Dr. Patrick Anthony Barbosa Brock
CoFutures

What do we do when we talk about Zoefuturism? This essay argues that Zoefuturism and CoFuturisms are not merely aesthetic or speculative categories, but infrastructural practices of collective world-making. I propose a framework for understanding how these movements intervene in social imaginaries through genre formation, manifestos, and boundary-making practices, while also examining their material implications for the communities and infrastructures from which they emerge. To that end, I draw on my previous theorization of the role genre mechanics play in the formation of collectivities.

Although they are envisioned here as operationally connected, speculative fiction, CoFuturisms, and Zoefuturism should not be treated as interchangeable categories. Speculative fiction is a broad narrative mode oriented toward hypothetical worlds, alternative temporalities, and estrangement from consensus reality. CoFuturisms, by contrast, designate culturally situated interventions that mobilize speculative methods to contest dominant imaginaries and produce alternative social horizons. Zoefuturism differs from both in that its central organizing principle is relationality itself: an ontological emphasis on “interconnected becoming” across human, nonhuman, ecological, and material forms of life. Where speculative fiction often asks what futures might exist, and CoFuturisms ask who gets to imagine and inhabit those futures, Zoefuturism asks how forms of life become entangled in the production of futurity.

CoFuturisms as a conceptual umbrella emerged with the publication of the Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms and its survey of speculative works from the world’s periphery, many of which blur the boundaries between art and activism. Like the imaginaries from which they emerge, CoFuturisms are collective constructions shaped by forces operating at both macro and micro levels. As digital media theorist, poet, and software designer Jason Edward Lewis writes, they “create a field of ‘future facts,’ a fully realized reality that exists somewhere down the timeline, waiting for us to catch up to it” (11). More broadly, CoFuturisms often emerge through science fiction (SF) and speculative practices, commonly appropriating their methods, to critique dominant imaginaries and intervene micropolitically in the present. As science fiction scholar Taryne Jade Taylor observes, “CoFuturisms is a movement that is found both within science fiction and fantasy and also reaches past the boundaries of speculative fiction” (2023).

In conversation with the editors of this special issue, I was provided with the following conceptualization of Zoefuturism: “Zoefuturism as a genre is founded upon the understanding that all things are relational—where descriptors, characteristics, or even a sense of ‘being’ depend upon everything around them—and that everything is constantly becoming, much like our DNA. As such, Zoefuturism is not political.”

I interpret Zoefuturism as an attempt to articulate a relational understanding of the world that moves beyond binary frameworks by foregrounding becoming, interdependence, and ecological entanglement. Unlike many futurisms organized around identity, technological acceleration, or emancipatory struggle, Zoefuturism situates relationality itself as the condition of futurity. Its emphasis falls less on representing marginalized futures than on rethinking the ontological assumptions through which futures are imagined in the first place. Yet Zoefuturism cannot escape political implications simply by rejecting explicit political identification. Like CoFuturisms, it shapes how reality is narratively and institutionally organized through language, cultural production, archives, and the social imaginaries that orient collective life. Its politics emerge less through ideological declaration than through interventions into the conceptual and affective infrastructures governing how relations between life forms are understood.

These interventions occur through genre itself. Genres are not merely aesthetic containers but social formations circulating among texts, communities, markets, and institutions. Because genres organize recognition, expectation, and participation, they function as technologies of collective becoming. Speculative fiction provides many of the formal tools that make such interventions narratively intelligible, while CoFuturisms mobilize those tools toward situated cultural and political projects. Zoefuturism, in turn, redirects speculative practice toward relational ontologies that destabilize distinctions between nature and culture, subject and environment, and human and nonhuman life. 

Continue reading “Zoefuturism as CoFuturism: Revisiting the genre argument” →