acknowledgements

To all the scintillating delegates at the Technotopias conference who I talked with about my paper or your paper, and to the audaciously fabulous conference organizers, thank you for a momentous, stupendous intellectual experience that will be with me always.

Patty, thank you. Not just for midwifing my own feat of non-sexual reproduction, which would not have been conceived, much less born, without your participation, but also for encouraging me to imagine radical new possibilities for myself.

Thanks to my Honors examiner Amy Villarejo for providing, all at once, a most magnificent closure and a new place to take off from.

I have had numerous conversations with people (both embodied and virtual) about this paper throughout the writing process that were invaluable to my intellectual work and to my morale. In particular, I would like to thank Tristan, Timothy Burke, Atara Stein, Tenderware, and Judith Gran for their enthusiasm and generosity with their ideas and feedback. And Mary Ellen Curtin, for being there to see the beginning and the end of it all.

A tip of my virtual hat to the fabulous freaks of ASCEM (alt.startrek.creative.erotica. moderated), who created a community where I could combine highbrow, lowbrow, and just plain libidinous pleasures. Whatever my studies in RL (real life), I could never have written this without that degree from TSU (Treksmut University).

And of course, thanks to all the people I love who listened to me obsess about this paper incessantly, trusting that someday the rest of Julie would return from thesis-space.