | | | | | ### Cultural/Political **explicitly queer** - conversion therapy Freedom Falls (ep 4) - closeted (refusal to be known) - forces "I" pronouns onto the "We" **Woke vulnerability** - lack of self-interest/survival instinct - most of the population will die of starvation - atom bomb:"it would be okay to say no at that point. that would be sane." - otoh not very vulnerable to emotional manipulation **paranoia/ xenophobia** - "only the english speakers" - "survivors" - "afflicted" **loss of culture** - Shakespeare, Quarto of 1597) - O'Keefe museum - Kusumayo's village - cooking as haunting, reproduction, cartography/decal - diabate - poulez yassa - breakfast "sandwich" - all eating different foods in bilbao - cover songs (international versions of pop songs) - "we are so excited about having something new to read" **authority** - military, police - cruiser - adam 12 - coyotes - shotgun - handcuff - Political - Under secrtary of agriculture - mayor of albequerque "thnak you for your vote" - can't lie, but lawyer speak. **bio-medical** - consent - manufacturing of HDP - stem cells/IVF - heroin "sophmore year was tough" - manousos "medical bills" **environmental/ecological** - "Peak oil" transition handbook - waste/efficiency - Animals - after the lab rats at the beginning, nature is a minor participant until after - - E3 "sprouts", turning off power, first coyotes, turning power back on - - - but by episode five, - coyotes @ trash - crows @ dairy - coyotes @ grave - buffalo @ golf - vs "Western Wolf" - buffalo - bear Jordan - freeing of the animals - Trash - zosia recycling her clothes - manousos licking can from trash - carol throwing away platter (and crashing the drone) - milk cartons Romantasy - burying body - stopping the plane - crashing car through fence - fireworks? - alcoholism ### Formal \[queerness\] “not only works against narrativity, the generic pressure of all narrative toward closure and the fulfillment of meaning, but also pointedly disrupts the referentiality of language and the referentiality of images,” (Lauretis, 2011, p. 244) #### examples time warping interstitials +/- Days, hours synchronized movement - swabbing petri dishes - cars leaving the culdesac - filling the sprouts - leaving the hospital overhead, wild angles - angled shot loading sprouts - sideways in the hospital - overhead car window shot color grading, esp. bright blue/yellow, humor out of sync with content - unicorn - hand grenade - AED - WTF cold opens (ep 2, 4) - thiopental sodium - Milk mystery - repetitions - voice mail "our feelings for you haven't changed..." - extremely precise memory - "Cottn candy 4 times in her life." ## Other Hive Minds The [**Borg**](https://youtu.be/rXzJFoAtilc?si=lZrQ9W-KhJyTWNio)/[**Cybermen**](https://youtu.be/FBHGbBJwyh0?si=M7_yf0tNEzIBolEL) as totalizing hegemony the ultimate "straight" hive mind **[Unity](https://www.wco.tv/rick-and-morty-season-2-episode-3-auto-erotic-assimilation)** a kind of "straight" collective (Rick and Morty Season 2 Episode 3) [**Sense8**](https://blindfieldjournal.com/2015/08/14/roundtable-sense8/) a kind of queer intersubjective/collective/minority/counterpublic **[Dark City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW2acP4-A9M)** a collectivity attempting to individuate Midwich Cuckoos / [Village of the Damned](https://archive.org/details/village-of-the-damned?start=3824) an invasive, superior minority **[Mass Games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67T9-43hb5I&list=RD67T9-43hb5I&start_radio=1)** ### other others ***[The Rook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rook_(miniseries))*** Dead Ringers [A Song for Lya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Lya_(novella)) Stephen Universe: Fusion, Clusters [seven of nine](https://youtu.be/dv8LSu9vljw?si=0ibtSD_6fmQqT_Cj) [Vampires of sinners](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq2Q8ZyjC-c) #### reddit list threads: - [one](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/cldo6i/does_anyone_know_of_any_books_that_feature_a/) - [two](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/1pj9xn8/good_hive_minds_examples/) #### Real World [Superorganism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism) [Holobiont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holobiont) [Unanimous.ai](https://unanimous.ai/) - To bring **Swarm AI** to major markets around the world, we have two powerful software platforms. [**Swarm**](https://unanimous.ai/swarm) is a graphical platform that enables networked human groups to quickly converge on AI-optimized decisions, predictions, insights, and assessments. [**Thinkscape**](https://unanimous.ai/thinkscape) is a conversational platform that allows networked groups (up to 400 people) to hold real-time deliberations and amplify their combined knowledge, wisdom, insights, and perspectives. ### Genre Conventions [TV Tropes - Hive Mind](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HiveMind) [TV Tropes - The Virus](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheVirus) [Wikipedia - Group Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction)) see also [Clone Angst](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CloneAngst), [Uniqueness value](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UniquenessValue) [Wikipedia list - Hive Minds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hive_minds_in_fiction) [Wikipedia list - Swarm intelligence list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence#In_popular_culture) ## pluribus materials [Transcripts](https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewforum.php?f=5952) ep1 ### pluribus clips E2: Diabate "...I am not convinced things are as bad as you say. As we speak, no one is being robbed or murdered. No one is in prison. The color of one's skin, by all accounts, now meaningless. All zoos are empty. All dogs are off their chains. Peace on earth." Carol: Cool plane. Really. Meanwhile, everybody everywhere else has turned into some kind of fucking pod person. Right? And it does not matter how nice they are to us or how many supermodels they send to peel our grapes and jerk us off, that does not change the fact that this is not right. I… I've seen this movie. We've all seen this movie. And we know it does not end well... ### other video Clips: [hive curious?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33v_D5MV3Gc) ["what pronouns do you use for the hive mind?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n9xZ0pEGhE) 0:07 [The octopus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1SgW_gMMHI) - city of lost children [Dark City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW2acP4-A9M) - let the tuning commence [Auto Erotic Assimilation](https://www.wco.tv/rick-and-morty-season-2-episode-3-auto-erotic-assimilation) ## Pluribus Analyisis [Lesbian Mojo](https://youtu.be/mJq14jpI35s?si=bZUkKWIzIZAegNm-) ## Pluribus Behind the Scenes ## Quotes "Normalcy is the evil side of homosexuality" - jack smith, (qtd Munoz, p IX) kinks - [strangers](https://genius.com/The-kinks-strangers-lyrics) (dave davies) ## Hook: **Welcome to Utopia.** We welcome a newly conscious, profoundly inclusive, interconnected and interdependent humanity, who live collectively as ***part*** of the earth---not its self-appointed master. Overnight, the entire human race has abandoned every prejudice. Skin-color, Nationality, Gender and sexual identity---no longer produce fear, hostility, or contempt. Mental health, physical disability, and age are no longer grounds for social exclusion or injustice. The enforcement of gender roles and oppressive family systems that once produced generational trauma and abuse have now been abandoned. There is no more class struggle. Greed no longer incentivizes---the old maxim, *from each according to their ability to each according to their need* has replaced a culture that was built on consumerism and the exploitation of precarity. Old markers of qualification and attainment, like education, certification, and credentials, are now irrelevant. Only expertise and ability matter. There are no more religious conflicts. Violence, cruelty, even mere unkindness are things of the past. Humans, animals, and plants are viewed as equals. The human species has stopped exploitation and recognizes the inherent worth in all forms of life. Preventing environmental degradation and waste by ensuring the efficient use of natural resources is now common cause for humanity. Compassion, Curiosity, honesty, and emotional growth are now universal values. This new, entangled-world is the fulfillment of the posthuman project, a global emancipation and universal abolition. worldview that has evolved beyond the various provincial theisms, tribalisms, rejected Colonialisms' masters and slaves, then further evolved beyond the secular humanist centering of the "rational individual"---read: white, cis-het (male), able-bodied, neurotypical, subject at the heart of the humanist project. The hive is nonbinary, polyamorous, polymorphously perverse, but not queer. Carol is a closeted, cis-femme, monagamist, human-centric individualist, success-motivated capitalist who writes "speculative historical romance literature, unconcerned with the environment, even if she donated twice to greenpeace. ### Telepathy Literature, Technology, Thinking. 1880-1920 (p. 25-26) “Thurschwell, P. (2001). Literature, technology and magical thinking, 1880-1920. Cambridge University Press. Created from washington on 2026-02-13 21:44:41.” (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 26) “If the world becomes a smaller place because of telecommunication, telepathy too is imagined to create connections with even more startling potential effects. In his book On the Threshold of the Unseen, William Barrett, one of the staunchest supporters of the truth of telepathy, imagines a telepathic utopia where social justice would follow inevitably from shared thoughts: If we were involuntarily sharers in one another's pleasures and pains, the brotherhood of the race would not be a pious aspiration or a strenuous effort, but the reality of all others most vividly before us; the factor in our lives which would dominate all our conduct. What would be the use of a luxurious mansion at the West End and Parisian cooks if all the time the misery and starvation of our fellow creatures at the East End were telepathically part and parcel of our daily lives? On the other hand what bright visions and joyous emotions would enter into many dreary and loveless lives if this state of human responsiveness were granted to the race!41 In this scenario, the ethical consequences of telepathy would mean that the rich would have to think about the poor and the poor could telepathically share the privileges of the rich.” (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 25) “How a piece of information (I'm thinking of a number from one to ten) gets from one place to another, and what that means in terms of the relationship between the bodies and minds that pass that information along is not as simple a problem as it may First appear. For psychical researchers, as for other commentators at the time, telepathy both promised and threatened that the mind was not necessarily a sealed and protected space. Critical interpretation of telepathy suggests that the mind's potential porousness was made to serve the purposes of the most erotically charged, as well as the most scientifically removed purposes, in a telepathic dialectic of touch and distance.” (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 36) ## Episode synopses from [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(TV_series)) ### 1 "We Is Us" Vince Gilligan Vince Gilligan November 7, 2025 Astronomers detect a radio signal from space that spells out a viral RNA sequence. Over a year, researchers reproduce the viral sequence in a lab, but an outbreak occurs one night, causing those infected to act collectively, spreading the virus through saliva. Romantasy novelist Carol Sturka returns to Albuquerque after her latest book tour with her manager and partner Helen. After planes disperse an aerosol, everyone around Carol, including Helen, begins to suddenly convulse. Carol rushes Helen to a hospital, finding the city overrun with chaos and destruction along the way. Carol is alarmed to find everyone at the hospital is infected and knows her name; Helen soon dies from her injuries. Carol flees to her house, where she discovers a TV broadcast showing a man in the White House press room with a lower third showing Carol's name and a phone number on-screen. When she calls, the man explains that the virus has transformed humanity into a permanently happy and peaceful hive mind. He tells Carol that she and eleven others appear immune, and the hive mind will grant their requests, but shares that the hive mind still seeks to assimilate them. ### 2 "Pirate Lady" Vince Gilligan Vince Gilligan November 7, 2025 While burying Helen, Carol is approached by Zosia, a member of the hive mind (the "Others"), who explains that all infected humans share one consciousness, containing each other's memories—including Helen's. When Carol lashes out at her, Zosia convulses. After recovering, Zosia reveals that Carol's anger overwhelmed the hive mind and that many died. Carol demands to meet the five other immune English speakers, and the Others arrange a meetup in Bilbao, Spain. One survivor, the hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, arrives aboard Air Force One, where the group assembles. Carol discovers the other survivors have accepted the new collective existence, despite her pleas to search for a cure. Zosia explains that the Others are nonviolent, but admits that over 886 million people died during the initial "Joining". Enraged, Carol accidentally triggers a second deadly global seizure, prompting the other survivors to abandon her. Koumba tells Carol he plans to travel to Las Vegas with Zosia as a sexual companion, but he requires Carol's permission. Carol protests but allows it before getting on her own commercial jet to return home. When she sees Zosia leaving with Koumba, she has a change of heart and rushes to stop their departing plane. ### 3 "Grenade" Gordon Smith Gordon Smith November 14, 2025 More than seven years before the Joining, Carol and Helen visit an ice hotel, after Carol had her egg cells frozen, where they witness the aurora borealis. In the present, Carol and Zosia fly back to Albuquerque, during which Carol calls Manousos, one of the immune, but he curses at her. Zosia provides Carol with a gift that Helen had ordered before the Joining; Carol demands the hive mind completely forget about Helen. Carol refuses a meal prepared by the Others and instead goes grocery shopping, finding her local store empty because of the Others' allocation of resources. At Carol's request, the store is immediately restocked. Angered by a forced power outage, Carol sarcastically asks for a hand grenade. Later, Zosia brings a grenade to Carol's home. Over drinks, Carol vents her frustrations and primes the hand grenade, thinking it is fake, but is shocked to learn it is real. Zosia quickly throws it away, but is injured in the explosion and taken to a hospital. While waiting for Zosia to recover, Carol speaks to a representative of the hive mind, asking if they would give her anything, even an atom bomb. When the hive mind confirms that they would, Carol dismisses the representative as she contemplates. ### 4 "Please, Carol" Zetna Fuentes Alison Tatlock November 21, 2025 In a flashback, Manousos, living in a storage facility office in Paraguay, refuses help from the Others. He ransacks the lockers for food when he receives Carol's call. In the present, Carol returns home from the hospital and starts to compile a list of facts she has learned about the Others, determining they cannot lie. Carol goes to Zosia at the hospital to ask if the Joining is reversible, but the hive mind refuses to answer. Carol secretly takes vials of sodium thiopental and tests its effectiveness as a truth serum at home, revealing to herself that she is sexually attracted to Zosia. Back at the hospital, Carol takes Zosia for a walk outside the hospital, stealthily injecting the serum into her IV bag. When Zosia starts to lose clarity, Carol tries to probe the answer from her about reversing the Joining. Zosia struggles to speak, while several Others arrive to surround them, repeatedly chanting "Please, Carol". Zosia collapses from cardiac arrest, with members of the hive mind coming in to try to revive her. ### 5 "Got Milk" Gordon Smith Ariel Levine November 26, 2025 After Zosia is returned to the hospital, Laxmi, one of the immune, calls Carol and berates her for disrupting the Others. Carol naps, during which the entire Albuquerque population departs, leaving a recorded message telling Carol they need space from her. She records a video message to the other twelve immune, explaining what she's learned and asking for their help. In trying to prevent wolves from digging in her garbage, she takes her trash to town and discovers a large number of empty milk cartons from a local dairy. She investigates and finds that, instead of milk, the dairy was producing a strange fluid created from a bagged crystalline substance. Carol performs tests on the bagged substance, recording her observations in a video for the immune. She postulates the Others drink it to maintain the hive mind. The wolves return for more food and attempt to dig up Helen's body. Carol scares them away with her police car and lays heavy tiles over the grave to protect it. After finding a barcode on the bag, she traces its origin to a local food packaging plant and discovers something shocking hidden under a tarp. ### 6 "HDP" Gandja Monteiro Vera Blasi December 5, 2025 Carol records her discovery from the packaging warehouse, which is filled with hundreds of shrink-wrapped human body parts. She drives to Las Vegas, where Koumba is living in the penthouse of the Westgate, causing the Others to leave the city. When Carol arrives, Koumba reveals he is already aware of her findings. He shows her a recording that explains that the Others cannot kill any animal or plant; hence, to sustain their bodies, they supplement their diet with human-derived protein (HDP) from dead bodies. Koumba also reveals that he and most of the immune stay in touch over video calls from which Carol is excluded due to a majority vote, which devastates her. The next morning, Koumba reveals the Others have learned how to convert the immune by extracting their stem cells and customizing the virus for each individual – but they require the person's consent to do so. Carol calls the Others to firmly refuse consent before leaving. Three days prior, Manousos receives the first of Carol's video messages and realizes he is not alone. Taking Carol's address from the package, he gets in his car and drives away. ### 7 "The Gap" Adam Bernstein Jenn Carroll December 12, 2025 Carol returns to Albuquerque and exploits luxuries abandoned by, or requested from, the hive mind as they continue to avoid her. Manousos ventures across South America alone, running low on fuel, food and water, but refusing help from the Others. He practices English by listening to language lesson tapes along the way. When he reaches the Darién Gap, the Others warn him of dangerous conditions and urge him not to continue his journey on foot, offering to transport him and his car directly to Carol. In response, Manousos defiantly burns his car and tells the Others that he will never accept their help because everything they could offer him is stolen. During his trek through the jungle, Manousos trips and is impaled on a chunga palm tree. Despite attempts to cauterize his wounds, he collapses and is rescued by the Others. Having spent over a month in isolation, Carol succumbs to depression. She paints a message on the street asking the Others to come back to her, leading to Zosia's arrival at her home. Carol tearfully embraces her. ### 8 "Charm Offensive" Melissa Bernstein Jonny Gomez December 19, 2025 Manousos wakes up in a Panamanian hospital, being treated for his injuries. Despite the Others' caution that he still needs time to recover, he forcefully demands to leave and drives away in an ambulance. In Albuquerque, Carol spends the day with Zosia as the Others return to the city. Zosia shows Carol how they sleep in groups inside big spaces, and Carol stays with the Others overnight. The two spend more time the next day, and Zosia tells Carol about the alien signal's origin and the Others' plan to build a giant antenna to transmit the signal to other planets. Later, they visit a diner with connections to Carol's writing career which was rebuilt from scratch by the Others. That night, Carol explains that the situation with the Others is unsustainable, and she knows the hive mind is attempting to distract her from pursuing a solution. Zosia kisses Carol and they sleep together. The next morning, Carol produces the first chapter of the next book in her Winds of Wycaro series. Several days later, Zosia informs Carol she is about to have a visitor as Manousos nears the Mexico–U.S. border. ### 9 "La Chica o El Mundo"[a] Gordon Smith Alison Tatlock & Gordon Smith December 24, 2025 Manousos arrives at Carol's home. Carol uses a translator app to communicate with him, and he reveals his intent to destroy the Others if the Joining cannot be reversed. Manousos searches Carol's home for listening devices. Carol brings him to stay at one of her neighbor's homes. After seeing Carol call Zosia, Manousos asks the Others to send Zosia to talk to him privately. Carol takes her away, but Manousos calls for another member of the Others to replace Zosia. Zosia suddenly goes into convulsions and Carol finds that Manousos has intentionally triggered a global seizure to test the radio frequency he discovered. Carol stops him, and Zosia and the Others leave the city to protect themselves from Manousos. Carol leaves with Zosia, and they tour the world together for two weeks. During this time, Kusimayu, an immune teenager in rural Peru, willingly joins the Others. Zosia reveals Kusimayu's fate to Carol and confesses that the Others are working to extract Carol's stem cells from her frozen eggs, expecting to complete her custom virus in about a month. Carol has Zosia return her home with a large crate containing an atom bomb and tells Manousos that she is ready to help him. ## possible sources Bosworth, David. “Knowing Together: The Emergence of the Hive Mind.” _The Hedgehog Review_ (Charlottesville) 19, no. 1 (2017): 1-. Editor, Opinions. “‘Hive Minds’ in Media Reflect a Real-World Need for Compassion.” _The Commonwealth Times_, October 8, 2025. [https://commonwealthtimes.org/2025/10/08/hive-minds-in-media-reflect-a-real-world-need-for-compassion/](https://commonwealthtimes.org/2025/10/08/hive-minds-in-media-reflect-a-real-world-need-for-compassion/). Gaggioli, Compiled by Andrea. “The ‘Hive Mind’ Is Near.” _Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking_ (Los Angeles, CA) 20, no. 5 (2017): 341–42. [https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2017.29071.csi](https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2017.29071.csi). “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance - University of Washington.” Accessed January 6, 2026. [https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/cdi_walterdegruyter_books_10_18574_nyu_9781479868780_003_0009/01ALLIANCE_UW:UW](https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/cdi_walterdegruyter_books_10_18574_nyu_9781479868780_003_0009/01ALLIANCE_UW:UW). Ho, Shuyuan Mary, Jeffrey Nickerson, and Qian Zhang. “Hive Mind Online: Collective Sensing in Times of Disinformation.” _Journal of Digital Social Research_ 4, no. 4 (2023): 89–129. [https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v4i4.119](https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v4i4.119). “Https://Orbiscascade-Washington.Primo.Exlibrisgroup.Com.” Accessed January 7, 2026. [https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com](https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com). “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual? - University of Washington.” Accessed January 7, 2026. [https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com](https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com). Jones, Michael Thomas. “The Post-Woke Story of the Hive Mind | Michael Thomas Jones.” _American Reformer_, January 5, 2026. [https://americanreformer.org/2026/01/the-post-woke-story-of-the-hive-mind/](https://americanreformer.org/2026/01/the-post-woke-story-of-the-hive-mind/). Joseph, Rachel. “GLITTERING JUNK: JACK SMITH AND THE VAST LANDFILL OF IDENTITY.” _The Journal of American Drama and Theatre_ (New York) 25, no. 2 (2013): 77-. Khawalid, Alex, Dan Acristinii, Hans Van Toor, and Eduardo Castelló Ferrer. “Grex: A Decentralized Hive Mind.” _Ledger (Pittsburgh, Pa.)_ 4 (2019). [https://doi.org/10.5195/ledger.2019.176](https://doi.org/10.5195/ledger.2019.176). Lesbian Mojo, dir. _Pluribus: The Lesbian Storyline Everyone’s Talking About — Finally Real_. 2025. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJq14jpI35s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJq14jpI35s). Milliner, Matthew J. “Hive Mind: Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and the Church of the East.” _The Hedgehog Review_ (Charlottesville) 26, no. 3 (2024): 1-. Moten, Fred. “To Consent Not to Be a Single Being.” Blog. The Poetry Foundation, February 15, 2010. [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/uncategorized/53342/to-consent-not-to-be-a-single-being](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/uncategorized/53342/to-consent-not-to-be-a-single-being). Muñoz, José Esteban. _Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics_. Cultural Studies of the Americas ; Volume 2. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Towards a Definition of the Brown Commons.” _Literary  Hub_, October 23, 2020. [https://lithub.com/towards-a-definition-of-the-brown-commons/](https://lithub.com/towards-a-definition-of-the-brown-commons/). Nothing Radical. “Being an Ambassador to the Queer Hive Mind.” September 11, 2021. [https://nothingradical.blog/2021/09/11/being-an-ambassador-to-the-queer-hive-mind/](https://nothingradical.blog/2021/09/11/being-an-ambassador-to-the-queer-hive-mind/). “Queer Universes : Sexualities in Science Fiction - University of Washington.” Accessed January 7, 2026. [https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/alma99161863581501452/01ALLIANCE_UW:UW](https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/alma99161863581501452/01ALLIANCE_UW:UW). Zubillaga, Luciano. _TCOET: Queer Theory, Pornography, Science Fiction_. 2021. [https://doi.org/10.22024/UNIKENT/01.02.87797](https://doi.org/10.22024/UNIKENT/01.02.87797). Annotated Bib: ## Nomadic Subjects Discontinuous Becomings Ch.9 offers a bridge to D&G "becoming-minoritarian" via deleuzian feminism. Becomings, "there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion.""deleuze strikes an alliance with the subversive, radical, and irreverent strands of feminist thought."p245 "Deleuzian becoming is the affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation. Both teleological order and fixed identities are relinquished in favor of a flux of multiple becoming. "P246 "in deleuze's thought the "other" is not the emblematic and invariably vampirized mark of alterity, as in classical philosophy. Nor is it a fetishized and necessarily othered "other" as in decinstruction. It is a moving horizon of exchanges and becomings, toward which the nonunitary subjects of postmodernity move and by which they are moved in return."p246 "the body is not an essence, let alone a biological substance: it is a play of forces, a surface of intensities; pure simulacra without originals. Deleuze therefore de-essentializes the body, sexuality. and sexed identities." "how can deleuze not see that this neutralization of sexual differences can only damage the process of reclaiming a political subjectivity for women?" p259 "the process of freezing out time is very clear in artificial procreation; the reproductive process is broken down into a series of discontinuous steps: freezing the sperm, the ovum, or the embryo suspends the process ad infinitum." ## Thousand Plateaus “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language (Joyce's or Ezra Pound's Ulysses)” (Deleuze et al., 1989, p. 126) “It is obvious that "man" holds the majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way around.” (Deleuze et al., 1989, p. 126) “For the majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is never anybody, it is always Nobody—Ulysses—whereas the minority is the becoming of everybody, one's potential becoming to the extent that one deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian "fact," but it is the analytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of everybody. That is why we must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming. The problem is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant. There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian.” (Deleuze et al., 1989, p. 127) “There is a universal figure of minoritarian consciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation. One does not attain it by acquiring the majority. The figure to which we are referring is continuous variation, as an amplitude that continually oversteps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess or default.” (Deleuze et al., 1989, p. 127) Pluribus points to the limits of possibility in the homonormative push of becoming-majoritarian. in the homo-pluriban regime, Warner, Michael. _The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life_. 1st ed., Free Press, 1999. _orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com_, [https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0645/99044356-s.html](https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0645/99044356-s.html). Hardcover. Warner is a professor, fellow at Rutgers, and was frequently cited and influential in development of early queer theory. *The Trouble with Normal* is critical of an assimilationist approach to Gay and Lesbian issues, and distinguishes the use of the term "queer" to "suggest how many ways people can find themselves at odds with straight culture" p38.. draws on Bersani in analyzing the construction and fragility of straightness, the political and social mechanisms of shame in limiting sexual variance, and Warner focuses on offering a critique of the project of normalizing homosexual desire, without addressing the underlying "hierarchy of shame"---a practice of moralism that stigmatizes (and controls) the minoritarian subject. Offers definitional arguments about homonormativity and normality, and See also a chart on p 25 (from Rubin) that offers categorical sexual hierarchies | **Good, Normal, Natural** <br> | **Bad, Abnormal, Unnatural** | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Heterosexual <br>Married <br>Monogamous <br>Procreative <br>Noncommercial <br>In pairs <br>In a relationship <br>Same generation <br>In private <br>No pornography <br>Bodies only <br>Vanilla | Homosexual <br>Unmarried <br>Promiscuous <br>Nonprocreative <br>Commercial <br>Alone or in groups <br>Casual <br>Cross-generational <br>In public <br>Pornography <br>With manufactured objects <br>Sadomasochistic | "The received wisdom in straight culture, is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you are born with male genitalia, the logic goes, you will behave in masculine ways, desire women, desire feminine women, desire them exclusively, have sex in what are thought to be normally active and insertive ways and within officially sanctioned contexts, think of yourself as heterosexual, identify with other heterosexuals no matter how tolerant you might wish to be, and never change any part of this package from childhood to senescence. Heterosexuality is often a name for this entire package, even though attachment to the other sex is only one element. If you deviate at any point from this program, you do so at your own cost. And one of the things straight culture hates most is a sign that the different parts of the package might be recombined in an infinite number of ways. But experience shows that this is just what tends to happen. If heterosexuality requires the entire sequence, then it is very fragile" p37-38 \[in queer circles\] "Sex is understood to be as various as the people who have it."p35 ** Braidotti Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. “Queering the Coming Race?: A Utopian Historical Imperative.” Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by WENDY GAY PEARSON et al., 1st ed., vol. 37, Liverpool University Press, 2008, pp. 233–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjcss.17. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026. According to the introduction of Queer Universes, Kilgore is a professor, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space, and recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for Excellence in Scholarship. A brief review of Astrofuturism shows Kilgore is significantly engaged with the work of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, two touchstones for Queer Sci-Fi.  This chapter asks whether all science fiction utopias are ultimately limited to conceptions of “an ideology combining white supremacy with patriarchy”.   On p235, Kilgore references Sedgwick’s challenge to practices of ‘paranoid’ reading, a practice he demonstrates in his analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. This approach is relevant to this project as a hermeneutic for a more ‘hopeful’ (reparative) queer reading of the first season of this series which could eventually go in a more normative direction. In the ‘paranoid’ reading, Pluribus is still bound to these hierarchies by Carol’s homonormativity, and the hive’s inability to accept Carol’s disconsent to joining. This fits Kilgore’s reading of Robinson’s concerns that “The coming race could become a new ruling class, a caste physically and politically separate and dominant over common humanity even if queer in some physical or social way.” (p244) In a more hopeful reading, though, Pluribus offers a vision of “epistemic change, a new structure of feeling incommensurate with the currently dominant hegemony.” (p 234) Of course in this reading, Carol rejects the epistemic change and demands the return to a more familiar hegemony, even if it is pragmatically more oppressive. Potential Quote: “as I define it, a queer futurity, however much it must proceed from our present, nevertheless is incommensurate with our own circumstances as a predictable end. It is a process in which the complex imbrication of race and gender with hierarchy shifts into a shape we cannot anticipate.” (p. 235) Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. [https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384786](https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384786). Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal : Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Free Press, 1999. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0645/99044356-s.html. Warner is a professor, fellow at Rutgers, editor of Fear of a Queer Planet,1993 and was frequently cited and influential in the development of early queer theory. The Trouble with Normal is a polemic, critical of an assimilationist approach to Gay and Lesbian issues, and denotes the use of the term "queer" to "suggest how many ways people can find themselves at odds with straight culture" p38.  Chapter one, “The Ethics of Sexual Shame”, analyzes the construction and fragility of straightness, the political and social mechanisms of shame and stigma in limiting sexual variance. Warner primarily focuses on a critique of the project of normalizing homosexual desire, without addressing the underlying moralism that stigmatizes (and controls) the minoritarian subject. See also a chart on p 25 (drawn from Rubin) that offers categorical sexual hierarchies of shame. Chapter two, “What’s Wrong with Normal?” provides definitional arguments about homonormativity and normality, and illustrates the ambivalence of the “stigmaphile” and “stigmaphobe” worlds relative to the dominant culture (p43) “Sex and sexuality are disavowed as “irrelevant” in an attempt to fight stigma… It expresses the utopian notion that somewhere, one might not be defined by one’s sexuality, that stigma might simply vanish from among the living. But since that utopia exists nowhere in this culture’s near future, the idea reads as wishfulness…” p46 “like most stigmatized groups, gays and lesbians were always tempted to believe that the way to overcome stigma was to win acceptance by the dominant culture , rather than to change the self-understanding of that culture.” p50 In Pluribus Carol, as a public figure, is unwilling to disclose her sexual identity to her fans. But during the joining, Carol’s lesbian partner Helen’s memories and intimate knowledge of Carol become part of the global consciousness. The collective consciousness has extremely stringent ethical framework around violence and consent, but a radical indifference to old hierarchies and frameworks of sexual stigma.  | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Good, Normal, Natural | Bad, Abnormal, Unnatural | | - Heterosexual <br> <br>- Married<br> <br>- Monogamous<br> <br>- Procreative<br> <br>- Noncommercial<br> <br>- In pairs<br> <br>- In a relationship<br> <br>- Same generation<br> <br>- In private<br> <br>- No pornography<br> <br>- Bodies only<br> <br>- Vanilla | - Homosexual<br> <br>- Unmarried<br> <br>- Promiscuous<br> <br>- Nonprocreative<br> <br>- Commercial  <br> <br>- Alone or in groups  <br> <br>- Casual  <br> <br>- Cross-generational  <br> <br>- In public  <br> <br>- Pornography  <br> <br>- With manufactured objects <br> <br>- Sadomasochistic | Potential Quote: "The received wisdom in straight culture is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you are born with male genitalia, the logic goes, you will behave in masculine ways, desire women, desire feminine women, desire them exclusively, have sex in what are thought to be normally active and insertive ways and within officially sanctioned contexts, think of yourself as heterosexual, identify with other heterosexuals no matter how tolerant you might wish to be, and never change any part of this package from childhood to senescence. Heterosexuality is often a name for this entire package, even though attachment to the other sex is only one element. If you deviate at any point from this program, you do so at your own cost. And one of the things straight culture hates most is a sign that the different parts of the package might be recombined in an infinite number of ways. But experience shows that this is just what tends to happen. If heterosexuality requires the entire sequence, then it is very fragile" p37-38 Politics of the Pods ** Grant, Barry Keith. _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_. BFI Publishing, 2011. [http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=4762984](http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=4762984). Ağın, B. (2022). Coda: Affirming the Pathogenesis. In _Posthuman Pathogenesis_. Routledge. Ağın, B., & Arman Arı, G. (2025). Thinking-with Muñoz: A Posthuman Queer Ecological Cruise. _Utopian Studies_, _36_(1), 182–203. Ahmed, S. (2006). _Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others_. Duke University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388074](https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388074) Anzaldúa, G. (1987). _Borderlands = La frontera: The new mestiza_ (First edition.). Aunt Lute Books. Barad, K. (n.d.). _Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter_. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. _Parallax (Leeds, England)_, _20_(3), 168–187. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623](https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623) _Being an Ambassador to the Queer Hive Mind_. (2021, September 11). Nothing Radical. [https://nothingradical.blog/2021/09/11/being-an-ambassador-to-the-queer-hive-mind/](https://nothingradical.blog/2021/09/11/being-an-ambassador-to-the-queer-hive-mind/) Bersani, L. (2021). _Is the Rectum a Grave?_ _‎Bloodsong of Wycaro_. (2026). [https://books.apple.com/us/book/bloodsong-of-wycaro/id6754341665](https://books.apple.com/us/book/bloodsong-of-wycaro/id6754341665) Bosworth, D. (2017). Knowing Together: The Emergence of the Hive Mind. _The Hedgehog Review_, _19_(1), 1-. Braidotti, R. (2019). Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life. _Deleuze and Guattari Studies_, _13_(4), 463–481. [https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2019.0373](https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2019.0373) Braidotti, R. (2022). The Virtual as Affirmative Praxis: A Neo-Materialist Approach. _Humanities_, _11_(3), 62. [https://doi.org/10.3390/h11030062](https://doi.org/10.3390/h11030062) Braidotti, R. & DePaul University. (2019). Transversal Posthumanities. _Philosophy Today_, _63_(4), 1181–1195. [https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2020128318](https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2020128318) De Lauretis, T. (1987). _Technologies of gender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction_. Indiana University Press. de Lauretis, T. (2011). Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future. _GLQ_, _17_(2–3), 243–263. [https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163391](https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163391) Edelman, L. (2004). _No future: Queer theory and the death drive_. Duke University Press. Editor, O. (2025, October 8). ‘Hive minds’ in media reflect a real-world need for compassion. _The Commonwealth Times_. 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Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only. _Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies_, _17_(1), 1–6. [https://doi.org/10.1080/1071441950170102](https://doi.org/10.1080/1071441950170102) Halberstam, J. (2011). _The queer art of failure_. Duke University Press. Ho, S. M., Nickerson, J., & Zhang, Q. (2023). Hive Mind Online: Collective Sensing in Times of Disinformation. _Journal of Digital Social Research_, _4_(4), 89–129. [https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v4i4.119](https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v4i4.119) _Https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com_. (n.d.). Retrieved January 7, 2026, from [https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com](https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com) Hutchison, A. L. (n.d.). _14. 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