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Speculative fiction has always been political, showcasing diversity and interrogating both current events and larger questions of humanity and society. The articles in this Special Issue, coming out of the annual conference of the German Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung in 2020, discuss a variety of different approaches.

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Citizenship" has seen an astounding revival as an analytical category, not only in Political Theory and the Social Sciences but also in Literary and Cultural Studies. Through "storying" citizenship (Chariandy), works of literature can productively negotiate established "civic myths" of citizenship (Thomas), i. e., stories about normative national membership; moreover, they point to contradictions, inclusions and exclusions, and shifts in understandings of what constitutes a citizen in a globalized world. This introduction provides an overview of important issues and approaches that have shaped "citizenship" as an analytical category in American Literary Studies in the past fifteen years. Focusing on the (largely neglected) systematic distinction between "citizenship" and "the citizen," it highlights the necessity of scrutinizing how literature imagines and narrates particular kinds of citizens and how such images tie in with, counter, or modify long-standing normative models of the citizen-in short, how literature "stories" citizenship and the citizen as potentially both normative and emancipatory concepts of political belonging and participation.

This chapter explores the intersectionality of seeking citizenship and gender on the movement strategies of undocumented youths by tracing the evolvement of the Undocuqueer movement within the overall undocumented youth movement in the United States since 2001. By analyzing both tactics and narrative self-representations of Undocuqueer activists, it describes the specificities of UndocuQueer challenges and opportunities in order to trace how LGBTQ representations of undocumented youth legitimized themselves within the larger scope of the movement. In the course of this discussion, it is clear that the UndocuQueer tactics are not be understood as a parallel occurrence to earlier representations of undocumentedness, but instead as an intersecting one in the fight for social justice, which almost organically grew from within the overall undocumented community.