Introduction: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating new worlds by re-imagining hacking

Feminist Storytellers Imagining New Stories to Tell

“…However, we focus on the work of feminists because we find ourselves in it. It welds us together in alliances "to transform and narrate [us] who go unrecognized and whose existence is considered impossible" (Toupin & Spideralex, 2018).…”

“…This chapter will take us, its writers and readers, to a dinner, inspired by the creative writing of Lillian, Rosa and other feminist authors who tell stories. It involves reading, quoting, conspiring, studying and supporting each other while summoning other feminists to do the same (Toupin & Spideralex, 2018).…”

“The only way we knew how:” provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials

“…It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” ( 2016 , p. 12). Fabulation as a critical feminist practice and speculative undertaking aims to use supposition, storytelling, and imagination to build more inhabitable worlds; it has the ability to act infrastructurally to circulate feminist ideas and imaginaries (Toupin and Spideralex 2018 ).…”

“…Alternative Toronto’s willingness to recognize the confluence of feminist ideas, attitudes and concerns beyond a generational rhetoric, while still acknowledging how feminism is understood and articulated by different people at different points in time, demonstrates how this archive has the ability to put contexts that may be “rife with contradiction” in dialogue with one another and transmit that uncertainty across space and time (Toupin and Spideralex 2018 ). It composes an important material-technological node in the feminist historical circuit that Withers ( 2015 ) characterizes as “feminism’s-already-there”.…”

“…Sophie Toupin and Spideralex suggest that speculative methods and practices “[are] infrastructural as [they allow] for the circulation of ideas, fabulations and dreams among others” ( 2018 ). Indeed, feminist archives have long acted infrastructurally to generate and circulate knowledges (Eichhorn 2014a ; Cifor and Wood 2017 ; Moravec 2017 ; McKinney 2020 ).…”