Sanders Reflection

 Joshua Singh

Dr. Ellis

EN 376

27 September

Rhonda Honda

I first would like to say that reading Rhonda Honda and Na Viro has been refreshing. While Na Viro presented the reader with ideas that challenged western views of Pacific and Indigenous peoples, Rhonda Honda does that but challenges heteronormativity of another group. This story follows a detective who has been tasked with finding a girl whose name is described as “immaterial” (243). Because the story is set sometime in the future and there is not much world building, the reader creates an image of the world through the characters’ dialogue. This is where we learn that the world exists in a pseudo-dystopian state in which the president is missing and biker gangs are an ever-growing problem for law enforcement individuals such as Noir, who serves as the story’s main protagonist.

Noir has only been told that there is a girl missing and that he must find her. The mission is incredibly secretive, and he cannot allow anyone else to know who he is looking for. The story ends with him finding the girl after a short fight scene. However, the author includes one twist at the end: the lost girl is actually the president who has been missing from the public eye due to his new “surgery.” The author uses science-fiction to depict a future in which “morphs” or body modifications are readily available to the public. The president used a morph to transition from male to female to better represent who they are. In a sort of abrupt ending, the author reveals that the president came out to the world, and the public instantly supported him.

While the story is fiction, I am unsure whether this ending serves as a hope for a possible future or one that projects a utopian ideal in which transitions are relatively instant and available. Nevertheless, the story does brilliantly challenge heteronormativity in displaying a transgender president in a science-fiction setting. 

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