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     It was my great pleasure to have my long friend Dr. Marleen S. Barr as a guest speaker of our Omnibus “Triculture” Lecture Series: Season Three on October 12, 2024.  Dr. Barr has already been very well-known as a feminist scholar critic and writer of speculative fiction who published such significant books that she received in 1997 the prestigious Pilgrim Award from Science Fiction Research Association. Hence her sensational title of the lecture “The Queens English or What’s a Nice Feminist Scholar Like Me Doing Writing Science Fiction about a Former President Like This?”

         Before explaining her works, let me recollect the year of 2000, when I first met Dr. Barr in Japan.  Back in the 1990s I was deeply involved with the annual conference of American Studies Summer Seminar held at Hokkaido University in Sapporo and Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, which provided us with opportunities to discuss the cutting-edge topics with quite a few distinguished literary and cultural Americanist such as Michael T. Gilmore, Emory Elliott, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. In 2000 I was required to join the executive committee of the conference, the chairman of which asked me to invite a scholar critic endowed with a broad, inspiring perspective and familiar with contemporary literary-cultural/critical trends ranging from New Historicism, Post-Colonialism, Cyborg Feminism through Queer Reading.  This chairman, Professor Takashi Sasaki of Doshisha University further looked for someone qualified to clarify the impact of virtual reality technology upon gender, class, and race within the postmodern discursive framework.   

      This is the reason why I decided to invite Dr. Marleen Barr to pay the first visit to Japan in the summer of 2000. Since her literary critical masterpieces like Alien to Femininity （Greenwood, 1987）and Lost in Space （The University of North Carolina Press, 1993）, which radically explored into differences within femininity, had already been introduced to Japan by Japanese feminist critic Mari Kotani, whose 1994 book Techno-Gynesis (Keiso Shobo, 1994), the winner of the 15^th Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize, digested and incorporated Dr. Barr’s theory into her own approach, she was already famous among the Japanese feminist intellectuals. Therefore, I was very pleased that Dr.Barr accepted my offer and participated in the American Studies Summer Seminar in Kyoto in 2000, making the whole conference extremely exciting.

Accordingly, after the lapse of 24 years, I feel very pleased that Dr. Barr accepted my second invitation, not in Kyoto but in New York this time.

      Marleen Barr received M.A. from University of Michigan in 1975 and Ph.D. from State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1979. Since then she has taught at not only City University of New York but also German institutions such as the University of Dusseldorf and the University of Tubingen. What makes Dr. Barr’s work remarkable, however, is her feminist literary criticism in the field of speculative fiction. She published influential monographs as represented by Alien to Femininity (1987), Feminist Fabulation (1992), Lost in Space (1993), which was translated into Japanese by Mari Kotani and her friends, and Genre Fission: a New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (2000). There is no doubt that in the past three decades Dr.Barr, together with Donna Haraway, professor of University of California, Santa Cruz, powerfully promoted the revolutionary discipline of Cultural Studies from a critical feminist perspective.

          In the past two decades Dr. Barr published not only academic criticisms but also creative writings such as Oy Pioneer! (2003) and especially When Trump Changed (collection, 2018) as a radical critique of the autocratic political context. In this sense, her new book This Former President (2023) featuring transactions between feminist extraterrestrials and the postmodern patriarch could well be considered as a sequel to her 2018 book When Trump Changed. Please note this title as a kind of ironic allusion to distinguished feminist writer Joanna Russ’s highly acclaimed short story “When It Changed” (1972), in which women’s utopia no longer needs any man biologically and ideologically.

             Thus, I contributed a blurb to Dr. Barr’s The Former President (Dark Helix Press, 2023):

Literary historians, who have long considered American presidents to be literary figures, have compiled anthologies which reflect their pride in regard to presidential discourses. However, former president Donald Trump defaced this heritage by awkwardly mocking postmodernists and falsely presenting post-truth and alternative facts as his original ideas.  Outraged by Trump’s shameless performances and insults to the dignity of the humanities, Earth’s mightiest feminist Dr. Marleen S. Barr has created the most strategic and most science-fictional doomsday machine exclusively designed for abolishing the discursive network of Trumpism. Postmodernism may fail, but Science fiction will prevail.

      What impressed me most is that in response to a students’ question about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), Dr. Barr didn’t regard those whose opinions contradict her own as her enemies. True democracy doesn’t exclude even the discourse of anti-democracy. By the same token, however, we should be more keenly aware that insofar as democracy is a Utopian vision, we have never achieved a truly democratic nation yet. As Jacques Derrida once pointed out, what we can perceive now is none other than “Democracy to Come.”