WIHM: Honey, I Teleported the President

Honey, I Teleported the President Or When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes The Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber Fights Horror Fiction With Horror Fiction

By: Marleen S. Barr

 

            Once upon a time the president of the United States bragged about pussy grabbing. It used to be logical to read this sentence as a feminist horror story’s opening line.  This particular horror story, as we are all aware, has become real. Trump habitually simultaneously turns what was categorized as fiction into reality and lies to distort reality. He routinely disturbs the space-time continuum which formerly defined the demarcation between fiction and reality. Since his discourse disruption is stranger than fiction, realistic literature does not provide the most useful method to counter it. Doing so is a job for science fiction. The science fiction subgenre I have defined as “Trumppunk” provides the best means to diffuse the prevarication which profusely emanates from what Stephen Colbert calls Trump’s “mouth hole.”  With this point in mind, I wrote When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes The Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber, the first single-authored Trump-focused short story collection. My intention was to fight his misogynistic horror fiction with satirical feminist horror fiction.

            When doing so, I tried to translate the ridicule Mel Brooks brandished in The Producers into feminist Baby Boomer mode. The fact that I hail from Forest Hills, Queens– a neighborhood located a stone’s throw away from Trump’s Jamaica Estates emanation point– facilitates my translation efforts in that I speak with his identical “New Yawk” outer borough cadence.  What his mouth hole throws out, I can immediately echo back.  Or, in Brent Stephens’ more august words, “in an era in which the president is constantly trying to impose his fictions on reality, it’s incumbent on the rest of us to keep the two separate. Understanding what fiction is, and all the ways Trump seems to spring from it, is a good place to start” (New York Times, December 28, 2018).  As someone who has dedicated her professional life to being a feminist science fiction scholar, I understand what feminist science fiction is, all the ways Trump’s discourse springs from horror fiction, and how feminist science fiction provides cognitive estrangement to becoming inured to Trump’s lies. When Trump Changed uses exaggeration to separate his horror fiction from women’s reality.  

            I take what Trump really says and turn it into fake news which is unreal to the extent that it could never be actualized. For example, after Trump used the phrase “the local milk people,” I wrote “Trump Uses ‘The Local Milk People’ To Lure Pussies Out Of the White House Basement,” a “trouble with tribbles” scenario in which feminist extraterrestrials from the planet Mammary deliver milk to the White House to control the pussy plethora (I refer to baby domestic felines) inhabiting the building’s basement. And in “Just The Two Of Us Or Trump Comes On to Comey,” I imagine that after Trump actually sexually propositions Comey, Bella Abzug and Ethel Merman, New York women whose mouths are louder than Trump’s mouth, save the former F.B. I. director’s honor. “Springtime For Trump Or Feminist Extraterrestrials Eventually Produce A Woman President” is self-explanatory.

            Okay, Trump bring on your misogynistic horror fiction. Anything you can make fake I can make faker. I can make anything faker than you. Yes I can. Yes I can. Yes I can. Feminist science fiction, which functions as horror fiction from your perspective, can teleport you to a galaxy far far away.