?

Reproductive Dystopia

Abstract

Reproductive Dystopia is drawn from a book project of the same name that treats a bestselling genre of Anglophone literary fiction––the dystopian novel–– and considers its cultural and political affordances. The project reveals that a significant subset of dystopian novels speak directly and eloquently to questions of both reproductive dispossession and reproductive freedom.? In so doing, Reproductive Dystopia both identifies and theorizes a major dystopian sub-genre comprised of narratives set in near and far futures in which profound exploitation of the reproductive body, its processes (ovulation, gestation, parturition, lactation), and its biological products (babies, eggs, stem cells) figure centrally.? In this paper, I hone in on one of the genre’s foundational texts, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to demonstrate how reproductive dystopias simultaneously invoke and constellate histories of reproductive extraction and dispossession; and, how they might ideally enable readers to comprehend the complex historical antecedents of the social and political formations currently emerging in the US and elsewhere in the Atlantic World.? In the present moment of crisis, many of us find ourselves wondering how we have ended up living in world in which hard won bodily autonomy is now under siege by conservative, authoritarian, fascist, and religiously fundamentalist regimes, and thus in which reproductive justice appears as an ever-receding horizon.? This paper turns to an emergent literary sub-genre for answers.

?

?

Alys Eve Weinbaum

伟德国际_伟德国际1946$娱乐app游戏 of Washington, Seattle

Short bio

Alys Eve Weinbaum?is a Professor of English at the 伟德国际_伟德国际1946$娱乐app游戏 of Washington, Seattle.? She is also affiliated in the department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies.? Her scholarship examines the connections between race and human reproduction in a range of Anglophone texts that reflect and refract the historically shifting relationship of these concepts across the longue durée of racial capitalism.? She is author of The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery:? Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (2019) ––the winner of the Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association and a recipient of an Honorable Mention for the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize, and Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought?(Duke 伟德国际_伟德国际1946$娱乐app游戏 Press, 2004).?? She co-editor of the anthology The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization?(with the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group), and Next to the Color Line:? Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois?(with Susan Gilman). Her most recent work appears in a special issue of History of the Present (Spring 2024) on “Reproductive Racial Capitalism,” a concept and heuristic device that she has developed with co-editor and collaborator Jennifer L. Morgan. Her current boo project, Reproductive Dystopia, treats an emergent literary genre focused on the exploitation of the reproductive body and demonstrates how the genre function as a form of historiography that is uniquely positioned to afford new understandings of the history of reproductive extraction and dispossession.?

?