Noah Witke Mele makes and writes about performance. They are about to hold a BA in Performance Studies from NYU, where they think about postmodern dance, science fiction, and affixes, along with minors in dance and American Sign Language. Noah’s performances have been presented at Phantom Theater, Movement Research, Lost Nation Theater, deep in the Vermont woods, and on Brooklyn rooftops with mediocre views of Manhattan. Currently, Noah writes performance reviews for Eye on the Arts.

Title of Capstone Project

The Queer Double Image of Science Fiction or Helva’s Manifold Body

Description of Capstone Project

This essay purposefully misreads an offhand comment of Isaac Asimov’s, where he evokes the “queer double image [of] science fiction” and redeploys the term as a performance studies method of reading akin to disidentifictory and reparative strategies. This argument is propelled by an archival case study of Anne McCaffrey’s proto-feminst novel The Ship Who Sang. Tracking varied readings of Helva, the novel’s titular character, as she is taken up by varied academic disciples, such as feminist science studies and disability studies, performance studies emerges as the next step in assembling the comprehensive body of work that makes reading (feminist) science fiction a rigorous as well as pleasurable practice.