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Lori Selke: The XY Conspiracy
Aug. 7th, 2018 11:36 amJyn works as a stripper, and she’s very good at her job - albeit rather cynical about the nature of the business and the majority of the customers she encounters. Her real passion, however, is hunting UFOs - and finding evidence to support her theory that not only do aliens exist, and have an interest in Earth, they are actually involved in a vast biological experiment centered on mammalian reproduction. As Jyn explains it: “According to scientists, no more than 300 million years ago, one of the chromosomes in the identical X pair mutated into a male-determining gene. If this rogue chromosome was present, then the organism that carried it would be male, no matter what. Over time, that rogue chromosome altered even more, lost much of its genetic material, and became truncated. That’s where we are now. In theory, this process could go even further, and the Y chromosome could disappear entirely. In fact, this has already happened in other species. But not in humans. Or more generally, primates. Over the past 30 to 50 million years, there has been a sustained pattern of gene migration onto the Y chromosome among primates, and only primates. That’s backwards. Left to themselves, genes should migrate away from the vestigial Y chromosome.”
This is the basic conceit of Lori Selke’s The XY Conspiracy, a short novel published as part of Aqueduct Press’ feminist-focused Conversation Pieces series.
When Jyn notices that she’s being observed by someone with a strong resemblance to the Men In Black familiar to every UFO enthusiast, she decides it’s time to make herself hard to find. Packing her research notes and her working clothes into her car, she hits the road, travelling from the location of one important UFO sighting to another, pausing along the way to earn money at strip clubs from Seattle to Montana, looking fir clues to support her theory. Meanwhile, her friend Dina is researching online, sending her articles about discoveries in the area of reproduction, sex and gender.
It’s an interesting, even provocative, juxtaposition, a narrative that chronicles the environment of a professional sex worker, someone whose livelihood is based in displaying the obvious biological distinctions between sexes, and at the same time looks at scientific evidence of the fragility and perhaps even the eventual disappearance of the chromosomal basis for sexual differentiation in mammals - including man. The protagonist’s often clinical, almost anthropological commentary on the details of a stripper’s life, the clubs, the culture, the men, and the broader attitudes toward strippers and sex workers as portrayed in the media, make a strong counterpoint to her thesis that the Y chromosome, the very basis of the sexually differentiated behaviour that shapes her working environment' is alien.
The novel is open-ended. We don’t know, not for sure, whether Jyn is right or not. But the possibilities are there, waiting for a continued conversation.
This is the basic conceit of Lori Selke’s The XY Conspiracy, a short novel published as part of Aqueduct Press’ feminist-focused Conversation Pieces series.
When Jyn notices that she’s being observed by someone with a strong resemblance to the Men In Black familiar to every UFO enthusiast, she decides it’s time to make herself hard to find. Packing her research notes and her working clothes into her car, she hits the road, travelling from the location of one important UFO sighting to another, pausing along the way to earn money at strip clubs from Seattle to Montana, looking fir clues to support her theory. Meanwhile, her friend Dina is researching online, sending her articles about discoveries in the area of reproduction, sex and gender.
It’s an interesting, even provocative, juxtaposition, a narrative that chronicles the environment of a professional sex worker, someone whose livelihood is based in displaying the obvious biological distinctions between sexes, and at the same time looks at scientific evidence of the fragility and perhaps even the eventual disappearance of the chromosomal basis for sexual differentiation in mammals - including man. The protagonist’s often clinical, almost anthropological commentary on the details of a stripper’s life, the clubs, the culture, the men, and the broader attitudes toward strippers and sex workers as portrayed in the media, make a strong counterpoint to her thesis that the Y chromosome, the very basis of the sexually differentiated behaviour that shapes her working environment' is alien.
The novel is open-ended. We don’t know, not for sure, whether Jyn is right or not. But the possibilities are there, waiting for a continued conversation.
