Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction (Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture) [1st ed. 2022] 9783030961916, 9783030961923, 3030961915

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Sociotechnical Design and the Future of Gender
References
Part I: Reproductive Technologies
Chapter 2: Ectogenesis on the NHS: Reproduction and Privatization in Twenty-first-Century British Science Fiction
Introduction
Baby X
The Growing Season
Dreams Before the Start of Time
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Being an Artificial Womb Machine-Human
Introduction
Like a Virgin: Parthenogenesis Through AWT
Artificial Womb Machine-Mother Replication of Organic Mother
New Family Forms: Towards Genderqueer Solo Parent Family
Parent–Child Bonding and Relationships: SoloGen Versus DualGen
Social Status of Parenting: GenRich and GenPoor Classes
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army
Introduction
An Eco-Dystopian Geo-fiction: Operational Biopower in The Carhullan Army
Ecological Feminist Resistance in A Trans-Corporeal Toxic Landscape
Interrelatedness of Environment and Reproductive Capacity
On a Material Feminist Quest
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Groomed for Survival—Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu
References
Part II: Reimagining the Woman
Chapter 6: A Housewife’s Dream? Automation and the Problem of Women’s Free Time
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Utopian Literature: A Vital Imaginative Resource
A Housewife’s Dream or More Work for Mother?
The Definitional Problem of Work
Give Us Something to Do!
Pleasurable Work and the Play Impulse
Free Time and How to Spend It on Mars
Conclusion: Women’s Work Beyond Labor and Leisure
References
Chapter 7: Motherhood Beyond Woman: I Am [a Good] Mother and Predecessors Onscreen
Technoheroines and the Absence of Maternity
The Artificial and the Constructed Mother
Raising Human, Rising Subjectivity
Created to Care
References
Chapter 8: Gender and Reproduction in the Dystopian Works of Sayaka Murata
Family and Reproductive Technology as a State-Controlled Mechanism
Good Mothers, Defective Mothers
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Cyborg Separatism: Feminist Utopia in Athena’s Choice
But What Kind of a Feminist Future Will It Be?
Separatist Feminist Imaginations During the 1970s and 1980s
Cyborgian Cultural Feminist Utopia with a Taste of Liberal Feminism
Cyborg Babies and Reproductive Freedom
Ephemeral Queerness and Racial Bias
Athena’s “Choice” under Heteronormative Separatism
A Straight White Man’s Feminist Fantasy
References
Part III: Queering Gender
Chapter 10: Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction
Introduction: The Medium and The Tank
The Medium
The Tank
Gestating Cyborgs
Leaky Boundaries
Or…
And…
And / Or
Touch, Tanks, and Talking
An Opening
References
Chapter 11: Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk Science Fiction
Introduction
In Search of Multiplicity
The Sutures of the Borderland
Conclusion
References
Chapter 12: Lesbian Cyborgs and the Blueprints for Liberation
Situating the Lesbian Cyborg
Warrior Cyborgs
Breaking the Past and the Future Open
Blueprints for Liberation
References
Part IV: Posthuman Females
Chapter 13: Becoming Woman: Healing and Posthuman Subjectivity in Garland’s Ex Machina
Introduction
The Manipulation of Gendered Spaces, or Ava’s Becoming
Posthumanism as a Healing Therapy
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction: Feminist Transhuman Embodiments in Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot
Introduction
Female Disability and the Female Cyborg as Narrative Prosthesis
Crip Humor and Metafiction as Enabling Narrative Strategies
References
Chapter 15: ‘Growgirls’ and Cultured Eggs: Food Futures, and Feminism in SF from the Global South
Critical Race Feminist Food Studies
Analog/Virtual: The Appetite and the Algorithm
Before She Sleeps: In Vitro Eggs and In Vivo Embryos
Ungirls: Carniculture, Sex Work, and IVM
Conclusion
References
Chapter 16: Reproductive Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, and the (Non)Human to Come in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God
Reproductive Futurism, Biopolitics, and the Economization of Life
Biomedicalization and Reproductive Control
Opposing Reproductive Futurism: The Queering of Matter and Nonhuman–Human Relations
Imagining Alternate Futures: Indigenous Futurism
References
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction Edited by Sherryl Vint · Sümeyra Buran

Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture Series Editor Sherryl Vint Department of English University of California Riverside, CA, USA

This book series seeks to publish ground-breaking research exploring the productive intersection of science and the cultural imagination. Science is at the centre of daily experience in twenty-first century life and this has defined moments of intense technological change, such as the Space Race of the 1950s and our very own era of synthetic biology. Conceived in dialogue with the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this series will carve out a larger place for the contribution of humanities to these fields. The practice of science is shaped by the cultural context in which it occurs and cultural differences are now key to understanding the ways that scientific practice is enmeshed in global issues of equity and social justice. We seek proposals dealing with any aspect of science in popular culture in any genre. We understand popular culture as both a textual and material practice, and thus welcome manuscripts dealing with representations of science in popular culture and those addressing the role of the cultural imagination in material encounters with science. How science is imagined and what meanings are attached to these imaginaries will be the major focus of this series. We encourage proposals from a wide range of historical and cultural perspectives. ​ dvisory Board: A Mark Bould, University of the West of England, UK Lisa Cartwright, University of California, US Oron Catts, University of Western Australia, Australia Melinda Cooper, University of Sydney, Australia Ursula Heise, University of California Los Angeles, US David Kirby, University of Manchester, UK Roger Luckhurt, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Colin Milburn, University of California, US Susan Squier, Pennsylvania State University, US More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15760

Sherryl Vint  •  Sümeyra Buran Editors

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction

Editors Sherryl Vint Department of English University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA, USA

Sümeyra Buran Visiting Research Scholar, Department of English University of Florida (Associate Professor of English, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Turkey) Florida, USA

ISSN 2731-4359     ISSN 2731-4367 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture ISBN 978-3-030-96191-6    ISBN 978-3-030-96192-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Scharfsinn / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction “This is a significant feminist intervention into the many ways in which the lives of women are being impacted across the world by the increasingly intimate technological productions of neoliberal hypercapitalist biopower. Contributors from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US offer informed and informative readings of a diverse range of speculative fictions across media. In this context, speculative fiction works to defamiliarize a future-present of pervasive automation, increasingly sophisticated assistive reproductive technologies, developments in future-food technologies, robotics and artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and genetic science. Contributors also suggest sites of potential resistance through hybrid figures such as the cyborg, the queer, and the posthuman, and through the insights of non-western epistemologies such as indigenous futurism.” —Veronica Hollinger, Emerita Professor, Trent University, Canada

Contents

1 Introduction: Sociotechnical Design and the Future of Gender  1 Sherryl Vint Part I Reproductive Technologies  19 2 Ectogenesis on the NHS: Reproduction and Privatization in Twenty-first-Century British Science Fiction 21 Anna McFarlane 3 Being an Artificial Womb Machine-Human 45 Sümeyra Buran 4 Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army 69 Pelin Kümbet 5 Groomed for Survival—Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu 91 Julia Gatermann

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Contents

Part II Reimagining the Woman 109 6 A Housewife’s Dream? Automation and the Problem of Women’s Free Time111 Caroline Edwards 7 Motherhood Beyond Woman: I Am [a Good] Mother and Predecessors Onscreen139 Jimena Escudero Pérez 8 Gender and Reproduction in the Dystopian Works of Sayaka Murata157 Chiara Sautto 9 Cyborg Separatism: Feminist Utopia in Athena’s Choice173 Chikako Takeshita Part III Queering Gender 195 10 Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction197 Beyond Gender Research Collective 11 Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk Science Fiction223 Sasha Myerson 12 Lesbian Cyborgs and the Blueprints for Liberation243 Héloïse Thomas Part IV Posthuman Females 259 13 Becoming Woman: Healing and Posthuman Subjectivity in Garland’s Ex Machina261 Rocío Carrasco-Carrasco

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14 Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction: Feminist Transhuman Embodiments in Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot283 Miriam Fernández-Santiago 15 ‘Growgirls’ and Cultured Eggs: Food Futures, and Feminism in SF from the Global South301 Nora Castle and Esthie Hugo 16 Reproductive Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, and the (Non)Human to Come in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God321 Kristen Shaw Name Index 345 Subject Index 351

Notes on Contributors

Beyond  Gender  Research  Collective  Amy Butt, Avery Delany, Tom Dillon, Rachel Claire Hill, Raphael Kabo, Felix Kawitzky Sing Yun Lee, Sinéad Murphy, Sasha Myerson, Eleonora Rossi, Smin Smith, Katie Stone Amy Butt is an architect and Lecturer in Architecture at Reading University with a specialization in architectural representation and communication. Her research explores the way the fictional worlds we construct influence and reflect the world we inhabit, writing about utopian thought and the imaginary in architecture through science fiction literature and film. Her recent publications include “‘Endless forms, vistas and hues’: Why Architects Should Read Science Fiction” in Architectural Research Quarterly and “City Limits: Boundary Conditions and the Building-Cities of Science Fiction” in Open Library of the Humanities. Avery Delany  is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths University. Their thesis examines how ideas of “what it means to be human” come to be co-constructed, negotiated and reconceptualized by single-player science-fiction video games, video game players, and developers. Their research specifically focuses on human/AI relations, the construction of desirable/undesirable bodies, and imaginings of the future/futures. Avery’s research interests include decolonization and decentering, disabled anthropology, human/nonhuman relations, video games, experimental methodologies, and anthropologies of the future. Avery is a member of the Beyond Gender collective. Their work has been

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featured on POMEmag, Sidequest, and in a forthcoming special issue of Teaching Anthropology. Tom Dillon  is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Tom’s work attempts to contextualise the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction within the wider cultural and political landscape of the 1960s. Tom has written for Science Fiction Studies, Fantastika, and collaborated on an essay with Dr. Linda Stupart published in Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal. Tom is also a codirector of the London Science Fiction Research Community. Rachel Claire Hill  is currently on the MA Cultural Studies program at Goldsmiths, where she is writing a dissertation on the contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries of outer space, with a particular focus on the visual cultures and utopian rhetoric of NewSpace companies. She regularly reviews speculative fiction for publications such as Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, Women’s Review of Books, Asymptote, Rain Taxi, and Strange Horizons. Raphael Kabo  is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London, writing on the relationship between contemporary utopian texts and oppositional social movements after 2008. His research encompasses utopian spatiality, the commons, precarity, and the radical imagination. He is a member of the Beyond Gender science fiction research collective; cofounder of the research network Utopian Acts; and has recently coedited a special issue of Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal on the theme of utopianism and activism. Felix Rose Kawitzky  is a game designer, researcher, and writer. They are a PhD candidate at the University of York, where they work as a postgraduate teaching assistant in theater, performance, and interactive media. Their work explores the relationships between queer science fiction, collective storytelling, and tabletop roleplaying games. They hold a BA in Fine Art, and an MA in Theatre Making from UCT. They are on twitter as @criticalmx. Sing Yun Lee  is an illustrator and graphic designer working under the identity Sinjin Li. Their creative practice is led by their interest in how science fiction can inform and influence method, approaches to learning, and visual communication. They have previously created work for Jo Fletcher Books, Glasgow University and the Petrocultures Research Cluster, the

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London Science Fiction Research Community, Gylphi Press, Fantastika Journal, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Their projects have been twice shortlisted, and twice longlisted for a BSFA Award for Best Artwork. Sinéad Murphy  completed her PhD in Comparative Literature in King’s College London in 2019. Her doctoral research was an AHRC LAHPfunded project on contemporary Arab speculative fiction in English. She also works in the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work has been published in Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, The Literary Encyclopedia, Strange Horizons, the Postcolonial Studies Association newsletter, and various online platforms including Arabic Literature in English. Her primary research interests include science and speculative fiction, Middle Eastern literature, postcolonial theory, and theories of world literature. Eleonora Rossi  is a postgraduate student and Associate Tutor at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research sits at the crossroads of hydrofeminism, posthumanism, postcolonial studies, and utopian studies. Her doctoral work examines utopian hope and watery togetherness in contemporary dystopias concerning environmental disaster. Alongside her PhD, Eleonora is currently coordinating public engagement projects across the UK. Smin Smith  is a fashion stylist, lecturer, and PhD student at UCA/ UAL. Outside of academia, they curate Vagina Dentata Zine, a publication that celebrates still-image science fiction. Smin’s research builds upon this practice, documenting the relationship between contemporary feminisms and science fiction artwork. Katie Stone  [the corresponding author for the chapter] is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis explores childhood and utopianism as imagined in science fiction. It seeks to put mainstream science fiction into conversation with feminist, queer, and decolonial critical and creative work in order to interrogate the genre’s complicity with multiple structures of oppression. Katie is codirector of the London Science Fiction Research Community and has recently coedited a special issue of Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal. Sümeyra Buran  is an Associate Professor of English at Istanbul Medeniyet University (IMU). Since she was awarded a postdoc research fellowship

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grant  by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) in 2018, she has worked as a visiting scholar in the departments of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California Riverside. By January 2022, she is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of English at the University of Florida.  She is the founding and coordinating editor of Journal of Posthumanism, the editor of Posthumanism Series by Transnational Press London, the editor of a collection Edebiyatta Posthümanizm (Posthumanism in Literature, 2020), the co-editor of a collection Religious Futurism (yet to be published), the co-editor of the first Anthology of Turkish Science Fiction and the co-editor of a collection Beyond the Occident: Perspectives on Past, Present and Speculative Future in Fiction, Art, Media, and Film (yet to be published). She is a focal point country representative member (Turkey) of the European Observatory on Femicide (EOF), the founder of the Center for Human Rights at IMU and the Turkish Observatory on Femicide, a committee member of BIPOC at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) and a country representative (Turkey) at the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). She is currently writing her monograph on Su-fi: Sufi Science Fiction. Rocío  Carrasco-Carrasco is Dr. Philol at the University of Huelva (Spain), where she is a lecturer in English. Her fields of research are gender in contemporary US science-fiction cinema and US cultural studies. She is author of New Heroes on Screen: Prototypes of Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (2006) and coeditor of Experiencing Gender: International Approaches. Her current research interests are the intersections of gender, body, and technology. She has recently focused on the concept of the posthuman body and the way it is represented in popular discourses like cinema. Her latest publications include the encyclopedia entry “Gender, Body and Computing Technologies in the Science Fiction Film” (Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 2015), the book chapter “Interrogating the Posthuman in US Science Fiction Films” (Identities on the Move, 2015) and the research articles “(Re)defining the Gendered Body in Cyberspace: the Virtual Reality Film” (Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2014) “Painful Embodiment in Aisling Walsh’s Song for a Raggy Boy and Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education” (Journal of Film and Video 2015), “The Mediated Body in Contemporary US Science Fiction Cinema: Tron: Legacy (2010) and The Hunger Games

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(2012)” (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 2016), and “The Commodified Body and Post/In Human Subjectivities in Frears’ s Dirty Pretty Things and Romanek’s Never Let Me Go” (CLCWeb 21 Issue 1, 2019). Nora  Castle is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research, funded by the Chancellor’s International Scholarship, is at the intersection of environmental humanities, food studies, and science fiction studies. Her project focuses on the future of food in SF narratives of post-­ ecological disaster. Nora has previously published in the field of East Asian Studies and has a forthcoming chapter in Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There (Routledge, 2021) on Sixth Extinction cannibalism in contemporary speculative fiction. She is also coediting a special issue of Science Fiction Studies on ‘Food Futures’ with Graeme Macdonald, which will be published in March 2022. Caroline  Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on the utopian imagination in contemporary literature, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and Western Marxism. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), coeditor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015), and editor of Margaret Atwood: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2022). Caroline is currently writing a book about science fiction and ecocatastrophe. Miriam Fernández-Santiago  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Granada (Spain), where she teaches several courses on critical theory, postcolonial narrative, and the cultures and literatures of English-speaking countries. She is the current lead researcher of research group “Studies in Literature, Criticism and Culture” (Ref. GRACO-­ HUM 676). Her research interests include Critical Posthumanism, Trauma and Disability Studies, which she is pursuing within research project “Trauma, Culture and Posthumanity: the Definition of Being in Contemporary North-American Fiction” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. FFI2015-63506-P). Julia Gatermann  is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Hamburg where she is currently writing her dissertation with the work-

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ing title “Representations of Fluid Sexuality and Gender Identity in Contemporary American Culture.” She works as a researcher at the University of Bremen for the interdisciplinary research project “Fiction Meets Science II” with the subproject “Science in Postcolonial Speculative Fiction: Nature/Politics/Economies Re-imagined.” From its inception in 2010 to 2020, she served as a member on the board of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (German research association for the fantastic in the arts). Esthie Hugo  is a PhD student at the University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. Her PhD research forms part of a Leverhulme-funded project entitled “World Literature and Commodity Frontiers: the Ecology of the Long Twentieth Century.” Her PhD traces the intersections between gender, race, and ecology in world literature from the plantation to the present. Esthie has published previously on African speculative fiction, animism, and the Anthropocene in Social Dynamics (2017) and has forthcoming articles and reviews in Fantastica and Interventions: The Journal of Postcolonial Studies, as well as chapters in The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (Edinburgh UP, 2022) and Gothic in the Anthropocene: Darks Scenes from Damaged Earth (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Pelin  Kümbet  is an assistant professor in the department of Western Languages and Literatures at Kocaeli University, Turkey. She received her PhD from the department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University, Turkey. While doing her research on her doctoral dissertation, she became a visiting scholar in the English Department, University of California, Riverside, between 2014 and 2015, and worked with Prof. Sherryl Vint on her dissertation. Her dissertation discusses the cruciality of enacting dynamic, evolving, and living posthuman(ist) ethics, which embodies the acknowledgment of inherent and intrinsic values of all beings through different posthuman body representations. Dr. Kümbet’s general research interests include posthuman theory and ethics, posthuman bodies—toxic bodies, clone, and cyborg bodies—transhumanism, medical and environmental humanities, in particular, the intersections between posthumanism, environmental humanities, gender issues, and science fiction. Anna McFarlane  is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Glasgow with a project investigating traumatic pregnancy and fantastic

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literature. She worked on the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project. She coedited Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2016), and the Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2019). Sasha  Myerson  is a PhD Student at Birkbeck, University of London. Sasha helps to organize the research group ‘Beyond Gender. Her work focuses on the urban spaces of Feminist Cyberpunk Science-Fiction, combining feminist writings on technology and urban geography. Her other research interests include global history and film, utopia, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, she is also a freelance editor and social media writer. Jimena Escudero Pérez  is a senior lecturer at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She was awarded the Patricia Shaw Prize in 2010 for her research by AEDEAN (Spanish Association for English and American Studies) and was president of ASYRAS (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies) from 2013 to 2017. Dr. Escudero’s research focuses on the construction of human identity as it is revealed in science fiction narratives, through literary, feminist, and film criticism. She regularly participates in international conferences on the subject and is the author of Tecnoheroínas: Identidades Femeninas en la Ciencia Ficción Cinematográfica (KRK Ediciones, 2010) and Una Cartografía del Fin: The Road de Cormac McCarthy (Edicions UIB, 2015). Chiara Sautto  is a PhD candidate at Toyo University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research is about Japanese women writers, mainly focusing on utopian and dystopian visions in contemporary fiction. She is currently working on her dissertation while teaching English part-time at her home institution. Kristen  Shaw  is an independent researcher and instructional designer living in Sudbury, Ontario. She received her PhD in English from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada in 2018. Her research focuses on space, assemblage theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, and speculative fiction. Chikako  Takeshita is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her main body of work draws on feminist science and technology studies to investigate the politics of reproduction in multiple spheres including biomedicine, population, birth control, abortion rights, childbirth, and mothering. Her sec-

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ondary line of work explores the relationship between technoscience, discourses of sustainability, and feminist environmentalism. Hélöise Thomas  is a PhD student at Bordeaux Montaigne University in France. Their dissertation, “Archive, Empire, Apocalypse,” studies representations of history in twenty-first-century US literature through a queer, feminist, and decolonial lens. Their recent or forthcoming articles discuss women’s autobiographical writings, lesbian representation, and poetics and politics of memory and the apocalypse in contemporary US culture. Sherryl Vint  is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside. She has published widely on speculative fiction, including most recently Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021) and the forthcoming Programming the Future: Politics, Resistance and Utopian Dreaming in Twenty-First Century Speculative Television. She is an editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and a recipient of the SFRA Lifetime Achievement Award.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Sociotechnical Design and the Future of Gender Sherryl Vint

In 1985, Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” reoriented feminist thought in her call for women to engage with science and technology, to recognize in them, and the changed worlds they might make, new resources for female emancipation and feminist critique. Now, over thirty years later, technology has remade much of the social world, from communications to reproduction to work. Haraway revisions the cyborg as a figuration of subjectivity beyond gender and beyond the nature/culture divide, what she calls a “rhetorical strategy and a political method” rooted in the irony of noting the connections among seeming incompatible, perhaps contradictory things (149). Most importantly for the perspectives collected in this volume, Haraway’s cyborg is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (149). This collection begins from this same set of concerns about the relationships among women, technology, sociotechnical practice, lived social relations, and the capacity of fiction to illuminate and shape these entanglements. In the years since

S. Vint (*) Department of English, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_1

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Haraway published her field-defining manifesto, there has been a myriad of changes in science and technology and in how they impact women’s lives. Yet the importance of Haraway’s way of framing these issues remains, as the work collected here demonstrates. Two aspects of Haraway’s work warrant highlighting since they continue to be problems that feminists confront in both science and technology studies (STS) scholarship and in speculative fiction. STS is the cultural study of science and its cultures, a field that ranges from ethnographic work to the history of science to critical analyses of science’s entanglements with issues of gender, ethnicity, and similar cultural ideologies. This collection draws from Haraway’s work in the field to examine the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, perhaps the most important influences on how the history of science developed. Here it bears keeping in mind that “A Cyborg Manifesto” was originally published in the Socialist Review, and that part of its intervention was to think about priorities confronting contemporary Marxist-feminists. Although Haraway does not use the term racial capitalism, now commonly used to denote the fact that capitalism arose hand-in-glove with colonialism and is never encountered without a racialized dimension, her work engages the colonial frameworks that were central to then-nascent industries, such as manufacturing circuits for IT industries. The cyborg is positioned as beyond binaries, the second point that bears emphasis, and although the scholarly tradition that followed focused almost exclusively on human/machine and male/ female binaries in how Haraway’s work was taken up, the scope of her original intervention goes further. She seeks no less than to challenge “what counts as women’s experience” (1991, 149) and to promote a figure capable of signifying politics of affinity (contra identity) that would elude the theoretical dead-end of feminist epistemologies that seek “to police deviation from official women’s experience” (156). For Haraway, the “we” of feminist practice was always a contingent and multitudinous collective, continuously “disassembled and reassembled,” a perspective that shapes many of the chapters collected here (161). The specter of the nature/nurture binary appears whenever women and technology are imagined simultaneously, a problem that continues to require a feminist response. As the long tradition of feminist STS scholarship has shown, we strive to think beyond simplistic framings such as considering whether technology is “good” or “bad” for women. Even the same technologies—and this is especially true for technological interventions into reproduction, particularly the fantasy of ectogenesis—can have

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both beneficial or repressive consequences, as everything depends on the social milieu unto which the technology is disseminated, on the design that informs how the technology will be used, grounded in a sense of the “problems” it is imagined correcting—and for whom. Haraway guides us here as well, arguing that the boundaries between “tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social-relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies” are as illusory as those between human/machine, human/animal, and virtual/material—i.e., the binaries for which the essay is best remembered (1991, 164). Haraway’s contention that “myth and tool mutually constitute each other” enables us to understand why speculative fictions are so important to a feminist, sociotechnical politics. Throughout her career, Haraway has returned to science fiction/speculative fiction (sf) examples as prompts for thinking about new social relations and as sites of critiquing existing ones. The urgency of addressing these intersections is equally palpable today. Technology, especially biotechnology and IT, continues to have a significant influence on human life, perhaps even more intensely now than thirty years ago. The inevitably gendered nature of many of these practices is most visible in the transnational and highly profitable fertility industry. Control of women’s reproductive capacities through techniques that defer reproduction until later in life, “outsource” aspects of the process to others through surrogacy and gamete markets, and intervene in the fetus through selective implantation are both pervasive and marked by differences of ethnicity and class. From one point of view, we might read such innovations as the realization of Shulamith Firestone’s (1970) radical vision in The Dialectic of Sex, that freedom from the constraints imposed by biological reproduction was necessary for women’s freedom; from another, we might take note of the fact that technology and science are always embedded in specific social contexts to observe that biological reproduction thus limits women due to how it is conceptualized within patriarchy, not due to its biological configuration. The same technologies that now give women more options regarding reproductive choices are simultaneously utilized by the Christian Right to agitate for regressive legislation that would limit reproductive options even more. The politics of reproduction are significantly inflected by race, and it is arguable that the obsessive concern with outlawing abortion that began to shape the American Right roughly contemporary to Haraway’s manifesto can be understood as part of the resurgence of white supremacist nationalism, which has become increasingly visible in the last decade. As Melinda

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Cooper (2019) carefully charts in Family Values, this fusion of neoliberal economics and fundamentalist Christianity since the 1980s was also a project to eliminate social welfare systems that were reducing economic inequality across class and race divisions. Social programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), for example, lost support as they became increasingly associated with African American families, or, even more alarming for traditionalists, “those elements at the margins of the New Left that questioned the very premise of the family wage—the notion, that is, that income redistribution should be linked to the normative policing of legitimate childbearing and sexual morality” (Cooper 2019, 51). A similar fusion of economic and imperialist ideologies informed global politics of reproduction as well, as Michelle Murphy (2017) documents in The Economization of Life. For Murphy, the entire Cold War project of “developing” nations must be understood as simultaneously a project of state management of women’s bodies and their reproductive capacity, creating “population” as a problem of Third-World excess that required management, putatively for reasons of ensuring economic stability, but more nakedly “animated by fear of a future with too many of ‘them’ that would derail the American good life of capitalism and white supremacy” (44). Feminists must take on these imperial legacies—and their ongoing afterlives—in any politics of reproductive choice, and thus the issue of who controls technology, and to what ends, remains an urgent one. Moreover, as feminist theorists increasingly recognize, the projects of reproductive justice, environmental justice, and racial justice must be understood in intersectional terms as linked, indeed, and as the same project of ensuring a viable future for all. In a more recent essay on this topic, Murphy (2018) uses the term “alterlife” to capture necessary shifts in feminist strategy, a term that resonates with the history of feminist speculative fiction as rhetorical practice. For Murphy, alterlife is “a project aimed at summoning new forms of humanity, not preserving the human that histories of deep violence have created,” and draws on antiracist and postcolonial frameworks, such as activism around indigenous land sovereignty and the work of scholars such as Franz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter (2003). Alterlife insists that the politics of reproduction are not merely about the right to choose, but also about the demand for a world in which children may thrive, and thus is about entanglements with land, water, soil, ecosystems, and other species. Murphy does not evoke speculative fiction in their theorization as Haraway once did, but this project of imagining our species and its

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lifeways differently resonates strongly with traditions of feminist sf, especially by writers such as Sheri S. Tepper, Joan Slonczewski, and N.K. Jemisin, who have similarly explored how colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalist extraction mutually damage women’s life and planetary ecosystems. In IT technology, as AI assistants proliferate, they too reinscribe and intensify patriarchal understandings of gender difference. The all-but-­ ubiquitous feminine gendering of programs such as Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and Cortana (Google) demonstrates how deeply gendered assumptions shape the design of technology, as Anne Balsamo (2011, 27) powerfully argues in Designing Culture. She opens her reflections on the technological imagination by reviewing, to contest, the common prejudice that women lack an “intrinsic aptitude” for STEM fields, a statement made by Lawrence Summers in his role as president of Harvard University in 2005. For Balsamo, the design of technology directly creates the future, that is, the world that will unfold from the consequences of how any technology reshapes material life and social relations. Thus, she argues that “cultivating and shaping the technological imagination is a cultural imperative of the highest order,” but also that women have historically been excluded from significant roles in this project of design (7). Despite recent efforts to diversify STEM fields, women and people of color often remain underrepresented in these fields, a fact that Balsamo contextualizes by exploring how the gendered and racialized assumptions that shape many sociotechnical histories continue to make many professions inhospitable, despite explicit calls for more diversity. What is needed, then, is not merely more women but a “gendered makeover” of the technological imagination itself (31). Technologies come embedded with systems of values that have been built into their design, often without one consciously reflecting on this fact because the hegemonic values present themselves as if there were no alternatives to them. Balsamo calls for a feminist intervention into the terrain of design, suggesting that design is akin to a worldmaking practice that materializes the cultural assumptions which inform it. Thus, diversifying the range of people involved in design is not simply a matter of better industry optics, but it presages fundamental change: “Diversity among design participants is generative, not because of some innate biological or ethnic quality, but because people embody different sets of assumptions” (36). Here, too, feminist STS meets feminist sf, both interested in the possibilities of what might be otherwise and what better futures might grow from these seeds.

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The design of AI and robots specifically is deeply entrenched in racialized and gendered assumptions. The fact that digital AI-assistants are ubiquitously gendered females—and that many systems do not enable the option of changing this default to a male voice—shows how thoroughly such gendered assumptions have saturated this space of design. Jennifer Rhee (2018) calls this the “robotic imaginary,” and argues that the history of robotics, from labor-saving devices through to drone warfare, is premised on dehumanizing erasures. Scholars such as Despina Kakoudaki (2014) and Gregory Hampton (2015) have examined the history of sf representations of artificial beings as metonyms for racialized others, and Rhee’s work extends this analysis to consider sf and the history of robotics in tandem. She points out that, in the robotic imaginary, labor that can be replaced by automation is imagined as unskilled and inherently devalued, “mindless,” that is, the kind of labor performed by marginalized subjects in capitalist patriarchy, such as household labor (Rhee 2018, 77). Yet this imaginary exists in historical tension with the fact that many of the manufacturing jobs central to the masculine scaffolding of the Fordist family wage were among the first to be eliminated. Rhee further points out the connection between sf images of domestic robots and capitalism’s reliance on unpaid labor in the home to sustain the work force engaged in the so-­ called productive economy. Such relations between production and social reproduction are one of the most fruitful areas of Marxist feminist analysis, and there remain urgent questions for political economy today, a fact perhaps now more visible to the wider public given the economic strain caused by school closure during the COVID-19 pandemic in western industrialized countries. Other scholars have focused more directly on the racialized assumptions that are equally constitutive of technological design. Ruha Benjamin (2019, 8) refers to the racialized assumptions buried in many automated algorithms as “the new Jim Code,” as she explains how “tech fixes often hide, speed up, and even deepen discrimination while appearing to be neutral or benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era.” Benjamin’s work offers a distressing example of why the issues of design highlighted by Balsamo (2011) remain sites of urgent political struggle: technology is as much imagination as materiality in terms of its cultural significance and effects. In Surrogate Humanity, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2019) similarly contend that “questions about what kind of tasks are replaceable, and what kind of creative capacities remain vested only in some humans, indicate that humanity stands in a hierarchical

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connected relationship to artificial intelligence,” which they term technoliberalism (4). Through this social imaginary, technology has a “surrogate relation to human spheres of life, labor, and sociality that enables the function and differential formation and consolidation of the liberal subject—a subject whose freedom is possible only through the racial unfreedom of the surrogate” (5). In their analysis, then, the human/machine binary intensifies and extends the pre-existing and racialized binary of liberal modernity between the free subject of liberal political tradition and the unfree laborer—enslaved, indentured, and always racialized subjects— whose compulsory labor forms part of the conditions that enabled this free, liberal subject to emerge. When we imagine utopian futures of robotic labor freeing us from drudgery, then, we participate in a racialized, colonial imaginary; and indeed, Vora and Atanasoski point out that “human intelligence” systems such as Amazon Turk are designed to give end-users the sense that they are already interacting with an intelligent system, even though the labor is done by economically marginalized subjects made invisible by the Turk’s design (98–100). In Ghost Stories for Darwin, Banu Subramanian (2014) explores how gendered and racialized assumptions shape not only technology but the very practice of scientific research itself. Insisting the nature and culture must be studied simultaneously, she draws on the Bollywood representation of ghosts as the marginalized, neglected, and dispossessed, to reconsider the science of evolutionary variation from a feminist perspective. A trained evolutionary biologist, Subramanian proposes new ways of conducting research if one starts from feminist rather than modernist framings, arguing that many of the anxieties about environmental change and species variation, such as concerns about invasive species, are often informed by a panic that “misplaces and displaces anxieties about globalization, labor shifts, and a fast-changing world onto a problem about the geographic origin” (loc. 394–395). Drawing on the long history of feminist STS which shows that ideas about difference are rooted in the structuring binaries of modernity (man/woman; white/black; center/colony; heterosexual/homosexual; elite/working poor), Subramanian shows how this language of difference is co-produced by political struggles and by the science of variation. Once more, we see that sociotechnical knowledge and social relations cannot be thought of separately, but must always be understood as two iterations of the same materiality. Of additional note in this context is the fact that Subramanian combines feminist STS scholarship with her own innovations in botanical research, which is derived from

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perspectives that use storytelling as a tool for creating knowledge. Ghost Stories for Darwin exemplifies how feminist STS and feminist sf are engaged in entwined projects, one of the main ideas animating this collection. As this brief overview suggests, science and technology are important sites of feminist intervention today, and there is a need to update and expand our conversation to engage with novel technologies and their impact on women’s lives—the very idea, as Haraway (1991) suggested long ago, of what should be counted as women’s experience. And indeed, there has been a plethora of sf texts published over the last decade that use fiction to interrogate the complex entwining of women, technology, and politics in twenty-first-century life. These recent texts build on a long history of women writing speculative fiction, which was embraced as an important tool during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s. The wide range of texts that have recently been published suggests that today marks a moment of equal significance to the 1970s for feminist sf. They examine themes such as using technology to control women’s agency, in Hilary Jordan’s When She Awoke (2011) and Christina Dalcher’s Vox (2018); how gender roles are changing, evident in Maggie Chen’s An Excess Male (2017) and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007); futures of infertility that result in oppressive social orders, such as Meg Ellison’s Road to Nowhere trilogy (2014–2019) and Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018); and futures premised on refusing patriarchal divisions, which imagine a changed relationship to technology and the environment, such as in Carrie Vaughn’s The Wild Dead (2018) and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline (2019). The twenty-first century has seen films that explore social relations with feminized AI, such as Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), as well as those which imagine women in central roles in technological futures, such as Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) and the all-female research expedition in Garland’s Annihilation (2018). Several contributors take up these and other recent texts, but many essays also return to earlier works and read them in light of more recent conversations about gender and technology. This collection seeks to make two related interventions. The first is to establish by example the importance of speculative fiction as a feminist cultural response to how technology is reshaping women’s bodies, the politics of social reproduction, and the cultural order of gender. Second, the collection highlights how these themes are taken up by feminist sf in a range of national contexts, demonstrating the importance of the genre as a place of feminist theorizing and alternative worldbuilding across a range

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of national and technoscientific cultures. Several themes and foci of interest recur across chapters and parts, including: 1. The importance of thinking about biological production beyond essentialism and in concert with social structures that enable—or fail to provide—support systems for healthcare and childcare. 2. The related centrality of understanding and revising structures of the family, especially motherhood as an often sentimentalized and essentialized identity. 3. The related and indeed over-represented focus on technologies of assisted reproduction, especially those that imagine severing gestation from women’s bodies, as one of the most recurrent speculative innovations in recent sf. As the range of examples explored in this volume attest, biological reproduction is perhaps the most fraught topic at the intersection of feminism and technology, offering as it does both the possible liberation of women from the sole responsibility for childbearing. 4. The undertheorized place of trans, lesbian, and other non-binary gender identities in the histories of both sociotechnical culture and speculative fictions, work that returns us to the often-forgotten politics of cyberfeminism, now newly revitalized for an age of social media. 5. The importance of recognizing the household itself and the so-­ called private spaces of women’s lives as significant sites of technological change, a point Lisa Yaszek (2008) makes when framing Galactic Suburbia, her book on women’s sf of the 1950s. 6. The intersections among colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, and especially their role in the design and implementation of technology. As noted above, any technology can be used to either liberate or oppress women, and the fact that technology has been embedded in relations of power structured by colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism means that the history of technology as we know it has largely been to oppress women. Yet as STS theorists and sf authors frequently demonstrate, this need not write the future of technology. 7. The closely related and parallel point that in thinking the future of technology, feminism must begin from an intersectional premise, to ensure that the category of “we” remains open and fluid, and that historically narrow definitions of women and women’s concerns do not continue to shape future prospects.

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In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” sf author Ursula K. Le Guin (1986) recasts human history through a gynocentric frame: hunter/gatherer life relied far more on gathering for ongoing nutrition and wellbeing, and thus the first technology invented was unlikely to have been the spear or club, as per 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but instead the humble container. Such a theory of technology, of culture, and of civilization requires different kinds of stories and a different notion of the hero—indeed, a different notion of what we mean by “human” at all, a perspective that, as noted above, informs recent feminist STS theory. Focusing on the utility of carrier bags—which enable one to store food for later or for sharing, which might hold infants safely and free the hands for other work—Le Guin finds another way to narrate the history of our species. We have become all too accustomed to the hunter story, “about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero” (1986, 152), so much so that perhaps we struggle to imagine what story might be without it—just as we might also wonder how sociotechnical history might have unfolded without the familiar motivations that link knowledge with “progress”—understood as imperial expansion and the domination of nature (and women, and racialized peoples). And yet are other stories and other ways to tell stories, and Le Guin suggests that novels are themselves a kind of carrier bag of ideas and people: this can be the case for science fiction as well, despite the affinity of some earlier examples within the genre for that old-story of the Hero and his conquest and mastery. Le Guin continues: If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s (killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as a primary cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realist one. It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality. (153–154)

This collection is a carrier bag of the strange science fiction of such a realism, charting the strange realities of how sociotechnical culture has shaped women’s lives and how women’s activism and knowledge shape possibilities for technology into the future. The volume is divided into four parts. Part I, “Reproductive Technologies,” brings together chapters that explore a range of texts, including Anna Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017) and

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Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017), and how they imagine the consequences of assisted reproduction, including ectogenesis, might play out for women. In “Ectogenesis on the NHS,” Anna McFarlane shows that access to reproductive technologies is entwined with cultural attitudes about motherhood and state assistance. Far from necessarily liberating women from responsibility for the biological continuation of the species, some fictions suggest, ectogenesis could give cover to the neoliberal withdrawal of social security, stigmatizing motherhood as the abdication of work and making the cost of reproduction prohibitively expensive, save for the wealthy. One of the novels she analyses projects that the withdrawal of the NHS would open “space for pro-life organizations to move into childcare, running care centers for unwanted fetuses which are grown, using the pouches, into unwanted children living in group orphanages.” The fuller context for the fiction’s technology thus urges us to think capaciously about the impact of these ectogenesis pouches not simply on gestation, but also on social roles and economic hierarchies, demonstrating that technology alone cannot liberate women or overcome gender biases, whatever their affordances. Sümeyra Buran’s chapter in this part, “Being an Artificial Womb Machine,” uses Charnock’s novel to further consider how ectogenesis would change our sense of the family, potentially enabling men to become more involved in parenting or for non-heterosexual partners or single individuals to become parents, and potentially stigmatizing those who choose to reproduce without technological intervention. Finishing this part, Pelin Kümbet’s chapter “Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army” considers how reproduction and environmental protection are entwined in this novel. While seemingly a feminist separatist novel on its surface, Hall’s work defies our expectations of this subgenre by interrogating a capacity for eco-fascism to infiltrate feminist thought. Even a matriarchal and eco-topian society, then, can fall into the power relations of domination that have defined history thus far. Julia Gatemann’s “Groomed for Survival: Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu” concludes the part by thinking through reproduction beyond the human and in the context of colonial histories. She shows how Lai “questions the sustainability of a Western, patriarchal, neoliberalist system that, if left unchecked … will lead to the destruction of our planet and all life on it.” Part II, “Reimagining the Woman,” expands out from the specificity of women’s connection to reproduction to ask how “the woman” is itself a

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cultural construction, open to reinvention in relation to technology and how it might remake social roles. In “A Housewife’s Dream?” Caroline Edwards considers the history of household automation within the context of feminist and other utopian texts that project freedom from domestic labor as part of their vision, from William Morris’ News from Nowhere (2004) to Ursula K.  LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974). While the nineteenth century may have seen the automation of work as a dream, the looming reality of ongoing job loss due to automation indicates how our relation to this vision of technology has changed. Edwards argues that “simply automating the hard work, or drudgery, in and of itself doesn’t address the underlying economic and gender inequalities that comprise the division of labor.” Putting this history in dialogue with Marxist feminism and its theorization of domestic labor as part of the social relations of capital, Edwards suggests that fear of what women might do with their free time is part of what explains why labor-saving devices that have routinely entered our homes have not necessarily lightened women’s domestic responsibilities. Considering the essentialized relationship between motherhood and womanhood, Jimena Escudero’s chapter analyzes Netflix’s provocative film I Am Mother, directed by Grant Sputore (2019), which imagines a robot as primary caregiver to a generation of artificially gestated children meant to restore humanity. Noting the near absence of images of mothering in most mainstream sf, Escudero suggests that, despite any sincere commitment to its nurturing program, a machine cannot replicate mothering, a bond that requires a mammalian, affective connection. The robot mother can replicate the social labor of mothering, but its failure beyond that points to the reality that human sociality is more than what capitalism and technology imagine. Chiara Sautto’s following chapter, which considers the work of Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata, considers how technology might remake social relations in even more dimensions—gestation and motherhood, but also sexuality, filial relations, the relationship between life and death, and coupling. Arguing that Murata’s experimental fictions respond to contemporary Japanese feminist debates, Sautto suggests that the end of normative heterosexual reproduction would not necessarily benefit women. Across these strange and haunting tales, the real monsters that consistently emerge are “those who blindly accept the ‘normal’ without questioning it.” Finally, Chikako Takeshita’s “Cyborg Separatism” considers how Athena’s Choice (2019), a novel that imagines an egalitarian future based

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on matriarchal rule, betrays the ideals of intersectional feminism despite its surface commitment to women’s autonomy. Putting this novel in dialogue with the wealth of feminist separatist works that flourished in sf during the 1970s, this chapter shows how much the conversation about women’s bodies and female-led societies has changed in the intervening years, as feminist scholarship responded to critiques of canonical second-wave positions articulated by women of color, queer, and trans women. Reminding us again of the centrality of colonial histories in these attests, Takeshita critiques the novel for relying on depictions of violence against women committed by brown men as its justification for perpetuating an all-female society. Part III, “Queering Gender,” includes several chapters that emerge from these debates, either contemporary to the original critiques or articulated as part of intersectional feminism in the years since. It opens with “Drowning in the Cloud,” written collaboratively by the Beyond Gender collective, a group of scholars whose collaborative practice mirrors the values of their analysis. In an experimental and dialogic mode, they consider technology as a medium of amniotechnics that resists the patriarchal and capitalist technologies of “borders, ranks, and pipes that seek to contain it”—explicitly evoking Le Guin’s carrier bag. Amniotechnics considers technology through queer and indigenous notions of science, creating space for other subjects, histories, and sociotechnical orders. Discussing a number of feminist sf works, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and ending with Raphael Carter’s (1996) cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, this chapter suggests that the imagery of fluidity can reinvigorate queer praxis in ways that transform our understandings of the digital. Sasha Myerson’s “Making the Multiple” turns to cyberpunk specifically to reconsider what is often seen as a masculinist and white genre in terms of how some texts are also informed by the cyberfeminist ideas celebrated during the early days of internet cultures. Drawing on trans theory in particular, Myerson considers how cybercultures open a space to conceptualize bodies as capable of holding multiple identities and genders. Focusing on cyberpunk written by women, such as Laura Mixon’s The Glass House (1992) and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Myerson revises our understanding of the gender politics of cyberpunk. She argues that cyber multiplicity can be an important cultural space that can “bring back different forms of thinking and language to help redescribe and reinscribe experiences and ways of being that are at present struggling to differentiate themselves in the face of a more powerful common language.”

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Drawing on similar ideas but considering texts that offer material cyborg instantiations of nonbinary women, Hélöise Thomas argues that cyborgs are constitutively lesbian, improvising on Monique Wittig’s contention that lesbians are not women because the category “woman” is defined through its relationship to men. Noting that many images of augmented or cybernetic females in films are explicitly sexualized and imagined only as extensions of male leads, such as in Ex Machina (2014), she nonetheless notes that these cyborg women provoke a sense of fear as much as they titillate. This pattern of cultural imaginary, then, connects autonomous technology at a subconscious level to a fear of female autonomy, given how often machines are gendered female. Thus, the “complex feelings western societies have had regarding technology” are expressions of gendered anxiety. Looking at the feminist version of warrior cyborgs in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019), Thomas suggests their “horizon of action is not merely winning a war but choosing the possibility of life over the restrictions of deadly oppression.” The final part, “Posthuman Females,” considers texts that project newly imagined versions of women into both utopian and dystopian futures, and in many ways these chapters offer posthuman extensions of the central themes that have been considered in each of the previous chapters. In “Becoming Woman,” Rocio Carrasco analyses Ex Machina to consider whether its emancipated AI Ava (Alicia Vikander) is best understood as promise or threat. Contending that it is important to theorize how popular culture embodies a mainstream zeitgeist, Carrasco suggests that Ava embodies the values of critical posthumanist discourse and offers a way forward to think anew about our taken-for-granted notions of the body, the human, the world, and other species. Considering similar terrain, Miriam Fernández-Santiago engages with disability studies and ageism in her reading of Jasper Fforde’s (2012) The Woman Who Died a Lot, a novel about a female cyborg operative whose augmentations are painful ways of trying to force her aging body to continue to function like its younger version. The novel, she argues, enables “readers to reflect on how the literary conventions of science fiction can participate in interpolating women to accommodate an ableist, transhumanist paradigm” because they show how women are disabled by the expectation that they will embody the hyper-accomplished cyborg familiar from so much fiction. In “‘Growgirls’ and Cultured Eggs,” Nora Castle and Ethie Hugo address the image of artificial women imagined as sex objects in their

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reading of Lauren Beukes’ Ungirls, a novella about sex dolls cultivated like lab-grown meat. Innovatively, they link this novel, through its technological innovation extrapolated from food industries, to other sf texts that consider the politics of food production. Food production has been transformed by biotechnology as much as has reproduction, and yet there has been comparatively less attention to this in STS and in sf, despite food security being a key issue of environmental and racial justice. As with reproductive technologies, one of the risks projected by sf considering the future of food is that women’s knowledge will be supplanted by patriarchally controlled technological systems. In contrast to hierarchal industrial centers of food production, the novels Castle and Hugo consider imagine female-centered collectives of food production that prioritize sharing over commodification. These works speak to the historical experience of women in the Global South in “viewing food-tech from the perspective of marginalized women who lie not only at the center of the world-food-system, but also experience its violences most powerfully and painfully.” Finally, Kristen Shaw rounds out the collection with a chapter on Louise Erdrich’s (2017) powerful novel Future Home of the Living God, which takes on entwined questions of indigenous sovereignty, ecological flourishing, and (post)human futures. Critiquing racialized regimes that seek to manage women’s reproductive freedoms, the novel shows how “discourses of reproductive futurism are activated to legitimize the development of new regimes and narratives of power.” Shaw’s insightful chapter is a fitting conclusion to our collection, drawing together decolonial politics, queer futurity, and a resistance to how “medicalized forms of discipline and biopower” have put science in the service of repressing women and people of color. Erdrich’s posthuman future offers another path forward, a perspective this collection also celebrates. I began this introduction by evoking the continued relevance of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” into the twenty-first century. Although the specific configurations of women and technology to which feminism must respond have changed over the last thirty-some years, the need for a feminist theory of science and technology—its possibilities as well as its liabilities—remains urgent. I will close by evoking the “Xenofeminist Manifesto” (2014) published by the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. Addressed to a world “swarming with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity,” it calls for “a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation

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contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position.” Overtly anticapitalist and nonbinary, as much as it is antipatriarchal, xenofeminsim calls for a radical new imaginary, a future that breaks with the dead hand of the past. Feminist speculative fictions have a role to play in this project, and this collection begins to chart the myriad ways toward this new reality.

referenCes Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham: Duke UP. Balsamo, Anne. 2011. Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Durham: Duke UP. Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. New York: Polity. Cooper, Melinda. 2019. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. New York: Zone Books. Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Marrow and Company. Hampton, Gregory Jerome. 2015. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday’s Slave with Tomorrow’s Robot. Lexington: Lexington Books. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. Kakoudaki, Despina. 2014. Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Culture, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Laboria Cuboniks. 2014. Xenofeminist Manifesto. https://laboriacuboniks.net/ manifesto/xenofeminism-­a-­politics-­for-­alienation/. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1986. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-­k-­le-­guin-­the-­carrier-­bag-­theory-­of-­fiction/. Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke UP. ———. 2018. Against Population, Towards Alterlife. In Making Kin Not Population, ed. Adele E.  Clarke and Donna Haraway, 101–124. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Rhee, Jennifer. 2018. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Subramanian, Banu. 2014. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3, Fall): 257–337. Yaszek, Lisa. 2008. Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

PART I

Reproductive Technologies

CHAPTER 2

Ectogenesis on the NHS: Reproduction and Privatization in Twenty-first-Century British Science Fiction Anna McFarlane

Introduction Science fiction is a powerful tool for critiquing social systems, and turning to an analysis of a particular technology, as it appears across a number of texts, can be a useful window into anxieties around a given topic. In this chapter, I consider how the representation of ectogenesis (the gestation of a fetus in an artificial womb) channels numerous fears about the commodification of medicine under neoliberal capitalism, and specifically how this may play out on women’s bodies and in the social role of womanhood. This discussion is particularly timely, as the ideal of universal healthcare, represented in the United Kingdom (UK) by the National Health Service (NHS), is under a sustained attack from private interests seeking to profit from illness and reproductive issues. The distribution of reproductive technologies is already inequitable, and as experiments in external

A. McFarlane (*) School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_2

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gestation are performed on animals, the divisions that such technologies may introduce or reinscribe must urgently be challenged from an intersectional feminist perspective. The concept of ectogenesis comes from two main lineages. In the UK, ectogenesis has a historical association with eugenics: in the early twentieth century, before the Second World War and Nazi attempts at human engineering, there was much sympathy for eugenics among feminists, leftists, and other intellectuals in the UK.  Texts such as JBS Haldane’s Daedalus (1923) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) explored the concept, though they left an association in the popular imagination between ectogenesis and babies created in uniform groups to fulfil specific social roles. This technology might be considered dangerous and anti-­ individualistic. The second, more recent, tradition is that of US-based second-wave feminism, pioneered by Shulamith Firestone (1970) in her work of science fiction theory, The Dialectic of Sex. Firestone argues ectogenesis to be a radical feminist response to the oppression of women, contending that the biological basis for sexist discrimination and the oppression of women is based on women’s ability (or perceived ability) to reproduce, and that removing this basis for oppression via ectogenesis would restructure society and finally allow for women’s liberation. Firestone’s ideas are further explored through Marge Piercy’s (1976) classic feminist utopian novel, Woman on the Edge of Time. More recently, and writing from a liberal feminist perspective, Evie Kendal (2015) has called for ectogenesis to be made an option for all women in Equal Opportunity and the Case for State Sponsored Ectogenesis. As a bioethicist, Kendal argues that the dangers women face during pregnancy, and the potentially lifelong health problems that can be caused as a result, amount to an argument for ectogenesis in and of themselves, while misgivings about ectogenesis tend to be based on the disgusting and off-putting imagery found in science fiction cinema. For Kendal, ectogenesis is a pragmatic technology that has been the victim of bad press and should be rehabilitated to save women’s bodies and lives, allowing a fuller commitment of women to the workforce. However, alongside these arguments for ectogenesis—arguments that might have reproduction completely overseen by scientific and medical bodies—there has, of course, been an alternative analysis. While Firestone and Kendal argue for ectogenesis as a means for liberating women, or at least working towards equality with men, the feminist response to existing reproductive technologies has often seen feminists argue against what is

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viewed as the patriarchal invasion and commodification of women’s bodies. Here, science and medicine are read as intrinsically patriarchal realms whose increased involvement will never result in a better outcome for women and their offspring. This debate was particularly polarized after 1978, when the heavily publicized conception and birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” brought Artificial Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) into the public eye, despite the potential for family life that ARTs offer to lesbian and single women.1 Given the polarized nature of this debate, it is worth considering ectogenesis as a neutral technology being developed in a neoliberal cultural context that threatens to co-opt it. Ectogenesis could be used to overthrow the status quo (as Firestone argues), but it also might be used to entrench pre-existing inequalities and to contribute to a trend that sees medicine as a force for commodification while challenging bodily autonomy in reproduction. Recently, Sophie Lewis (2019) has also argued against the use of artificial wombs (currently being trialed to complete the gestation of lamb fetuses removed early from their mother’s wombs via Caesarean section).2 While Lewis bases her argument in the tradition of Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism, and might be expected to embrace ectogenesis as a bastard offspring of capitalist technology that can be used to liberate bodies and create new forms of kinship, she is skeptical, viewing it through the paradigm of the American culture wars and the efforts of evangelicals and right-wingers in the United States to ban abortion outright. For Lewis, the artificial womb removes the logic of an abortion limit (limits that are usually set through some reference to the fetus’s viability outside of its mother’s body, a time limit that is challenged as neonatal intensive care technology improves). Looking at these opposing views, we can see that this impasse comes from the nature of the technology as a neutral tool that may be used to destroy the current paradigm (Firestone’s position); to shore up the current paradigm; or even to extend capitalist, patriarchal control over women’s bodies. To complicate matters further, infertility and related reproductive issues walk a thin line between the medical and the social. On the one hand, as Lara Freidenfelds (2019) reminds us, miscarriage is so common as to be a normal part of a woman’s reproductive life, and is not by itself a cause for medical intervention. Infertility might not be quite so common, but again, the effects of the condition are primarily emotional and social (the grief 1 2

 See Donchin (1989).  See Devlin (2017).

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and loss that can be experienced in the face of the inability to have children) rather than medical (as in a threat to life or physical wellbeing). On the other hand, the interventions made possible by medical technology, even if only to watch helplessly as a pregnancy fails, mean that infertility is inevitably viewed through the medical lens to a certain extent, and that arguments have been made to classify infertility as a disease or even a disability (Maung 2019; Khetarpal and Singh 2012). The possibilities of detecting egg fertilization before pregnancy have even been established via home pregnancy kits (sometimes known as a chemical pregnancy); the ability to view an early pregnancy, or an embryo without a beating heart, via ultrasound (a silent miscarriage); and, in the case of infertility, the urge to find out whether there is an identifiable problem that can be fixed has been supported via modern medical science. These issues intertwine the personal, emotional, and bodily experience of pregnancy with the systems of medical science available to us in the twenty-first century. There is also a wider dimension to infertility, in that the external environment has some influence over infertility rates and pregnancy outcomes. For example, it has been found that environmental pollution increases the risk of miscarriage and damages the fetus, with pollution crossing the placenta and endangering women who live in polluted areas (Leiser et al. 2019). These are issues of poverty and environment, rather than issues of the individual body and its limitations. This wider concept must also be kept in mind within the context of feminist critiques of medicine and the priorities of patriarchal society. The novels I analyze here interrogate these boundaries while also illustrating the slip from a health model of medicine to medicine as a form of risk management. ARTs and ectogenesis may initially be developed to serve the medical needs of those suffering from infertility, or to allow procreation for same-sex couples and single people; these two variations are how we predominantly see them used in contemporary society. However, the novels I work with extrapolate to a time where these techniques have spread to the rest of the population under the distinct banner of risk management solely. Joseph Dumit (2012) has observed the move of the pharmaceutical industry in the twentieth century from constructing disease as an acute state requiring treatment to constructing the role of drugs as a means of managing risk, which sees people as suffering from risk factors, even if not diseases, requiring chronic management. Drugs that lower cholesterol or blood pressure can be taken for life by people who may feel

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and appear healthy, creating lifelong customers for drug companies. Dumit concludes that: underlying the continual growth in drugs, diseases, costs, and insecurity is a relatively new understanding of ourselves as being inherently ill. Health has come to be defined as reduction in risk. Treatment is prevention, and we have an increasingly insecure notion of our wellbeing because we have outsourced its evidence to clinical trials. (12)

This model is what pressures people into choosing ectogenesis, even when there is no medical reason to do so, thereby increasing the medicalization of the process. Once the use of ectogenesis is founded on the basis of risk, women can be judged for choosing to have a “natural” pregnancy, as they are seen as exposing their unborn to risk factors that could be avoided through the use of ectogenesis. This move from a health model to a risk model (one that is conceived with the intention of profiteering on the part of the pharmaceutical industry) is combined with the commercialization of parenthood which, particularly as practiced by the middle classes, becomes part of a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. The result of this pincer movement is that reproduction, pregnancy, and gestation become ever more entangled in a market economy, via the creep of neoliberal healthcare. In this chapter I consider texts from a UK context; viewing reproduction in contemporary UK science fiction shows how concerns about the commodification of medicine and reproductive materials are filtered through anxieties about the current and future availability of the National Health Service (NHS) in terms of defining the horizons of expectation for reproductive healthcare. In his memoir, The View From No. 11, Conservative MP Nigel Lawson (1992), formerly Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, called the NHS the closest thing that Britain has to a national religion, as he bemoaned how the revered status of the institution made it difficult to reform or to privatize. The NHS has, at times, seemed like a matter that transcends politics and occupies a space of national pride, as was seen in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for London’s 2012 Olympics, in which dancers dressed in old-fashioned nursing uniforms twirled around beds that spelled out the letters NHS in lights, and on which children bounced joyfully. Considering that most of the population were born in an NHS hospital and will receive treatment throughout their lifetimes (as well as visiting family members), perhaps ending their lives in

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one of the NHS’s beds, it is perhaps not hard to understand the emotional attachment that has grown up around the health service. Its preservation remains a key priority for voters at election time: the polling company Ipsos Mori found that the NHS nearly matched voter concerns about Brexit during the run-up to the December 2019 election, despite the media being dominated by the issue of leaving the EU (Clemence 2020). Concerns about the preservation of the NHS are well-founded, given a series of structural reforms that serve to move the service closer to a private insurance model. During the custodianship of the New Labour government (1997–2010), under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, these reforms included the formation of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and splitting the English NHS into independent bodies based on geographical area, known as Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).3 The role of NICE was, ostensibly, to make sure that decisions about new treatments to be offered on the NHS were evidence-­ based rather than subject to the whims of politicians. NICE was set up as a group of clinicians who could evaluate new treatments and decide whether the NHS should offer them, and to which groups of patients. In reality, this organization allowed politicians to ration healthcare by limiting the available funding while outsourcing unpopular decisions about withholding new treatments to NICE, an arms-length organization for which elected officials could not be held directly accountable. The creation of NICE led to a corresponding relentless drip-feed of tabloid headlines showing the treatments that had not been funded, and describing the decisions being made as a choice between quality of life, or lengthening of life, for terminally ill people on the one hand weighed against cash savings on the other. As Daniel Callahan (2012) points out, the heart-wrenching, human stories of those denied expensive drugs, drugs that they and their families believe will enhance their lives, makes for “a perfect tabloid story” (128). This very visible rationing of healthcare has eroded public confidence in the NHS, leading to anxieties about the future availability of universal health treatments in the UK.  It encourages citizens to weigh some treatments or patients against others, arguing for one priority over 3  These groups were called Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) under New Labour and were later renamed CCGs during a further restructuring of the NHS because of the Health and Social Care Act (2012), passed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government (2010–2015). The restructuring and renaming of organizational bodies, using different acronyms rather than simple names, acts as a strategic means of mystifying NHS structures and their responsibilities, impeding public transparency and accountability.

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another, rather than demanding that a truly universal healthcare system be reinstated. It also opens the NHS to further privatization; as users become disillusioned with the level of service they can expect, the argument that the NHS “no longer works” and should therefore be “reformed,” dismantled, and ultimately sold off gains more ground. These rationing measures have a direct impact on reproduction through the rationing of IVF treatment, one of these health realms in which patients are subject to a postcode lottery. There are also marked differences between different regions of the UK: the NHS in Scotland is a devolved issue, under the remit of the Scottish Parliament, and the disparities between the (better) services offered in Scotland and those offered in the rest of the UK increase the sense of injustice and uncertainty felt by service users. In the case of in vitro fertilization (IVF), the NICE guidelines state that women under forty should be offered three cycles of IVF, and the Scottish government has committed to this in the Scottish health service, following the advice of infertility charities that this is best practice and best value for money based on the evidence. However, in England, the decision about how many IVF cycles to fund for different groups of patients varies as the advice from NICE is not mandatory and as different CCGs have different policies. IVF and other ARTs are easy targets for such rationing because of the confusion between the medical and the social; the complexities of infertility and associated conditions mean that a great deal of money can be spent with no guarantee of a positive outcome, leading to debates about where to draw the line. Rationing and regional disparities in women’s health have been particularly obvious due to the different rules on abortion in different parts of the British Isles. Until 2019, abortion in Northern Ireland remained illegal, forcing women to travel to mainland Britain to seek treatment or to undergo forced pregnancies. These concerns for women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and for the social impacts of restricting health treatments—or creating a two-tier system in which the wealthy have access to their choice of treatment while those who cannot afford it are left paying—are clear in contemporary women’s science fiction, which has seen a number of recent novels deal with the subject of ectogenesis (the gestation of a fetus outside of the womb) through this lens. This chapter thus considers three contemporary UK novels featuring ectogenesis—Rebecca Ann Smith’s Baby X (2016), Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017), and Anne Charnock’s Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017)— to show how these concerns are mobilized in science fiction. The

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contemporary novels I consider in this chapter take part in the debates surrounding eugenic and feminist uses of ectogenesis while reacting to the realpolitik of living with a universal healthcare system under attack and a political environment that encourages citizens to prioritize some health treatments over others, rather than fight for a truly universal healthcare system. However, writing from the interstices of these regressive impulses does not prevent a glimmer of utopian possibility from appearing as we think with these texts. It is important to note that these novels do not simply investigate the concept of ectogenesis for its own sake, but they attempt to portray something of the pregnancy experience—an experience that has been notably lacking in science fiction as a whole. In her review of Dreams Before the Start of Time, Abigail Nussbaum (2017) bemoaned the paucity of pregnancy representations in science fiction, diagnosing a lack of imagination in science fiction texts. She gives as an example J. J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek, which includes a woman giving birth vaginally “even though the ubiquitous use of matter teleportation in her society would seem to suggest a very obvious alternative.” Meanwhile, Aliette de Bodard (2017) spoke of her interest in widening representations of pregnancy and motherhood in SF, pointing out that mothers tend to be dead, and pregnancy tends to be either monstrous or holy. In analyzing reproduction and motherhood, one of the things that writers and academics struggle with is the naturalization of these systems, or ways of being, in our societies. In Mother: An Unconventional History, Sarah Knott (2019) writes that her intention is to reinstate some sense of historical contingency into the process, while in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Sharon Hays (1996) writes of the need to “take the familiar and attempt to make it strange” (x). Reading about pregnancy via science fiction texts helps highlight the cultural and historical contingency of pregnancy and motherhood in order to properly critique the practices of reproduction in contemporary society. In these novels, the historical and contingent situation of women’s healthcare in a National Health Service that is no longer universal shows the anxiety that such a situation causes for those dealing with reproduction and motherhood.

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Baby X Rebecca Ann Smith’s Baby X came from a small, independent publisher, Mother’s Milk Books. This publisher takes an activist position, aiming to explore and raise awareness about breastfeeding through its publications. Their website observes how “there are very few books on the market that illustrate the natural beauty of the breastfeeding mother-child dyad,” with the press aiming to contribute to a conversation that normalizes breastfeeding. The novel tells the story of Baby X, the first baby to be born using the technique of In Vitro Gestation (IVG). Baby X is gestated under the watchful eye of a Dr. Alex Mansfield, a physician working with the private company Verlaine International, who have a representative named Danny Hall overseeing the process and hoping to harvest the placental blood after the birth for use in stem cell research. The novel begins with Alex in a secluded cottage, to where she has escaped, with the kidnapped Baby X.  She suspects that someone has tampered with the child during the period of gestation, having found an injection mark on his ankle, and is trying to keep the baby safe. The novel is then told via flashback, with chapters alternating between Alex’s attempts to care for the baby and her experiences leading up to the birth. There are also chapters from the perspective of one of Alex’s team members, Dolly, giving a statement to police about Alex’s behavior. The mystery of the anomalies in their data and the injection mark on the baby’s ankle turns out to be the work of Danny Hall, working for Verlaine in an unofficial (and deniable) capacity. Danny has been giving the baby injections to develop its immune system, hoping to produce stem cells in the fetal blood that will cure specific illnesses, leading to a scientific breakthrough that Verlaine can quickly monetize. Having been unsuccessful with Baby X, Danny plans to kill both Alex and X to cover his tracks. The power that this private company holds over Alex and her team, over Baby X, and—by extension—over the future of reproduction itself is a significant fear among the book’s characters and an important aspect of the novel’s political position. The creep of Verlaine’s involvement in the birth is expressed through Dolly’s outrage at the company’s level of oversight. Members of the scientific team joke that, when Baby X is born, he will have the Verlaine logo embossed on his buttocks, showing an unease with the intimate relationship between life and life-as-biopower (83). There are also a number of references to how the importance of private corporations endangers the precarious hold that the NHS maintains on

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public life in an era of austerity and increasing privatization. At one point, Alex consults her NHS ID card to check her personal identification number. Readers from outside of the UK might not recognize this as a subtle message letting the reader know that the NHS in this near future has already been much diminished. In our contemporary UK, there are no NHS ID cards: when the idea of showing identification has been raised (whether an NHS-specific ID card or any formal identification), it has been politically toxic, as it suggests that people who do not have a form of ID might not be able to access services free at the point of use, thereby undermining the NHS’s founding principle. The exclusion of a significant proportion of the population would amount to a roll-back of NHS services—a form of rationing care, or even of discrimination, that might endanger socially excluded individuals and the entire population as a challenge to public health (an issue brought into focus by the COVID-19 pandemic). That these political obstacles have been overcome in Smith’s near-future shows that the NHS is well on its way to becoming a private insurance company rather than a universal healthcare system. The slippery-slope erosion of the NHS is portrayed as inextricable from the creeping movement of commodification from human tissues to human life in the form of externally gestated babies. As Danny Hall reveals his nefarious involvement in Baby X’s treatment, he tells Alex that the IVG technology will not be used simply as a fertility treatment but as “a perfectly optimised supply-chain” for biological products like stem cells (251). Danny also explains that the weakness of the health service will be used as a means of controlling people, blackmailing them into following Verlaine’s plans: Of course, no one’s going to force anyone to gestate their foetus in an artificial uterus. But you’ve got to understand the economics. The NHS is already close to bankruptcy. Ten years from now a couple will be able to choose to have their baby in some filthy, disease-ridden, understaffed public hospital, and risk mother and baby contracting some superbug while they’re in there. Or, for a fee, Verlaine can grow their foetus in a state-of-the-art, sterile environment, where it will get absolutely everything it needs. I can already picture the television ads. (251–252)

The NHS here is portrayed not only as a universal provider of healthcare but as a bastion that protects people from the rapine machinations of the marketplace. By allowing the NHS to go through managed decline via

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underfunding, politicians are opening members of the public to blackmail and exploitation by private companies who can target them at their most vulnerable: through the health of them and their children. As well as describing reproduction against this specific political and cultural backdrop, the novel gives representation to those who have suffered reproductive loss through Karen Frey, the intended mother of Baby X. In doing so, the novel treats ectogenesis and ARTs as positive developments that can and should be used to help those suffering from infertility. X is created using a donor egg for Karen and her husband, Rob, after Karen is found to be a candidate for fertility assistance at the Centre for Reproductive Health, having suffered three miscarriages before her diagnosis with Hughes syndrome, a real illness in which blood is too thick to carry a pregnancy to term. Even after treatment, she suffers a fourth miscarriage at twenty weeks, and when analysis is done on the couple it becomes clear that Karen has been passing on a genetic abnormality to the embryos. Smith does not go into detail about the physical process of miscarriage, but she does capture something of the contradictory feelings surrounding these situations. Karen presses, “I don’t really like to talk about it” (13), and “there’s not a lot to say really; I can’t see the point in dwelling on it” (15) while, at the same time, she still clearly remembers the shock of having a doctor tell her that her first miscarriage was “not significant” (13–14), showing that even though she struggles to discuss her miscarriages they are certainly significant and devastating to her. This attempt to capture the realism of the patient experience is extended to the novel’s account of the patient-doctor relationship between Karen and Alex. Alex mentions that she has been treated with fertility drugs as part of a medical trial for a new means of egg retrieval. Karen thus finds her perception of Alex shifting: “Doctors were people who did things to you, rather than people who had things done to them. Dr Mansfield, it turned out, was one of them, but also one of us. Was that why she was always so sympathetic?” (35). This passage foreshadows Alex’s identity as a would-be mother, continuing the novel’s theme that reproduction affects everyone and is entangled in all lives, but it also speaks to the activist intentions of the text, intending to contribute to a social conversation about the role of the fertility patient and the medicalization of pregnancy. The binary relationship of the active doctor and the passive patient is disrupted through the recognition that their reproductive experiences connect them. The novel opens as Alex arrives at her Grannie’s old house, where she intends to live in secret until she can make a more permanent plan. Alex

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suspects that the donor egg used to produce X might have been one that was taken from her during experiments when she was a student. She has reacted to the baby as though she were its biological mother, including by breastfeeding, a reaction that she later considers might have been caused by drugs that Verlaine was slipping into her coffee. In the opening pages of the book, we see Alex changing the baby’s diaper, cleaning the meconium from his buttocks and the gunge from around the stub of his umbilicus (10). These simple acts of caregiving are so rarely described in literature, and yet will be performed for all new babies; as the narrator explains, “I watched my sister … do this when her babies were newborn” (10). Baby X’s provenance does not make him any different from any other baby, and through describing these simple acts that performatively establish Alex’s role as the baby’s mother, regardless of its genetic provenance or the technology used to gestate him, Smith shows the common experiences that unite all babies, all caregivers, despite the different technologies that might assist their births while also drawing the reader’s attention to the absence of such descriptions elsewhere in literature. The protagonist’s lactation shows her physical bond with the baby, even though she is not necessarily related to the child, and how the possible use of hormones to heighten her maternal feelings situates the mother’s body as a site of the breakdown of barriers between the mental, the emotional, the biological, and the medical. The distinction between “natural” and “artificial” is repeatedly challenged. Rather than sanitize the process of pregnancy through ectogenesis, Baby X returns the reader to the weird biology of motherhood, showing that the event of birth is only part of the very physical, messy process of bringing a child into the world. The novel ends with Karen Frey acting as a loving mother to the baby, showing that the process has finally had a positive outcome for her. Meanwhile, Dolly’s partner Aimee suggests that the two have a baby together: I don’t mind how we do all that other stuff, you know, whether we use a sperm donor, or whatever. We can work that out later on. But I do know I want to carry it. The baby. I don’t want it grown in a box in a lab. I want to do it the old fashioned way. (268)

Aimee recognizes that the pair may well use some form of ARTs to begin the pregnancy, but still rejects the possibility of ectogenesis, contrasting the cold, medical environment of a lab with the warmth of the maternal

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womb. The novel, therefore, ends ambivalently with a commitment to ARTs and the options it offers to people suffering infertility and lesbian women, but does not go as far as situating ectogenesis as a welcome part of that continuum. To some extent, ectogenesis remains aligned with the capitalist hegemony of corporations like Verlaine.

The Growing Season Helen Sedgwick’s alternative 2016 gives us a world in which ectogenesis has already brought two generations of humans into the world and is beginning to produce the third when a terrible problem is uncovered. Produced by a company called FullLife, the third-generation products of the baby pouches are being stillborn due to an epigenetic shift. The story is told through three generations of two different families. There are the Bhattacharyas; Holly Bhattacharya is the first woman to have a child using the pouch, and her great-grandson, Will, is stillborn. The other family is that of Freida Goldsmith, the scientist who invents the pouch, now living in hiding in a remote Scottish lighthouse. Her daughter, Avigail, became a feminist campaigner against the pouch, arguing that it represented the corporatization of women’s power, resulted in the birth and mistreatment of babies who would otherwise have been aborted, and increased health inequalities in the UK where it had been almost universally adopted. The novel is primarily focused on Avigail’s daughter, Eva, who has suffered a stillbirth of her own while carrying a pregnancy unaided by technology, and who begins to uncover the problems with FullLife. Once again, the privatization of the NHS and of healthcare more generally is at the forefront of this text. Freida was inspired by a talk by JBS Haldane during her time as a student, establishing the novel’s link to this older lineage of British ectogenesis discussed in Haldane’s 1923 Daedalus. Freida sees the visions of Haldane and Huxley as clinical and alienating, and she resolves to create a kind of intimate ectogenesis; one designed around the closeness that parents would wish to feel with their unborn children. The resulting pouches can be worn by the parents or hooked up to a stand at night to be fed with nutrients. However, the personal design behind the pouch has led to a clear and visible social hierarchy marked out by the different types of pouches used based on the FullLife insurance plans that potential parents can afford or are granted through workplace benefits. Top-of-the-line models have matching accessories, colored velour covers that stretch as the baby grows, and pouch-stands. They have audio

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systems so that parents can sing directly to their unborn child. Older models are notable by the absence of these accoutrements and are reused, showing how those without wealth and privilege are forced to deal with the second-best for their children, even before they are born. This line in the novel speaks to the commodification of parenthood that we see in contemporary society; it is not enough to keep a child clothed and fed, but the capitalist ethos feeds on middle-class parents’ fears for their offspring’s safety and social standing to pressure them into making expensive and unnecessary purchases that serve to situate the child as the center of a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, rather than as a new individual and citizen (for example, see Takševa 2012). The advent of the pouch and its importance to public health has led to the NHS being overtaken by the power of FullLife. The text describes the slow creep visible in the UK health sector today: “The introduction of used pouches for people without a FullLife plan [led] to the slow, often unreported, reassignment of contracts from the NHS to FullLife. Not just maternity wards—entire hospitals, every aspect of health care. At first it was presented as a ‘partnership.’ Then a merger” (134). While the growth of FullLife is held responsible for the demise of the NHS, there is also a hint that the kind of austerity that has been enforced on the health service over the last decade has taken its toll, too. It is a belief amongst health campaigners and workers in the UK that there is an ideological reason for starving the NHS of funding: an under-funded service will decline and can then be portrayed as not fit-for-purpose, or even dangerous. For example, the British Medical Association held a debate on the topic among doctors who voted overwhelmingly on a motion that said the decision to starve the NHS of funds was a conscious one, that promoted the goal of privatization (Cassalicchio 2017). Showing an awareness of this issue, one of Sedgwick’s characters wonders “if it was the lawsuits that had finished off the National Health Service,” a comment that speaks to the slow dismantling of the service through dangerous levels of understaffing, leading to public dissatisfaction and a loss of trust that makes it easier to hand over services to private companies that can be portrayed as safer, better-financed alternatives offering patient choice (210). While the pouch was envisaged by Freida and marketed by FullLife as a technology that would liberate women from the burden of reproduction, the results of its universal adoption in the UK are shown to have been mixed. There has been some movement in legislation, readers find, with parents granted equal paternity and maternity leave; this does mean that

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women are free to excel in their careers to a greater extent than we see currently. However, the legacy of inequality between the sexes remains unaddressed in ways that become increasingly clear as the novel continues. The prevalence of the pouches and the withdrawal of the NHS have opened the space for pro-life organizations to move into childcare, running care centers for unwanted fetuses which are grown, using the pouches, into unwanted children living in group orphanages—a significant reason for Avigail’s feminist opposition to the pouch technology. The pouch has also become instrumental in cases of domestic violence. The current evidence shows that intimate partner violence (IPV) is common and can continue, or even escalate, during pregnancy, and remains relevant in this alternate society (Devries et al. 2010). Men apply for the pouch knowing that they will have full control over their partner’s child, bringing her further under their control than ever. Freida sees this herself as she interviews potential beneficiaries of the pouch in its earliest forms, and as she warns FullLife against providing these men with another tool: “I’ve built up a dossier of all the abuse cases I could find—the pouch being used to threaten, to manipulate. Women too terrified for the life of their unborn child to stand up and speak. Society was not ready for my invention … No one notices as the NHS slips away. Hooray for the UK!” (236). This ironic, final exclamation, “Hooray for the UK!” underlines that connection felt by many British people between a sense of patriotism and the institution of the National Health Service. To stand by while a tool for gender equality is used to oppress women and to watch the NHS be dismantled without a fight is to watch the demise of the UK and the values that an audience (particularly a liberal-left one) might associate with their national identity. Revolutionary technologies are only as valuable as the society in which they find themselves; if the social issues of gender and class inequality are not addressed, even a revolutionary technology like the pouch will only reinscribe those inequalities and never address them. The novel does show some positive benefits of the pouch. The involvement of men in pregnancy through taking turns carrying the child shows a growing intimacy between men and their children, and one of the characters, Kaz, is the son of two fathers who credit the pouch for giving them their son. These changes do seem to have had some impact on social roles, but not to the extent that the pouch’s creators had hoped (given the continuing prevalence of domestic abuse), and once the technology has been taken over by corporate interests, it infests society with those same

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principles alongside the unintended consequences of the epigenetic shift in human fertility.

Dreams Before the Start of Time While Baby X and The Growing Season in many ways explore the contingency of reproduction in early twenty-first century Britain, Dreams Before the Start of Time is perhaps most interesting for the universalizing assumptions it makes about life, health, and reproduction. This might be considered the most culturally significant of the three novels, given that it was recognized as the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2018. Recent previous winners of the award include Colson Whitehead (2016) for The Underground Railroad, which dealt with slavery in the US through a science-­fictional lens, and Emily St. John Mandel’s (2014) wildly successful post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. Given this accolade, and in terms of ectogenesis and reproduction, one might expect that Charnock’s novel would do some of the useful work I have suggested important for science fiction: making the familiar strange, and considering the possible societal impacts of such a radical technology. However, the text pays little attention to the relationship between production and reproduction, and this absence opens the text to a number of political and aesthetic problems revealing the role ectogenesis plays in the British imaginary. Dreams Before the Start of Time is the sequel to Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (2015), which features some of the same characters. Both novels show a society in which various birthing options are available, including ectogenesis and parthenogenesis (a kind of cloning that produces an embryo from one gamete, an unfertilized ovum). Embers shows that carrying one’s own child, rather than using ectogenesis, is now considered to be the cheaper, but riskier, birth plan. In 2113, Carmen lives with parthenogenetic sisters Toniah and Poppy. As a single lesbian, she is considering having a child through parthenogenesis, and is considering carrying her own child because it is cheaper and also because she does not want to take out a loan “that’s bigger than absolutely necessary” (45). Poppy warns her that she might experience pregnancy complications, so Carmen “better check her maternity terms,” as carrying her own baby might turn out to be “a false economy” (46). The sense identified by Joseph Dumit, “that any measurable health risks must be treated immediately, as if the risks themselves were diseases,” is evident here (12). Because ectogenesis provides an alternative to carrying the baby in utero, the

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decision between the two methods becomes an actuarial one, where Carmen is seen as putting her baby at risk by failing to take the statistically predictable (and expensive) option—even though she is healthy, and there is no reason to think she would not have a healthy pregnancy. The conspicuous consumerism surrounding parenthood has shifted from baby showers and an affluent lifestyle for the baby, to the process of reproduction and gestation itself. Dreams Before the Start of Time follows a number of different characters in different, increasingly futuristic timelines. Beginning in 2034 and ending in 2120, it allows the reader to see shifting perceptions of reproduction through ARTs and ectogenesis; social attitudes change from disapproval of a new and unfamiliar technology to disapproval of mothers like Carmen who choose to carry their own children rather than pay for the option of (now tried and tested) ectogenesis. Thus far, this trajectory follows the same one imagined by Sedgwick in The Growing Season, as well as that imagined by Danny Hall in Smith’s Baby X. Charnock’s futures allow the reader to contemplate the ways in which such changes have already begun, judging mothers for their perceived level of commitment to the healthiest path (statistically speaking) for their children. However, in this sense, the novel does not make the familiar unfamiliar—it repeats familiar scenarios in superficially estranged settings and, as a result, risks reinscribing contemporary anxieties about mothering and reproduction; namely, that so-called mistakes made by mothers, or decisions to raise children in unconventional family units, might scar children for life and leave them neurotically returning to the circumstances of their birth and rearing in an attempt to reconstruct fractured identities. Rather than show motherhood (or parenthood) as a historically contingent phenomenon, then, Dreams Before the Start of Time implies that its suffocating middle-­ class vision of parenthood is perennial, and that it will withstand the vicissitudes of time and technology. The futuristic dates in bold at the beginning of each chapter almost serve to repeat to the reader again and again: time is not important, and motherhood, fundamentally, will never change. While Charnock’s novel does serve to illuminate these contemporary middle-class concerns, it does so through a text that constructs a nostalgic, never-changing middle-class Southern Englishness. The characters in the novel do have problems, of course, but these tend to be individualistic and emotional, rather than reflective of the presumably seismic social, economic, and political changes that the availability of ectogenesis must wreak on society. The novel’s creation of this cozy middle-class world amounts

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to a kind of utopianism, as the problems of austerity and resultant health insecurity (as the NHS is dismantled) are willed out of existence. As with any utopia, it is worth asking—who is this utopia for, and who does it exclude? The Arthur C. Clarke award is not transparent about its jurors’ opinions, and these are not shared once a unanimous winner has been chosen. However, the Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy provides the service of a Shadow Clarke jury, who share their thoughts on the shortlisted novels in an exercise that is always engaging, though sometimes controversial. Considering the responses of the shadow jury is illuminative, here, given the criticisms of the novel that arose (Shadow Clarke Jury 2018). When thinking of ectogenesis, one might imagine that the promise of access to birthing technologies might be utopian for non-traditional families, and, like The Growing Season, the novel does consider the possibility of platonic co-parenting, lone parenting, and same-sex couples exploiting ectogenesis. However, the queer science fiction writer Foz Meadows points out that the non-traditional family types that the novel portrays as a new and strange occurrence in 2034 were already functioning and relatively common in the society of 2018, when the novel was published. The representation of queer families as an unusual novelty in futuristic settings gives the novel a conservative tone that exoticizes families which are already on the way to becoming normative (Shadow Clarke Jury). Meanwhile, Samira Nadkarni, an academic based at the Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, explained that the novel does not spend any time pondering the racial or ableist implications of a society in which eugenics is effectively available on demand, describing the novel as “quietly cruel in ways I’m not sure I’ve fully processed yet” (Shadow Clarke Jury). To these issues I would add the problems of pregnancy and birth’s representation. Birth and its traumas are very common experiences, but women suffer through social pressure to remain silent, and through having their experiences mediated through medical systems. Medics are often busy and ill-equipped to cope with the emotional care needed by women suffering birth trauma, and society at large tends to silence women’s experiences by constructing birth as a happy time and the death or abortion of a child as a taboo. As mentioned above, and in her review of the novel, Nussbaum expresses that there are few science fiction novels dealing with these topics, and that this has led her to desire that pregnancy and reproductive technologies be written about in original ways that challenge the assumptions of the audience. Charnock’s book does not do this, alas, and

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the accounts of pregnancy, childbirth, and ectogenesis are almost disembodied, sanitized and free of any sense of the body and its disruption. Pregnancy and childbirth are ostensibly the focus of the novel, but they are processes strangely missing, with the focus being on the emotional lives of characters as they decide to procreate or discover they are accidentally pregnant, followed by the neuroses of the children produced as a result. The bodily reality of pregnancy is a notable and unfortunate absence, especially in contrast to a novel like Baby X, which demonstrates that even ectogenetic technologies cannot sanitize birth and motherhood. The reasons for this novel’s success may lie in its political and aesthetic conservatism. Its style is redolent of literary fiction, with characterization prioritized over action, and a well-captured, cozy London-centric setting that is certainly attractive, particularly to those who live in a similar environment or find such a lifestyle aspirational. The combined political and aesthetic conservatism encourages a reading that reveals the over-arching problem with this novel: the way in which it offers class as nostalgia. The association between the middle class and literary fiction, between a cozy, gentrified London and the middle class who people this world, means that this novel is an exercise in class nostalgia. This is on the level of content, as there are only a couple of lines given to the consideration that inequality might increase through the introduction of birthing technologies. As well, it is present on the level of form through the novel’s focus on the minutiae of its middle-class characters’ quotidian lives and feelings. And it is present in the reader reception, which has seen the book elevated to a prize winner. Considering this novel and its reception is, therefore, an invaluable exercise. It tells us that a significant barrier to having a real discussion about how capital shapes our lives and hardens inequalities—in medicine and in elsewhere—is that, in order to really see capital, we have to really look at our affective class identifications.

Conclusion Considering these novels alongside each other shows the difficulties that women in the UK face as they consider the future of reproduction in a society where universal healthcare is under a slow but constant assault. In their different ways, these novels diagnose a bleak situation in which technologies that could change social and political relations might be envisaged, but these technologies will simply move into a pre-existing matrix of social and gender inequality, rendering them tools of oppression. The role

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that ectogenesis might play in healthcare, and in wider society, is a matter of quite urgent debate given that “bio-bags” that can prolong the gestation of premature lamb fetuses may begin human trials in the very near future (Devlin 2017). While these bio-bags are designed to extend time spent in an amniotic environment, rather than for gestating tout court, their widespread availability may begin to alter the parameters of reproductive healthcare in some of the ways anticipated in science fiction. An important preparation for such an eventuality would be for feminist campaigners and their fellow travelers to consider the state of healthcare in the UK, and the extent to which its rationing and privatization is already a feminist issue, particularly for Black women who were four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women in the UK in the period 2016–2018 (MBRRACE-UK 2000). Working to reverse some of the damage that has been done and for all women to receive high-quality reproductive healthcare would be beneficial regardless of future developments, but is especially urgent in light of the possibility. It is also worth considering how the issue of commodification runs through these texts, whether it be the commodification of the embryo, fetus, or baby; the commodification of associated bodily tissues; or the commodification of parenthood itself. Sociologist Vivianna Zelizer (2010) has argued that commodification should not be treated as negative in its own right, and that analyzing the circulation of biological tissues in contemporary ART systems shows that the gift economy and the language of commodification are both used, with the gift economy language causing just as many potential problems for participants as the capitalist model (Almeling 2011). Such models are useful in considering how a neutral technology might come to be leveraged by corporate interests, producing unintended consequences with a significant impact on the act of reproduction and its associated roles. While the novels under consideration here call for the reader to be wary of commodification, they also offer the potential for new and utopian relationships. In The Growing Season, Freida keeps fish, indigo hamlets, in her isolation and describes their beauteous mating dance in which the fish change roles to become both mother and father to the resultant offspring. Baby X shows a messy blurring of the physical and emotional relationships between parents and children, opening up options for new ways of relating to the next generation. Dreams Before the Start of Time, in its cozy nostalgia, is already attempting a kind of utopian vision; reading the novel against the grain might inspire a combative utopia that would consider

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and include the perspectives of those outside of the novel’s consideration. While technology alone will not disrupt the inequalities we currently see, seizing the means of (re)production through ectogenesis to create a utopia in which the pains of reproduction can be consigned to the past, and in which the “dialectic of sex” identified by Firestone could finally be synthesized into a truly post-gender society, should not be ruled out. As Haraway (2016) identifies, cyborgs are “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (9–10). These new explorations of ectogenesis—in which the mother, too, could be inessential—are motivated by contemporary anxieties about health under capitalism. We can also look to them for those utopian moments that offer a way through.4

References Almeling, Rene. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Callahan, Daniel. 2012. Rationing: Theory, Politics and Passions. In The Roots of Bioethics: Health, Progress, Technology, Death, 124–132. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cassalicchio, Emilio. 2017. Doctors Accuse Government of Starving NHS to Boost Privatisation. PoliticsHome, June 27. https://www.politicshome.com/ news/uk/health-­and-­care/nhs/news/87043/doctors-­accuse-­government-­ starving-­nhs-­boost-­privatisation. Charnock, Anne. 2017. Dreams Before the Start of Time. Seattle: 47North. Clemence, Michael. 2020. NHS Surges to Match Brexit in Final Issues Index Ahead of the 2019 General Election. Ipsos Mori, February 3. https://www. ipsos.com/ipsos-­m ori/en-­u k/nhs-­s urges-­m atch-­b rexit-­f inal-­i ssues-­ index-­ahead-­2019-­general-­election. De Bodard, Aliette. 2017. Horrific Pregnancies and Dead Mothers: Motherhood in Fiction and How I Learnt to Love My Pregnant Character. Intellectus Speculativus, April 19. https://intellectusspeculativus.wordpress. com/2017/04/19/guest-­post-­aliette-­de-­bodard-­on-­horrific-­pregnancies-­ and-­dead-­mothers/. Devlin, Hannah. 2017. Artificial Womb for Premature Babies Successful in Animal Trials. Guardian, April 25. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/

4  This research was produced as part of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, pf170027.

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apr/25/artificial-­w omb-­f or-­p remature-­b abies-­s uccessful-­i n-­a nimal-­t rials-­ biobag. Devries, Karen M., Sunita Kishor, Holly Johnson, Heidi Stöckl, Lorraine J.  Bacchus, Claudia Garcia-Moreno, and Charlotte Watts. 2010. Intimate Partner Violence During Pregnancy: Analysis of Prevalence Data from 19 Countries. Reproductive Health Matters 18 (36): 158–170. Donchin, Anne. 1989. The Growing Feminist Debate Over the New Reproductive Technologies. Hypatia 4 (3): 136–149. Dumit, Joseph. 2012. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health. Durham: Duke University Press. Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company. Freidenfelds, Lara. 2019. The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Manifestly Haraway, 5–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hays, Sharon. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kendal, Evie. 2015. Equal Opportunity and the Case for State Sponsored Ectogenesis. Houndmills: Palgrave Pivot. Khetarpal, Abha, and Satendra Singh. 2012. Infertility: Why Can’t We Classify This Inability as Disability? The Australasian Medical Journal 5 (6): 334–339. Knott, Sarah. 2019. Mother: An Unconventional History. Penguin Viking. Lawson, Nigel. 1992. The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical. Bantam Press. Leiser, Claire L., Heidi A.  Hanson, Kara Sawyer, Jacob Steenblik, Ragheed Al-Dulaii, Troy Madsen, Karen Gibbins, James M. Hotaling, Yetunde Oluseye Ibrahim, James A. VanDerslice, and Matthew Fuller. 2019. Acute Effects of Air Pollutants on Spontaneous Pregnancy Loss: A Case-Crossover Study. Fertility and Sterility 111 (2): 256–257. Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. London: Verso. Mandel, Emily St. John. 2014. Station Eleven. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Maung, Hane Htut. 2019. Is Infertility a Disease, and Does It Matter? Bioethics 33 (1): 43–53. MBRRACE-UK. 2000. Saving Lives, Improving Mother’s Care: Lessons learned to inform maternity care from the UK and Ireland Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths and Morbidity 2016–2018, December 2000. https://www. npeu.ox.ac.uk/assets/downloads/mbr race-­u k/r epor ts/mater nal-­ report-­2020/MBRRACE-­UK_Maternal_Report_Dec_2020_v10_ONLINE_ VERSION_1404.pdf.

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Nussbaum, Abigail. 2017. Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock. Strange Horizons, June 5. http://strangehorizons.com/non-­fiction/ dreams-­before-­the-­start-­of-­time-­by-­anne-­charnock/. Piercy, Marge. 1976. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sedgwick, Helen. 2017. The Growing Season. Random House. Shadow Clarke Jury. 2018. Panel Review: Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock. Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, July 5. http://csf f-­a nglia.co.uk/clarke-­s hadow-­j ur y/shadow-­j ur y-­2 018/ panel-­review-­dreams-­before-­the-­start-­of-­time-­by-­anne-­charnock/. Smith, Rebecca Ann. 2016. Baby X. Mother’s Milk Books. Takševa, Tatjana. 2012. The Commercialization of Motherhood and Mothering in the Context of Globalization. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative 3 (1): 134–148. https://jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/view/ 35343/32068. Whitehead, Colson. 2016. The Underground Railroad. Doubleday. Zelizer, Vivianna. 2010. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Being an Artificial Womb Machine-Human Sümeyra Buran

“Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphorical extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females.” —Haraway 1991, 180

Introduction The idea of alternative solutions to natural childbirth defects and other problems that threaten the health of the mother and child is not as recent one might think. The study of human gestation and the desire to control human procreation is already present in many recent developments in reproductive biotechnologies. From caesarean section surgery to the tangible reality of other, new reproductive possibilities in the implementation

S. Buran (*) Visiting Research Scholar, Department of English, University of Florida (Associate Professor of English, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Turkey), Florida, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_3

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process, it is clear that human reproduction has changed in the past and will continue to rapidly change in the near future. In recent decades, artificial insemination in humans, which resulted in the world’s first test-­tube baby—Louise Joy Brown, born through in  vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1978—has transformed into new research regarding artificial womb gestation.1 In 2001, and using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), Advanced Cell Technologies (ACT) announced the cloning of an embryo through the parthenogenesis method following the cloned sheep Dolly in 1996.2 In 2004, the first, initial one-year license to clone human stem cells and an embryo using parthenogenesis was approved by the British Human Fertilization and Embryology Agency (Hauskeller 2004, 519; Singer 2006).3 In 2014, Mats Brännström (2017) writes, the world’s first bioengineered human uterus was “mostly created from the recipient’s own stem cells that grow on a synthetic scaffold or a biologically derived scaffold” (75). The first artificial womb was similarly created for premature lamb fetuses, which were removed from their mothers’ wombs surgically, and put inside the external amniotic womb, called a “biobag,” to be able to grow over four more weeks. These fetuses were born with better brain performance, according to a team of researchers at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, who hoped for the same biomedical gestation for prematurely born babies in the future (Partridge et al. 2017). In 2018, researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology Netherlands started to work on Future and Emerging Technologies (FET), developing high-tech artificial wombs to grow premature babies in liquid-filled giant balloons in a decade. Microbiologists at Newcastle University in Britain have also taken a step forward by developing artificial sperm cells (spermatogonial stem cells) from bone marrow, so women in same-sex couples can produce female sperm cells and bear a daughter as mothers. Lastly, He Jiankhui, known as China’s Frankenstein, announced the first CRISPR generation 1  The term “test tube baby” does not mean that she/he was decanted from a bottle, but fertilized in a test tube and then gestated and born as normal. 2  SCNT differs from cloning, which creates the embryo without sexual reproduction, by creating the embryo through removing and replacing the nucleus of an egg from a mature body cell. 3  The license goes to Professor Alison Murdoch and Dr. Miodrag Stojkovic at the Newcastle Centre for Life. The first human-cloned embryo using SCNT was announced six months ago by a group of scientists at the Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea, but the project was under investigation due to ethical misconduct. See https://www.everycrsreport. com/reports/RL31358.html#ifn13.

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when the first gene-edited twin babies, Lulu (露露) and Nana (娜娜), were born through the techniques of IVF in 2018, as described by Kiran Musunuru (2019), Nessa Carey (2019), and Françoise Baylis (2019). Moving beyond these developments in bioscience, reproductive technologies have become one of the main focuses of feminist sf, which include artificial reproduction, IVF, sperm donation and artificial insemination, remote gestation, clinic-based artificial wombs, genome-edited embryos, parthenogenesis, ectogenesis, synthetic chromosomes, reprogenetics, parasitism, animal-machine-human hybrid uteruses, machine reproduction, inter-species reproduction, and human reproductive. Elizabeth Sourbut (2012) claims that “procreation is a culturally constructed activity, but that part of the construction is to view it as a natural process” (142). Childbearing has culturally been associated with women’s bodies due to reproductive restrictions, and women traditionally choose to have vaginal deliveries for a range of reasons commonly described as “natural” and “normal”; thereby, feminist sf breaks this naturalistic fallacy by proposing alternative ways of reproduction for women to be freed from their bodily constraints. The technologies therein speculate how we would come into the world in the twenty-first century, were biotechnology to replace human mothers with Artificial Womb Machine-Mothers. Utopian feminist sf reflects women’s hopes concerning the freedom of their bodies in reproduction; it offers positive scenarios arising from the feminist adaptation of technology. In other words, and as argued by Gary Westfahl (2005), “feminist science fiction writers have been more hopeful—imagining societies in which political arrangements […] and advanced control of reproductive biology increase the freedom and capabilities of women” (72). Brian Attebery (2002) notes how “separation by gender has been the basis of a fascinating series of thought experiments,” mostly in feminist utopian sf (107). Most feminist sf writers speculate on single-­ gender worlds, particularly female-only utopias, and imagine female parthenogenesis reproduction as seen in Mary E.  Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1890), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978), Shelley Singer’s The Demeter Flower (1980), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Waterground (1979), and Nicole Griffith’s Ammonite (1992). Rather than eliminating men, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) present alternative reproductive methods for both genders.4 Ursula Le 4  Charnock’s novel does not mention about breast milk or feeding for any gender; we do not have an idea how women feed their artificially conceived machine-human babies, or

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Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) creates an alternative hermaphrodite world (sexless society) in which ambisexual individuals with no fixed sex have reproductive abilities. As seen in Octavia Butler’s Blood Child (1984), feminist sf writers sometimes imagine male pregnancy, or homosexual worlds using male parthenogenesis, as seen in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos (1986), this latter text depicting a single-sex male-­ populated reproductive society where men can reproduce male babies or co-parent their partner’s son conceived by uterine replicator machine. Contemporary feminist sf writer Helen Sedgwick similarly incorporates male ectogenesis carrying in The Growing Season (2017). How might new reproductive technologies change the world without requiring women’s pregnancy? Contemporary feminist sf writer Anne Charnock foresees a coming era of motherless births in human procreation, depicting the future of reproductive technologies and its myriad consequences in Dreams Before the Start of Time (2018). The text narrates how reproductive choices across multiple generations in the same group of families are distinctly changed by biotechnology in 2034, 2080, and 2120. Charnock covers five generations of two families, the Dacks and the Munroes, who witness new directions in reproductive technology that their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren choose. Charnock does not create a “single-sex utopia” as Kristine Anderson describes (1990, 86), eliminating neither men nor women from reproduction through artificial womb biotechnology. Instead, the novel explores the limits of pregnancy and alternate forms of reproduction in which women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities are altered by biotechnology. Departing from a feminist understanding of utopian futurist motherhood, I will argue how parthenogenesis and gene-editing/designer technologies liberate both men and women from sex boundaries and traditional family structures via asexual reproduction. This chapter explores what gender roles would be in such childbearing and childrearing, how the family concept would transform, what single-sex or solo parenting would mean for family bonds, and how the choice of reproduction technology would affect relationships with any following generations, if not shift “natural” entirely. I will examine the psychological transformations and consequences of each generation as affected by their choice of reproduction, by exploring whether technological mediation changes the parent–child relationship and creates whether men can breastfeed their babies through hormone injection as in the case of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of the Time.

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new bounding problems related to the SingleGen/SoloGen (using a genome from a solo parent) and DualGen (using a genome from both parents) binary. The novel extrapolates technologies of assisted reproduction to expand and reconfigure concepts of family. Thereby, this chapter reflects on a number of issues related to reconstructed family forms and the possible repercussions of artificial womb technology (AWT), through ectogenesis and parthenogenesis gestation methods, for homo-/heterosexual parents. Could AWT bring alternative control within the techno-social domain, particularly for women via the choice of artificial childbirth? Feminist sf writers, writes Suzanne Damarin (2004), challenge existing reproduction “in order to deconstruct or at least displace, the totalization of patriarchal reproductive arrangements on the lives of women” (59). Charnock similarly creates an equal opportunity for both genders without any governmental reproductive control or authority except the social and public domain, the latter of which regards natural birth as abnormal and leads women to AWT. This process also maps onto economic issues in which wealthy prospective parents opt to pay for artificial wombs, while poorer people rely on women’s bodies to gestate their babies. The novel is thus concerned, I press, with social inequality and questions of ableism, as the genetically engineered children will potentially create another class distinction between “GenRich” children who are genetically enhanced, and “GenPoor,” or natural-born humans. I will demonstrate how reproductive choices affect parent–child bonding and relationships, and explore how the novel’s new family forms and changes in the social status of parenting demonstrate the importance of being a parent, a child, and a family in each generation to follow.

Like a Virgin: Parthenogenesis Through AWT Human reproduction is still limited to the union of egg and sperm, either from a sexual encounter or in a test-tube, until biotechnologies perfect the possibility of sexless reproduction outside the organic womb. Dream Before the Start of Time fictionalizes the speculation of British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane (1924), however, who in 1923 coined the term ectogenesis to define reproduction outside the human body, and suggests that more children would be born in ectogenesis clinics by 2074. The future prospect of biotechnology in Charnock’s work leads us to re-examine the probable problems of new family bonding and social class distinction by

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questioning whether “mankind will be free in an altogether new sense,” as Haldane writes, “if reproduction is at once completely separated from sexual love” (68). In some speculative fiction, the ectogenetic artificial womb gestation might involve a portable unit to be carried or a staff (a balloon or backpack) in a clinic, but in Charnock’s novel, it is a machine technology for mass production in a reproductive gestation clinic.5 The parthenogenetic artificial womb machines develop embryos from unfertilized egg or sperm cells, Charnock speculating how such futuristic reproduction technology could allow a gender-equal world where the artificial womb is not only for “women’s reproductive freedom,” but also for men’s reproductive hope (Petchesky 1984). Aline Ferreira (2015, 213) writes that parthenogenesis is not only portrayed as a “female fantasy of bearing a child without men,” but also as a “male dream of producing children without the help of women,” since ectogenesis “would enable them to have a child on their own, provided there were ova banks” (Murphy 1989, 70). So, as Prasad defends (2012), AWT “would be a great biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex” (loc. 3336). Charnock accordingly shapes the prospect of AWT parthenogenesis into an ultimate gender equalizer, decreasing the risks of pregnancy and childbirth, freeing the woman’s body from their biological constraints of reproduction, as well as offering single men or women to become a solo parent. This direction also enables transgender and queer identifying individuals to have a baby instead of using surrogacy, such as when the novel introduces an alternative way of reproduction for men and gay males, who can go solo by using self-­ reproduction through artificial womb machines, freeing them from dependency on female pregnancy and carrying because they will “create an egg from the father’s [their] stem cells” (Charnock 2017, 88). Influenced by Prasad’s Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex (2012), which discusses the possibilities of the virgin birth in humans, Charnock speculates on solo parenting as a new family form of “full biological ownership” of the child (Prasad loc. 58), that is, the novel dreams of future technology as a means to create partheno-children from a single parent’s SoloGen, or solo genome, alone. Rather than using a 5  Ectogenesis became famous with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), yet works like Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017) weave ectogenesis in, speculating on whether both men and women would share procreation though artificial wombs, called pouches, carried as backpacks.

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partner’s genetic material and so using a dual genome, men or women in the novel can have a child solely from their own genes through producing synthetic eggs or sperm in their bodies. This ability enables both men and women to have a baby with their SoloGen without the need for external eggs/sperms, with the question of who carries the baby losing its importance. Thereby, Charnock speculates about a future where motherless or fatherless children emerge, thanks to the biogenetical developments, and create different forms of family and parenting, of which I will show in the following examples. The speculation on AWT portrays how family relations are restructured by parthenogenesis as an emerging alternative reproductive method, and how gender roles are changing through characters’ reproductive choices.

Artificial Womb Machine-Mother Replication of Organic Mother Cultural feminists such as Sara Ruddick and Carol Gilligan relate mothering to women-fetus/child gestational relationships, offering ethical criticism about AWT, which disintegrates “the unique and enigmatic relationship between a mother and child in pregnancy” (Sander-Staudt 2006, 116). Unlike cultural feminists, Shulamith Firestone (1970), as a liberal feminist, identifies AWT in her The Dialectic of Sex to be an agent of liberty and equality as well as an escape from the biological boundaries of motherhood. Likewise, Tuija Takala proposes on that “if and when ectogenesis becomes a safe option, it will finally make true equality between humans possible” (188). What Charnock shows of ectogenesis, in Firestone’s words, is how it “free[s] women from the tyranny of their sexual reproductive roles” as long as reproductive technology simulates an organic womb (1970, 31). By portraying an artificial incubator and an artificial matrix replicating the organic mother’s womb—filled with synthetic amniotic fluid, the formula by the synthetic placenta, and parent sound vocalization during remote control gestation—Charnock establishes a Firestonian utopia and explores what we consider a machine-­ mother to be, or a maternal cyborg body in which the body of the child becomes cybernetic itself. That is, readers see “the encounter between the ‘natural’ body of the mother and the child, and the ‘technological’ body of the machine [as] producing cyborg-mother and cyborg-child” (Aristarkhova 56). Charnock technologically recreates the gestating maternal body and offers new maternal practices attributed to an

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intelligent machine which merely simulates breathing, voices, sounds, and symbiosis as if they were real and natural. Human mothers thus leave their role of social “birthing machines” to Artificial Womb Machine-Mothers. Artificial womb gestation is regarded in the text as “safer than a natural pregnancy once the fertilized egg has bonded with womb lining,” which is controlled and monitored “around the clock, checking nutrient levels, oxygen feed, waste removal and so on” (Charnock 2017, 81). This process operates as Maurizio Balistreri (2018) proposes, in which “an artificial uterus would never subject to unavoidable accidents, injury, and aggression and still be a more aseptic environment” (18–9). Charnock depicts Christine Rosen’s (2003) assumption of a perfect artificial womb, or a good replication of the organic mother that offers a “‘healthier’ environment than the old-fashioned human version,” or that which is capable of threatening the child by “irresponsible introductions of alcohol or illegal drugs” despite regulating “sources of temperature and nutrition and ongoing monitoring by expert technicians in incubation clinics” (72). Because of the safety that the artificial womb offers, one may find parents questioning why they “take the risk of gestating [their] child in an old-­ fashioned womb” (72). In other words, in a living simulacrum of the womb, organic gestation and the organic mother’s womb are simulated as if real. Charnock shows that artificial womb “[t]echnology is capable of simulating vital signs, of supporting life, of becoming Mother. The child of the techno-Mother is essential, a virtual body,” as describes J. Smith-­ Windsor (2004, 2). For example, Charnock’s artificial womb gestation clinic has red lights through the corridor floors, but the “viewing gallery” in the baby wards is dimly lit, “as it’s dark in a mother’s womb” (2017, 79); that is, the artificial machine “acts as if it were a mother” (Aristarkhova 2005, 43). The ward is also portrayed as noisier for the fetus like the organic womb. The real voice and heartbeats of parents are recorded to “feed the sound into the fetus flasks during gestation” (Charnock 2017, 80). Thus, Charnock shows that the AWT needs to be more than just a container; it must be as interactive as a human mother.

New Family Forms: Towards Genderqueer Solo Parent Family So far, we have seen how feminist sf reconstructs family values by introducing new reproductive technologies and alternatives to two-parent family values. In Dream Before the Start of Time and thanks to AWT, for

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instance, the third generation uses remote gestation, gynogenesis, and parthenogenesis, which enable each gender to have a baby without the need for an egg or sperm donation. As the title of the novel suggests, however, Charnock designs new family forms from the start, or “before the start of time,” before the next-generation Artificial Womb Machine-­ Humans are conceived. She challenges traditional heterosexual nuclear family forms and speculates about new conceptions of family in which children are born by an Artificial Womb Machine-Mother. As Firestone (1970) argues, “[t]he reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would bear to both sexes equally,” so the artificial womb gestation technology in the novel breaks “the tyranny of biological family” (11). The novel discusses the relationship between family forms and biological reproduction, with Charnock representing new forms of families enabled by technologically augmented production, which enables the death of a heteronormative nuclear family and the birth of a nonbinary genderqueer solo parent. As well, Charnock’s alternative forms of reproduction bring out a variety of alternative family such as donor insemination families (lack of genetic link with the father or mother), godparenting (voluntarily agreement), co-parent families (a signed agreement to share the duties), multiple parenting, SoloGen parent families (which lack a DualGen parent link) by choice, genderqueer families (same-sex parenting), adoptive families, and foster families (for Artificial Womb Machine-­ Orphans). In this next section, however, I examine whether AWT irreversibly changes the organic nature of family and our ideas of parenting, and how ARTs complicate understanding of gender, reproduction, and family in ways that promote gender equality while creating new and different kinds of family and social struggles. Therefore, this section demonstrates how reproductive choice changes the importance of what it is to be a parent, a child, and a family. In Charnock’s 2034, we witness a new type of family and romantic relationship be created despite it not living under the same roof. Women’s preference for sperm donor gestation by IVF is not welcomed by the previous generation such as with the character Betty, who, in coming from a traditional nuclear family, reacts negatively to the reproductive choice of her son Aiden’s girlfriend, Millie Dack. Millie is not pregnant with Aiden’s son, but instead, she carries the child of a sperm donor. In effect, the novel proposes a co-parenting method for those solo parents with the agreement of a companionate godparent, and without the need for a partner

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like Aiden who agrees to be the godfather. As the novel progresses, it depicts Millie’s baby becoming an excellent opportunity for Millie’s queer sister to be a voluntary co-parent, with Millie become “the only birthing partner” with her sister and “a joint godmother with Toni Munroe,” her close friend (Charnock 2017, 59, 62). Charnock thus offers a new type of family and alternative parenting with a donor sperm baby raised by multiple parents; a biological mother, queer aunt/mother, a godmother, and a godfather. The novel thus offers a “platonic co-parenting” structure as an alternative option for single, queer, or gender fluid individuals, if not anyone who prefers not to live under the same roof with an arranged partner, but wishes to share the joy and the work with “a special forever friend who is equally keen to be a loving parent” (Charnock 2017, 22–3). The scene described above depicts a techno-economic market based on co-­parenting and childrearing under a contract. The possibility of choosing a partner according to genetic heritage also allows the parent to choose the future baby from a catalogue, if once removed. In this way, women free themselves from the bonds of living with a husband under the same roof with the help of IVF at the clinic and with “Mr. Right’s cleaned-up sperm” (25). Millie and Toni have different views of reproduction and building a family, for instance; while Milli chooses to bring her son up in a single-sex family with an unknown biological donor father, Toni prefers to sign a co-­parenting model with her boyfriend to raise their biological son in separate houses. However, after Toni decides that “co-parenting with someone new could be a total disaster,” she tries to persuade her boyfriend, Atticus, to co-parent his own biological son, thinking that he can transfer a functional gene as his “parents are still alive (good genes)” (33). The novel shows that this new family form living under different roofs also offers “part-time parenting” like Atticus, who ultimately views himself as “a part-time father” to his own biological son, signing a contract agreement that if he and Toni break up, he will do the co-parenting. Thus, the so-­called “platonic [non-romantic] co-parenting” family confronts the traditional nuclear family concept (39). Charnock depicts heteronormativity as limiting for the second generation, which showcases how biological reproduction (genes) is separated from social reproduction (family). Charnock’s year-2080 further introduces the option of the gynogenesis method, which offers single women and lesbian couples the chance to have a baby with two biological mothers and no biological father by “using

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two eggs; one, [which is] less mature than the other, acts as a pseudo sperm” (2017, 84). As a broader term, parthenogenesis—along with AWT—brings further freedom of reproductive rights for women who move “beyond biological essentialism in gaining control of their own reproduction” and for men who move beyond alternative gestation bypassed by ectogenesis and beyond dependence on female wombs and surrogacy (Sourbut 2012, 158). Ectogenesis increases the reproductive choices for all sexes: women can be “a solo parent who conceived with synthetic Y chromosome,” and men who conceived with synthetic gametes may similarly follow (Charnock 2017, 84). That is, Charnock anticipates a techno-future that enables lesbians, gays, or those identifying as transgender to have their babies as solo parents. The novel speculates upon queertopian reproductive technology, which offers new ways of living through creating new lives. Asexual reproduction via parthenogenesis frees Toni’s gay son Marco from nuclear reproduction, and he forms a non-traditional and nonbinary SoloGen, genderqueer single-parent family, making a partheno-baby from his SoloGen as if giving birth to himself (cloning himself). This form of partheno-baby resonates with Donna J. Haraway’s (1991) statement that “cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction” (150). Marco is freed from the tyranny of ovum transplantation, from producing an organic womb and surrogate carrier, as well as from living with his queer partner under the same roof. The novel questions what it means to be a single solo queer parent and offers the possibility of being a male-mother like Marco. While Marco prefers single parenting, Millie’s son Rudy and his wife Simone choose to keep the traditional nuclear family model using AWT.  Rudy does not want to repeat his upbringing with his mother, Millie, who had raised him with his transgender aunt/uncle in turns: “both women in his childhood, their love interests were, ultimately disposable. Drove him to fucking distraction” (Charnock 2017, 81). Thus, because of his mother’s reproductive choice of an unknown sperm donor father, Rudy feels the lack of a biological, genetic kin, which leads him to choose a nuclear family as his wife “offered him a true lifelong marriage. He saw himself as a devoted one-woman man” (80). At first, the couple considers adopting an orphan Artificial Womb Machine-Baby from the AWT clinic because Simone does not prefer to have a biological baby, particularly a son who might resemble her brutal brothers who bullied her. Thus, she prefers to have one child: “a non-bio, one-child agreement, which negates her anxieties over sibling rivalry” (81). Charnock’s

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biomedical dream laboratory, here, offers women the “freedom from reproductive slavery” (de Beauvoir Simone 2011, 139), AWT freeing Simone from the constraints of her reproductive body and from societal codes for women to have a biological baby. In this type of reproductive speculation, the couple decides to have one side’s genetic offspring—using Rudy’s own SoloGen—as they prefer not to use somebody else’s genes after learning that an orphan techno-baby may also have some negative personality traits derived from their biological parents. Hence, Rudy becomes a solo father, while Simone becomes a non-bio mother. This scene shows the transformed concept of motherhood, which becomes what Maureen Sander-­Staudt (2006) describes as “a gender-neutral activity signified by the conscious activity of nurturing, not physical process contingent upon biological destiny” (114). Charnock shows how flexible women could be in their decision about reproduction choices, even to the point of choosing not to become the biological mother of their own baby. That is, traditional parenthood roles of mother (as child bearers) and father (as procreators) are de-restructured by the reproductive technologies available, increasingly changing the meaning of parenting by making it possible for a woman to “father,” a man to “mother,” or an individual to be a solo parent. Furthermore, Charnock speculates on an alternative family form in which babies are raised collectively. The novel offers an orphanage, Baby Bertrand House, where Artificial Womb Orphan Bottle-Babies are brought up parentless in a collective family unit because the dream ended before the start of their time/life/birth (as the title of the novel refers) due to their parents’ death. Readers find a “a survivalist community, struggling in the aftermath of an apocalypse … all adults were dead; the children had to grow their own food” (Charnock 2017, 150). The novel demonstrates that an alternative Artificial Womb-conceived Child can have an Artificial Womb Machine-Mother, a dead Single/Dual Genetic parent, no social parent (godparent), adopted parent, or a foster parent, ultimately having to live as an Artificial Womb Machine-Orphan. Charnock portrays an optimistic Artificial Womb Orphanage, however, where orphans benefit from genetic enhancement, living a better life with the caregivers and individual life coaches. They are not used for humanity, governments, or authorities;6 instead their life “before the start of time” provides a high-class status 6  As depicted in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), in which clones are raised in orphanages for organ transplantation.

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within society, with Baby Bertrand House offering an alternative market for adopting high-quality Artificial Womb Machine-Orphans. The novel also portrays that Artificial Womb Machine-Orphans who can marry up the orphan gene pool have a higher intellectual capacity and genetic enhancement that puts them in a higher class and economic position, but this new, collectively raised form of family lacks an emotional bond of kinship towards natural-born humans, a sign of new techno-able class distinction.

Parent–Child Bonding and Relationships: SoloGen Versus DualGen Some psychological theories show a relation between pregnancy and birth, bonding and kindred, while others argue against the strength of bonding during pregnancy.7 That is, Ruth Landau (2007) writes, “it is unclear whether it is the result of biology or social construction” (6). Charnock shows bonding to be about how much the child is wanted, so that parents “may see their great desire to bring their child into the world translate into a great bond with their child, no matter the womb it developed in” (Prasad 2012, loc. 2839). The novel depicts how AWT alters traditional maternal identity, where, here, to be able to view the fetus through sonograms and ultrasound is considered to increase the early mother–child relationship even before the first infantile kicks. As a result, Prasad argues, “being able to watch, in plain sight, the fragile, doll-like fetus as it develops and grows may encourage a new and special bond” (loc. 2826). The novel draws another point here, questioning the bonding problem that remote gestation might cause, not only for women, but also for parents in general because, in this techno-society, emotional attachment is not associated with mothers having “more innate caring skills” (Charnock 2017, 78). Charnock’s new type of parents/mothers “can place their palms on the vessel. They can see and feel the baby moving,” with the parent–child relationship “itself [becoming] mediated by technology” and thereby virtual (83); thus, the organic womb of the “[m]other becomes redundant: technology becomes the external womb” (Smith-Windsor 2004, 3). Charnock offers an alternative family bonding between procreation and parenthood via the fetus listening to the voices of both mother and father

7

 See Gregory Pence (2006).

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from the vessels. Therefore, the novel shows a new techno-bonding for techno-generation. I argue that feminist SF offers a reproduction of the mothering concept by even anticipating paternity as a kind of mothering through AWT. In the parthenogenetic society of Charnock, the concept of mothering referred to as birthing and nurturing is reconstructed, and men and women can achieve equal reproductive opportunities, so men can “become mothers easing the maternal burdens of women” like Marco, who becomes a mother without the need of a woman’s egg (Sander-Staudt 112). Thus, Charnock portrays a gender-neutral understanding of motherhood through the upbringing of Amelia by her solo father, “a man ‘mothering’ a child,” which shows the recoding of the role of mothering/fathering and even the redefinition of “family relations—the sphere of human reproduction” (Chodorow 1999, 11–12). Paternal bonds and emotional ties between father and child are portrayed as instinctual. Charnock, for instance, shows how a solo man can feel a deep sensation of mothering when Marco sees his baby in the artificial vessel: “Amelia is seven months. She hugs herself in her artificial womb. […] There she is in her dimples, still the same. Is she smiling? Or full of wind? There’s no knowing. Or is she dreaming? He prefers to think so. A dream before the start of time, her time here in the world” (103–4). The novel shows how motherhood is overly associated with women. The title of the novel given in this quotation refers to the idea that the artificial womb is a kind of dream for those machine-conceived babies for whom the womb is not a mother’s reality, but just a dream before coming to the real world. However, this new start for Amelia without a genetic mother becomes a psychological burden in her childhood. The novel questions here if AWT is a better opportunity for the baby, or “to ensure our [the] child had the best start, had the best chance of surviving” as a head start or to come short of organic gestation (138). Although Charnock’s AWT frees women from biological construction, the parental social domain is perpetuated in terms of reproductive choice, which breaks parent–child relationships. Despite the technological freedom for both sexes, the complications and guilt of family structures and relations are not erased, as new reproductive technologies bring new parent–child relationship problems. Each type of human, either natural-born or Artificial Womb Machine-conceived Human (ecto-, partheno-, or techno), suffers from a family relationship and their reproductive choice. Millie feels disappointed when Rudy decides to find his biological father,

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and she wishes she could have had a chance for SoloGen like Rudy, where she would “have jumped at the chance” of AWT (Charnock 2017, 114). However, we witness how Rudy both accuses his mother’s reproductive choice: “You didn’t have to have a baby. The fact that I’m here in the world doesn’t justify your decision” (114). He as well hits his donor father, accusing him of creating hundreds of children in disparate locations, and worries that if his daughter might meet one of them, asking, “What happens if they fall for one another?” (142). This scene shows how the AWT generation ethically criticizes the traditional method of gestation following sperm donation, when new reproductive technology offers remote SoloGen incubation without the need for an unknown egg donor. The novel portrays Rudy as proud of being a solo father instead of a sperm donor, exclaiming how “She’s my solo daughter—all her DNA is mine. I want her to feel that being a solo child is better than being a donor-­ conceived child” (141). Rudy feels that having an unknown donor father is worse than having no father. However, Rudy’s SoloGen-conceived daughter, Julia, leads her father to regret his decision of not using her mother’s biological gene. As a fourth-generation solo Artificial Womb Machine-conceived woman, Julia has some concerns on whether her boyfriend can “cope with my personality traits—specifically, my tendency towards impulsivity. Not to mention my sensitivity arising, so I’m told, from my solo conception—that I’m apt to form intense friendships with other women … I’m deeply affected by my lack of genetic diversity” (Charnock 2017, 170). These sentences suggest that Julia might even prefer an anonymous donor mother as she feels emotionally more connected to her mom. She also suffers a possible collapse in genetic diversity for her offspring if she too prefers single-parent reproduction. So, her parent’s choice shapes her own decision of reproduction, as Julia says, “I wouldn’t choose a solo conception if it was avoidable—I’d prefer to splice my genes with a sexual partner as part of a long-term relationship” (170). Each generation comes to be unhappy with their parents’ reproductive choices, which leads them to choose what they perceive as the opposite option. In the same way, Marco’s SoloGen-conceived Amelie, as a fourth generation, wishes she had a donor mother among her father’s friends rather than have no biological mother: “But why didn’t you ask one of your friends to give you a few eggs?” (Charnock 2017, 130). Deciding to be a solo parent, raising a child without a mother is described as “a one-way ticket to the other side of the planet” (127). Amelie questions her father’s

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choice of reproduction: “Why did you make me, you know, on your own?” She even asks, “Why can’t I have a mum like my friends?” Marco explains his sexual preferences, that “You had two dads for a while,” but she does not count this as relevant since she received no genetic inheritance from him. One can see how a SoloGen child may feel a longing for a DualGen family, thus. Both Amelia and Julie prefer to have a DualGen family, believing that self-fertilization can reduce the offspring’s genetic diversity, and the novel is ultimately critical about the future Artificial Womb Machine Human generation, who might want to return to a DualGen family form in a techno-socially reconstructed society. The novel portrays the impact of future reproductive technologies on society, family structure, and parenting models. A new form of parenting by rearing children in co-parenting programs, as a team, or in solo parenting is exalted, yet the protagonists experience contradictory emotions about new reproductive technologies that enable the nullification of traditional parenting roles. Although reproductive technologies advance from generation to generation, Artificial Womb Machine-Humans’ concerns about the new reproduction methods still continue to increase. The novel portrays how each new generation will continue to criticize the previous generation’s reproductive choices, which in turn shows that the parent– child relationship will continue to be disrupted until the gap disappears between generations.

Social Status of Parenting: GenRich and GenPoor Classes Ectogenesis presents the opportunity for women’s freedom, but it can also “coerce women’s reproductive choices” because of the social circumstances and public domains that “are already inhospitable to pregnancy” (Sander-Staudt 2006, 113). As Gosden (1999, 182) writes, twenty-first century women would prefer AWT for “social or professional convenience,” like Nancy in the novel, whose reason for her choice of AWT is her teaching job which requires physical effort: “It’s bloody awful being pregnant in my job. I’m on my feet in class for six hours some days” (Charnock 2017, 119).8 The novel depicts how “the public presence of pregnant woman” becomes “a social anomaly” as if it were a kind of 8  Nancy is the sister of Nicol, who is the skating instructor of Toni and Millie, who can skate with the help of high-tech exo-skel human-assisted technology.

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primitive way of risking the health of the baby and women, so in the novel, as long as one can afford it, it is expected to use AWT (Sander-Staudt 114). AWT is such a preferred choice that the previous generation feels guilty for not using this method to have more kids. This is the case of Nancy’s mother, who “couldn’t face the pregnancy and birth” but “didn’t like the idea of leaving the baby in the prenatal unit, leaving it in its ‘little bottle,’ as she called it” (Charnock 2017, 121). In this scene, we see that AWT at first is not preferred by the older generation, who might regard new moms as “heartless, leaving the baby at the hospital. Just visiting during gestation”; but later, technology becomes more societally acceptable, and Nancy’s mother is “having regrets. Seeing you. Seeing you and Timmy [Nancy’s son]. And you feeling no guilt” (121). The novel shows how natural labor becomes wrongly “naturalized” as necessary for all women, also depicting how it is equally wrong to insist that all women must have babies or that ART is always better, so pregnancy becomes truly a choice, not stigmatized either way. Charnock depicts the regrets of the previous generation mothers who chose not to use the AWT: “We all have to live with our decisions” of reproduction (121). It is noticeable that Charnock’s techno-society is becoming accustomed to using AWT that frees women not only from potential disfiguring effects and the suffering of childbirth, but also from risky positions in business, workplace, career, and politics, so women can “obtain true equality in other spheres of life” (Singer and Wells 1984, 129). The novel suggests that there is no technological solution that “frees” women from reproduction, but instead, no matter what the technology offers, it is social organization which creates problems, so the solutions need to be social, not just technical. Sherryl Vint (2007) argues that one of the reproductive “technologies of body modification that enable[s] the transition to posthumanism” is CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing technology to evolve humanity beyond its limitations by erasing diseases and enhancing the physical and mental capacity of human (176). In this case, Charnock’s futuristic Artificial Womb Machine-Humans can be described as what Ferreira (2015) terms “posthuman parturitions” (25). In the novel, human genetic enhancement is conducted through genome editing technology, which through the possibility of genome enhancing results in “designer babies.”9 In other words, so-called “gen-designer babies” (new techno-capital babies) of 9  See Michael Bess (2015); Henry T. Greely (2016); Robert Klitzman (2019); Françoise Baylis (2019); John Bliss (2011) and Everet Hamner (2017).

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wealthy parents create another class distinction between the “GenRich” machine-born and “GenPoor” natural-born humans.10 Charnock foresees shift from economic inequality to “tomorrow’s genetic inequality” (Peters et  al. 2008, 74). The inevitable outcome of the novel’s reproductive genetic technologies is depicted as leading to a new market-based geneconomic system which increases the genetic gap between GenRich and GenPoor classes in the future. The GenRich children of wealthy parents start a different socioeconomic gen-class, and people who cannot afford the technologies belong to the GenPoor class. Charnock’s prediction also portrays this digital divide as that which leads people to choose to have genetically engineered offspring as long as they can afford it. The novel shows that such a problem results not from reproductive biology but rather social policy. In this way, Charnock thinks through the various possibilities created by the technological control of reproduction, including the new parenting and family structures they enable. Nevertheless, Charnock portrays how humans redesigning their babies before they are born—like Amelie’s son Theo, a fifth generation, who is conceived as a designer baby—can draw up conflicts pressing beyond simply ethics.11 Being a partheno-human, Amelia uses the new technique of genome editing and corrects her unborn child’s DNA. The reason Amelia chooses AWT for her second baby is her guilt of choosing natural gestation for her first baby, natural-born Seb, who we come to find spoke late. Modern reproductive biotechnology confuses her, which leads her to feel guilty about her choice of natural reproduction for Seb: “the clinicians preyed on their guilty feelings. Why take the risk of having two children with learning difficulties?” (Charnock 2017, 179). However, when Seb produces a full sentence after six months, Amelia again feels guilty, but this time it is for paying a large sum of money for Theo’s “standard germline modifications to delete the mutation load and [allowing] the clinic to screen for the most vital embryo. Then—going too far—they paid for aesthetic tweaks” (179). This layered approach to birth shows how new technology might become an “industrial gestation,” in which gen-­capitalist 10  The term GenRich is borrowed from Lee Silver (1999), who predicts a new digital divide as GenRich-humans and Natural-humans for the year 2350. 11  This part of the novel reminds readers of the genetic determinism and technoeugenics in dystopian sf films such as Gattaca (1997), in which people are categorized into a hierarchy of genetic classes as superior or inferior, as the siblings Vincent (GenPoor) and Anton (Gen Rich) are.

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system and techno-social domain shape the reproduction choices of the new generation (30). By portraying women’s roles and the options of using AWT by choice or necessity, Charnock explores in what ways “the very concept of an artificial womb reveals how societies view women” (Prasad 2012, loc. 2902). Charnock’s transformed techno-society in 2120 has an unwelcoming attitude to organic pregnancy, which is wholly considered as abnormal and an unhealthy way of producing. In this bio-geno-medical future, parents are encouraged to dream the genetic make-up of their babies before birth and before the start of their offspring’s time. So, in this generation, “many women feel compelled to choose ectogenesis over natural birth methods in order to maintain their public positions,” like Amelia, who finds it challenging to balance her choice of natural gestation in her first baby with her public position (Sander-Staudt 2006, 114). Amelia feels her nostalgia for traditional, corporeal gestation motherhood; however, she feels “the withering glances” that get her down when a woman says, “if you can afford that bracelet, you can afford to look after your child better” (Charnock 2017, 200–1). The biogenetic technologies are portrayed to be limited to parents who can afford it, yet this scene also shows that the social and public domain regard the public presence of pregnancy as “a social anomaly.”12 Even after having her gene-designed baby, her husband thinks that if they have a third child, he will definitely insist on clinic gestation because he “didn’t like seeing her pregnant. Turned his stomach. Embarrassing at times too; people assumed they’d hit hard times” (Charnock 182). Charnock accordingly depicts a future in which pregnancy becomes the choice of only the poor, and this genetic inequality fuels a new social class inequality in the 2120s. Carlen Lavigne (2013) describes that female characters in women’s reproduction-themed SF “reproduce using futuristic technologies [and] tend to suffer disjoined relationships with their (human mechanical) offspring” (143). In the novel, those gene-designed children no doubt rebel against the expectations of their parents, like Theo, someone who has a problem in his relations with his parents emotionally. It seems that as a germline-enhanced child, Theo needs more time invested in him because of his physical and mental differences not unlike a disabled, but like a 12  Toni from the second generation also finds her fourth-generation granddaughter’s decision of natural gestation wrong.

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super-abled child. In Charnock’s novel, even the appearance of gene-­ designed techno-babies is somehow different from more natural infants, and that distinction creates another split in society. Amelia “came away from the gestation unit with someone else’s baby,” but she should “accept Theo as he is,” Charnock writes (2017, 180). Theo ultimately achieves greatness and develops early thanks to his high intellectual capacity, while Amelia gets tired of Theo’s advantages over Seb. The couple feels guilty to have a natural-born son when they see that “in time, the differences between his sons will make more sense” (182). As Vint (2020) argues, speculative fiction is “a way of extrapolating from specific technological capacities through to the changes in social relations that they might entail,” and Charnock shows that we cannot look beyond the societal effects of such reproductive biotechnologies considered to free all sexes, and how “SF often enables us to see how otherwise neutral or even benevolent technologies could have dire social consequences if issues of equity are not addressed in how they are implemented” (Vint 2020, 75). The novel ultimately leaves the debate whether gene-editing technology will create economic and social inequality between the genetically privileged generation and natural-born humans unresolved.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined a futuristic method of reproduction via AWT, of which I argue promotes gender equality and freedom for all sexes. AWT appears to be a good solution for ending the exploitation of women’s bodies, as well as resolving issues such as abortion and miscarriage. It also appears to be an opportunity for the transgender, queer, infertile, disabled, menopausal women, single parents, and even men to have children without the need of a woman or her womb. Dreams Before the Start of Time imagines that biotechnology can separate parenting from gestation, with such a promise of sf vision pressing how gestation might become entirely separate from women’s bodies. Mothering is more than just gestation, however. Charnock opens a new path by welcoming new reproductive technologies that “open original scenarios which may substantially broaden future generations’ reproductive freedom” (Balistreri 2018, 19). Nevertheless, the novel shows that even in a future of techno-­ abled human reproduction, parents remain subject to social, public, and technological domains, which seek to control women’s reproductive

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choices. Charnock portrays multiple reproductive futurisms rather than a singular one, depicting the future of reproductive parenting as a range of alternatives to nuclear family norms. The novel demonstrates that reproduction need not be confined to the female body, since Artificial Womb Machine-Mother technology enable alternative family forms and potentially a techno-genetic gap in parent–child relations. As Jeremy Rifkin (1998) claims, “[b]iotechnologies are ‘dream tools,’ giving us the power to create a new vision of ourselves, our heirs, and our living world and the power to act on it’ (xii). Charnock fulfills this dream with her Artificial Womb Machine-Humans, who are not portrayed either as a gift nor a curse. The novel highlights ideas from the importance of reproductive technologies to decisions about whether and how to have children, how to give birth, how to raise children, and how the techno-capital domain may govern us in the coming future. The new techno gen-class distinction as GenRich and GenPoor depicts how alternative economic disparities can shape the societal expectations of what it means to be an organic-artificial post(human) in the prospected future in the novel. The novel concludes that new opportunities in biogenetic science and reproductive technology will reshape our understanding of being a parent, a child, and a family in a techno-society with improved reproductive technology. Every reproductive choice/dream is a new “starting of time.”13

References Aristarkhova, Irina. 2005. Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine. Body and Society 11 (3): 43–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F1357034X05056190. Attebery, Brian. 2002. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New  York: Taylor & Francis.

13  This work was supported by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) under Grant [2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship] Program for the grant-awarded research project titled “Violence Against Women in British Science Fiction” to be performed at the University of California Riverside under the supervision of Sherryl Vint, to whom I express my sincere appreciation and gratitude for helping me get started on this project and for her valuable suggestions and comments on this chapter. Some parts of this article are the revised and extended version of my article “Biyogenetik Posthüman Bilimkurgu: Yarının Gen-Tasarımlı Çocukları ve Gen-Kapitalist Sınıfları” published in Turkish language in the collection Edebiyatta Posthumanism (Ed. Sümeyra Buran), 2020: 163–184.

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Balistreri, Maurizio. 2018. Guest editor’s introduction to “Genome Editing, Human Cloning, In Vitro Gametes and Artificial Womb: Towards Future Scenarios, New Dilemmas and Responsibilities”. Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics XX (3): 9–20. Baylis, Françoise. 2019. Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex, Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Bess, Michael. 2015. Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future. Boston: Beacon Press. Bliss, John. 2011. Designer Babies (Hot Topics). Chicago: Heinemann Library. Brännström, Mats. 2017. Uterus transplantation and beyond. J Mater Sci: Mater Med. 28 (5) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10856-­017-­5872-­0. Carey, Nessa. 2019. Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures. London: Icon Books Limited. Charnock, Anne. 2017. Dreams Before the Start of Time. Seattle: 47North. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1999. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Updated edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Damarin, Suzanne. 2004. Required Reading: Feminist Sci-Fi and Post-Millennial Curriculum. In Science Fiction Curriculum, Cyborg Teachers, & Youth Culture(s), ed. J.A.  Weaver, Karen Anijar, and T.  Daspit, vol. 158, 21–35. Bern: Peter Lang. Ferreira, Aline. 2015. Beyond the Womb? Posthuman Parturitions in Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love. La Camera Blu: rivista di studi di genere 11 (12): 11–28. Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Marrow and Company, Inc. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gosden, Roger G. 1999. Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co. Greely, Henry T. 2016. The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haldane, J.B.S. 1924. Daedalus. Or Science and the Future. New  York: P. Dutton and Co. Hamner, Everett. 2017. Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age. University Park: Penn State University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hauskeller, Christine. 2004. How Traditions of Ethical Reasoning and Institutional Processes Shape Stem Cell Research in Britain. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29 (5): 509–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/03605310490518104.

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Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. Klitzman, Robert. 2019. Designing Babies: How Technology Is Changing the Ways We Create Children. New York: Oxford University Press. Kristine, Anderson J. 1990. The Great Divorce: Fictions of Feminist Desire. In Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, ed. Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, 85–99. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Landau, Ruth. 2007. Artificial Womb Versus Natural Birth: An Exploratory Study of Women’s Views. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 25 (1): 4–17. Lavigne, Carlen. 2013. Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc. Murphy, Julien S. 1989. Is Pregnancy Necessary? Feminist Concerns about Ectogenesis. Hypatia 4 (3): 66–84. Musunuru, Kiran. 2019. The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World’s First Gene-Edited Babies. N.p.: BookBaby. Partridge, Emily A., Marcus G. Davey, Matthew A. Hornick, Patrick E. McGovern, Ali E.  Mejaddam, Jesse D.  Vrecenak, Carmen Mesas-Burgos, Aliza Olive, Robert C.  Caskey, Theodore R.  Weiland, Jiancheng Han, Alexander J. Schupper, James T. Connelly, Kevin C. Dysart, Jack Rychik, Holly L. Hedrick, William H.  Perenteau, and Alan W.  Flake. 2017. An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb. Nature Communications 8 (15112): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15112. Pence, Gregory. 2006. What’s So Good About Natural Motherhood? (In Praise of Unnatural Gestation). In Ectogenesis: Artificial Womb Technology and the Future of Human Reproduction, ed. Scott Gelfand and John R.  Shook, 77–88. New York: Rodopi. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. 1984. Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality and Women’s Reproductive Freedom. New York: Longman. Peters, Ted, Karen Lebacqz, and Gaymon Bennett. 2008. Sacred Cells? Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Prasad, Aarathi. 2012. Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications. Rifkin, Jeremy. 1998. The Biotech Century. New York: Penguin/Putnam. Rosen, Christine. 2003. Why Not Artificial Wombs? The New Atlantis 3 (Fall): 67–76. Sander-Staudt, Maureen. 2006. Of Machine Born? A Feminist Assessment of Ectogenesis and Artificial Wombs. In Ectogenesis: Artificial Womb Technology and the Future of Human Reproduction, ed. Scott Gelfand and John R. Shook, 109–128. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Silver, Lee M. 1999. Remaking Eden: Cloning, Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humankind? London: Phoenix Giant. Singer, Emily. 2006. Stem Cells Reborn. Technology Review 109: 58–65.

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Singer, Peter, and Deane Wells. 1984. Making Babies: The New Science and Ethics of Conception. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Smith-Windsor, J. 2004. The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary. Ctheory 2. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14547. Sourbut, Elizabeth. 2012. Reproductive Technologies and Lesbian Parents: An Unnatural Alliance? In Science and the Construction of Women, ed. Mary Maynard. London: Routledge. Vint, Sherryl. 2007. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2020. Promissory Futures: Medicine and Market in Speculative Fiction. In South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas, ed. Anindita Banerjee and Debra A.  Castillo, 73–92. Albany: State University of New York Press. Westfahl, Gary, ed. 2005. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

CHAPTER 4

Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army Pelin Kümbet

Introduction Written by contemporary award-winning British feminist and speculative fiction writer Sarah Hall (2007), The Carhullan Army (published in the United States as Daughters of the North) intersects ecological destruction, environmental problems, and bodily ailments with uneven gender politics in dystopian future created by speculative reproduction and birth control policies. Retrospectively narrated by Sister, the novel depicts a near-future, bleak Britain, a place mostly underwater, beleaguered by severe economic depression, relentless warfare, devastating eco-disasters, fatal epidemics, social turmoil, systematic cultural and traditional breakdowns, and massive

P. Kümbet (*) Department of Western Languages and Literatures, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_4

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gender inequality. The trans-corporeal1 dissemination of toxicity through land and air has prompted the hegemonic, totalitarian, and despotic government, referred to as the Authority, to initiate involuntary sterilization. Assuming an intrinsically misogynistic approach, the oppressive government known as the Authority holds women responsible for all sorts of pollution, food and resource shortages, pervasive pests and new pestilent diseases, overpopulation, and prevalent contamination in the country. This chapter explores how the Authority diminishes women, reducing them to controllable bio-subjects, their bodies made into biological vessels through state-controlled contraceptive devices putatively ensuring environmental cleansing via population control. Drawing on Michél Foucault’s (2003) concept of biopower, this chapter reads the mandatory sterilization coil through biopolitical theory, an interface between complex networks of environmental sterilization policies and women’s reproduction. Biopower is a highly significant term in recent theoretical structures, signifying the transition from “the power of sovereignty to [that of] power over life” (2003, 239). Referred to specifically as “power’s hold over life,” biopower is “the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being” (240). The Authority’s mechanism to control and regulate the population through a legally mandated, painful contraceptive device manifests its absolute power over life and futurity through the surveillance of women’s body and sexuality, to control the rate of population growth. Hall traces the intersections between environmental and reproductive justice while raising critical questions about women’s equality within such a governance structure. She makes visible the inextricable link between the subjugation of women, the domination of the environment, and the legitimization of this exploitation through biopolitical logics. Sister seeks refuge in Carhullan, whose inhabitants are only women, suggesting that an ecologically sustainable, free, democratic, egalitarian, and just place free from patriarchal enforcement can exist, and thus undermining the Authority’s claims that reality necessitates their harsh policies. In this way, the novel challenges the premises within biopolitical governance that blame reproduction rather than capitalist production for environmental devastation.

1  I use this term in Stacy Alaimo’s sense, as developed in her book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Indiana UP 2010).

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An Eco-Dystopian Geo-fiction: Operational Biopower in The Carhullan Army Working in the tradition of feminist sf, Hall reconceptualizes issues such as gender politics, femininity, institutionalized misogyny, women’s bodily autonomy, individuality, and women’s agency from a perspective divorced from patriarchy. Her dystopic portrait of an ecologically devastated world is crafted from a material feminist perspective. As Keith M. Booker (1994) notes, “[d]ystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable” (19). Hall further connects contemporary feminist issues with the escalating global climate crisis, writing from a committed belief that the dystopian genre can create environmental awareness and align the feminist movement with environmental justice. Hall (2007) explains, “[f]or its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster.” Since “dystopia is something we may feel we are experiencing now … whether on a social or political or an environmental level” (2017, 2), according to Hall’s definition, the ecodystopian elements in her novel should be read less futuristically and more figuratively: the Authority is a speculative figuration that enables us more clearly to see contemporary social, political, and gender issues as they are entwined with environmental issues.2 Hall continues the idea of survival of the species … [requires] the focus on women. Women represent life, reproduction, genesis—and the State-governing of their biology has taken on a variety of nightmarish forms. My version of female manipulation is really bleak. The female body is still a controversial and hotly debated topic. Issues of motherhood, abortion, sexuality, legal rights, how we should look, and how we should act, are still not truly reconciled. (4)

Because the continuation of humanity concerns women’s place as “life-­ givers, life-bearers,” the threat to their existence and their reproductive freedoms are a central question for all political futurity. Hall is accordingly preoccupied with the means by which women’s bodies, sexualities, and reproductive capacities are controlled and governed via medical practices 2

 See “A Conversation with Sarah Hall,” at the end of The Carhullan Army (2017).

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and government policies—both of which operate as agents of patriarchy in The Carhullan Army. Her insights exemplify Foucault’s theorization of biopower as governance of biology and bodies in a manner that turns subjects into capitalized commodities, in this instance as a tactic for resolving environmental deterioration and ecological crisis, but without shifting patterns of consumption. The novel articulates fears about imminent environmental destruction, the depletion of natural and energy resources, and the toxic politics of seeking to resolve these problems through control of reproduction, which triggers misogynistic and sexist thoughts, practices, and communities. Hall links feminist ideologies with environmentalist ones to awaken us to “our presently ill-judged relationships” with our landscapes, relationships that presage equally environmental destruction and misogynistic politics (Lowen 2008). The novel encompasses the aftermath of a series of events following an eco-disaster, with the unnamed female narrator introducing herself as Sister, a name deliberately used in place of her birth name. As she states: “This is the name that was given to me three years ago. It is what the others called me. It is what I call myself. Before that, my name was unimportant” (Hall 2017, 5). With her individual identity and agency stripped away, Sister recounts her personal story, fraught with impositions, restrictions, ordeals, atrocities, and conflicts, from the cell of a prison where she is held captive. Arrested for being involved with a group of nonconformist women who comprised an army of feminist resistance combat and who rebelliously act against the Authority, she uses her partially missing, or in some places destroyed, personal story as a testimonial document to amplify the experience of many women in this future, warning the reader against the imminent dangers of the global climate crisis, environmental destruction, and the consequent sexism. Sister’s account displays how things can spin out of control easily and abruptly in the face of ecological crisis, transforming “a narrative of environmental collapse” (Walezak 2018, 3) into one about taken-for-granted borders that connected past with present, femininity with masculinity, and nature and culture—all of which inevitably are embedded into one another.

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Ecological Feminist Resistance in A Trans-Corporeal Toxic Landscape The narrative begins in a disaster-stricken town called Rith, seemingly a futuristic Penrith in Cumbria, England—Hall’s hometown. It takes its inspiration from the relentless flooding incidents in England during 2005 and depicts a catastrophic flood “as a symbolic image for life in the Anthropocene: unpredictable, overwhelming, and engulfing,” to contest the Western world’s existing ways responding to global ecological crises, asking us urgently to take concrete measures to prevent further environmental destruction on a planetary scale (Bracke 2019, 278). These floods, as Bracke points out, “inspired Hall to write the novel, when she realized that the implications of climate change were no longer imagined, but visible” (280–281). Acknowledging that no one can position themselves as distinct from any catastrophe happening anywhere, because as we are all connected, Hall portrays Rith as a “trans-locality” (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013, 1), using a real-life local event to address bigger global issues. Thus, this wrecked and grim town of Rith vividly signifies a dystopian microcosm of a near-future England that is hit by a series of environmental calamities, starting with the massive and anthropogenic flood. The dystopian element of the novel is reinforced by Sister’s documentary-like statement: “It was a wet rotting October … The atmosphere felt as if it was finally breaking apart” (Hall 2017, 5). Hall describes the extent of the extreme contamination, toxicity, sour atmosphere, and the change of temperatures meticulously: The bacterial smell of the refinery and fuel plants began to disperse at night when the clouds thinned and the heat lifted. Each year after the Civil Reorganisation summer’s humidity had lasted longer, pushing the colder seasons into a smaller section of the calendar, surrounding us constantly with the smog of rape and tar-sand burning off, and all of us packed tightly together like fish in a smoking shed.

Intensified industrialization destines people to live in the cramped places spared to them, an inherently toxic life, and has parallel effects on the ecology, which is radically altered by climate change caused predominantly by industrial-technological systems. Life itself becomes toxic and polluted. Even the rain is “erratic, violent” and “feels wounded” (6), the sky is “the dun colour of bitumen” and the moon is “a white smear”

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appearing like “a ridged and filmy ulcer in the lining of cloud” (8). In addition, a huge increase in the number of rodents is observed, causing a widespread epidemic. Tiny fruit have turned black, looking “as if it had ripened too soon and too small and then shrivelled away” (19). New factories are erected under the strict supervision of the Authority, which, instead of alleviating the social and economic crisis, brings about more pollution and contamination: “the air was filled with petrochemical emissions and the rot of uncollected rubbish” (65). Cars are “left to rust in gateways and cottage garths abandoned on the roadside… [t]heir keys locked away, their number plates recorded in the Authority’s logs” (19). As a place-conscious writer, Hall draws particular attention to pervasive toxicity, encapsulating the lives of the characters and structuring their reality, to unravel the fact that the root cause of environmental destruction and its related problems is the patriarchal Authority’s mindset and its industrial practices. Yet, as Sister notices, people are not even aware of the impact of toxicity in their lives. It turns out that one of Sister’s neighbors, who thinks that she is just “in a bad mood,” “has got TB. That new bloody strain” (40). People exposed to environmental toxicity start to display symptoms of what Heather Houser (2014) defines as “eco-sickness,” or environmental-­ related diseases that “make visible the intimacy [between] the bodies and the more-than-human world” (21). In the end, “[w]hat was left of the country was the disfigurement of its sickness, the defects left by its disease” (Hall 2017, 73). This toxic tour of the city that Sister performs exhibits the increasing permeability of the boundaries between material bodies and the physical environments. It also evinces how gradually “environmental problems become health problems because there is a continuity between the earth and the human body through the processes that maintain life” (Shiva 1994, 3). Thus, the emerging eco-sicknesses in the novel give voice to the severity of the landscape’s toxicity. This continuous movement across various bodies is best explained by material-feminist Stacy Alaimo (2010) and her influential term “trans-­ corporeality,” that is, “the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human-world” (2). Such a trans-corporeal dissemination of toxicity, as a part of the post-natural society of the Authority, finds itself in toxic food, toxic environment, toxic minds, toxic bodies, and toxic relationships and politics, as human corporeality cannot be severed from the corporeality of the environment. As a result of toxic exposure, the characters’ contaminated bodies provide powerful and

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agentic reminders that “the very substance of self is interconnected with vast biological, economic, and industrial systems that can never be entirely mapped or understood” (Alaimo 2010, 23). As an adamant believer in agency of place, Hall shows how humans mesh with toxic incursions into the environment ever-more-tightly in the Anthropocene. As she explains in interview, her central concern is this reciprocity: “I’m interested in the impact we have on the environment and how the landscape affects us, not just in a ‘green’ sense but how the characters might be shaped by surroundings” (Lowen 2008). Being cognizant of the trans-corporeal circulation between our bodies and their environments, Hall draws our attention to the trans-corporeal connection between the rise of toxic governance, the Authority, and the increasingly toxic threat in people’s health in The Carhullan Army. With her spatial emphasis on altered and toxified post-natural landscape and polluted lives, Sister mentions miscellaneous irredeemable transformations in this post-apocalyptic society. The House of Parliament is flooded with water that has dismantled the barriers of the Thames River, causing the deconstruction of the English political system and “democratic” political power. Environmental degradation and eco-disasters, ongoing global warfare, severe economic instability and money crises, gasoline and oil scarcity, and social and cultural tumult—all trans-­corporeal issues—become pervasive in this dystopian future. Furthermore, natural resources are exhausted, and electricity is severely interrupted and rationed. Food is scarce, making people dependent on “imported canned food” with “gelatinous contents,” from the United States (Hall 2017, 32). Many cities have become uninhabitable due to the horrific flood, and people are confined to densely cramped, wrecked small apartments, dubbed as “Terrace Quarters,” and must work in factories for long hours. The tyrannical Authority government—under the leadership of the power-hungry bigot Powell—rose to power because of the environmental crisis of the flood. It promises to rebuild England, yet persecutes people with its strict policies, sanctions, restrictions, and enforcements, making their lives even more challenging (Hall 2017, 25). In addition to the persecution of humans, Authority policies become the primary cause of ongoing and further environmental damage and the deterioration of biodiversity. The inauguration of the toxic Authority and its biopolitical mode of governance induces the disintegration of social and civilian life, compromises democracy, censors the news, and uses of television as propaganda. Life becomes “ant-like” owing to travel bans requiring authorized permission,

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which is rarely granted, and the restrictions and regulations of curfews, patrols, and checkpoints (88). Suicide rates, drug abuse, and overdoses all increase, further evidence that this biopolitical governance that climbs to protect human health and the environment in practice does the opposite, due to its emphasis on keeping economic productivity as its primary objective. In sum, the environmental crisis gradually and trans-corporeally paves the way for the destruction of England’s political, economic, social-­ cultural, and personal life. This lucidly embodies a material feminist understanding that the “human [is] perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” (Alaimo 2014, 187). The reality belies a pervasive belief that environments associated with women exist beyond cities either as a beautiful landscape or as an exploitable, if distant, resource. Thus the novel’s critique of the Authority is also a critique of patriarchy, specifically its symbolic associations suggest that women are closer to nature, and thus less civilized. Alaimo (2010) maintains that “nature, the environment and the material world itself signify, act upon, or otherwise affect human bodies, knowledges and practices” (8), a vision the novel shares. Nature cannot be external to culture and similarly, the material self cannot be disconnected from the environment. Hall shows that it is to our peril that we continue to hold to this modernity binary between humanity and the rest of the living world, showing how such beliefs enable a form of governance whose response to environmental crisis is actually the “country’s swift demise” (Hall 2017, 196): Everything had fallen too far. The people were oppressed, just they had been hundreds of years before … The government had long ago failed them, and would go on failing them. It was a place of desperation and despotism. Like the rest of the country, Rith was already a scene of ruin; nothing worse could have befallen than its current state.

Forecasting this imminent precarity, Sister realizes that “the awful truth was upon us; things were breaking down, completely, irreparably; all the freedoms were being revoked and nothing could be done to stop it” (26). The circumambient toxic environment could no longer be deemed disjunct and invisible artefact but must be recognized as a “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010, viii) that pervasively shapes the way the characters think, act, and conceive the world around them. The characters are themselves thus a product of this environment, their minds and the bodies radically

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altered, every bit as much as is the environmental, by the agentic capacity of the Authority and its destructive policies. As Sister declares, “[t]he conditions were hard on all of us. Life changed in every way and it was difficult to adjust. There was despondency and resentment, food shortages, humiliations” (Hall 2017, 30). Their lives are fundamentally shifted because of environmental toxicity. Since the promised reconstructive strategy, or the “hopeless myth” (Hall 2017, 9) of the recovery plan, does not work out, the despotic leaders of the Authority launch a dehumanizing population control program, allegedly to enable environmental cleansing, re-stability, and to resolve social, economic, and ecological conflicts. The escalating environmental toxic threats, low economic gain despite the rebuilding of various poisonous factories, and—more precisely—the increase of human population without sufficient resources to sustain them incites the Authority to take some restrictive measures; these, however, unequally and unjustly target women only. Women are fitted with this mandatory “alien implant,” an embedded, biopolitical controlling device that feels like “an invader” at all times (Hall 2017, 90). The right to bear children is distributed via a lottery, which denies reproductive justice because it takes no account of historical disparities that have positioned some as more vulnerable to the environmental destruction of the flood. Loreatta Ross (2017)  explains that reproductive justice covers the issues of “population control, bodily self-determination, immigrants’ rights, economic and environmental justice, sovereignty, and militarism and criminal injustices that limit individual human rights because of group or community oppressions” (3). In this case, the plan of environment sterilization through population control is both a gender-specific suppressive and a  bio-political  practice related to the Authority’s labor needs, turning those bodies into capital commodities fitted with the coil. These sterilized bodies then function as resources to be used and exploited like nature itself, which points to the ways in which Hall intermingles feminism and environmentalism and works for their dual emancipation. Sister’s personal account clearly unveils the compromise of individual rights, particularly the violation of women’s bodies and their reproductive rights, intermittently subjected to “random examination” of their compulsory coil to ensure that the device is intact and worn all the time. Without any notice, the women are often asked to “display themselves to monitors in the backs of cruisers,” sometimes at work, irrespective of the presence of their colleagues (Hall 2017, 27). Voicing her horrendous

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experience of surveillance and the painful gaze by one of the agents of the government, Sister reports how a monitor “had me lower my overalls in front of his colleague, who had come forward with a gloved hand, joking about dog leashes, and though the wire of my coil was easily seen, he had still examined it” (17). Women’s individuality, identity, self-confidence, and dignity can be easily stripped during this appalling examination. As the government’s “sterile subjects,” most subdued women grow helplessly accustomed to wearing this contraceptive coil; for example, a “constant embarrassment” overwhelms Sister as if she has “an ugly birthmark,” with the device feeling like “a spelk” under her skin, constantly pricking, making its disturbing presence felt (90). However, she feels obliged to succumb to this practice: “What choice did I have?’ ‘It’s the law. I was surrounded by the system and … they have these places where those who refuse are sent. I’ve heard about them’” (117). The Authority’s hidden agenda is thus seemingly to oppress women and diminish their self-confidence. In this context, namely the systematic and planned abuse of reproductive rights, a ban on fertility turns out to be a means of state-sanctioned violence against women. The mandatory insertion of a coil, and particularly the frequent inspections, function in this way as a tool of institutionalized rape. Sister thus epitomizes what Maria Mies  and Vandana Shiva (2014) theorize as a risk of alternative reproductive technologies, in that she is no longer one whole object but a series of objects which can be isolated, examined, re-combined, sold, hired, or simply thrown away, like ova which are not used for experimentation or fertilization. This means that the integrity of the woman as a human person, an individual, i.e., as a person who cannot be divided up, is destroyed. It is the ideology of man’s dominance over nature and woman, combined with the scientific method of analysis and synthesis that has led to the destruction of the woman as a human person and to her vivisection into a mass of reproductive matter. (186)

Building on Mies’ and Shiva’s analysis, one can notice that the ideology that controls nature and wastes its resources is homologous to these ideas within the medical world that exploits women and their reproductive capacity. The coil similarly “increasingly reduces all elements of individual choice … and the women are increasingly subjugated through political, economic and cultural coercion” (Mies and Shiva 1987).

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Hence, while Sister feels humiliated and disdained by this “inverse process” of coil implantation, she also feels violated by her own husband’s part in the process. The “translucent medical jelly” applied to provide wetness for a quick insertion arouses her husband, Andrew, even though he appears to advocate for her rights over her body at first, saying “[y]ou’re still you … Beautiful you. They can’t control that, can they?” (Hall 2017, 29). He is later overwhelmed by the idea of the absence of “barriers” (31) during intercourse, and he succumbs to his own sexual pleasures: “I just want to be inside you … Can I? Will it make you forget it maybe? Come on. It’ll be just us” (29). The fact that the coil transcends “barriers” between Sister and Andrew arouses him and empowers him to strengthen his internalized sexism, since he can penetrate her without the risk of pregnancy; yet the structure disempowers and degrades Sister, causing her to feel violated by both the government and by her husband. She reports that she “wanted to ask him to stop, it had been too traumatic, and there was still some blood, but neither one of [them] had ever said no to the other,” and so she feels compelled to comply with the nonconsensual intercourse. What Sister undergoes can be described as double rape, operating at both the institutionalized and the marital level. The toxic government exerts biopower over Sister’s reproductive biology and capacity by means of the coil. Her husband, then, turns out to be very complicit in the Authority’s attempt to this forced penetration. He even begins to judge her disobedience and resistance: “Why the hell would you want to bring a baby into all this mess anyway”…? he would ask me, each time I scowled at the hair-thin line of wires resting between my legs and said I wished I could just pull it out and be rid of it. I mean where’s the problem, really? You are still a young woman. “You just don’t get it, do you?’” I would tell him. “It’s not you, is it? It’s never you.” … Look, you know it’s just a practical thing! There’s no conspiracy here … Fucking hell, this country is in bits and you’re obsessing over your maternal rights!” (Hall 33)

Not being able to comprehend the dehumanizing experience of the coil and unable to empathize with Sister, Andrew even suggests this should empower her due to pregnancy prevention. Since the established idea is that the manufacture of reproductive technologies is for the benefit of women, in that they can supposedly choose when to reproduce, Andrew overlooks how the coil has reinforced the imbalances in gendered power

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dynamics and intensified “exploitative and unequal relationships” (Mies 2004, 175). Mies places particular emphasis on how the advancement of reproductive technologies benefits capitalist and governmental interest as the female body and biology: The female body’s generative capacity has now been discussed as a new “area” of investment and profit-making for scientists, medical engineers and entrepreneurs in a situation where other areas of investment are no longer very promising. Reproductive technologies have been developed not because women need them, but because capital and science need women for the continuation of their model of growth and progress. (175)

These technologies, she adds, are marketed in a convincing way through “humanitarian arguments”; however, by legitimizing these medical interventions on the female body in the name of assistance, the aim becomes “total control of all women’s reproductive capacity. In this the woman as a person with human dignity is ignored.” In the novel, the “humanitarian” action that women should take is yielding to this undignified and alienating practice in the name of saving the environment. Here we see how the rationalization is similarly flawed because “the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked” (Mies and Shiva 2014, xvi). Pointing toward the contemporary scientific reality that engineers commodify lives and biologies in the name of humanitarian science and progress, Mikes focuses on how reproductive justice and rights are compromised and how women are de-individualized. Similar de-individualization and violation of female dignity via reproductive technologies is apparent in The Carhullan Army. Although the environment is devastated by the industrial and techno-­ scientific applications of the Authority, the resulting guilt is easily placed on women because their reproductive capacity is regarded as the environmental pollutant contaminating the landscape. The contextualization of fertility as a disease or an epidemic—the spread of which needs to be controlled—emblematizes how biopolitical discourses of health can be oppressive. Since women are conceived to be accountable in population control, Dorothy Roberts argues, policies “legitimiz[e] punitive regulation of … women’s reproductive decisions” (2009, 785). She continues: “By identifying procreation as the cause of deplorable social conditions, reproductive punishments divert attention away from state responsibility and the need for social change” (785). What Roberts highlights is parallel to the

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Authority’s strategy: that is, instead of bearing responsibility and accountability for its exploitative actions toward the environment, the government projects its guilt and accountability on to women, placing reproductive responsibility on them for ecological and social sustainability, epitomizing the sexist approach of “[b]laming women as environmental policy” (Seager 2003, 966). In a similar way, Mies (2014) calls our attention to the ways that sexist, racist, gendered, and environmental ideologies and practices are firmly intertwined with the control of reproductive capacities: “It is in this context that one can speak of the inherent sexist, racist and ultimately fascist bias of the new reproductive technologies” (175). What is in fact obscured by such ideology is how the toxic patriarchal and anthropocentric mindset is responsible for the damaged environment in Rith –and for the trans-corporeally affected and ruined lives. As Serenella Iovino (2013) explains, in this mutual toxic cycle “both human and nonhuman bodies are interlaced in the ‘trans-corporeal’ domino-effect of the toxic event: … the future of all living forms involved in this process of genetic toxification” (43).

Interrelatedness of Environment and Reproductive Capacity In his first volume of The History of Sexuality (1986), Foucault outlines the notion of biopower that frames human life—reproduction, healthcare, aging, health, disease, abortion, sexuality, and death fall in tandem with power and governance: “Bio-power brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life … Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence in question” (143). Moreover, what Foucault crucially underlines is how human bodies, together with human desires, emotions, capacities, functions, and biological processes such as reproduction, have become politicized as the focal points of disciplinary power and biopower alike within the purview of the contemporary political agenda. As he theorizes, biopower renders human bodies “docile,” subjectivities compliant, and “life” regular (Diprose 2009, 11). Social control of the body is achieved by exercising this “normalized” power. A co-constitutive relationship exists between medicine and patriarchy in The Carhullan Army—it targets and assaults women’s bodies that have been configured as land to be conquered, governed, and experimented

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upon, while transposing women into controllable bio-subjects, their bodies into biological vessels. It is in this sense that this invasive contraceptive device, the coil, functions as a legitimate and patriarchal tool to be wielded and exerted upon women’s bodies, positioning the medical industry as complicit with the biopolitical exploitation of the Authority’s stance on population control. As Sister explains: “All I could think about was the doctor who had rubbed cool lubricant inside me, inserting the speculum and attaching the device efficiently as a farmer clipping the ear of one of his herd” (Hall 2017, 28). Yet, the coil’s insertion as an exercise of biopower turns the women into docile, passive bio-subjects as well as violates their reproductive freedom. The coercive coil aptly symbolizes how “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy” (Foucault 2009, 1). Joni Seager (2003) draws a link between the environmentalist ideologies of population control and totalizing and essentialist systems—which similarly transform women’s bodies into mere biological vessels, but also do the further biopolitical work of channeling fertility and reproductivity toward only favored social groups: Environmental advocates of population control typically ignore its history and ideological underpinnings, especially its association with repressive regimes and genocidal governments. Mainstream environmentalists are uncomfortable acknowledging that population control, no matter how euphemistically couched, is essentially a vehicle for the control of women; intervening in “fertility” always means, above all, intervening in women’s lives, in female reproductive organs, and in the exercise of reproductive freedom. (967–68)

Even if it is in the name of rescuing the environment from total collapse, population control always implies the exercise of centralized authority—a government, often in concert with international development agencies—imposing restrictions on specific women’s reproductive activities. As an extension of colonial control, racialized “women are used as international guinea pigs for birth control … women have been subjected to mass sterilizations, without consent.” Seager draws out how ecological problems often pave the way for such gendered applications and practices, as we see in The Carhullan Army.

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On a Material Feminist Quest Refusing to be “complicit in a wrecked and regulated existence,” or to be the Authority’s “sterile subject” like many others, Sister eventually decides to embark on a quest to leave this eco-catastrophic and oppressive environment, moving instead to a marginalized and “sterile” place called Carhullan—a remote Northern farm where a group of women referred to as “Un-officials” unite and forge solidarity against the oppressive practices of patriarchy, military, and heterosexual restrictions on marriage (Hall 2017, 41). Run by ex-soldier Jackie Nixon, the matriarchal city of Carhullan is what Anna Cottrell (2017, 687) describes as “a return to an idealised, pre-industrial past, to a sense of a community that is self-reliant and in harmony with ‘the territory.’” Carhullan is a “feminist eco-topia” (Robinson 2013, 197), pointing out that there are other practices and logics beyond population control through which to seek to mitigate environmental damage. To explore the possibilities of unleashing her chains and to seize an opportunity to empower her body, sexuality, and identity, Sister illegally flees to Carhullan in an example of “transformative retreat” (Lilley 2016, 61). Having heard so many stories about the space, this last resort fueled by feminism provides hope for both Sister and for the novel’s readers. It is “an example of environmental possibility, of true domestic revival,” which she correlates with feminist identification and autonomy she hopes to (re) gain, like the rest of the members who have “washed their hands from the past” (Hall 2017, 166, 115). Because they do not conform to the “anti-­ breeding” (90) policies and regulations of the Authority, but instead live a marginalized life outside the borders of patriarchy, Carhullan’s citizens are targeted by the Authority as “a gang of bloody terrorists” (18), labelled “nuns, religious freaks, communists, convicts. They were child-deserters, men-haters, cunt-lickers, or celibates” (48). The long-held patriarchal mindset stigmatizes and associates them with “witches, up to no good in the sticks” (Hall 2017, 48). As a stark contrast to Rith, then, Carhullan represents matriarchy and feminist resilience with these “in/appropriated others,” a community founded on a commitment to reject patriarchal norms and ideologies altogether (Haraway 2020, 320). These women are nonbinary, strong, brave, and self-sufficient and refute the common belief that women depend on men for survival. Carhullan is thus also a queertopia where lesbian affairs flourish, and where heterosexuality is not deemed a norm. With this queer idealization,

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the members of such a feminist group also aim to establish self-sufficient female companionship. These industrious women work on farms, grow their own food, raise cattle, and survive in the wilderness: Within a year of it being inhabited the women had installed a waterwheel, harnessing a nearby spring. A year-round garden had been planted, and a fast-growing willow copse. There were sties, bees, an orchard, and a fishery at the beck shuttle of the tarn. There were peat troughs, filtration tanks. It was all grandly holistic, a truly green initiative. (Hall 2017, 40)

The description suggests that Carhullan has fully integrated the idea of trans-corporeality into their lives, which bolsters them to embrace a more holistic and embodied vision, extending their material feminist connection and corporeality to the more-than-human world. It is also important to note that they flourish in a region deemed sterile and irredeemable by the capitalist worldview of the Authority. However, back in Rith, [w]omen were treated like cunts back down there. Like second-class citizens and sex objects. They were underpaid, under-appreciated. Trust me, I know all about being told you aren’t suitable for a job. Fifty percent of the world’s female population was getting raped, the fanatics had the rest bound up in black. We were all arguing over how women should look and dress, not over basic rights. (116)

In contrast to this gender separatism in Rith, in Carhullan, “[e]veryone’s employed. No one’s made to kneel in a separate church. No one’s getting held down at bayonet point. We’re breeding. We’re free” (116). This apparently “emancipatory enclave,” as Robinson notes (2013, 197), helps Sister establish a new identity and form a close, trans-corporeal alliance with the natural landscape. It also partakes in what Anna Cotrell (2017, 685) describes as “the process of the unmaking of the self that will allow Sister to become a full resident of Carhullan, unfettered by gendered preconceptions about relationships and family—she has left behind a husband with whom had once desired a child and who, in the repressive atmosphere of a totalitarian Britain, has come to disgust her by his conformity.” While sexist and misogynistic ideologies define Rith, Hall proposes a material feminist “counter-narrative” in Carhullan to challenge this patriarchal system (Robinson 209).

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While seeking refuge, completely divorced from her old self, Sister’s life is ironically and despairingly inaugurated by the same amount of exposure to brutality in Carhullan. It is at this point that the eco-topian and idealistic image of Carhullan morphs into a dystopian place ending in equal if different tyranny. It turns out that Sister has deserted her old, subjugated life and repressive biopolitical structure to find an equally problematic and hierarchical, but less suppressive one. Hall, in this vein, blurs the seemingly oppositional characterizations of these two communities. The ordeal that newer members endure can be understood as both a literal and metaphorical cleansing from the old self, opening oneself to resurrection with the embodiment of new beliefs, understandings, and ideologies. Sister voices her experiential transformation: To get here I had committed a kind of suicide. My old life is over. I was now an unmade person. In the few days that I had been at Carhullan nobody had called me anything other than Sister.… The person I had once been, the person who had walked out of the safety zones and up to the mountain, was gone. She was dead, I was alive. (2017, 94)

While helpful in that the location tries to remove the patriarchal marks on the women’s bodies and identities, to Sister, this farm operates like an experimental laboratory, where members-to-be are put on trial to be evaluated as to whether they are absolutely ready to give up on their constructed images: “We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained” (187). To achieve a complete purge from patriarchy, old books, shoes, and clothes that might remind the member of her old self are eradicated upon admittance. This act connotes stripping off patriarchy and its toxic practices. Sister for one is put “behind the metal walls of the dog box,” stripped naked, denied sufficient food, beaten, and exposed to various other painful tests to prove herself to be worthy of admittance to Carhullan (94). Even though Carhullan initially suggests itself as an “agrarian utopianism” (Smith 136), then, signifying solidarity, interdependence, connectedness, responsibility, and reverence among women, it operates on “a system of control,” or in “a hierarchy” set by the “superior” “alpha” (84)—Jackie Nixon—who exerts absolute power over the whole population of women, using their bodies for the cultivation of land, to combat

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the forces of Authority, and for various other purposes. As Robinson (2013) postulates, a “clear hierarchy emerges, with Jackie at its feudal centre, living in the best lodgings on the farm, the field workers at the periphery, living in crowded and poorly insulated dormitories” (202). Jackie’s use of biopolitical power, like the Authority’s, resonates with Foucault’s description of biopower’s “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (1990, 140). Like the forces of Authority that manage the population through reproductive control, Jackie, as an authoritarian female figure, manages and administers life—including sexuality, marriage, behavior, health, diseases punishment, production, and bodies. By the exertion of this biopower, Jackie optimizes the life of her female population to optimize their use. As Foucault specifies, biopower aims at “working towards to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (2009, 136). Ending up with a similar kind of exposure to subjugation and hierarchy enforced by the matriarchal regime of biopower is quite unexpected and uncanny for Sister. Jackie, with a serious “look of someone in power,” turns out to be the female version of the Authority, as no one dares to challenge her rules and her dominance. She applies the same (bio) policies on women’s bodies, rationalizing that she uses them to fight against gender inequalities. It is, however, the same type of power to “make” live and “let” die (Foucault 2004, 241). Power here is “a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminate[s] in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it” (Foucault 2014, 136). Female bodies in the allegedly idealized land of Carhullan become the commodity, trained especially to combat the Authority and thus displace their regime. However, it turns out that Jackie’s purpose is to construct her own totalitarian regime rather than to preserve the solidarity and peace in her Carhullan community. Gendered oppression in Carhullan is visible, as no men or boys are allowed. Thus the reversal of biopower dynamics from the patriarchal toxic Authority to female dictatorship remains equally, if differently, abusive. In a brilliant way, Hall turns expectations upside down by transforming the nurturing, matriarchal, rural and eco-topian society Carhullan into a violent, sexist, and anti-democratic place. Due to her abuse of absolute power, Jackie falls for the same fallacy as did the Authority. Sister is thus

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de-individualized through the erosion of her name, agency, and history. In effect, Hall explores the entanglements between biopolitical forces, gender inequalities, and environmental exploitation in two different models of future governance, both a response to our current ecological crises. Thus, the novel hints that a restoration of the ecological order can be achieved only by treating all genders and sexualities equally, by attaining an expanded environmentalist and posthumanist perspective, and by recognizing the agentic power and vitality of the non-human world. As she displays, absolute power given to any gender turns out to be toxic, corrupting both human and non-human lives.

Conclusion The novel invites a critical exploration of “how environments [shape] human flesh in a minute and in profound ways” (Nash 2007, 8). The analysis of the toxic contamination of mutating bodies and minds irreparably suggests anxieties about ecological degradation. Hall’s work can be placed under the rubric of “feminist political ecology” (Seager 2003, 966) that includes a focus on the uneven distribution of access to and control over resources; economies of uneven development; challenges to modernist inscriptions of resource-as-commodity relationships, such as the imposition of Western systems and the commodification of nature; and exposing the environmental consequences of the forced integration of local environments/communities into global capital flows, world trade regimes, and military webs. By analyzing the dual domination and exploitation of women and nature at the hands of medical and patriarchal practices that benefit, reinforce, and co-constitute one another, Hall fuses a dystopian geo-fiction, where “landscapes feature so strongly,” with a material feminist outlook in her environmental ethics of human and non-human embodiment. Through her place-based dystopian speculative fiction, she presses readers to be aware of the interrelatedness of exploitation and subjugation of nature, as well as its resources and social inequalities. Jesse Oak Taylor (2018) emphasizes that these kinds of fiction offer “the simulation of hypothetical possibility within the actual world, akin to the computer models that simulate possible futures based on historical data” (108). In this sense, Hall’s speculative fiction constitutes a critical tool to bring forward alternatives to our current contemporary reality. The blend of Sister’s subjective narrative with emphasis on the pervasiveness of toxicity within post-natural risk societies urges us to register

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our embodied experience and recognize invisible toxic threats, particularly with their agentic capacity to transform natures and bodies. As biopower fundamentally is “dependent on the domination, exploitation, expropriation and, in some cases, elimination of the vital existence of some or all subjects over whom it is exercised” (Rabinow and Rose 2006, 198), The Carhullan Army is a pertinent example of how biopower is chiefly perpetuated in fertility management to control and dominate women’s sexuality and agency under the pretext of resolving environmental problems. Environmental healing can be achieved only through the sterilization of toxic minds that justify the exploitation of nature and women to gain profit, power, and sovereignty. The novel thus invites us to acquire a widened material feminist perspective that offers new means of challenging sexist and misogynistic ideologies and to embrace a trans-corporeal vision that cherishes interconnectedness between human and non-­human lives.3

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism and New Materialism at Sea. In Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 186–203. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. Booker, Keith M. 1994. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bracke, Astrid. 2019. Flooded Futures: The Representation of the Anthropocene in Twenty-First-Century British Flood Fictions. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60 (3): 278–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/0011161 9.2019.1570911. Cottrell, Anna. 2017. The Power of Love: from Feminist Utopia to the Politics of Imperceptibility in Sarah Hall’s Fiction. Textual Practice 33 (4): 679–693. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2017.1371218. Diprose, Rosalyn. 2009. Toward an Ethico-Politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. Parrhesia 8 (December): 7–19. Foucault, Michél. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Tran. Robert J.  Hurley. New York: Vintage.  Some parts of this article are the revised and extended version of my article “Sarah Hall’un Carhullan Ordusu Romanına Materyal/Eko Feminist Yaklaşım” published in Turkish language in the Journal of Dil ve Edebiyat Çalışmaları (DEA), 2021 (24): 325–351. 3

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———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76. NewYork: Picador ———. 2009. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78. In Translated by Graham Burchell, ed. Michael Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Greiner, Clemens, and Patrick Sakdapolrak. 2013. Translocality: Concepts, Applications and Emerging Research Perspectives. Geography Compass 7 (5 (May)): 373–384. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12048. Hall, Sarah. 2007. Survivor’s Tale. The Guardian, December 1, 2007. http:// w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / b o o k s / 2 0 0 7 / d e c / 0 1 / f e a t u r e s r e v i e w s . guardianreview16. ———. 2017. The Carhullan Army. London: Faber & Faber. Haraway, Donna. 2020. The Promises of Monsters. In The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 459–521. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f.27. Houser, Heather. 2014. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S.  Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia University Press. Iovino, Serenella. 2013. Toxic Epiphanies: Dioxin, Power, and Gendered Bodies in Laura Conti’s Narratives on Seveso. In International Perspectives in Ecofeminism, ed. Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann, 37–55. New York: Routledge. Lilley, Deborah. 2016. Unsettling Environments: New Pastorals in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army. Green Letters 20 (1 (January)): 60–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2015.1123103. Lowen, Linda. 2008. Global Warming, Female Utopias and Gender Roles: Interview with Sarah Hall. About. http://womensissues.about.com/od/ reproductiverights/a/SarahHallInter.htm. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 2014. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. ———. 1987. Sexist and Racist Implications of New Reproductive Technologies. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 12 (3 (July)): 323–342. https://doi. org/10.1177/030437548701200303. Nash, Linda Lorraine. 2007. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkley: University of California Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. Biopower Today. BioSocieties 1 (2 (June)): 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1745855206040014. Roberts, Dorothy. 2009. Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34 (4 (Summer)): 783–804. https://doi.org/10.1086/597132. Robinson, Iain. 2013. ‘You Just Know When the World is about to Break Apart’: Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army. In Twenty-First Century Fiction, ed. Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert

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Hildyard, 197–211. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1057/9781137035189_13. Ross, Loretta J. 2017. Teaching Reproductive Justice: An Activist’s Approach. In Black Women’s Liberatory Pedagogies, ed. Olivia N. Perlow, Durene I. Wheeler, Sharon L.  Bethea, and BarBara M.  Scott, 159–180. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­65789-­9_9. Seager, Joni. 2003. Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming of Age of Feminist Environmentalism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3 (Spring)): 945–972. https://doi.org/10.1086/345456. Shiva, Vandana. 1994. Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health, and Development Worldwide. Philadelphia: New Society. Taylor, Jesse Oak. 2018. The Novel after Nature, Nature after the Novel: Richard Jefferies’s Anthropocene Romance. Studies in the Novel 50 (1 (Spring)): 108–133. https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2018.0006. Walezak, Emilie. 2018. Landscape and Identity: Utopian/Dystopian Cumbria in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60 (1 (June)): 67–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1479242.

CHAPTER 5

Groomed for Survival—Queer Reproductive Technologies and Cross-Species Assemblages in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu Julia Gatermann

Women’s reproductive rights continue to be a highly contested ground for ideological battles. While advances in reproductive technology have created new freedoms, especially with regard to lesbian parenthood and other forms of non-heteronormative family planning, they also have generated new cultural and political anxieties, resulting in an increased use of technology to monitor and police women’s bodies. Mary Ann Doane (1999) remarks how “technology promises more strictly to control, supervise, regulate the maternal—to put limits upon it. But somehow the fear still lingers—perhaps the maternal will contaminate the technological” (27). Taken outside of the “natural” procreational context, it is questionable what the future of the human species—with the technological possibilities

J. Gatermann (*) Institute of English and American Studies, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_5

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of cloning and genetic engineering available—will look like, and who will come to control it. In this chapter, I analyze how Larissa Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu (2018) envisions alternative reproductive technologies from a marginalized, queer subaltern point of view. Her dystopian world is rendered inhospitable by climate change, scarcity, and a global pandemic called the tiger flu, which has brought humanity close to extinction, killing mostly men. Lai critically questions the sustainability of a Western, patriarchal, neoliberalist system that, if left unchecked, will lead to the destruction of the planet and all life on it. In her subversive use of techno-Orientalism, she challenges the stereotypical racist portrayal of Asian subjects that is pervasive in science fiction. From a feminist, posthuman perspective, Lai as well observes how the gendered and racialized bodies—especially of people from the Global South—are culturally marked as expendable, and advocates for more equal and egalitarian relationships between humans and non-human animals. In their marginalized, deviant and hybrid bodies—and through their “unnatural” reproductive capacities—Lai’s protagonists find a means of resistance against neo-colonial oppression. The novel thus presses how, in order to survive in a rapidly changing world, we need to radically rethink what it means to be human—not in an abstract and removed way, but in a viscerally material sense, reminding us that we are connected to all life on this planet. In order to survive and adapt to an ever-changing world, we need to achieve a profound transformation of both the body and the mind. Located on the North American West Coast, Lai’s Saltwater City and the surrounding quarantine rings are teetering on the brink of war and chaos. In a delicate power equilibrium that is about to collapse, the former nation states have long crumbled, and other factions have taken over. While Saltwater City is still officially under the control of Isabelle Chow, CEO of Höst Light Industries, she is losing ground to cult-leader Markus Traskin, the head of the paramilitary tiger men and a would-be war lord. Chow’s grip on power seems to depend on her ability to deliver on her promise for a better life free from the torments of an earthly existence constantly under threat of starvation and the plague. Her solution is a simulated reality, however, hosted on a mainframe on one of the two large satellites in orbit, Eng and Chang. With the help of her LïFT elevators, the personality supposedly can be digitalized and uploaded to her virtual paradise for a disembodied existence in a metaphorical heaven far above the slowly dying planet.

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The classic cyberpunk trope of Chow’s upload technology can be found based in Western neoliberal thinking. Driven by capitalist interests, Chow’s dream of an eternal life in a better place is only available to those with the means to afford it. Over the course of the novel, though, it becomes clear that this promise is nothing but a scam: the so-called personality upload merely generates an algorithm to simulate someone’s personality, a cheap, weakening simulacrum, while the original is destroyed with its body. As the Western world’s science and technology lack sustainable solutions to the many problems they helped cause, people grasp for shortcuts that could help sustain their life in the new climate. Facing the extinction of the human race, Chow offers an easy way out to avoid dealing with the ugly consequences of uncompromising exploitation: putting an end to material existence altogether by having her customers unwittingly commit suicide. Still deeply ingrained in the Western notion that the mind exists separate from and is deemed superior to the body,1 classic Humanism upholds the ideal of “Man” as the defining feature of the human, a definition that describes “human” mostly in terms of negation and exclusion, clearly marking the Other to confirm its own boundaries and their integrity (“mankind” as not “woman,” not “animal,” not “nature”). Conceptualizing oneself as apart from the natural, material world helps justify its exploitation and everyone who is considered part of it, with everything that does not fall into this category automatically occupying a status of “less than” that justifies discrimination. Sherryl Vint (2007) points out how such normative categorizations that discursively try to fix bodies and subjects into place are becoming increasingly destabilized by body modification technologies, which render “the concept of the ‘natural’ human obsolete. We have now entered the realm of the posthuman, the debate over the identities and values of what will come after the human” (7). The notion of the body’s irrelevance in this process is an expression of a certain privilege that comes with the normative “white, male, straight, non-working” body, she explains. This embodiment excludes everyone who relies on their bodies for subsistence, lacks access to the respective technologies, or experiences discrimination based on embodiment (8-9). Vint thus asserts how the increasingly radical interventions that are available to change and modify the body have intensified anxieties about these already unstable and porous boundaries: 1  A more in-depth discussion of Humanism can be found in Kate Soper’s (1986) Humanism and Anti-Humanism.

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“The material and the discursive body are mutually productive: the material body is read by discourses, and the conclusions produced by these readings structure practices which influence the ways bodies come into being” (17). Both the new material reality of biotechnologically possible bodies, as well as the political and cultural debates we have about them, will determine which bodies fall into normative categories, and thereby who will be granted humanity and who will be excluded from it. Regarding Foucault’s concept of biopower as it is concerned with how social control over  bodies can  produce specific kinds of subjectivities within them, Vint (2007) summarizes, “the body is integrally linked to the discourses that make it intelligible. Biopower, with its classifications of normal or abnormal, valid or invalid, produces a field of hegemonic culturally intelligible bodies and produces bodies that fall outside of this field and hence cannot be ‘seen’” (18). She adds that in order to become subjects, then, we are forced to participate in the process of our own subjugation. In other words, bodies that fall outside of normative classification, bodies that are unintelligible, are not part of hegemonic ideology. While having a physical existence, they lack a discursive one, or to quote Judith Butler’s famous pun, they do not matter. Vint suggests, however, that distinguishing between the material and discursive body is, in fact, a fallacy, and that in return, bodies can challenge the process of classification itself, or “the field of the culturally intelligible,” by resisting any submission to cultural norms. The posthuman, therefore, can be seen as a site where the radical change of bodies, subjects, and socio-cultural contexts is possible (19). The ways in which ideology is brought to bear on bodies excluded from normative categorization is something that techno-Orientalism picks up and negotiates controversially.2 Unlike Orientalism—which casts subjects of non-Western cultures as “primitive” and “savage” Others to uphold Western hegemonic representational authority over the “Orient”— techno-Orientalism is a much more dynamic and bidirectional phenomenon. Complex and contradictory at heart, it is shaped by inherent tensions that imagine Asia and/or Asian subjects both as “hypo-” and 2  Kevin Morley, David Robins, Toshiya Ueno, and Kumiko Sato have provided much of the critical groundwork of the concept; “techno-Orientalism” as a term was first defined in print in Morley’s and Robins’s Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (1995), while Ueno has arguably published most widely about the concept itself.

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“hypertechnological,” complicating and unsettling cultural stereotypes as it receives input from the East and the West simultaneously (Roh et  al. 2015, 2). The deeply racist and xenophobic metaphor of the “Yellow Peril,” which emerged from early American industrialization relying heavily on imported and Chinese labor, is an early expression of such stereotyping. Especially in nineteenth-century discourse on the abject figure of the “coolie,” as Eric Hayot (2007) points out, the Asian body was cast as something more akin to machines than humans, thereby divesting members of Asian ethnicities from their human status and rendering them ultimately expendable. Chinese workers were expected to demonstrate “an almost inhuman adaption to contemporary forms of modern labor” (102), and descriptions of their characteristics constructed a believed “ability to endure small levels of pain or consume only the most meager food and lodging, [...an] ‘absence of nerves,’ remarkable ‘staying qualities,’ and a ‘capacity to wait without complaint and to bear with calm endurance’” (103), as can be found in Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1894). “The coolie’s biologically impossible body was the displaced ground for an awareness of the transformation of the laboring body into a machine,” Hayot (2007) further explains, and these American anxieties about imminent change brought on by modernity and its Fordist capitalist production—of being replaced by someone better suited to the new working conditions—find expression in such dehumanizing images that simultaneously cast members of Asian ethnicities as animals or with superhuman capacities (103). In this tension between inferiority and superiority, past and future, the subjects are displaced both from the present and from humanity, allowing the West to retain its centrality in all respects. The dehumanizing and racially stereotyped images of the coolie find an echo in Donna Haraway’s analysis of port-Fordist neoliberal capitalism, where she describes the “nimble-fingered” Southeast Asian women working in sweatshops for transnational corporations (1985, 177). Operating as “real-life” examples for her concept of the cyborg, she thus demonstrates how these same dynamics still hold. As Roh et al. (2015) suggest, techno-Oriental tropes have often served to transport a specific ideology to counter fears of being left behind in the race for technological supremacy, or “the West’s project of securing dominance as architects of the future, a project that requires configurations of the East as the very technology with which to shape it” (2). Nevertheless, techno-Orientalist tropes are also being employed in cultural production to unsettle and subvert such hegemonic discourse to engender a counter-dialogue. Especially

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in sf, they have been picked up by non-Western authors, re-worked as a tool in their self-expression to help re-appropriate, and thereby reshape, their own cultural identity in complex and multilayered ways. In The Tiger Flu, Lai critically engages with racist Asian stereotypes by employing techno-Orientalist tropes in such a complicated manner, and, with Haraway’s cyborg concept in mind, uses them to break binary thinking for more egalitarian relationships not just between human beings, but across species, imagining new posthuman becomings. In her so-called Grist sisters (reminiscent of the idiom “to bring grist to somebody’s mill,” signifying lucrativeness), Lai depicts women who due to their specific embodiment are Othered from mainstream society and denied status as human beings. The sisters are all clones, descending from a genetically engineered woman of Chinese ancestry, Chan Ling, property of the Jemini corporation. As explained in her history, Chan Ling’s genes became spliced with those of various animal species, designed as a cheap and efficient labor force to be sold for work in factories such as for the microchip and scale manufacturer HöST—a nod to Haraway.3 Chan Ling managed to escape the cloning facilities of Jemini with some of her clone sisters, however, and set up a laboratory of her own in the slums of Saltwater City, where she engineered parthenogenic capabilities as well as properties capable of organ regrowth into the Grist genome that manifests in some of the clones. As a result, she effectively strips Jemini of their control over the clones, placing the Grist sisters’ survival into her own hands to self-(re) generate and perpetuate her own species. In a context of patriarchal control and oppression of women’s bodies, and with a biopolitical history in the United States of coercive sterilization aimed particularly at poor, indigenous, as well as African American and Hispanic women—which occurred as late as 1975—Lai creates a powerful icon of resistance with this survivor who managed to escape slavery.4 Chan Ling succeeds in shaping the very technology used for her exploitation into a tool for her own 3  In their transgressive hybridity that defies binary categorization, but also in a quite literal reference to the following passage already alluded to above from “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), the Grist sisters seem a direct embodiment of Donna Haraway’s cyborg concept: “These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a ‘Western’ commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by ‘Western’ technology, by writing. These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies” (177). 4  See, for example, the 1978 federal class action lawsuit Madrigal v. Quilligan.

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empowerment and emancipation, coming to own her body to freely multiply and mutate a species that was meant to be limited and strictly regulated,5 a species that was not meant to have a future outside of strict patriarchal control. Lai consequently imagines queer futurity in a manner that offers thinking against Lee Edelman’s (2004) famous argument that there is no queer future. Working within Lacanian theory, Edelman contends that the future is discursively coded along notions of heteronormative procreation with the symbolic figure of the Child, white and male by definition, as its center. This logic comes at the expense of present-time “real” citizens, especially those who do not match this hegemonic ideal and whose claim to the future is thereby limited. He therefore argues that queer people ought to reject futurity, as it would only “reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future,” thereby only repeating the violence that has been wielded against them (31). José Esteban Muñoz (2019) counters Edelman by arguing that the utopian future, especially imagined by racialized queers, is the domain of queerness: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). In “Cruising Canadian SF’s Queer Futurity,” Wendy Gay Pearson (2019) notes how Lai’s second novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) anticipates Muñoz in his claim that queer futurity can critique the present by being attentive to the past, and that Lai does so by imagining alternative, queer ways of reproduction that subvert the heteronormative and white supremacist contexts that, according to Edelman, claim the future as theirs (187). Pearson calls attention to sf’s queer modes of reproduction, here, listing Shelley’s Frankenstein, Le Guin’s Left Hand of 5  The Grist sisters’ multiple births, as many as ten in a “litter,” call up societal fears of “unnatural” interventions via assisted reproductive technology and remind of the controversial debate around Nadya Suleman who was referred to by the media as “Octomom” after she gave birth to eight surviving babies in January 2009 that were conceived via in  vitro fertilization. While the ethical implications of this particular case can be questioned—the fertility specialist who performed the procedure was investigated and expelled from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine—the public outcry and the ensuing debate about whether women should even have access to assisted reproductive technology can serve as an indicator for a collective societal fear of—and demand for control over—women’s reproductivity.

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Darkness, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as examples which also, I would argue, function as intertexts for The Tiger Flu. Each suggests the possibility of a different relationship between self and world, of a different journey toward subjectivity, one that is not necessarily based upon its inability to, and indeed may be founded on its refusal to, enter into the patriarchal symbolic order. The alternative is the near inevitability that the symbolic order will attempt to reposition its new queer children as nothing, as literally non-human. What is different is the balance of power, which shifts, sometimes imperceptibly but unstoppably, from patriarchy to its presumptively abjected others. Sf, we might argue, refutes queer shame by literally replacing the definition of the human. (188)

The Tiger Flu, I argue, does exactly that: its queer, non-human children shift the balance by having readers rethink what the “human” is, and that it is the characters’ difference from the “old” identity that makes them inherit the future. They are reviled by the “normal” population of the urban sprawl for their otherness, eventually making them flee civilization altogether and build Grist Village in an isolated location far off in the woods of the Fourth Quarantine Ring. Kirilow, one of the novel’s protagonists, thus comments somewhat bitterly: “Who cares? We will outlive them all, in beds of our own making” (2018, 19). With their origins as an artificially created cheap work force to replace human labor, the hostile, even violent reactions of their surrounding society clearly call up the Yellow Peril discourse. As Roh et al. (2015) point out, Chinese workers are still often cast as a “vast, subaltern-like labor force” in the American cultural imagination, playing on old fears such as invasions by “faceless Asian masses” encroaching on North America to replace American born workers—a racist stereotype Lai literalizes with her clones who actually do all look alike (4). With the clones’ genetically modified genetic make-up, Lai also employs the techno-Orientalist trope of displaced Asian bodies that are more akin to animals or machines, better suited to the harsh living conditions of the dystopian environment, more resilient against the plague, and with fewer needs than any “white” bodies of the mainstream population. In their Otherness, the Grist sisters are denied a “human” status in this world, as they are society’s Other, the abject. Their bodies fall outside of normative categorization and therefore

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are illegible—cast as both hypo- and hyper-technological, living simultaneously in the past and the future.6 Since the Grist sisters’ genome deteriorates, accumulating defects in their genetic code through faulty replication, their life expectancy is rather limited and requires frequent medical intervention. Their collective survival depends on so-called doublers, who birth entire “litters” of new clone-sisters through asexual reproduction, and “starfish,” who have the ability to re-grow any organ in a matter of days and therefore can be harvested for donations to their sister clones multiple times, most importantly, to their doublers. The biological peculiarity of these clones—or the “promiscuity” of their cells, referring to their capacity to self-replicate as well as repair— plays on these fears of invasion, I would argue, and calls up another racist discourse in America’s medical history. Rachel Lee (2014) draws a link between the racialized biology of the “impossible bodies” of Asian workers in the United States, and the “the similarly impossible biologies of cellular matter—tissue culture able to survive in vitro, that is, without the nutrition or ‘lodging’ provided in vivo by the organism—whose very displacement facilitates the extraction of surplus values on behalf of contemporary biotech and for-profit medicine” (14). Lee gestures, here, to the history of the HeLa cell line. Summarizing Hannah Landecker’s accounts of Henrietta Lacks, who in 1951 underwent a tissue biopsy at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and became the unknowing and nonconsenting donor of the cells that, without Lack’s knowledge, were declared “immortal,” which means that they possessed the ability to grow and divide indefinitely in an artificial environment—an immensely useful and profitable capacity. In 1967, HeLa was “racialized” within the public discourse when Stanley Gartler pronounced that HeLa had supposedly contaminated eighteen other distinct cell lines in use, identifying the donor for the first time as an African American woman. In the contemporary political climate, the idea of “colored” cells “promiscuously infiltrating other cell lines,” and the implicit rhetoric of the one-drop rule, appealed 6  The clones live in a “backwoods” way, both literally in their deliberate isolation from others as well as figuratively, in my reading, with their alternative cultural traditions and belief systems that to a Western-biased observer might appear as “primitive” and “barbaric,” despite how superior they are in many respects to anything Western science has to offer. Their spatial remove is thereby both in space and in time, calling up Anne McClintock’s (1995) term of “anachronistic space” that describes colonial conceptions of indigenous peoples as inhabiting an anterior time, pre-modern, or “primitive” imaginary past.

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to fears of miscegenation, Lee relates, with cell lines becoming stand-ins for humans and casting non-white biology as “the superhuman, aggressively invasive and prolific survivor rendering the regular (unmarked aka white) human as radically dependent, frail, and under assault” (16). Lai’s self-repairing and self-replicating Grist sisters, who are not just surviving but thriving in both artificial as well as natural environments, are similarly perceived as a “superhuman” invader biologically dethroning “normal” humans from their place. While the Grist sisters’ “origin myth” of Grandma Chan Ling is indeed inspiring and empowering, on closer inspection, this new way of life comes with its own inequalities, seeing that it is based on the exploitation of one group of differently embodied subjects for the sake of another. Kirilow is a so called groom, proficient in several areas of the medical sciences and specialized in amputation and transplantation procedures. At the beginning of the novel, she is forced to perform surgery on her lover Peristrophe Halliana, the community’s last starfish, in order to remove her eyes for Auntie Radix Bupleuri. It is a procedure that is likely going to cost Peristrophe her life, since her liver had been removed the week prior and her kidneys three weeks before that. This fact is an incomprehensible injustice in the eyes of Kirilow, who argues that a nineteen-year-old should not be asked to sacrifice her life for someone forty-eight years of age. But since Radix is their last doubler, and therefore the Grist sisters’ last hope for survival (without her, they would inevitably become extinct), her life is considered more valuable than Peristrophe’s, who, consequently, becomes expendable, or what Lee would call “bioavailable” (210). Lee (2014) describes a “biomodification regime of primary class or economic stratification  in which wealthier sectors of society supplement and extend their optimized bodily transformations, while poor and perpetually debt-ridden sectors of society become bioavailable to service this sector's amplified transformations” for which the procurement of organ donations from impoverished persons from the global South is an example (210). Becoming bioavailable is the result of being both biological, possessing a body whose parts can become materially useful for other bodies, and of being discursively constructed as different, Other. To return to the concept of biopower, thus, only by placing such bodies outside of normative classification through their discursive construction as different (often along racial lines)—thereby rendering them culturally unintelligible and, consequently, invisible—can they be stripped of the rights and protections that the biologically identical bodies they become available to are endowed

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with. The tension inherent in this dialectic is that between Agamben’s bios, the culturally organized and protected life of the free citizen, and zoe, bare, unprotected, and culturally invisible animal life. It is a process Lee calls “zoe-fication,” which often entails the rhetorical reduction of humans to vermin, with the pathologizing of South Asians in the subcontinent and East Asian migrants to the United States through, respectively, their association with cholera and their metaphoric collapse in popular songs into rats, mice, and fleas (upon which they are claimed to feast). More recently, news coverage of the early-­ twenty-­first-century SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) scare drew on these earlier intimate conjoinings of Asiatic peoples and nonmammalian life (here birds) to raise fears of Asians as microbe carriers—as petri dishes for the crossing over of avian viruses to humans. (48)

Here, I have to add the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic has been instrumentalized by the Trump administration in March 2020 to stoke up xenophobia and racism in the United States. On March 19, 2020, Trump was photographed by Jabin Botsford (Washington Post) at a press conference reading from his notes, in which the word “corona” was crossed out and replaced with “Chinese” in black marker (cf. Gearan  2020). On March 23, however, Trump fortunately changed his rhetoric and called for the protection of Asian-American communities. Nevertheless, his repeated use of the phrase “Chinese virus” despite the World Health Organization’s insistence on not naming diseases after the place of outbreak, and despite advocates warning against the use of such terminology, fueled hate crimes against people of Asian descent—who, as a result of the outbreak, experienced a surge in discrimination and violence. As Lee argues, the reduction of a group of people to “disease carrying vermin” allows their “zoe-fication”—it discursively removes them from the company of their fellow human beings and casts them as something other, something less than human. Dehumanized in this fashion, or turned into unprotected zoe rather than bios, their bodies become available for exploitation and disassembly into useful parts. In Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2002) words, “[organ donors] are an invisible and discredited collection of anonymous suppliers of spare parts; [organ recipients] are cherished patients, treated as moral subjects and as suffering individuals [whose] names […] biographies and medical histories are known, and [whose] proprietary rights over the bodies and body parts of the poor living and

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dead, are virtually unquestioned” (4). Scheper-Hughes (2002) thus regards contemporary organ trafficking as a postmodern form of sacrifice: “Global capitalism and advanced biotechnology have released new medically incited ‘tastes’ (a New Age cannibalism, perhaps) for human bodies, living and dead, for the skin and bones, flesh and blood, tissue, marrow and genetic material of ‘the other.’ What is different today is that the sacrifice is disguised as a ‘gift,’ a donation, and is unrecognized for what it really is” (54). Within the context of organ trafficking, these impoverished “state-appointed ritual scapegoats” from sectors of the Global South, as Scheper-Hughes argues, serve to delay mortality for privileged recipients from the Global North—something that only becomes possible because the sacrifice is made invisible. In her novel, Lai makes the inhumanity of such practices visible. Lee (2014) summarizes Michel Foucault’s biosociality of race as “the creation of a population whose demise and limited lives are required to promote the enhanced, limitless lives of others” (22). In her depiction of the Grist sisters, Lai literalizes this: an artificially engineered new species whose express purpose is the promotion of the “enhanced, limitless lives of others.” Without any protection or rights in mainstream society—their lives clearly in a status of zoe rather than bios—they are hunted like animals by Isabelle Chow for the lucrative properties of their bodies, or a substance they call forget-me-do. Part powerful anesthetic, part psychoactive drug, “[f]orget-me-do makes you feel pain as pleasure. It takes away all memory and feeling of pain, leaves nothing but a craving to be cut again. We cultivated it for the sisterly insertion and the doublers [sic] return, two holy ways for one to become two” (21). Forget-me-do is the key component both in the psychoactive drug N-light and in Chow’s virtual reality scheme, increasing verisimilitude. Originally intended for slave labor, the now-free Grist sisters are still wanted for their bodies to enhance the lives of the citizens of Saltwater City. Called “tub puppets, fuck moppets, matchstick monkeys” (19) and “slit sluts” (20) in mainstream society, they are stripped of their human status due to their deviant embodiment, and are thereby rendered culturally unintelligible and invisible, making any violent action against them justifiable and unpunishable. They become what Giorgio Agamben terms homo sacer. While the Grist sisters’ bioavailability in mainstream society is coded along the lines of racism and xenophobia, inequality due to their deviant embodiment within their own community, however, is differently coded. Here, the assigned roles and the demand to make sacrifices are a highly

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visible part of their culture, and while particular embodiment might strip the subject of her agency, it grants her an elevated status. Lai thus calls attention to inequalities within the marginalized group, adding complexity and hinting at a deep stratification of exploitation by openly returning her characters to a ritual setting surrounding the surgery of organ transplants in Grist Village. While sharpening and sterilizing her knives, for instance, Kirilow chants the verses of her ancestors and gives a preparatory anesthetic drink to Peristrophe Halliana—patient and “sacrificial victim.” As barbaric as these practices might strike readers, in the Grist society, they are again visible and openly communicated. It is the starfish’s duty to be sacrificed to the doubler in order to extend her life, because without said doubler, the entire species would become extinct. The continued demand for sacrifice, burdened on Peristrophe beyond her ability to give, thus resonates with Lawrence Cohen’s (1999) research on Chennai slums debt economies, where it is mostly women who are forced to sell their kidneys. Their scars become a sign of the embodiment of the loans one seeks to supplement wages and give life to one’s family, the scar reveals both the inevitability of one’s own body serving as collateral and the limits to this “collateralization.” One has only one kidney to give, but the conditions of indebtedness remain. At some point the money runs out and one needs credit again, and then the scar covers over the wound not of a gift but of a debt. (141)

Due to her particular embodiment, Peristrophe Halliana is marked as bioavailable to others. Her exploitable status is a result of a compounded marginalization, with her anesthetic properties of the forget-me-do allowing Kirilow to operate on her starfish-lover without her feeling any pain, once more calling up the racist image of the coolie whose body seems to lack nerves and is capable of enduring the greatest hardships. Here, though, the forget-me-do does more than just numb the body to pain. On the contrary, the concoction turns pain into pleasure and erases its trauma from memory.7 Throughout the surgery, while Kirilow cuts into her flesh, Peristrophe sighs and moans in “pleasure-pain” as she lovingly gazes up at 7  This is a powerful commentary by Lai on the importance of (cultural) memory, and as Kirilow explains about forget-me-do, “[t]hrough its use, we cultivate what we remember and what we forget in order to make Grist history” (43). Only by remembering the pain of one’s oppression, can one truly resist it. This knowingly rings with the unwillingness of Western culture to account for past injustices and atrocities, such as genocide of indigenous peoples

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her (22). This “harmful” invasion of her body causes her a pleasure that is coded as sexual, connecting sex and violence in an uneasy way: it is due to her assigned role, her bioavailability, that she is made to enjoy her own abuse—another rather painful association with racist stereotypes, in this case with the “natural submissiveness” and “sexual availability” of Asian women as objects of male Western desire, particularly in the context of sex tourism, human trafficking, and forced prostitution. Peristrophe is stripped of any kind of agency and is even forced to become complicit in her own exploitation. This is another instance where Lai picks up (techno-) Orientalist tropes in order to complicate and subvert them in a powerful manner. Unfortunately, her sacrifice is in vain: shortly after the surgery, the weakened Peristrophe becomes infected with the tiger flu, tracked in by an invader from the outside world, and dies, while Auntie Radix suffers a fatal heart attack. The two losses rob the community of their hope to reproduce and continue their species, and still mourning their deceased, Grist Village is attacked by a militia sent by Isabelle Chow, almost all of the sisters taken in the process. Among the survivors is Corydalis Ambigua, who we learn had hidden her doubler capacities in fear of Radix’s wrath and, now, hides away from Grist Village as she gives birth to seven new babies. The Grist sisters consider themselves a different species from humans and in contrast to the human predisposition to categorize one’s own species as above animal status, they openly refer to themselves as animals, even calling their offspring “puppies” and “litters”. Their genetic material is a splice of human DNA with that of several other species, and it is a part (and a necessity) of their culture to continue seeking new ways of improving their biology in order to become more resilient and better adapted to the challenges their hostile environments hold. Being derived from the same genetic material, they are inherently vulnerable to potential flaws in their genome—there is no natural corrective due to genetic variety, after all. Therefore, they themselves have to introduce change and adaptation, and to do so is only possible via the genetic material of “outside sources.” Consequently, they depend on “genetic impurity,” the exchange with other species, or, to put it in Haraway’s terms, the becoming-with animal, plant, and machine. Kirilow even hints at an ability she calls “cell-­ knowledge,” which allows her to feel where she relationally stands with and slavery, which enables the continuance of racism that, most perniciously, can also be internalized by the victims of such oppression and their descendants.

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other beings, or a knowledge that she does not live apart from but in a continuum with other species that is hard-wired into her (91). This “cell-­ knowledge” is an expression of what Rosi Braidotti (2013) calls nomadic subjectivity, which rejects individualism [… and] promotes an ethical bond of an altogether different sort from the self-interests of an individual subject, as defined along the canonical lines of classical Humanism. A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism. […]. (49-50)

Grist society, indeed, rejects individualism and promotes non-unitary subjectivity, and their interconnectedness to other life forms is a palpable and conscious part of their biology and psychology that they foster and enhance. Kirilow even speculates whether the future of the Grist might lie in a stronger connection with plants rather than animals. Were she able to modify the longevity of Ganoderma fungi, she would be able to put an end to the necessity for doublers and starfish, making her sisters immortal (49). Lacking both the knowledge and the ability, Corydalis as their new doubler seems to remain their last hope. Only with a new starfish do they truly stand a chance to survive, so Kirilow sets out to Saltwater City to find another hidden Grist commune, the Cordova Dancing School. When she finally arrives, she learns that they have lost their doubler and starfish, too, but in Kora, one of the orphan girls they’ve taken in to compensate for their dwindling numbers, Kirilow recognizes the familiar features of the Grist sisters and valuable starfish qualities. Kora and Kirilow end up as prisoners in the Pacific Pearl Parkade, controlled by Traskin’s tiger men, where they learn that the abducted Grist sisters have been taken to be fed into their version of virtual reality via the LïFT elevator technology that transforms their bodies into fish in the process. The somewhat peculiar “transspeciation” of the Grist sisters into fish can be read as a multiply coded metaphor, pointing to the Christian use of the symbol tied to original Pagan culture, and standing for fertility and the female reproductive organs. While imprisoned, Kora and Kirilow are, to their horror, made into “cannibals,” forced into eating fish that used to be the Grist sisters. Traskin also offers them tiger wine which, Kora knows, carries the tiger flu pathogen. These offers call up Christian symbolism, the Eucharist, with its

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loaves and fish in particular standing in for the body of Christ, while the wine represents his blood. During Catholic Mass, the body and blood of Christ are consumed as a celebration of his sacrifice. Lai ironically inverts the sacrifice, stripping it of its sanctified meaning, and thereby once more emphasizes the ruthless exploitation of the impoverished, bioavailable sectors of society by those in privilege and power. Here, I would like to call attention again to Scheper-Hughes’s (2002) comparison of organ trafficking to sacrifice—a “New Age cannibalism”—that calls for “human bodies, living and dead, for the skin and bones, flesh and blood, tissue, marrow and genetic material of ‘the other’” (54). In her novel, Lai frequently picks up cultural images from disparate contexts and layers them to create a productive tension, tilting their respective frames of reference, and critically questioning and subverting them. Unable to save her sisters, Kirilow escapes with Kora to the New Origins Archive, run by the high priestess Elzbieta Kruk and her order that used to maintain friendly trade relations with the Grist sisters and share their faith in “Our Mother.” Formerly a gene bank, the New Origins Archive’s original function is played on by the acronym NOA, for Noah’s ark. Built to save all the species from extinction, the Archive is a place of zoe—bare, naked animal life—and can be read as the opposite end of Isabelle Chow’s celestial elevator that promises disembodied consciousness, an existence as purest mind. Meant as a quick stopover on their way to join the surviving Grist sisters in New Grist Village, Kora’s and Kirilow’s stay at this strange place takes an unforeseen turn when they become prisoners here as well, caught up in a power struggle between Kruk and Chow. Kruk, who seems to have lost her faith and now is in league with Traskin, wants Kora to upload to his virtual reality onto the satellite mainframe Chang, while Chow wants Kirilow for hers on Eng—yet both women fight the powerful seduction of a promised better life to stay firmly embodied. Embodiment resonates with the Grist belief that “body and mind exist together in harmonious balance. When one dies the person no longer exists,” as Kirilow explains (294). Against her will, however, Chow drugs Kirilow and implants her with one of her high-tech data scales, directly injecting her with the information stored on it. She then forces her to attend a feast8 whose highlight is the launch of an atomic missile to shoot down the 8  During the feast, it becomes clear that the dishes contained the flesh of the murdered Elzbieta Kruk—another cannibalistic incident, this time by Isabelle Chow’s hand. This, again, could be read as a critical comment on capitalist greed.

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Chang satellite. In the ensuing collapse of the building, Chow is killed, and Kora is mortally injured. Thanks to the scale’s information about the organic LïFT technology, however, Kirilow can save Kora from her deadly injuries by “hacking” the Archive’s elevator in an ad hoc surgical procedure on its innards, so that it exchanges Kora’s injured human body into that of a fish through a “transspeciation process.” Already hybrid, with her DNA a splicing of human and animal genetic material, Kora merges even further with her environment: In the last chapter, 156 years later, Kora has become a sentient starfish tree, able to grow any organ as needed and expanding the life spans of her sisters whilst providing them with an archive of their cultural memory. She has become both a tree of life and a tree of knowledge, watching over the Garden of Eden of her Grist sisterhood. In a world overwhelmed with the accumulated problems caused by unbound neoliberal capitalist exploitation—problems that seem to lack solutions—the notion to leave a troublesome material existence behind and exist unburdened from these responsibilities as pure mind seems seductive. In her novel, Lai imagines tentatively hopeful alternatives, and conveys a notion of self and subjectivity that is viscerally embodied. Recalling Vint’s (2007) claims that the body can be a site of resistance in refusing cultural norm complicity, the deviant bodies and queer reproductivity of the Grist sisters demonstrate such a resistance against ideology and neo-colonial oppression. By refusing to conform to normativity, the Grist sisters not only remain unintelligible within ideology—they intentionally seek to merge with other species and thereby blur cultural boundaries, breaking up binary categorization altogether. The deep interconnectedness with other life forms that lies at the heart of Grist culture proves to be their salvation. In the end, Kirilow has succeeded in making the sacrifice of doublers and starfish unnecessary, modifying Kora’s DNA even further and merging it with her “earth others” (cf. Braidotti). Not only does Kirilow save the Grist sisters from extinction, she also creates a community and way of life based in a more sustainable, equal, and egalitarian relationship with other life on the planet.

referenCes Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Cohen, Lawrence. 1999. Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation. Daedalus 128 (4 (Fall)): 135–165.

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Doane, Mary Ann. 1999. Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine. In Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark, 20–33. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Gearan, Anne. 2020. Trump Takes Direct Aim at China as Known U.S. Infections Double and Criticism Mounts. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-­t akes-­d irect-­a im-­a t-­c hina-­a s-­k nown-­u s-­ infections-­d ouble-­a nd-­c riticism-­m ounts/2020/03/19/6df10828-­6 a06-­ 11ea-­abef-­020f086a3fab_story.html. Accessed 19 Mar 2020. Haraway, Donna J. 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Last Quarter. Socialist Review 80 (March/ April): 65–107. Hayot, Eric. 2007. Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures. Representations 99 (1 (Summer)): 99–129. Lai, Larissa. 2018. The Tiger Flu. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Lee, Rachel. 2014. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America. Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Pearson, Wendy Gay. 2019. Cruising Canadian SF’s Queer Futurity: Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl. In Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, ed. Amy J.  Ransom and Dominick Grace, 185–201. Basel: Springer International Publishing. Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. 2015. Techno-Orientalism. Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. Bodies For Sale: Whole or in Parts. In Commodifying Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 1–8. London: Sage. Vint, Sherryl. 2007. Bodies of Tomorrow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

PART II

Reimagining the Woman

CHAPTER 6

A Housewife’s Dream? Automation and the Problem of Women’s Free Time Caroline Edwards

Loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, MGM’s Forbidden Planet (1956) was one of the defining science fiction features of the 1950s. As the astronauts descend from their spacecraft at the start of the film onto the muted extra-terrestrial desertscape of Altair IV, they are met by a curious welcome party barreling at speed through the dust towards them. “The driver must be a madman!” one lieutenant exclaims, unholstering his ray gun and approaching the alien craft. It dispatches the wobbling figure of Robby, the most identifiable robot in science fiction since Fritz Lang’s Maria in Metropolis (1927) and before Star Wars’ iconic R2-D2 and C-3P0 (1977). The technological futurism announced by Robby’s sleek metallic casing, plexiglass domed head, and flashing electronic brain circuitry brings into thrilling cinematic verisimilitude a 1950s macho techno-capitalist dream of robotic sophistication; located at the galactic

C. Edwards (*) Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_6

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frontier where “whiteness and masculinity find their apotheosis,” as De Witt Douglas Kilgore (2003, 231) writes. Looking back at Robby’s helpful robotic demeanor, it can be hard to recall this earlier moment of post-WWII optimism when cybernetics popularized the reimagining of people’s relationships with their machines. In performing the domestic chores of cooking, serving drinks, and rustling up slinky evening gowns for his mistress Alta, Robby is an unambiguous signifier of the anticipated rising prosperity of the middle classes, whose near-future visions of automation removed the drudgery from domestic life.1 Today, however, automated technologies and artificial intelligence epitomize growing fears about technological displacement and collapsing economic conditions. With self-driving cars, computerized manufacturing, fully automated warehouses, Amazon’s “just walk out” technology, and nursing-care robots, the need for human labor or intervention is almost entirely removed from the sphere of production, even in traditionally white-collar areas of employment, such as legal services and hospital surgery. Discussing labor in contemporary capitalism, Ursula Huws (2019) suggests that: As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the media are abuzz with sharply polarised debates about the future of work. Utopian visions of a post-capitalist world in which all the drudgery will be carried out by machines and people are free to enjoy a life of leisure and creativity jostle with dark dystopian views of a future society in which the majority of the population is reduced to precarious penury under the all-seeing gaze of a panoptic authority that monitors every aspect of life. (1–2)

But what if the economic fallout of technological displacement that automation causes could produce a new utopian reality out of the current economic dystopia? What if our contemporary moment of big data, machine learning, and emergent digital technologies, which Nick Srnicek 1  See Dustin A. Abnet’s discussion of robots in the post-war period as “playfellow[s] and protector[s]” in The American Robot: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 209–94. Whilst a figure like Robby might appear to offer a robotic ally to the feminist cause of women’s liberation, in performing the domestic duties traditionally assigned to subordinated female labor, he is also an updated science fictional version of the butler—a figure associated in Victorian and Edwardian literature with extending the patriarchal order of “above stairs” to the feminized working-class space “below stairs,” as indicated in his gentleman’s costume and position of authority. See Fernandez (2009), 106–7.

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(2017) calls “platform capitalism,” could help us to stumble out of capital accumulation and into shared collective forms of de-commodification founded in the conditions of abundance that automation makes possible?

Fully Automated Luxury Communism This is the question posed by contemporary science fictions that imagine futuristic post-scarcity worlds made possible by 3D printing, including William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014), Kim Stanley Robinson’s multi-­ generation ship story Aurora (2015), Emma Newman’s 2015 novel Planetfall, Neal Stephenson’s earlier 1995 text The Diamond Age—which features 3D printing but retains scarcity as its underlying social logic—and Cory Doctorow’s 2017 novel Walkaway. In Doctorow’s near-future vision, the unemployed global lumpenproletariat produced by automation, or what Aaron Bastani (2019, 23) calls the “unnecessariat,” have decided that they have less to lose if they simply walk away from capitalist “default” reality into the Canadian tundra. People “[became] walkaways because there was nothing for them in default—no rent money, no health care, no food” (Doctorow 2017, 359). Having reached pensionable age without securing stable employment, today’s precarious workers finally take the utopian plunge into a faltering configuration of post-capitalist groups that operate along principles of communalism and mutual aid, but also scavenging, anarchist in-fighting, and dangerous skirmishes between factions. Although technological displacement will replace human labor, the novel reminds us, the attendant impoverishment of unemployment is a social, rather than a technological, relation. The reduction of necessary labor time required to maintain automated, “smart” community facilities (power generation, sanitation systems, hydroponics maintenance for growing food, harvesting drinking water) to just three hours each day liberates the walkaways from the realm of necessity. As Limpopo describes, they enter Marx’s realm of freedom by spending their increased free time “re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry” (Doctorow 2017, 76). Walkaway’s utopian vision of automation returns us to the labor reform laws of the nineteenth century and the political struggle over the length of the working day. Marx describes in the first volume of Capital how, since the capitalist has already paid for the productive infrastructure (what he terms “constant capital”), the extraction of surplus value depends on

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keeping the length of the working day as long as possible. As he (1991) writes towards the end of Capital, Vol. 3: The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper … The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (959; italics added)

In Doctorow’s novel, this “basic prerequisite” of reducing the length of the working day via automated technologies has not only increased the walkaways’ quantity of free time, but, more radically, has emancipated them at the instinctual level. It is not simply the vision of a revolutionary break with default capitalism that makes this an important political novel for the twenty-first century; it is the creative energy Doctorow puts into imagining what people would do with all the free time that automation makes possible. “The idea of integral human liberation,” as Herbert Marcuse (1956) asserts in Eros and Civilisation, “necessarily contains the vision of the struggle against time” (191). If repressive clock time is to be defeated, we need to reach a point at which libidinal pleasure ceases to be parcellated into what Marcuse calls “a temporal and controlled condition, [and becomes] a permanent fountainhead of the human existence” (234). In the walkaways’ ubiquitous Japanese onsen, Doctorow’s novel offers a glimpse into this Marcusean liberation of Eros from repressive temporal control. Gretyl, for example, luxuriates in the public baths, unbinding herself from chronometric productivity: “the feeling of peace, the intimacy that was asexual and sensuous at the same time. It was child-like, a feeling from before sex, or maybe the feeling of someone very old, beyond sex. Everything was at peace” (Doctorow 2017, 284). Despite the younger (male) protagonists’ initial adolescent fantasizing about the sexual promise of living away from the mechanisms and structures of institutional authority, these onsen scenes in fact depict a reconfigured sensuality liberated from the function of sex. Limpopo, Seth, and Etcetera, for example, slip into sensuous communalism: “Without saying a word—without it being overtly sexual—they scrubbed one another’s backs. Sexual or not, there was animal pleasure in being groomed by someone, and it deepened the feeling of sweet, tazzy decadence” (284, 84). These scenes recall Marcuse’s ideas about the civilizational power of Eros once it has been

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liberated from sexual behavior, de-sublimated and unleashed into creative fulfilment; the animal pleasure of casting off the shackles of capitalist subjectivity and meeting in new kinds of collective encounter that are both child-like, with all its implications of the promise of futurity, and also decadent. As Aaron Bastani puts it, “Communism is luxurious—or it isn’t communism” (2019, 56).

Utopian Literature: A Vital Imaginative Resource Given the rampant inequality that we now associate with technological displacement, characterized by increasing precarity, austerity, longer working hours, and declining (real) wages, reminding ourselves of an earlier dream of full automation becomes an urgent task: part of what Kathi Weeks (2011) calls the utopian demand to rethink work “as a way of life.” In her influential study, The Problem with Work, Weeks observes that work functions to interpellate political subjects and is the primary means “by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation” (2011, 3, 8). Rethinking the world of work thus involves more than simply re-­organizing how economic goods and services are produced; it is nothing short of a utopian transformation of our entire social relations. This Marxist discourse has recently resurfaced as years of precarity, austerity, and ongoing capitalist crisis (exacerbated, in the past eighteen months by the COVID-19 global pandemic) have led to scholars re-examining older debates concerning the politics of work, and various antiwork and antiproductivist theories have become popular (Tronti 1980; Postone 1996; Aronowitz and Cutler 1997; Negri 2003; Weeks 2011; Frayne 2015; Srnicek and Williams 2016; Fishwick and Kiersey 2021; Dinerstein and Pitts 2021). In his 2015 study of antiwork politics, The Refusal of Work, the sociologist David Frayne draws on the Italian Autonomist movement of the 1960s and 1970s to consider whether automation would reduce the length of the working day, releasing exhausted workers into a realm of sensory experience outside of work; or whether increasing industrial productivity and efficiency would simply lead to ever-higher standards of production that had the opposite effect and trapped workers in longer hours of employment. Frayne suggests that the Autonomists’ insistent demand for “the right of workers to feel the sun on their skin, to play with their children, to develop interests and skills outside the factory, and to rest peacefully at night” should guide our own workers’ struggles in the twenty-first

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century. As he puts it, they remind us that capitalist exploitation diminishes workers’ “sensory experience of the world” by robbing them of free time (2015, 1). The relationship between sensory experience and free time is my focus here. It seems to me that what is missing from many contemporary antiwork and antiproductivist discussions is a properly utopian thought experiment about what life could look like under the transformed social and productive conditions of a post-capitalist future, that is, what kind of social, physical, aesthetic, literary, performative, cultural, ecological, and political pursuits might we develop given more free time? We should pay attention to the utopian tradition of literary and philosophical thought experiments set in various post-capitalist and post-industrialized futures. Their speculative visions, which frequently draw on automation as the technological prerequisite for arriving at conditions of abundance, contribute a vital imaginative density to sober economic questions of value, production, and the problem of free time. Perhaps the most influential vision of automation in utopian literature is Edward Bellamy’s (1888) nationalized industrial system in Looking Backward. Waking up in the year 2000, Julian West discovers that his native Boston has been transformed into a paradisal vision of sumptuous public gardens and tree-lined boulevards. The highly rationalized Boston of the future relies not only on a futuristic vision of pneumatic automation, in which each town’s warehouse “all but runs itself,” but, more importantly, on the corresponding socio-political vision of post-capitalist work. Admiring the city’s public laundries and kitchens, West exclaims: “What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!” (70). West’s remark reminds us of the importance of women’s liberation from household duties within utopian thinking; an issue that, although not unproblematically depicted (as we shall come to see), predates Marxist feminist thinking about unwaged domestic labor and women’s access to waged work by almost a century.2 This “housewife’s dream” of more free time is the utopian promise offered by Robby in Forbidden Planet as well as the public laundries and dining halls of Looking Backward. It is the question at 2  In the 1970s, Marxist feminists such Silvia Federici, Margaret Benston, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa focused their analyses on the gendered division of labor and its denigration of the domestic sphere, which positions women outside the sphere of economic production. The “wages for housework” campaign organized by Dalla Costa in Italy and Federici in the USA in the 1970s was designed to bring women’s domestic work into the realm of economic production and recognize women’s socially necessary labor, without which capitalism could not function. See Toupin (2018).

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the center of antiproductivist and postwork studies such as Weeks’s (2011) The Problem with Work, which argue that the refusal of work might provoke a broader reconceptualization of productive activity outside of the wage relation; a relation that has consistently denigrated and devalued women’s vital contribution to social production and reproduction. If we want to understand how our own contemporary moment of accelerating automation might be wrangled into a more egalitarian direction, we need to pay attention to these utopian visions and what they have to say about women’s roles—in their own particular late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century retrofutures. They help us overcome an all-too-­ often naturalized antipathy towards automation as the cause of growing impoverishment and precarity, rather than a symptom of ongoing capitalist crisis in the late phase of neoliberal post-hegemony.3 In what follows, I examine different speculative visions of women’s free time made possible by automated productive futures in utopian texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These texts are frequently overlooked by utopian and science fiction studies, and are entirely ignored by scholarly debates around productivism, antiproductivism, and work. In conceptualizing what I mean by women’s free time, it will be necessary to consider competing definitions of work and labor, leisure time and free time, that are central to discussions of social organization and economic production in a number of academic disciplines, including the sociology of work, Marxist feminism, ethical and political philosophy, liberal egalitarian theories of justice, time-use studies, and, more recently, discussions of antiproductivist, antiwork and postwork imaginaries. Whilst many of these fields offer a crucial theoretical basis on which to build a critique of contemporary work culture and its productivist ethos, few of them make more than a passing reference to the imaginative resources of utopian literature.4 As I will argue, an earlier phase of utopian literary production helps us consider the question of women’s free time and its relationship to work, or labor, as brought about by automated futures. In what follows, I draw on Hannah Arendt in arguing that eliminating work altogether does little to advance a more progressive politics beyond capitalist exploitation. Rather, as utopian 3  I am indebted to William Davies’s (2017) analysis of neoliberalism in its post-hegemonic phase since 2008. 4  Despite her engagement with utopian thinking in The Problem with Work, for example, Kathi Weeks (2011, 174) offers little in the way of imaginative examples that illustrate time as “a resource to use however we might wish”; a crucial ingredient of her argument about post-work imaginaries.

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literary and philosophical visions help us imagine, what is required is a rethinking of the nature of work, what Frayne (2015, 2) calls “the ethical status of work itself”—not within the capitalist lifeworld, but beyond it.

A Housewife’s Dream or More Work for Mother? In her influential study More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology, Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) reveals that rather than functioning as a refuge from industrialization and economic competition, the domestic sphere is integral to economic production. This is nowhere more evident than in the labor-saving devices invented to save women’s time, which brought cutting-edge industrial products into women’s homes and yet failed to liberate them into free time. Despite removing the drudgery of heavy work, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers, Cowan illuminates, have simply raised societal expectations that clothes, carpets, and dishes are ever cleaner. Thus, the time spent undertaking household chores remains constant. This state reveals a central issue that I will return to throughout this chapter: that simply automating the hard work—or drudgery—in and of itself does not address the underlying economic and gender inequalities that comprise the division of labor. Men, it seems, can be released from household chores, but women are required to fill up their increased free time with additional menial tasks. As Graham Neville (2004, 67–8) writes in Free Time: “In many discussions of leisure the distinctive situation of women is inadequately recognized. […] It is a common opinion shared by men and women alike, that men are entitled to some independent leisure in a way that women are not.” There is a conceptual conflation here between leisure time and free time that needs to be disaggregated. In her recent book Free Time, political theorist Julie L. Rose (2019) intervenes into contemporary liberal egalitarian theories of justice via a consideration of time-use studies and time-­ use data. Rose’s analysis offers some crucial conceptual tools that can help us debunk a persistent strain of liberal pessimism, which assumes that if people were liberated from work into leisure, they would squander their expanded free time. This is a problem that John Maynard Keynes (1972) considered in a short speculative essay, “Letter on the Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren,” which considers how automating production into a world of post-scarcity lays bare “[man’s] permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to

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occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” As he argues: … there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself…

As we shall see, this fear of free time is a persistent productivist attitude that combines class prejudice with the Weberian Protestant work ethic. According to this logic, the aristocracy are entitled to enjoy free time, but working people (women, in particular) should be kept busy with work since they lack the education and refinement required to spend their free time in productive pursuits. As Rose (2019) argues, however, “it cannot be assumed that people would use their free time as they presently do if all had their fair share under just conditions” (8; italics added). When liberal commentators decry the working class’s passive consumption of leisure (in generalizing statements routinely espoused about drinking, gambling, watching too much television, or playing too many computer games, for example), Rose suggests that they conveniently ignore that this free time is not experienced under “just conditions.” Exhaustion from overwork, isolation from geographically dispersed friends and family, and lack of access to public utilities such as green space, libraries, or lifelong education prevent people from spending their free time in pursuits considered valuable by liberalism. Free time, as Rose contends, should not be thought of as a particular good, such as a leisure activity, but as a resource. This broader conceptualization of time-as-a-resource (akin to potable water or access to food) forces liberal egalitarianism to enshrine free time as a basic right of all citizens, removing the moralistic discourse of how people choose to spend their time. Under just conditions, free time might then be best described as “hours for what we will”: the political campaign articulated by late nineteenth-century trade unionists demanding “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will” in the labor struggles for the reduction of the length of the working day (Rosenzweig 1983, 1–2).

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The Definitional Problem of Work The question of drudgery—that is, hard, manual, and undervalued domestic and childcare work disproportionately performed by women—is central to utopian literature. If we are to ascend from what Marx (1978) called the “realm of necessity” into the “realm of freedom,” we must first overcome the problem of hard work (439–441). Drudgery not only functions as an index for economic and social organization in the utopian world, it is also a bellwether of attitudes towards work as the production of value. The speculative worldbuilding of utopian fiction allows authors to consider how such attitudes might change under transformed productive relations. An excellent illustration of this is provided in Ursula Le Guin’s influential 1974 novel, The Dispossessed, which complicates understandings of utopia as some Edenic post-scarcity vision of abundance and plenty in its depiction of the barren lunar landscape of Anarres (Moylan 1986, 96). This anarcho-utopian moon world provides Le Guin with a sufficiently defamiliarized setting from Earth on which to examine our relationship with work. In a section which quotes the writings of the philosopher Odo, whose texts have informed the contemporary Anarresti understanding of anarchism, Le Guin’s informs readers that: It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well,—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole. (2002, 205)

The key phrase here is needed work—work needed by others, by the collective, by society as a whole—needed and therefore valued, contributing to social production and reproduction. This exemplary passage in The Dispossessed reformulates Marx’s discussion of the abolition of capitalist alienation and recovery of species being in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, as well as his vision of communist society in The German Ideology (1845), in which it would be possible “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (Marx 1959, 1975). Released from the regimented division between labor time (exploitative, immiserating, and always too

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long) and leisure time (controlled by capitalism through consumption, and never long enough), the subject might return to the temporal rhythms of pre-capitalist communal work of the kind described by E. P. Thompson in his 1967 article “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” Before the Industrial Revolution, patterns of work were inextricably bound within the social worlds to which they gave rise. Whilst pre-industrial timescales varied across different cultures, they tended to be what Thompson calls “task-oriented.” So, for example, villagers in Madagascar measured time according to units of duration like “rice-­cooking” (which took half an hour) and “the frying of a locust” (which took only a moment). As Thompson notes: Three points may be proposed about task-orientation. First, there is a sense in which it is more humanly comprehensible than timed labour [under capitalism]. The peasant or labourer appears to attend upon what is an observed necessity. Second, a community in which task-orientation is common appears to show least demarcation between “work” and “life”. Social intercourse and labour are intermingled—the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task—and there is no great sense of conflict between labour and “passing the time of day”. Third, to men accustomed to labour timed by the clock, this attitude to labour appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency. (1967, 60)

In mature capitalist society, however, “all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labor force merely to ‘pass the time’” (90–1). Thompson’s excavation of pre-capitalist timescales suggests a problem for antiwork theories in its non-alienated vision of work as a central component of collective life that might, under transformed productive relations, become something pleasurable. This question of removing the “demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’” is similarly explored in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The Anarresti language of Pravic uses the same word for “work” as it does for “play” (Le Guin 2002, 79, 223). Pravic uses a separate word for drudgery, “kleggich,” to differentiate back-breaking, menial, and unfulfilling work from the kind of creative labor associated with work-as-play (exemplified by Shevek’s research in astrophysics). Le Guin thus indicates that the elevation of meaningful, needed, valued work from drudgery or toil would signify a properly utopian revolution of productive relations. Actually, if we look a bit closer, The Dispossessed goes even further than this. On Anarres, social

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conscience is such that there’s a waiting list of people signing up to do this drudgery, or kleggich: … the work posting called Defence never had to call for volunteers. Most Defence work was so boring that it was not called work in Pravic, which used the same word for work and play, but kleggich, drudgery. Defence workers manned the twelve old interplanetary ships, keeping them repaired and in orbit as a guard network; maintained radar and radio-telescopic scans in lonesome places; did dull duty at the Port. And yet they always had a waiting list. (79)

Even properly “dirty work” on Anarres, such as garbage collecting, grave digging, mercury mining, and sewage processing, is willingly performed by every citizen one day in each decad (ten days). And why? The answer lies in the fact that no matter how menial, all work within the lunar socialist society is valued, needed and useful. It demands “altruism, self-­sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture,” and in this sense might be called fulfilling. If we are to understand how Le Guin defamiliarizes contemporary 1970s American attitudes towards work in her utopian lunar society of The Dispossessed, we need to think more carefully about the meaning, dignity, and value of work. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt (1958) interrogates these overlapping ideas of work and their cultural heritage, particularly the slippage between notions of work and labor. As Arendt points out, John Locke’s influential distinction between the working hands and the laboring body contains a residual contempt for labor and the act of laboring inherited from the ancient Greek distinction between craftsmen and indentured labor. In the Greek polis, labor was performed by slaves and animals (in the Greek idiom, Animal laborans, or the animal that labors) and liberation from this bestial understanding of labor was required for the subject to enter the realm of freedom—that is, political and cultural life. If we refocus our critical energies on a conception of work outside of exploitative class relations, however, we have a better chance of moving beyond this prejudice towards labor inherited from the caste system of the ancient Greek city-states. Arendt suggests that work is unavoidable: not because we have yet to invent the automation that might replace our own human labor, but because it is our inescapable human condition:

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… the perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would not only rob biological life of its most natural pleasures but deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality. The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life. (2018, 120)

This criticism of the “lifeless life” is an important stumbling block for utopian fictions to overcome, as we shall see below; for now, it is worth noting how Arendt’s argument concerning the human condition confirms that a certain amount of “toil and trouble” must be endured as an inescapable rhythmic component of the biological life cycle, in which pain and the effort of labor generates vitality, liveliness, and “natural pleasures.” Returning to Le Guin’s differentiation between “needed” and “useless” work in the post-capitalist lunar world of The Dispossessed, we can parse this conflation between labor and work.

Give Us Something to Do! Kurt Vonnegut’s unerringly prescient Player Piano (1952) is an important literary example of a speculative automated future in which the “ethical status of work” is interrogated. Whilst it cannot be called a utopian novel as such, the novel’s privileging of the problem of free time will help us understand how and why social attitudes towards work must be transformed, rather than simply automating work out of existence. This responds to a longer utopian tradition of reimagining work outside of the capitalist wage relation and beyond the regimented temporal division of workers’ time into labor and leisure. Written whilst Vonnegut was working at the General Electric headquarters in Schenectady, New York, the novel extrapolates the possibilities of data tape automation—a technology trialed in the 1950s to automate milling work—and its impact in terms of technological displacement (the elimination of jobs by robotics and automated production) (Hodson and Sullivan 2012, 212). “Machines,” we are told, “were doing America’s work far better than Americans had ever done it. There were better goods for more people at less cost, and who could deny that that was magnificent and gratifying?” (Vonnegut 2006, 51–2). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Vonnegut’s satirical vision of an automated, planned economy is its sustained reflection on the meaning

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and value of work. Protagonist Dr Paul Proteus, a distinguished young engineer overseeing the factory works in a fictitious upstate New  York town called Ilium, spends much of his time fantasizing about manual labor: “Somewhere, outside of society, there was a place for a man—a man and wife—to live heartily and blamelessly, naturally, by hands and wits” (146). In one memorable scene, we meet a housewife called Wanda who describes her brief reprieve when the washing machine breaks down: “It’s kind of a relief. A body needs a change. I don’t mind. Gives me something to do” (165). In imagining the boredom of the automated future, Player Piano is an important work of speculative fiction to draw into the discussion of work. Without a corresponding change in social and productive relations, the novel explores how delivering a higher standard of living risks sliding into Arendt’s “easy life of the gods,” or the “lifeless life”; and in the character of Wanda, we have a powerful reminder of the way in which the so-called problem of free time is disproportionately levelled against women. The ultrasonic dishwashers, clockwork radar cookers, thermostatically controlled windows, and electrostatic dust precipitators that Wanda possesses in her high-tech home have done little to assuage what Arendt would describe as her basic need to work to experience the “liveliness and vitality” of human life. Vonnegut’s near-future world, then, has not found any way to replace the self-worth we associate with working. Automation, as Proteus finally realizes, has “traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them—the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundations of self-respect” (Vonnegut 2006, 175). No matter their job or rank, the characters of Player Piano are horrified by the expansion of free time that automation has delivered. Propelled against their will into a realm of automated free time, Vonnegut’s lethargic workers are so entrenched within the system of productive exploitation, they have no idea how to spend their time under just conditions. They need, in effect, a utopian re-education in desire. In his 1985 essay “Why Work?” Stanley Aronowitz similarly notes that workers have internalized the capitalist conditions of their own exploitation to such an extent that “we may be terrified of free time,” because “[t]o have time on our hands produces not only personal anxiety but challenges the cultural assumptions of the prevailing order” (39). This fear is similarly anticipated in an early euchronian novella that imagines the kinds of activities women might be able to undertake in the fully automated future: Anna Bowman Dodd’s (1887) The Republic of the Future: Or, Socialism a Reality. Published in the

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same year as the Haymarket riot, Dodd’s anti-socialist tract imagines a fully automated future visited by a Swedish capitalist named Wolfgang, who marvels at the technological innovations in hyperbolic letters written to a friend back home. In this “strange socialistic society,” all degrading and menial labor has been mechanized. Full automation, that housewife’s dream, has released women into public life. “One sees them everywhere,” Wolfgang complains, “in all the public offices, as heads of departments, as government clerks, as officials, as engineers, machinists, aeronauts, tax collectors, filling, in fact, every office and vocation in civil, political and social life.” Free from having to do the cooking and cleaning, the sewing and bed-making, women simply manage the machines, freeing up their time for other pursuits which have included pursuing a legal process to outlaw motherhood and release themselves completely from family life. Wolfgang’s horror at this kind of state intervention into familial life and social reproduction is underscored by his descriptions of the “torpor and settled apathy” that characterizes the citizens in the Republic of the Future. As he writes: Dear friend: The longer I stay here the more I am impressed with the profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people. […] So universal is the dreary aspect of the people, whether at work or play—and they play, I observe, far more languidly than they work—that the type of face among them has undergone a strange and interesting transformation. (Dodd 2012, 59–60)

Dodd’s text challenges the utopian socialist assumption that “were [they] given time enough, each man and woman would devote himself and herself to the development and improvement of his or her mental tastes and capacities” (65). Increasing leisure time in this socialist euchronia has manifestly failed to increase people’s enjoyment or happiness. Arguably, this “settled apathy” is symptomatic of Dodd’s oddly liberal distaste for women’s liberation. The text propounds an undeniably consumerist understanding of leisure as an activity primarily concerned with self-­ gratification, which anticipates the fears of free time that Keynes (1972) and Aronowitz (1985) describe. Like Player Piano, The Republic of the Future remains useful as an early euchronian-turned-dystopian vision of full automation because in answering the question of scarcity it throws up an even more important political question: how is work entangled in the social construction of value and self-worth?

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Pleasurable Work and the Play Impulse If we accept Arendt’s (2018) proposition that our basic human condition requires that we work, we could approach the problem of work from a different angle. Rather than identifying ways to avoid or refuse work (according to antiwork and antiproductivist positions), or even transcend it altogether (in speculative visions of the automated future), we might reconceive of work as something pleasurable. Despite its misleading subtitle, “An Epoch of Rest,” William Morris’s News from Nowhere spends much of its utopian worldbuilding imagining how people would work in the post-capitalist future. In Morris’s novel, even the dirty manual job of road mending is transformed into an enjoyable pastime, with the utopian traveler William Guest describing workmen “looking much like a boating party at Oxford would have looked in the days I remembered” (Morris 2004, 82). Rather than automating domestic labor to free up workers’ time, News from Nowhere achieves the more radical utopian vision of a non-alienated world in which work has become pleasurable; it is needed work, according to Le Guin’s distinction in The Dispossessed, or task-­ oriented according to Thompson’s (1967) evaluation of pre-capitalist social temporalities. Despite the political radicalism of this vision, however, the gendered division of labor remains, and although women receive help around the house from their utopian menfolk, they are still required to manage household duties. “[E]verybody likes to be ordered about by a pretty woman,” old Hammond declares, recollecting the older generation’s chivalric values: “it is one of the pleasantest forms of flirtation” (Morris 2004, 94). In his essay “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” published six years before News from Nowhere, Morris (2012) lays the foundations for this utopian vison of “happy daily work” in a speculative treatise on non-­ alienated labor. Drawing on the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who devised a system of pleasurable labor (attraction industrielle),5 Morris argues that “all labour, even the commonest, must be made attractive” and directed towards “some obviously useful end”: useful work, rather than useless toil, will bolster workers’ morale with the “consciousness of benefiting ourselves and our neighbours by it” (Morris 2004, 123, 2012, 111). This can be assisted by the reduction of the working day’s length through increased automation if such productive efficiency can be 5

 For a useful discussion of Fourier’s idea of pleasurable labor, see Hemmens (2019), 45–78.

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disaggregated from the repetitive mechanical kinds of labor required under industrialization’s mass production; which, Morris insists, is the chief cause of toil. Morris had in mind the revival of traditional artisanal craft-­making, enabling workers to experience what he calls the “ornamental” side of work, in which toil would become transformed into a creative Bergsonian durée of absorbed concentration wherein workers forget that they are actually working. With its organic unity of intellect and manual skill, Morris’s engrossing ornamental work offers a precursor to Marcuse’s similar idea of the “aesthetic dimension.”6 Here, Marcuse suggests that automation will achieve the conquest of Ananke (scarcity). In such conditions of abundance, automating drudgery would transform work into play. As Marcuse writes in his 1956 lecture on “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” the “force of the instinctual energy released by mechanized labor would no longer have to be expended on unpleasurable activity and could be changed back into erotic energy” (Marcuse 1970, 39–40). The release of this powerful instinctual energy (Eros) is a crucial utopian resource and one that Marcuse returns to again and again throughout his writing. In his later text An Essay on Liberation (1969), he argues that socialism must overcome the presupposition that human freedom could only ever occur beyond the factory gates, and should instead entertain the Fourierist possibility that socially necessary labor could become play (20–22). Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension is indebted to Friedrich Schiller’s (1794) Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which argues that humans, like other animals, have a basic play impulse (he calls it “the instinct of play”). Schiller conceives of this play instinct as a spontaneous activity to release an overflow of energy when no other external material demands (necessity) nor societal restraints (repression) are present. Play is therefore opposed to work: it is non-­ utilitarian, an end in itself; performed purely for itself. Schiller’s idea of the play impulse offers Marcuse a vital instinctual recourse to our basic human need to act spontaneously, with creativity, for no particular material purpose; as well as a utopian glimpse of what our lives could be like if humanity ventured into the realm of post-scarcity or abundance. In the non-utilitarian exercise of cognitive and physical 6  Marcuse develops this idea throughout his philosophical career, from his first publication Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud [1956] (1987) until The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). I have written elsewhere about Herbert Marcuse’s utopian temporal politics. See Edwards (2013).

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faculties, we can identify a surplus of energy that remains outside the sphere of scarcity, or Marx’s realm of necessity.7 As such, Marcuse’s liberation of erotic instinctual energy is important to the question of how we might spend our free time in the automated future: beyond the temporal ­distinction between alienated labor and leisure time, understood as nonwork time primarily governed by patterns of consumption. Marcuse’s Schillerian “aesthetic dimension,” then, gives us a utopian example of free time; not as Julie L. Rose (2019) describes, in the form of a specific good understood as intrinsically valuable, but more radically as a resource— “hours for what we will”—that expands free time into a legitimate part of all citizens’ formal liberties (4–5).

Free Time and How to Spend It on Mars Abolishing the temporal demarcation between labor and leisure, the pleasurable work described in speculative utopian thinking offers a concrete example of how we might spend our time outside of the repressive relations of capitalist productivity. But where are all the women? Nowhere in the utopian speculative visions of Morris’s useful work with its ornamental qualities, Schiller’s irrepressible play impulse, or Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension do we get a sense of how working families would juggle childcare among their pleasurable tasks, or how women might be liberated from the insistent bodily demands of small and growing children. As Ruth Levitas (1990) notes in The Concept of Utopia: It is perhaps significant that Marcuse (like both [Ernst] Bloch and [William] Morris), uses the generic male throughout his writing. For despite the centrality of the transformation of labour in Marcuse’s image of the good society, and despite his avowed “feminism”, there is virtually no mention of domestic labour or child-care. The role of automation in the home is not discussed nor, in his twin concerns with ecology and automation, are we offered the self-changing, bio-degradable, disposable nappy. The reduction and transformation of the working day to the extent that work becomes play is not applied to the home front. (162)

Within utopian thinking, it is primarily women’s fiction that considers the question of women’s free time. Perhaps, then, we might contemplate the 7  Human play, as one aesthetics scholar puts it, falls somewhere “between our purely sensuous, animal nature and our formal or purely rational nature” (Hein 1968, 65).

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so-called problem of women’s free time by turning the issue on its head: what if women were allowed the same freedoms as men in these automated worlds? An early Martian utopia that usefully addresses this question is Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant’s 1893 novella Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance. Like many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century utopian romances authored by women (including Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence [1836], Annie Denton Cridge’s Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It [1870], Mary E.  Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A World of Women [1880–1], and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland [1915]), the text utilizes the estranging novum of a science-fictional world to expose the hypocrisies of American patriarchal culture. In the pink skies of this perfect Martian society, fin-de-siècle readers are treated to a utopian vision of clean electric power, full automation, and a life of aesthetic pursuits enjoyed in impeccable health. To the male narrator, however, more shocking than the red planet’s enviable achievement of sustainable industrialization is the prospect of transformed gender relations. Women’s superior position to men on Mars is embodied in the character of Elodia, the utopian guide’s sister, who is a banker and notable civic leader with financial interests in the railways, steam liners, mining, and manufacturing. To the male narrator’s horror, she exhibits a variety of masculine behaviors: getting drunk at her club on champagne and discussing politics, reading the papers, smoking a pipe, enjoying women’s boxing, and having illegitimate children whom she financially supports but does not raise. “She amused herself with us [men],” he notes, “just as I have seen a busy father amuse himself with his family for an hour or so of an evening” (Jones and Merchant 1893, 38). The Martian character of Elodia perhaps comes closest to a utopian vision of automated futurity in which women enjoy leisure time pursuing activities of their choosing. However, the text’s dialogic structure—in which the male narrator and his Martian guide Severnius compare Martian and terrestrial customs and mores—makes it clear that this alien utopia is a mundus inversus of fin-de-siècle capitalist America. In imagining a rigid Martian caste system, Jones and Merchant have simply reversed the gender roles for men and women on Mars, leaving the underlying conditions of capital accumulation and feudal aristocratic class system intact. Whilst it might provide us with the estranging spectacle of a powerful woman enjoying her free time in whatever way she chooses, freed from the biological ties of parental responsibility or the manual labor of domestic drudgery that imprison women back on Earth, Unveiling a Parallel does

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not ultimately meet Rose’s (2019) criteria of “just conditions” discussed above. Elodia’s pursuit of pleasure in Unveiling a Parallel is made possible by her vast accumulation of wealth, a manifestly unjust background condition. In this sense, the novella’s focus on the consumption patterns of a wealthy Martian businesswoman reminds us of the restrictive definitions of leisure that plague sociological and political literature on the question of free time. Within alienated capitalist relations, the question of how to spend one’s leisure time becomes riddled with problems of consumption (to bolster capitalist productivity) and entrenched class judgments about the indolence of workers (to discipline the working classes). Women are doubly judged here: if they are middle-class, they are the intended audience for stimulating consumption through advertising and the emergence of the leisure industry; if they are working-class, they are subject to strict moral censure about appropriate ways to spend their free time. As we have already seen, simply automating household chores will not liberate women into free time. As historians have observed of the automation of domestic labor in American households from the 1930s onwards, freeing women’s time produces the new problem of how to spend it. Sociologist Martin Neumayer thus asks: “What do women do with their leisure? … Some not knowing what to do with it, find the surplus time a bore. Hence the commercial amusements, bridge clubs, beauty parlors, and shopping centers attract their attention” (quoted in Currell 2005, 107).

Conclusion: Women’s Work Beyond Labor and Leisure Reflecting on the persistent and gendered restrictions placed on workers’ access to leisure reminds us of the importance of imagining free time outside of the regimented temporal organization of labor and leisure under capitalism. Mary E. Bradley Lane’s hollow Earth utopia, Mizora: A World of Women (1880–1), is an interesting early feminist novel in this regard. Its focus on a separatist utopia of parthenogenetic women removes the intractable problem of gender inequality under patriarchal capitalism and allows Lane to consider how work might be distributed under the more just conditions of an all-female society that has abolished the distinction between painful labor time and consumerist leisure time. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this is not an unproblematic vision, and critics have examined the casual eugenicist references in Lane’s utopia which, like

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s better-known Herland (1915), privileges a particularly Aryan image of blonde-haired beauty in its project to eliminate women “of the dark complexions” (Lane 1999, 92). Mizora’s balmy Italianate climate, lush orchards, and advanced technology all bear the hallmarks of the utopian kingdom; whilst its sophisticated mechanization of domestic labor has done away with drudgery. As the Russian traveler Vera Zarovitch notes upon arriving in the hollow Earth utopia: “Toil was unknown; the toil that we know, menial, degrading and harassing. Science had been the magician that had done away with all that” (Lane 1999, 21). The country’s extreme proficiency at chemically producing food “out of valueless elements” such as limestone and “the refuse of the marble quarries” has eliminated both poverty and disease (36). Liberated from the realm of necessity, Mizorans are released into Marx’s realm of freedom. Central to this post-scarcity utopia is a reconceptualization of work as pleasurable. The women may not want for anything in this post-scarcity kingdom beneath the Arctic, but they are not idle. Indolence, as Vera ascertains from living among the Mizoran women, “was as much a disgrace to them as is the lack of virtue to the women of my country; hence every citizen, no matter how wealthy, had some regular trade, business or profession” (27–8). Lane writes: The dignity and necessity of labor was early and diligently impressed upon the mind. The Preceptress said to me: “Mizora is a land of industry. Nature has taught us the duty of work. Had some of us been born with minds fully matured, or did knowledge come to some as old age comes to all, we might think that a portion was intended to live without effort. But we are all born equal, and labor is assigned to all; and the one who seeks labor is wiser than the one who lets labor seek her.” (1999, 28)

As Vera comes to understand, then, the women of Mizora choose to spend their free time working because labor “is the necessity of life” (37). Like Arendt’s (2018) defense of work as the inescapable social activity that gives human life its “liveliness and vitality,” Lane’s utopian Hollow Earth offers us a fascinating example of what women’s work might look like under the transformed productive conditions of automation and the emancipation of work into play. In Mizora’s subterranean world of abundance, the criteria for free time—or “hours for what we will,” as the trade union movement described it—has been elevated from an individual

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activity into a national program. With its insistence on the dignity and necessity of work, Mizora’s highly automated utopian future is perhaps a rare example of utopian literature or theory addressing the question of how women might spend their free time under just conditions. I would like to conclude with a little-known speculative documentary that perhaps comes closest to imagining the just background conditions of an automated utopian future in which women may spend their free time in whatever way they please; having finally achieved “hours for what we will.” In June 1963, the BBC broadcast a speculative documentary set in the near future. Commissioned by executive producer Donald Baverstock and produced by Don Haworth, “Time on Our Hands” featured cameo interviews with Kingsley Amis, Stafford Beer, as well as footage of Raymond Williams, to interrogate the question of what liberated workers might do with all their free time in the automated future. The film is structured proleptically, looking back at the present time in a retrospective format from the near-future world of Britain in 1988. Here, the documentary reveals, automation has released workers into a life of leisure. In the opening scene, a young couple skip through the surf along a deserted beach as the narrator intones: These are children of our times. They should live to be one hundred. They may colonise the stars. They will not toil; they need never be unhappy. This morning, as every morning, there is a problem—how to spend a golden lifetime? What to do with so much time? (Haworth 1963)

The documentary investigates this so-called problem of free time, attempting to imagine how people would occupy themselves in a post-­scarcity world that is finally free from the capitalist-productivist ethos of not wasting time, or idling. Workers, however, are shown to be deeply suspicious of technological displacement and the coming liberation into a world of leisure. Indeed, during the years in which the country transforms its productive relations towards full automation, there are scenes of violence as trade unions defend their right to waged work. “We didn’t ask for all this leisure,” one picketer memorably yells, “and we don’t want it!” Part of the problem, as Kingsley Amis notes in a panel discussion about the documentary screened twenty-five years later, is that men associate an expansion of free time with involvement in household duties; confirming their assumption that such “women’s work” does not involve them and negating women’s equal right to free time beyond the home and household

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responsibilities.8 For the women portrayed in the film, by contrast, the prospect of free time is truly liberatory. As one speaks to camera: [T]he greatest change for women has been that for the first time ever we’ve got spare time. I mean, twenty-five years ago all women were drudges. They’d have been frightened out of their wits by all this leisure. They could never have imagined this great flood of creative activity that we fill our time in with. (Haworth 1963)

Overcoming what Aronowitz (1985) calls the “fear of free time” is one of the most profound stumbling blocks in the ongoing political struggle for reducing the length of the working day and expanding workers’ access to free time. As we have seen, far from liberating women from household drudgery, early twentieth-century automated technologies such as electric food mixers, dishwashers, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners simply produced the new problem of women’s leisure time. As the above utopian texts have unambiguously demonstrated, without a corresponding vision of economic and productive transformation away from the capitalist disciplining of clock time—with its dichotomy of labor time and leisure time— simply removing the problem of hard work by displacing it into automated futurities fails to address the corresponding questions of the meaning, dignity, and value of work; the relationship between labor and leisure; the quality of so-called “free time”; and the persistent gender inequality that finds ever more ways to remove women from waged work and into an obscured realm of undervalued labor. Even when technology and/or historical conditions have created more free time for women, gendered, productivist, and moralizing attitudes have kept them trapped in the domestic sphere. As Susan Currell (2005) observes, during the Great Depression unemployment had the ironic effect of expanding leisure time, which men occupied with gambling, smoking, and drinking in bars. Women who attempted to spend their non-working time in similar pursuits, however, were treated “as selfish mothers who should be spending in a way that was beneficial for her family” (Currell 2005, 107). 8  “I think a lot of the fear of so-called leisure is the fear of being at home and being expected to help around the house … That’s one good reason for wanting to stay at work.” 1988 BBC panel discussion of Time on Our Hands, twenty-five years after it was first broadcast. This film is in the BBC Archive and was kindly provided to me by BBC Radio 4 producer Phil Tinline during my work on the radio programme “The Problem of Leisure,” for BBC Radio 4’s Archive on 4 series.

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If women are to be allowed to enjoy the increased free time that automated technologies promise, we first need to achieve what Bastani (2019) calls in Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labor and leisure blend into one another” (50). Under such conditions of “living for abundance, and in abundance,” as modelled by Doctorow’s (2017, 63) near-future walkaways, we would be able to reformulate free time not as a commodifiable good, or leisure activity, but as a resource—as Julie L. Rose describes (2019, 8). Although the utopian novels I have explored in this chapter often feature public goods including manicured public gardens, sports and exercise facilities, architecturally refined social housing, and aesthetic experiences via the arts, such is not their most utopian aspect. Rather, as I hope to have demonstrated, the transformation of temporal experience beyond the labor/leisure binary imagines the just conditions necessary for utopian citizens—women, in particular—to begin exploring how their increased free time could change their lives. Removing the distinctions between labor and leisure allows us to find ways to enjoy our free time, as the utopian models described above through needed work, useful toil, and pleasurable labor or work-as-play. In such a world, we might be free to experience the utopian pursuits enjoyed by Bellamy’s (2007) young retirees in the automated future Boston of Looking Backward. With its vision of an expanded retirement of artistic, literary and scientific pursuits, lifelong learning, travel, socializing, and the “leisurely and unperturbed appreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped create,” Bellamy’s future Bostonians have finally understood that free time is much more than simply an endless spooling of self-gratifying leisure; indeed, as they put it, discovering how to spend free time is “the main business of existence” (115–16).

References Abnet, Dustin A. 2020. The American Robot: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2018. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aronowitz, Stanley. 1985. Why Work? Social Text 12 (Autumn): 19–42. Aronowitz, Stanley, and Jonathan Cutler, eds. 1997. Postwork: The Wages of Cybernation. New York: Routledge.

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Bastani, Aaron. 2019. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso. Bellamy, Edward. 2007. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. Ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1983. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books. Currell, Susan. 2005. The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in the Great Depression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Davies, William. 2017. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. Rev. ed. London: Sage. Dinerstein, Ana Cecilia, and Frederick Harry Pitts. 2021. A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State Between Crisis and Utopia. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. Doctorow, Cory. 2017. Walkaway: A Novel. London: Head of Zeus. Dodd, Anna Bowman. 2012 [1887]. The Republic of the Future; Or, Socialism a Reality. London: Forgotten Books. Edwards, Caroline. 2013. From Eros to Eschaton: Herbert Marcuse’s Liberation of Time. Telos 165 (Winter): 91–114. Fernandez, Jean. 2009. Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy. New York: Routledge. Fishwick, Adam, and Nicholas Kiersey, eds. 2021. Postcapitalist Futures: Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope. London: Pluto Press. Frayne, David. 2015. The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work. London: Zed Books. Haworth, Don. 1963. Time on Our Hands. BBC Broadcast. Hein, Hilde. 1968. Play as an Aesthetic Concept. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27 (1, Autumn): 67–71. Hemmens, Alastair. 2019. The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodson, Randy, and Teresa A. Sullivan. 2012. The Social Organization of Work. 5th ed. Andover, UK: Cengage Learning. Huws, Ursula. 2019. Labour in Contemporary Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jones, Alice Ilgenfritz, and Ella Merchant. 1893. Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance. Boston: Arena Publishing. Keynes, John Maynard. 1972. Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren. In The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 9: Essays in Persuasion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. 2003. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Lane, Mary E. Bradley. 1999. Mizora: A World of Women. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2002. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. London: Gollancz. Levitas, Ruth. 1990. The Concept of Utopia. New York: Syracuse University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1970. Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts. In Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J.  Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber, 28–43. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1978. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Trans. Herbert Marcuse and Eric Sherover. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1987. Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Ark Paperbacks. Marx, Karl. 1959. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Mulligan. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ———. 1975. The German Ideology in Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1845/german-­ideology/ch01a.htm. Accessed 4 August 2020. ———. 1978. On the Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Freedom. In The Marx-Engels Reader, Capital, ed. Robert C. Tucker, vol. 3, 2nd ed., 439–441. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 1991. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 3. Trans. D. Fernbach. London: Penguin. Morris, William. 2004. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2012 [1884]. Useful Work versus Useless Toil. In The Collected Works of William Morris, with Introductions by His Daughter May Morris, vol. 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen. Negri, Antonio. 2003 [1997]. Time for Revolution. Trans. Matteo Mandarini. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Neville, Graham. 2004. Free Time: Towards a Theology of Leisure. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. Postone, Moishe. 1996. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Julie L. 2019. Free Time. Durham, NC: Princeton University Press. Rosenzweig, Roy. 1983. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2016. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso.

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Thompson, E.P. 1967. Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. Past and Present 38 (1, December): 56–97. Toupin, Louise. 2018. Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77. London: Pluto Press. Tronti, Mario. 1980. The Strategy of Refusal. Semiotext(e) 3 (3): 28–35. Vonnegut, Kurt. 2006. Player Piano. New York: Dial Press. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Motherhood Beyond Woman: I Am [a Good] Mother and Predecessors Onscreen Jimena Escudero Pérez

Technoheroines and the Absence of Maternity Pitch black screen, intermittently lit. At the end of a futuristic corridor, a long-take reaches an illuminated robot. We witness it starting up automatically, and a soft membrane is installed on its chest. The android moves to a control panel, where from a display it selects a human embryo and places it into an artificial womb. Against the darkness of the repopulation facility, the minuscule human is presented with pristine detail and clarity. APX 01. Female. The robot-mother sits and patiently waits for the embryo to develop. The baby is born. Quietly, peacefully, painlessly, bloodlessly. Sequences of ordinary life in the growth of a girl follow, her robotic mother always by her side, playing the role to perfection. Betty Noyes sings “Baby Mine” in the background. The idea that women are programmed to be mothers by nature is increasingly being put into question (Brase and Brase 2012). There is no

J. E. Pérez (*) University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_7

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denial, however, that maternity does activate an innate reconfiguration of body and mind. Research has now proven that women’s brains are extremely flexible and undergo dramatic reshaping processes to ensure the survival of their offspring. Pregnancy triggers a series of mechanisms that “[f]undamentally change the neural architecture” well into fostering stages (Pawluski et al. 2016). But the hormonal and cognitive modifications of this neuroplasticity combine with an equally determining sociocultural molding that cannot be seen in laboratories or scans. Motherhood—the definitive conditioning necessary for the perpetuation of the species, for ensuring the survival and development of each individual—can be said to be “programmed” to a significant extent, almost as it is in Grant Sputore’s (2019) droid from I Am Mother. As in most genres, motherhood in mainstream sf has been approached via the ways it concerns patriarchy: chiefly, the reproductive or the symbolic. Mother and birth trauma, charged with Freudian connotations, are often used for horror purposes. Maternity itself is traditionally a collateral effect; the necessary state for procreation or care is contingent on the real story. The historical mother (i.e., “real life” mother), as E. Ann Kaplan (2013) coins, was only appealing for certain feminist narratives, an “insignificance” that was transferred into the study of its representations. Until Kaplan’s essay insisted on the necessity of approaching the depiction of motherhood in filmic studies and discourse analysis, the theme appeared to have been unworthy of scholarly attention. The figure of the mother, Kaplan argues, has been systematically put to one side, deprived of entity unless “[s]poken by an Other”; a living paradox Kaplan referred to as the “absent presence” (3). Indeed, a striking characteristic of motherhood in much sf cinema has been its absence. Maternity is typically missing, either not discussed at all or else used to shape characters’ identities in its absence. In the iconic Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (1982), mothers arguably invoke death: their mention reveals the prosthetic memory of a target to be retired. When asked to describe the good things he remembers about his mother as part of the Voight-Kampff test, replicant Leo shoots the interviewer and escapes. Blade Runner’s obsession with the theme goes as far as showing fake pictures of infant Rachael in her mother’s arms, an emphasis that only intensified in the 2017 sequel. The same predicament affects other humanoids and even clones, forms that are traditionally created for commercial purposes and which are therefore motherless children (e.g., Never Let Me

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Go, The Island, Moon).1 In the inventory of traits used to determine whether an individual can be considered human or not—a perennial quest in these narratives—having had a mother is a prominent one. Many of the most remarkable discussions on maternal duties are found in stories that deal with technologies of reproduction, including some examples of the maternal that begin before birth. As a rule, the figure of the mother here is absent or else detached from her offspring to make space for technology. This is a common element in dystopian scenarios that take our species to be endangered due to fertility failure, as in The Handmaid’s Tale or Children of Men. In other instances, technologized reproduction might be the result of a totalitarian state that enforces eugenic control over the population. Although human, Gattaca’s (1997) protagonist faces constant discrimination because his unselected genes make him an “in-valid,” a second-class citizen unsuitable for the career in space for which he yearns. The mid-1990s saw the completion of entire genomes for the first time, and the fascination with genes has since invaded not only fiction but has a tremendous impact on our notions of identity and family. In much of the discourse around kinship, DNA has come to replace blood. The “cultural science fiction of the gene,” as Stuart J. Murray (2012) calls it, has also affected our notions of complex concepts like personality, in parallel with the advances being made in behavioral genetics. While its medical application is unquestionably valuable, genetic research remains a constant source of debate across many fields. For Murray, the current intoxication with genetic terminology and procedure is “[l]eading toward the geneticization and technologization of motherhood and the maternal relation,” a threat to natural maternity which might distract from conversations concerning relevant ethics and affect in upbringing (377). In Sputore’s I Am Mother, Mother—the robotic artificial intelligence— breeds Daughter from her embryonic state into adulthood, training her to become the perfect mother for a newly coming humankind. The isolated facility where they live also guards a stock of fertilized eggs that are waiting to be gestated. The idea that human reproduction will be ectogenetic in the future is not new to sci-fi, however. Long before it could be considered a biological possibility, gestation outside of the womb was a matter of both narrative and medical speculation. Such technologies of 1  A notable twist to this would be David in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), also artificially created, but to be the object of maternal love in this case.

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reproduction are hinted at in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where the procedure owes inspiration to the 1924 essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923), in which J. B. S. Haldane ultimately predicts a directed evolution of our species through the controlled mutation of embryos that, after nine months, would be “[b]rought out into the air.” In the 1970s, the idea of freeing women from the reproductive burden was famously argued by Shulamith Firestone (2003) as the only way to reach gender equality (213). Away from transhumanist or feminist projects, most of the fiction featuring ectogenesis depicts human attempts at extra-terrestrial colonization, including films such as Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017). In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), five thousand human embryos are carried around space in search of the most suitable planet to host repopulation on the occasion that survival on Earth is seriously threatened. Also set in an apocalyptic scenery but still on Earth, the sixty-three thousand frozen eggs of I am Mother hold the only future and testimony of our species. Unlike in Interstellar, the potential humans in I Am Mother are openly displayed right from the start. The film’s exhibition of the embryos speaks to the “culture of embryo culture” (Traweek 1988, Franklin 2013) that describes the overexposure of IVF images. The first sparks of life, hitherto secret, are now visually exposed, making the most intimate and arcane processes part of the capitalist image catalogue. While the radical feminism of the seventies embraced technology to fight patriarchal oppression, late twentieth-century ecofeminism openly denounced any alliance with reproductive technologies. Eugenics and sociobiology, labelled as fascist in the past, are being scientifically legitimized with biotechnology in the present (Mies and Shiva 2014, 98). The possibility of intruding into biological processes that were previously inaccessible soon started to permeate fiction. By the time that mass audiences had access to the imagery of “embryo culture,” a particular type of birth, eclosion, was already well-established in filmic tradition. From Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) to Scott’s Alien (1979), the hatching of extra-terrestrial eggs proved to be an appealing spectacle for the big screen. The latter received considerable scholarly attention, and the maternity theme was read from many different angles, significantly, as pro-abortion. The Alien (1979–) franchise has since fed ambivalent feminist criticism with its controversial cocktail of motherhood and body horror, but Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is, unequivocally, a pioneering female character. Ripley is the first action heroine in the sci-fi

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cinema. She is the protagonist, she outlives all the other crew members, and she exterminates the enemy. From the beginning of the film, she is portrayed as the most intelligent, sensible, and courageous in the spaceship; much more so than any male character. In a previous study (2010) I referred to Ripley, Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Sarah Connor from James Cameron’s Terminator (1984) as “technoheroines,” because I found the narrative possibility of their heroism inextricably linked to technology. Such human technoheroines share another common characteristic: their maternal instinct and the relevance of motherhood to their stories. In the Alien franchise, maternal protection eventually confronts Ripley with her antagonist, a mother, both fighting for their own progeny. Motherhood determines their role in the story and blurs the idiosyncrasies of their species, a theme that also dominates Sputore’s I Am Mother.

The Artificial and the Constructed Mother I Am Mother stars technoheroines, both human and non-human. Involving action, horror, and suspense, it features AI and biotechnology challenges and quintessential mother symbolism. The film can superficially read as a collection of sf tropes, but the rearrangement of such tropes works to noteworthy contributions in the result. Remarkably, motherhood is far from incidental, absent, or an absence: it is the axial theme. The plot is built around motherhood training, entitlement, and performance. It also condenses the historical and personal worries of the writers: on the one hand, it questions parental authority and its moral legitimacy; on the other, it reflects on the troubling reality of our transferring highly biased code into our AIs. In an interview for Collider (Parks 2019), director and co-writer Sputore comments: Like, it’s this parallel debate that Michael and I were having about, how to become decent parents; like how do you instill right and wrong within a child and, likewise, if you’re creating an AI system how do you instill right and wrong in that AI system, and how do you know what is right and what’s wrong … this film was a chance to sort of explore one character trying to work out how she felt about something separate to what she was being told from the outside world from the people that she knew.

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The parallelism Sputore refers to is masterfully outlined in the film. Sf has consistently reflected on AI’s autonomy gain and/or the unwanted consequences derived from its programming, but often not so much on the difficulty of deciding what to program. Nods to Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” or their adaptations are frequent, but much of sf takes the necessity of human supremacy and its continuation as its ethical foundation, or the means by which good and evil are judged. The binomial focus on both AI’s programming and human upbringing forces a comparison and highlights how transcendental these choices of input are in the first place. The question is not about the degree of correlation between algorithmic and ethic codes or the forms of their implementation. It is, as the director suggests, about the responsibility of the agent in charge of that process and content. To instill the difference between right and wrong in a child, we need to confront this quandary ourselves first—an ongoing practice, as old as civilization. The design of AI forces us to the same task in more scrupulous ways. Theoretically, an AI will never be able to question its embedded conduct scheme. Human creativity allows constant adaptation, which can make up for deficiencies or mistakes, and enables us to re-establish value systems. An AI’s design dictates its behavior perpetually. This might be irrelevant in simple performances, but it can pose a substantial risk when the task is more complex. Putting an AI in charge of raising a human is the turn of the screw to that complexity. As Sara Wachter-Boettcher (2017) points out, “[t]he more technology becomes embedded in all aspects of life, the more it matters whether that technology is biased, alienating, or harmful” (11). Notwithstanding how biased or harmful Mother’s programming might have been, perhaps as a narrative device to enhance human subjectivity, Daughter does grow into a sound mother—and woman. Sputore has remarked, in the former interview and others, that personal parenthood and the global blooming of AI converged to provide the seeds for the film (Wixson 2019). There is no direct acknowledgement, however, of an increasingly popular format of AI which, in many ways, agglutinates both influences: personal assistants. According to “I’d blush if I could”—Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education (West et al. 2019), voice assistants are becoming the most widely used form of interactive technology, and they are overwhelmingly being designed— mostly by men—as female. The same publication references how such gendering choice has traditionally been defended by the industry in terms of customers’ preference, but the origin of this preference remains unclear.

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Acoustic arguments—that it is easier to understand, more trustworthy, and so on—have at times even been grounded on the resemblance to the mother’s voice. With as much research contradicting or complicating them, these studies remain inconclusive in explaining the predilection for female voices in virtual assistants. A woman’s voice, whether evocative of maternal care or not, seems to make the user more confident in the help at hand, an assumption that is not necessarily innate. As the report commissioned by the UNESCO—EQUALS Skills Coalition remarks: “[p]eople’s preference for female voices, if this preference even exists, seems to have less to do with sound, tone, syntax and cadence, than an association with assistance” (2019, 98). The feminization of AIs is not limited to speech, it encompasses the writing of a “female” personality too. Although Alexa, Siri, or Cortana have not been conceptualized as virtual mothers, their co-parenting role is already being recognized in many households (Botsman 2017; Rosenwald 2017; Samuel 2019). Alongside the historical sexualization of AI/robotic femininity, its marketing features have now become the abnegating motherly component attempting to rescue an endangered figure in the family order. The attributes that we expect from cutting-edge humanized assistant technology are disturbingly akin to those by which “a good mother” would have been defined not so long ago. Being a “decent parent” today also involves managing children’s coexistence with AI, sometimes even vying with it. These synchronic accounts may not have been deliberately considered in the writing of the character, but they must have, nevertheless, shaped the idea of Mother. Despite sf’s suitability to transcend biological and gender norms, the film insists on designating the core parental duty as feminine. Mother (Rose Byrne) is a robot, so its gendering is superfluous. Mother is instructing Daughter (Clara Rugaard) to raise a new humanity, but no “female” attributes are necessary for this enterprise either. All the embryos are ready to finish developing in an artificial womb, just like Daughter did before them. The choice of “mother,” then, is not anatomically imposed. Although I Am Mother’s nature–nurture discussion feels at times contradictory, it clearly implies that maternal chores must be performed by women. In the BBC’s Orphan Black (Fawcett 2013–2017), the sister clones created by a eugenics company have been designed to be sterile, but one of them “miraculously” gets pregnant and has a little girl. While industry, science, and family are amused with the biological rarity, Sarah— the—clone, faces other concerns. She questions her own ability to

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perform as a mother and to act as a reference for her daughter. The show portrays remarkable differences between the clones, who have all been raised apart, highlighting the impact of environment on individuation. In I Am Mother, Mother’s setup entails not only that the essential parental figure is female, but also that the ability to be a good mother might be genetically determined. The film’s first flirt with horror is when Daughter finds her “sister’s” bones in the incinerator. When she inquires to her mother about this, the robot euphemistically confirms that other candidates had to be “aborted” before her. At some point in their upbringing, Mother found them unsuitable for the job. We are to expect equal training for every child, with scarce environmental variation, so it could only be due to innate characteristics that a girl would fail to meet Mother’s requirements. As with Gattaca, genetics aren’t invoked here to suggest the holiness of DNA connection, but rather the apparent validity of one individual over another—a matter of life and death, in this case. Mother’s project to create a better humanity entails selecting the species from the biological to the social. The epigenetic improvement of that new humanity requires that the first human mother is flawlessly “selected.” But this selection, differently to Gattacca, cannot be carried out before birth. The use of the verb “abort” could be a strong argument for a pro-life reading of the film, but such positioning would probably clash with the ectogenic procedure in the first place. The topic of bringing a baby to life outside the mother’s womb is bound to trap anti-abortionists in an ideological dead-end: it is, after all, giving that life a chance. The storage of fertilized eggs, on the other hand, might unequivocally evoke one of the most controversial flip sides of technologized reproduction: the expanding problem of abandoned embryos.2 I Am Mother’s conservative role assignment creates, however, an exceptional all-female cast. It is almost comical that even AI is female.3 To make the feminine theme here completely unmistakable, the outsider is also a woman (Hilary Swank). In a wrestle between characters that is reminiscent of dynamics in Alien, all the characters aim to be matriarchs in their own ways. It is in this setup that the film offers another narrative rarity: the 2  According to the International Fertility Law Group website, “Today there are an estimated 600,000 to 4 million frozen embryos stored in the United States that are abandoned or unclaimed, representing an enormous burden for clinics and storage facilities,” https:// www.iflg.net/abandoned-embryos/ (last retrieved 16/08/2020). 3  Although the inside of Mother’s body is articulated by actor Luke Hawker, the characterization of the role through the voice is female.

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conflict between mothers ends in matricide. Although the victim is a robot mother with a lethal past, and although her omniscient AI survives, it is, nevertheless, a matricide. The early breeding sequences, when Mother rocks the baby against a warm node installed in her chest, inevitably come to mind at the sight of conflicted Daughter, weapon in hand. Mother is, after all, the only mother and family she ever knows. In an epic, while carefully orchestrated, farewell, Mother helps hesitant Daughter to pull the trigger. Aside from any psychoanalytic interpretations, the act adheres to the machine’s plan. This, too, becomes part of Daughter’s graduation to becoming the best possible mother for the lineage to come. Mother states that her “primary directive is to help humanity,” but halfway into the film, she is revealed as a stereotypical villain. She later sacrifices herself for Daughter and humanity. When she is about to regain our sympathy, we realize that she has not actually died, and that we, like Daughter, have been fooled by the AI. This constant fluctuation makes Mother a magnificently round character despite the acting constraints. It is worth noting, with regard to characterization, the film’s choice of a robotic AI over a more humanoid one. In an age of replicants, clones, and cyborgs, most of which are indistinguishable from human beings, a quasi-­ obsolete droid stands out. Its impeccable design, no doubt challenging, could have been easily spared in using an actress for the role. Considering the renaissance of artificial women on the screen (Ex Machina, The Machine, Blade Runner 2049, Westworld, etc.), this does not seem an arbitrary decision. Metallic attributes might minimize the risk of any Uncanny Valley effect in the spectator, here (Masahiro Mori 1970), which would favor viewers’ (intermittent) identification with the character. Replacing flesh for metal configures a fascinating maternal character. It is more visually daring, and also creates an interesting allegory for the mechanistic use of the female body itself—notable, in this instance, in not being put to sexual purposes. The film depicts a desexualized universe that paradoxically is, at the same time, completely female. Transgressing the formulaic artificial female character, Mother is not sexualized in any way. Like Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), the only feature that marks her as feminine is her sampled voice. Although Samantha’s speech reveals her growing sexualization, eventually, both characters share an unusual lack of feminine anatomy. Nothing in Mother reminds us of a human female except for, of course, that she is “a mother.” In terms of character construction, she is closer to the homonymous mainframe of Alien’s spaceship than to Blade

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Runner’s Rachel. Perhaps the fact that she is trying to raise perfect humans without any resemblance to one is what makes the prospect so eerie. As well, Mother’s frontal camera looks like HAL 9000, and her elongated head bears similarities with that of Aliens’s mother creature. The AI’s pursuit of a higher civilization seems challenged in this sense more than any other: how can Mother’s minimalist expression imprint the complex myriad of emotions that are constantly communicated and deciphered by our species? The script’s answer is humorous yet sad: Johnny Carson and guests of the Tonight Show provide Daughter with a unique catalogue that she can use to develop instinctive empathy.

Raising Human, Rising Subjectivity It is easy to accept that Mother only carries this name by her position, but undoubtedly another oddity of the film is the more general lack of proper names. Even when Daughter tests her literacy in social manners by shaking hands with Woman, no introduction is made. The only names mentioned belong to deceased people—Jacob, Rachel and Simon—who are no longer in the story’s world. Their Biblical origin honors a lineage long gone. Anonymity reinforces the idea that Daughter is the only daughter in the world and, at the same time, that she stands for all the possible daughters; the same can be said for Woman. It is hard to dissociate Mother from a futuristic archaic mother spinoff. This annulment of identity creates awkward dialogues when characters address each other, but it also echoes a characteristic fable device. The allegorical tone is reinforced by a certain visual anonymity, too. Mother is faceless, even for a robot. As a matter of fact, she looks the same as her deadly soldiers. Embryos all look the same, and the striking resemblance between Daughter and Woman is, to say the least, suspicious. It is probably no coincidence that Woman makes reference to being an orphan, found in the outside when she was a baby.4 The film seems to insist on the uniformity of members of each species, with a homogeneous appearance for machines and a homogeneous appearance for humans: identity is diluted. This is the story of a new humanity, selected and bred by AI. There are no individuals involved, only two different species. Contrary to many genre classics and to Woman’s fears, there is no real 4  The film might be suggesting that Woman was discarded as a baby, but deliberately kept alive to play her role in Mother’s plan. The resemblance between Woman and Daughter could be hinting at their biological kinship.

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conflict between the two kinds. Maternity is thus a challenge for all the characters, but it also seals the alliance between the races. The denial of individualism that unspools across the film serves, in the end, to highlight Daughter’s difference. It also exposes another rarity of Mother as a main character: although she leads the action and the plot runs parallel to her (successful) plan, the plan itself obeys a programming. Contrary to many clichés attached to the megatext of artificial humans, Mother does not seek freedom, the end of humanity, revenge for her kind, becoming fully human, or a commercial purpose. She does not seek subjectivity. She is, in this sense, very simple, possibly coming closer to the AI of the future (which are likely to be more limited in their programming than other films’ romantic representations). Despite her complex thinking, language and psychology, all Mother does, in the end, is follow her encoding. The title of the film synthesizes the idea of an artificial mother perfectly. It also works as the character’s self-introduction, and as a sort of statement to resolve any further ambiguity on who holds the position of Mother. While it is the case that the film’s structure resembles a cautionary tale—in stressing the ways that moral codes are built solely on human subjectivity—the story’s clearest message might be that there is no moral to it. Decision-making, a process inextricably bound to the human brain, will always put impartiality at stake. The choices any AI might make are ultimately driven by the biased programming of its creators. Throughout the film, we are presented with philosophical dilemmas that are never resolved. The most evident is the “transplant problem,” an ethics exercise Daughter must solve for her home-schooling exam. The exercise asks Daughter to choose a course of action based on her judgment as to the value of human life: does saving more people always take priority over saving one? Do all lives “count” the same? Daughter points out that applying the axiom “minimize the pain to the greatest number possible” could result in sparing a murderer or sacrificing a doctor who would have saved other people’s lives (2019). Hiding her approval of Daughter’s remark, Mother asks her, “You don’t feel that every human has intrinsic value?” It is on the screen display of this test that, ironically, the film first gives away Mother’s dark past: Daughter is PX 03, not the cute little girl(s) we see growing in the intro. The exordial sequences shows, in fact, the previous PX. Like Daughter in the test, Mother decided that certain human lives could, and should, be spared for the benefit of more valuable ones. This is reprehensible for a “historical mother,” perhaps not so much for a Mother

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designed to guarantee improved humankind. Although viewers do not witness them, these filicides are to be condemned much more strongly than the later matricide. The act is aggravated by the innocence of children, and the death of Mother can be excused because of her culpability. As spectators, viewers may be expected to price human life over robotic as well. Whatever the long-term implications for one’s own species might be, the suggestion is that most participants would fail Daughter’s test. Considering that viewers are led to identify with Daughter in the end, her ethics problem is stimulatingly turned against us. Within the diegesis of a civilization reset to zero, though, ethics and morality are unsurprisingly dismantled, a signature of (post)apocalyptic fiction. As a reward for obtaining her best mark in the examination, Daughter gets to pick the next member of the family, and the fetal intimacy of humanity’s future is exposed again. While they both watch her only brother spark to life, she hugs Mother. Academic success is a petty triumph in comparison with the creational instance. The combination of tenderness and cruelty behind the scene recalls Yi-Fu Tuan’s analysis (1984) of the relationship between power and affection. Mother exercises all possible control over Daughter’s existence. The loving gesture represents, in the extreme, Tuan’s idea that affection “[m]itigates domination, making it softer and more acceptable” but that it is, ultimately, “[p]ossible only in relationships of inequality” (5). The difficulty of deciphering a moral in the film does not tarnish the centrality of ethics in relation to motherhood. Good and evil entwine in what appears to be a difficult picture for both Daughter and the spectator. Like parents or AI designers, we, the viewers, must confront these questions constantly. Is Mother installing the right values in Daughter? Is Mother a good or a bad mother? Mother defends her aptitude from the beginning of the film. When their household is destabilized with Woman’s arrival and Daughter begins to question everything around her, Mother insists: “I hope you see that I am a good mother. Have I ever done you harm?” Indeed, Daughter’s fellow human lies to her too. She has no other company to offer, no food or resources, and does not care about leaving the newborn and remaining embryos behind. Both human and synthetic codes are ethically compromised: the matriarchs representing each of them act in their own benefit, disregarding Daughter’s welfare if not her opinion about what is right and wrong. The peculiar family arrangement reminds us that there is no perfect mother, that disappointment with the other will inevitably appear in the relationship, and also that what a child needs to grow healthily is

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love—even if it is “prosthetic.” A priori, an artificial being is the reverse of a maternal figure; any female mammal would be a better match. Machines are simply not suited for the organic connection maternity requires. But this machine takes the role very seriously. Motherhood is a matter of will. As the influential pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1987) put it: If human babies are to develop eventually into healthy, independent, and society-minded adult individuals, they absolutely depend on being given a good start, and this good start is assured in nature by the existence of the bond between the baby’s mother and the baby, the thing called love. (17)

Daughter must have been given a good start. What accounts for “The thing called love” is another major theme or rather, unanswered question, in I Am Mother. Despite Woman’s warning to Daughter—“That thing feels nothing for you. It can’t”—Mother’s comportment resembles that of an ordinary mother even in her jealousy of the intruder. It is impossible to assess the authenticity of Mother’s affection but the bond between her and Daughter seems fairly “real.” The girl grows loving her mother like any other: she puts stickers on her metallic body and falls asleep to her bedtime stories. They do everything together and look after each other. Their eventual clash is not much different from that in any human household with a teenager. Reading their bond from Tuan’s perspective rather than Winnicott’s, the protagonists’ struggle of subjugation and power would still be simply conforming to standard dynamics of human love. A significant contribution of the film is that through Mother’s professionalism, motherhood, a widely underrated and overshadowed though important task, becomes vindicated. The robot constantly stresses the difficulty of her role (“raising a child is not a small task”) and justifies bringing Daughter up as an only child because “mothers need time to learn.” The results of her job are impeccable. In terms of the way that viewers identify with the characters, the film keeps its audience swinging from Mother to Woman and from good to bad. The only steadily faultless behavior is Daughter’s. Her codes remain uncorrupted to the end; she is the lone (techno)heroine. The film serves to metaphorically criticize society’s pressure on women to embody perfect mothers. Everything Mother and Daughter do is focused on excelling at the job. The qualifying process is fierce, and expectations are more than high. Mother asks Daughter, “Are you prepared to be the woman your family needs?” Daughter’s

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family is nothing less than future humankind—not a trifling responsibility. A superb problem solver, intelligent, didactic, patient, understanding, disciplining, protective, tenacious, and with robotic accuracy; Mother has set a standard difficult to raise or raise a child to. Ultimately, recalling Sputore’s quote, I Am Mother deals with human subjectivity emerging, as is the case, out of the smallest, oddest, possible community. Daughter learns to question, disagree, and even condemn Mother’s behavior, but she goes through a similar process with Woman. In time, adult Daughter needs to make her own decisions and break free from external conditioning, whether this comes from family, friends, fellow species or others—and whether this was predicted by Mother or not. Like Moon, I Am Mother brings forward the power of random, radical individuality. Even under laboratory conditions, human identity thrusts through in ways no science can predict. In the historic twilight of the human reproductive female, Daughter also surfaces as an allegory of a new mother and woman, maternal and feminine, without sexual conditioning.

Created to Care I Am Mother inverts the prolific sci-fi trope of the Promethean myth. The idea of creating a human-like being goes back to one of the foundational works of the genre. It was a woman, Mary Shelley, who gave literary birth to the man who first generated life solely using science. Two centuries later, two men—Michael Lloyd Green and Grant Sputore—have imagined an artificial woman as the architect of a new humankind.5 Mother does not technically “create” the new humans, but her supervision is indispensable to the survival of the embryos; her motherhood, the only way for the species to prosper. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, she does not despise her creation. She bears full responsibility for it in every sense. The film pays tribute to pretty much all the big sci-fi titles since Metropolis, whether in subtle details or major philosophical discussions. It is easy to see the ways in which the film has taken aesthetic and rhythmic inspiration from classics. That humankind is its own fiercest predator and 5  During the process of publication of this book, HBO Max released Raised by Wolves (Aaron Guzikowski 2020). The series’ premise resembles I Am Mother in many ways and develops similar themes, particularly the exploration of the maternal role and figure of an artificial mother raising human children herself.

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unable to safeguard its own future, not to mention the surrounding life; this is an ongoing theme of the genre. The homo homini lupus est is the perfect excuse for—or cause of—an AI takeover. Sometimes AI decides to exterminate the human race; sometimes its role is to reset humanity and ensure that we do not make the same mistakes again. Early in the story, following Daughter’s remarks (“I don’t want to be a human; they ruined everything!”) viewers are led to think that humanity’s extinction in I Am Mother has been self-inflicted. However, as the plot unravels, this is far from clear. Deliberately or otherwise, the film leaves two important questions unanswered: whether Mother had been programmed to improve humanity or just to save it from annihilation; and, relatedly, whether the cataclysm was forced by her or human-led. Her general primary directive “to help humanity” can be both read against and in concordance with her intention “to make a better human. Smarter. More ethical.” Although Mother eventually declares, “I had to intervene to elevate my creators,” she does not state whether this intervention was after or before the apocalypse. The variables could imply very different readings on the AI’s subjectivity and even morality, but none of them would change any eventual evolutionary failure. The question of humanity’s ethical involution is central to Blade Runner. One of the signature themes of Alien is the psychoanalytically fraught fear of an archaic mother, embodied in a different species. The challenges of new forms of personhood are at the core of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and I, Robot, as well as more recent productions such as Moon, Robot & Frank, Her, and Ex Machina. While it openly draws from the genre, I Am Mother has nevertheless broken with several typical constraints. The orthodox cinematography and, to a certain extent, predictable plot twists contrast with the peculiar cast and a main theme that transgresses longstanding conventions of blockbusters. It is very rare indeed to have a sf action thriller pass the Bechdel test, and very rare that it makes a traditionally seen “women’s issue,” motherhood, the center of its plot. The film spotlights scientific topics of reproductive technology that have been widely interpreted in popular culture—namely, genetics and the embryonic imagery. Its treatment of these topics prompts the viewer to reflect on the transformations in our approach to parenthood, and on the denaturalization of primary life processes. But I Am Mother’s focus is not on the biological nor the technological aspects of reproduction; it is on the complexity of the maternal role, including the ability to teach and raise an infant effectively in terms

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of emotional and pedagogical development. It digs into multifaceted issues like affection, trust, self-assurance, possessiveness and envy, which emerge in the mother–child relationship and have a profound impact on the human experience. The allegorical tone of the film’s reflections shifts these subjects from individual level to philosophical discussion, raising questions that get to the foundations of twenty-first-century humanity. Intentionally or otherwise, I Am Mother also invites stimulating meditations on gender.6 Beyond biology, the story reflects the burden placed on women and used to perpetuate the species. Through the choice of ectogenesis and an artificial matriarch, the film dwells on a deeper type of gender programming. By definition, the maternal instinct is presumed to be engrained in our nature. Stripping out the biological, the film suggests that Mother’s mission is more a social tool, a labor power that History has never valued. Whether motherhood is genetically determined for reproductive reasons, the adaptation of millennia of indoctrination—or both— women are shown as caregivers par excellence. What I Am Mother is telling us, probably quite rightly, is that it will be easier for women to overcome sexual and reproductive constraints than be freed from their charge over those in need of care. Women are trapped in the culture of care. Daughter triumphs over the multiple adversities that come her way, and her technoheroic identity enables her to channel her own destiny, even if these results, in the end, force her becoming the mother that society had prepared and intended her to be. Daughter sings Baby Mine to comfort her baby brother against her chest, with no Woman nor Mother there to intrude anymore; the rulings of God and the Machine are gone with them. Closing a circular structure, the song fades out as Daughter looks down at the reproductive line to come. A close-up on her distinctively human face ends the tale. She is Mother, now.

References Botsman, R. 2017. Co-parenting with Alexa. The New York Times, 7. Botsman, Rachel. 2017. Co-Parenting with Alexa. New York Times, October 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/children-­alexa-­ echo-­robots.html.

 Although it will not be explored in this chapter, a queer reading of Mother’s character and the whole treatment of gender in the film might be relevant. 6

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Brase, Gary L., and Sandra L.  Brase. 2012. Emotional Regulation of Fertility Decision Making: What Is the Nature and Structure of ‘Baby Fever’? Emotion 12 (5): 1141–1154. Escudero Pérez, Jimena. 2010. Tecnoheroínas: identidades femeninas en la ciencia ficción cinematográfica. Asturias: KRK Ediciones. Firestone, Shulamith. 2003. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Franklin, Sarah. 2013. Embryo Watching. How IVF Has Remade Biology. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 4 (1): 23–44. Guzikowski, Aaron, dir. 2020. Raised by Wolves. London: Scott Free Productions. Aired September 3, 2021, on HBO Max. https://www.hbomax.com/ raised_wolves. Haldane, J.B.S. 1924. Daedalus: Or, Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923. New  York: E.  P. Dutton & Company. Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. London: Vintage. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2013. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 2014. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Mori, Masahiro. 1970. Bukimi no tani (the Uncanny Valley). Energy 7 (4): 33–35. Murray, Stuart J. 2012. Coming to Terms: Ethics, Motherhood, and the Cultural Science Fiction of the Gene. In Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, 376–394. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Parks, Dorian. 2019. ‘I Am Mother’ Director on The Films & Real-Life Tech That Inspired His Netflix Thriller. Collider, June 10. https://collider. com/i-­am-­mother-­grant-­sputore-­interview/#images. Pawluski, Jodi L., Kelly G. Lambert, and Craig H. Kinsley. 2016. Neuroplasticity in the Maternal Hippocampus: Relation to Cognition and Effects of Repeated Stress. Hormones and Behavior 77: 86–97. Rosenwald, Michael S. 2017. How Millions of Kids Are Being Shaped by Know-­It-­All Voice Assistants. Washington Post, March 2. https://www. washingtonpost.com/local/how-­m illions-­o f-­k ids-­a re-­b eing-­s haped-­b y-­ know-­i t-­a ll-­v oice-­a ssistants/2017/03/01/c0a644c4-­e f1c-­1 1e6-­b 4ff-­ ac2cf509efe5_story.html. Samuel, Alexandra. 2019. A Voice Assistant Has Become My Co-Parent. Wall Street Journal, March 29. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-­voice-­assistant­has-­become-­my-­co-­parent-­11553890641. Scott, Ridley. 1982. Blade Runner. Sputore, Grant, dir. 2019. I Am Mother. Penguin Empire. Released on Netflix January 25. https://www.netflix.com.

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Traweek, S. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of high Energy Physicists, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Tuan, Y. F. 1984. Dominance and affection. Yale University Press. Wachter-Boettcher, S. 2017. Technically wrong: Sexist apps, biased algorithms, and other threats of toxic tech. WW Norton & Company. West, Mark, Rebecca Kraut, and Han Ei Chew. 2019. I’d Blush If I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education. EQUALS. Winnicott, Donald Woods. 1987. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing. Wixson, Heather. 2019. Sundance 2019 Interview: Director Grant Sputore on the Timeliness of the Science Fiction Behind I AM MOTHER. Daily Dead, June 2. https://dailydead.com/sundance-­2019-­interview-­director-­grant-­sputore-­on-­ the-­timeliness-­of-­the-­science-­fiction-­behind-­i-­am-­mother/.

CHAPTER 8

Gender and Reproduction in the Dystopian Works of Sayaka Murata Chiara Sautto

Debuting in 2003 with Jyunyū, Sayaka Murata has consistently sought new, experimental ways to sexuality, gender roles, and motherhood since the earliest stages of her career. As Chiaki Yano (2017, 121–137) and Yuichirō Kurihara (2013, 145–169) have suggested, however, some of her most recent works—including the best seller and Akutagawa Prize winner Conbini Ningen (Convenience Store Woman)—focus more on the definition of “normalcy” (futsu ̄).1 These works explore the raw portraits of daily life in Japan through dystopian worlds. Following her tendency, Sayaka’s main characters are women, received through first-person 1  Her first novel to be published in English and several other languages, Conbini Ningen has been translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and published in 2018 by Grove Press (US) and Portobello Books (UK). The title has been translated as Convenience Store Woman, even though the original Japanese version uses the non-gendered word Human. During an interview at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, the translator has stated that it was an editorial and marketing choice.

C. Sautto (*) Japanese Literature and Culture, Toyo University, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_8

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̄ (2017, 68–71) has argued that Murata “was able to narration. Yūko Ida narrate the difficulties in our society” and “can imagine the future lying ahead of our reality.” Before Conbini Ningen, Murata published a collection of short stories, Satsujin Shussan (2014), and a novel, Sho ̄metsu Sekai (2015a). Murata defines their settings as “weird”: a future dystopian Japan where new technology-aided reproductive systems have replaced natural pregnancy, while sex and marriage are gradually disappearing. Nevertheless, it could also be said that the future Murata talks about is not that far from present day; in fact, we could be living it already. In the past decade and despite displaying traditional conservative political views, the government lead by Shinzo Abe has been trying to make some efforts to promote gender equality in Japan. In fact, it should be noted that even though Abe has incited women both to work and to give birth, mainly to prevent a labor shortage due to the falling birth rates, some legislations have been enacted in order to improve working conditions for these women. In particular, the 2017 Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement of Women in the Workplace and the 2018 Act on Promotion and Gender Equality in the Political Field show that, at least formally, Japan is progressing towards gender equality (Ueno 2019, 75–94). However, as Chizuko Ueno describes, “most laws remain ineffective, as they lack penalty clauses” (2019, 81). Furthermore, the backlash on the “working mothers of the nuclear family” due to the “dysfunction” of the family as a site of reproduction has been an issue in Japan since the 1960s, and since then, the discourse of a “family crisis” has been largely considered an exclusive responsibility of working women themselves (Ueno 2009, 302–3). Moreover, as Ayako Kano has argued in her Japanese Feminist Debates (2017): in much of the policy discourse on women in modern Japan, womanhood has been equated with motherhood, and all women have been understood to be potential mothers. Modern gender policy has been driven by the assumption that all women will, at one point, become mothers—and that almost all of them will do so within the context of married family life. This assumption has made life more difficult for women who do not follow the prescribed expectations of wifehood and motherhood. This assumption has also impeded efforts towards gender equality in employment to the present day.

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Murata is a writer of this era, and through her works, she has depicted an ideological, generational gap, giving voice to all those women who are struggling with expectations by society and the impossibility to fulfil them. In the short story Satsujin Shussan, which gives the title to the collection, Murata imagines a new system implemented in Japan, where people volunteer to give birth to ten children in exchange for taking the life of one specific person selected by them. These people are called umibito, or a person who bears children. The designed victims—or shinibito—cannot oppose their fate, and once dead, they are celebrated as “wonderful sacrifices.” One of the cardinal points of Murata’s narrative strategy is the substitution of love with killing instinct: this makes the victims the object of intense “feelings” by the killer comparable to love. The story of Ikuko, Tamaki, and Sakiko—three young women—takes place in this setting. Ikuko is a regular employee, and Sakiko transfers to the same company. Ikuko’s older sister, Tamaki, has been secretly giving birth for years under the new Birth Murder System. Sakiko, who is a member of the Rudbeckia Group, an underground organization trying to restore the old reproductive system, finds out about her circumstances, and asks Ikuko to let her meet Tamaki in order to save her.2 She does not know that Tamaki has become an umibito to commit murder legally, resulting in becoming her target. After killing Sakiko together with her sister, Ikuko decides to become an umibito herself. Shōmetsu Sekai instead describes protagonist Amane’s struggles with sex, romance, marriage, and childbirth in trying to live the “correct way.” Torn between three reproductive systems, Amane constantly rejects her mother’s conception of romantic love and reproduction, and embraces the modern Family System, where sex between two married people is considered taboo, and most of the people channel their sexual desire towards human or imaginary lovers.3 Later, Amane and her husband Saku decide to run away and move to an experimental city on the outskirts of Tokyo, where an even more advanced reproductive system, called Eden, is being tested. The children born in this special residential area are collected and educated together by the government in a dedicated facility. Every day, 2  The flower Rudbeckia represents “justice,” or the state of one being “correct.” See Fujiki, Naomi. 2018. ‘Ninshin’ wo dasshu suru: josei sakka ni yoru ninshin yōshō wo yomu. In Ninpu A ̄ to Ron. Fukuramu shintai wo dasshu suru Ron Fukuramu shintai wo dasshu suru. Seikyūsha: 66–86. 3  In Japanese, they are called kyara. It stands for characters appearing in manga, games etc.

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the children are “showered with love” for a few hours by all of the adult residents, who are indistinctly referred to as mother in the same way that all the children have no name and are simply called child. In this way, the government claims that children grow up more mentally stable compared to those raised by only one or two parents. This resulting homogenization, nevertheless, brings readers to question their beliefs regarding family, sex, marriage, and motherhood—issues addressed in Satsujin Shussan as well. At the narrative’s end, despite “being equipped with a uterus” and carrying “their own baby,” Amane has a miscarriage, while her husband successfully completes the first male pregnancy and gives up their child to the government. In this chapter, I particularly address Murata’s critique of the pressure for marriage and reproduction in Japanese society today, triggered by the issue of the shrinking and aging population as well as by an underlying patriarchal system that has yet to be completely eradicated, one that continues to nurture an idealized image of motherhood that Murata intentionally deconstructs in her works. I will analyze the role of state-controlled technology and motherhood in the new familial and reproductive systems, and will finally discuss where we could situate Murata’s oeuvre regarding the ongoing feminist debate in Japan.

Family and Reproductive Technology as a State-Controlled Mechanism Assisted reproduction has been explored and examined from different perspectives by Japanese women writers. In less recent works, such as the Murder in Ballon Town series (1992) by writer Yumi Matsuo (a world where assisted reproduction has become the most common and efficient way to have children), natural pregnancy has become extremely rare and is fully supported by the government, which reconverted a specific area in Tokyo to host pregnant women and to provide them with the best care until their delivery date. Furthermore, in Motoko Arai’s 1999 novel Chigurisu to Yu ̄furatesu (Tigris and Euphrates), assisted reproduction has led to infertility and the inevitable extinction of the human race on an imaginary star colonized by Earthlings, Planet Nine. Finally, in Izumi Suzuki’s Onna to Onna no Yononaka (The World of Women and Women,  1978), assisted reproduction is the only way to ensure the

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continuity of life in Japan, but only females are permitted to live.4 These works, including Murata’s, have one thing in common: assisted reproduction is provided by the government and deemed as advantageous for women, since it eases the painful experience of pregnancy but is never free of charge. The price to pay is the control exerted over women’s bodies, and following, on the number of lives that will be born from them. In the works we are considering here, state and citizens are completing a “transaction” for which the price of life can be quantified and exchanged with other lives or for specific privileges. Murata imagines that since the number of people falling in love and giving birth is decreasing, the government finds a way to substitute the motivation for childbirth with murder. People’s desire to kill someone is traded with the often-unfulfilled commitment for citizens to give birth to ten children; also, in order to punish all the illegal murders, criminals are obliged to give birth until they die, an interesting twist on the death sentence (here called birth sentence). To ensure a constant birth rate, anything can be used for the final goal of the state. With this narrative strategy, no less, Murata parodies the Japanese government’s efforts to increase the number of births, which after a post-war peak in 1949, has started to decrease with alternate phases of growth and decline since 1975. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW 2021) describes that in 2015, there was an increase for the first time after 5 years, but since 2015, the numbers have continued to drop. Furthermore, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (NIPSSR) (2017) has found that for any length of marriage, the ratio of couples that have undergone tests and treatments for infertility has been increasing over the past years up until today. It is in this context that in 2014, Satsujin Shussan won the 14th Sense of Gender Prize—Special Prize for Countermeasures to the Falling Birthrate, awarded by the Japanese Association for Gender Fantasy & Science Fiction. Murata, as some of the writers previously mentioned, shows how the government considers the use of assisted reproduction as a mean to practically “solve” the problems of infertility and miscarriage and the weight they might have on the citizen’s mental health. Satsujin Shussan and Shōmetsu Sekai specifically show 4  See Mari Kotani, “Space, Body, and Aliens in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction.” Translated by Miki Nakamura. Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (2002): 397–417 and Seaman, Amanda C. Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

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how assisted reproduction not only helps with easing the difficulties of conceiving children, but also how it becomes the only possibility for bodies to give birth without any biological limitation; more importantly, it becomes a tool for men to perform equal to women and access the femaleonly world of pregnancy and childbirth. In Satsujin Shussan, it is mentioned that men cannot get pregnant that easily yet, as the installation of an artificial uterus is overwhelming for the male body, and most of the candidates die in the attempt. However, in Sho ̄metsu Sekai, Murata portrays the first successful male pregnancy by the protagonist’s husband, Saku, as a turning point in the history of humanity: It’s a success! The doctor held the baby, and his crying voice echoed through the surgery room. Ahhh, we have become a different species of animals. I was looking at the scene through the window in a daze. The scene in front of my eyes was very far apart from that of “human” childbirth I knew. Full of blood, wrinkly, a newborn similar to a giant testicle, was raised in the middle of the white surgery room. Under that, beside the uterus of my husband who was lying down, his penis was aimlessly hanging down, and on that belly the uterus was cut open, it was really like a flower made of artificial skin had blossomed. (2015a, 243–4)5

Despite being a state-controlled technology, Murata presents assisted reproduction as a tool to deconstruct the connection between the ideologies of reproduction, family, and love. Amane’s mother believes in the traditional idea of family: from two people in love, the next step would be marriage to officialize their union and then eventually have a child. However, in Murata’s world, the family is not a union between two people who love each other anymore; they do not have a physical relationship, and if they decide to have a child, it will be through artificial reproduction. At the same time, sex is connected only to romance, and only for those who still perform it. This reading can be connected to the real-life issue of the “sexless family” deemed to be one of the causes of the falling birth rates in Japan. As seen in the MHLW’s report (2021), the total number of children per couple has decreased significantly after the war, and after reaching 2.20 people in 1972, in 2010, it fell below two for the first time,  My translation.

5

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with an average of 1.96 per person. In 2019, the total number of children per couple reached 1.94. No less and in the same year, it had been confirmed that the number of couples practicing birth control had reached its lowest rate, which means that the chance of couples “going sexless” is significantly increasing. In the Family System depicted by Murata, not only is sex disappearing, but less and less people are falling in love with humans, preferring animated characters, with the number of people getting married similarly declining. Nevertheless, Amane and Saku are still tied to the idea of having their own child and living together as a “family,” even if they also doubt the meaning of it throughout the text. When conflicts with their lovers arise, for instance, their only support comes from the idea of being a family. In one instance, readers find Amane and Saku described as though the idea of family controls them. We, who are being hurt by the religion called love, are now trying to be helped by the religion called family. If our whole body were brainwashed, I feel that we could finally forget about “love”.… “Raising life is the most precious life work, isn’t it? I am so glad we made a family.” … When we say “family”, I feel like I am praying to something. I believe that this is a religion indeed. When we say those words, we gradually become faithful believers. (Murata 2015b, 96–7)

In many interviews and events, Murata has talked about her relationship with her mother and with her ex-boyfriend. They both firmly believed that she was supposed to be a wife and have children by the age of twenty-five. She has stated that it was almost like her mother had “brainwashed” her with this ideal life direction; however, she understood that it was not what she wanted to do with her life. Murata has shared her personal experience and has resonated with her readers, exactly because even if Japanese society’s view on gender, motherhood, and marriage has been changing and becoming much more flexible—especially since the approval of the Basic Gender Equality Law6 in 1999, which declared that gender equality would be one of the most important tasks of the Japanese society in the twenty-­ first century and other policies such as the Act of Prevention of Spousal Violence in 2001, the government still encourages the idea that women 6  “Danjo Kyodo Sankaku Shakai” translated as “Equal participation in society by both men and women.”

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should retreat from the workplace and procreate, dedicating themselves to their children’s education, if not at least temporarily. Murata thus represents a generation that has been living through a change, and her works let readers notice this discomfort and the gap between reality and expectations, particularly from the point of view of women in Japanese society. Eventually, Amane and Saku move to the Experimental City Chiba in order to run away to a world where “romance does not exist.” After moving and adapting to the innovative Eden System, they rapidly lose faith in their own beliefs. Would having a child really confirm that they are a family? Is having a child the goal, and is it really what they want? What does it mean to be a mother? These are the questions Amane confronts herself with.

Good Mothers, Defective Mothers There has been a lot of debate in Japan on women’s expectations to concentrate on their careers while being mothers. The traditional concept that women are supposed to be in the house (uchi) dates back centuries, and even if there is a growing number of working women, and several options like maternity leave are made available for them, there is still a stigma on those mothers who somehow chose to prioritize their careers or plan a pregnancy later than the average. Statistics show us that more women than ever do not feel like getting married and having children before they reach age thirty. As well, the demand for working women and their actual possibilities of career advancement do not match the pressure exerted on them regarding marriage and childbirth. With the return of Abe to power in 2012, the idea of the “traditional family,” while no longer a practical possibility for many citizens, has indeed been advertised by the government during the last decade. As Kano (2017) argues, “the government policy has had the effect of shaming both men—who are told they are not fully men unless they also engage in housework and childcare—and women—who are told housework and childcare is not sufficient to make them fully women” (181). This complex situation is extensively debated in Murata’s novels. In Shōmetsu Sekai, for instance, besides monitoring reproduction, the Eden System also claims to free its citizens from unnecessary sexual desires, letting them focus solely on their part-time role as mothers and eventually their jobs. This can be interpreted as a metaphor of the state imposing only a prefabricated identity on women—that of mothers—and trying to

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prevent them from being something different from the assigned role. The control exerted on sexuality is also advertised as something in the interest of the citizens, but it is clear how the same mechanism is working here as well: sexual desires must be controlled because they could lead to a different behavior from what has been deemed normative. The progressive dismission of sexual desires, thanks to the help of technology, shows how the latter becomes an instrument for the state to manipulate and assign identities. Let us now have a look at how Murata portrays women who cannot give birth. Since pregnancy has become an exchange tool between state and individuals, unexpected difficulties such as miscarriages are handled as technical deficits and should not involve any feelings by the “breeder” producing the child. In Satsujin Shussan, after two pregnancies ended up in miscarriage, Tamaki’s doctor asks her to “do her best” and promptly move on to the next pregnancy. In Shōmetsu Sekai, the doctor’s reaction to Amane’s miscarriage is very similar. Abortion at this stage is pretty common. Including this, everything is monitored by a computer. That is why you don’t need to take it to heart. Take care (…) I wanted to scream that I had lost not a child for humanity. I had lost my own child, but even that, I was not allowed to do it. (Murata 2015a, 216)

After losing the chance to give birth to her own child, Amane initially becomes dedicated to her husband’s health, but soon they grow apart from each other. Seeing her husband carrying around an artificial uterus while her body—biologically made for giving life—could not perform as it was supposed to, she is filled with rejection: “Somehow, more than somebody who is nurturing a child, it looked like a gigantic parasite was possessing him” (238). While also considering the unwillingness of women to take on the expected roles of housewives and mothers, Murata shows a possible outcome of the ongoing shift from what has been considered the ideal life course in Japanese society until now. As children become state property, parenthood becomes a communal role, but such is limited to superficial care of the children, which can also be interpreted as a parody of the continuous efforts to beautify pregnancy and motherhood in Japanese media (Kobayashi 2018, 43–65), as it has been addressed by other writers like

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Matsuo, who also describes natural pregnancy as grotesque.7 Such a perspective can also be read as a subtle criticism of the Abe government, which, in an effort to boost the falling birth rates, had proposed extending women’s childcare leave to three years: This proposal, which Abe touted as a way to allow mothers to “hug their children as much as they want for three years,” was based on the so-called three-year-old myth, or the persistent discourse that children should be solely cared for by their biological mothers until the age of three” (Kano 2017, 168). Amane, despite being a woman “naturally equipped with a uterus” and supposedly wanting to have babies, suddenly finds herself as a mother of a group of baby strangers. The first contact she has with a child, whose “body temperature was high, and everywhere in his body was mushily soft, that it was gross,” (Kano 2017, 168) leaves her feeling unsettled. In Satsujin Shussan, Tamaki feels that the system has finally given her the chance to channel her killing instinct into something productive and useful to the community. After years of being labelled with psychopathy, she can feel fulfilled and reach her potential—to “link herself to someone” by “the extraordinary experience” of killing them. Through Ikuko’s narration, we find out that Tamaki’s killing instinct presumably originated from a lack of motherly love she felt since a very young age. After adopting her, her mother eventually decided to have a second child, Ikuko, through assisted insemination. Later, their mother was heard praising the fact that Ikuko was sharing her own blood, which makes her “cute” before her mother’s eyes. Ikuko believes that this complex towards her could have triggered Tamaki’s urge to kill and has always been an accomplice in her “executions” of several insects because she felt guilty. For Tamaki, then, motherhood does not provide love nor the feeling of belonging somewhere. Since she lacks the blood tie with her family, symbolically, she would like to create a new one not through birth but through murder, as she cannot be the mother of her children per contract. In fact, Tamaki does not even feel connected to the babies she delivers; she considers them exchange goods.” They are destined to be taken away from her and raised in a specific center, where they will be made available for adoption. Resultantly, Tamaki is the nemesis of her mother. Instead of “giving birth,” which is what she couldn’t get from her mother, and therefore she does not seek, she will be “giving death” to someone. This desire thus makes murder a symbolic fulfilment of her quest for blood ties. It can also 7

 See Mackie (2003), V.

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be read as parallelism between the freedom of giving birth, symbolically expressed by the freedom of giving death. Tamaki’s murder transcends its destructive nature and becomes a communicative act: the gift of death for Sakiko, who, according to her, did not fit in the system and was then considered pitiable, is the antitheses of the gift of life that “good mothers” are supposed to give. Murata’s Sakiko is the opposite of Tamaki, however, as she presses against the new “mad world” she has to live in, and together with other people, tries to restore the order and bring back the “correct world” she believes in. She asks Ikuko to remember the time when murder was still a crime, and people would get pregnant through sexual intercourse, give birth to their own children, and predominately raise them as parents on their own. She is not afraid to declare that that is the way she wants to live, and in fact, at the end, Ikuko and Tamaki find out that she was already pregnant, trying to protect her baby from this unexpected death sentence she brought on themselves. Nonetheless, when Sakiko confronts her and tries to offer her help, Ikuko is irritated by her beliefs and her attitude. After letting her meet Tamaki, Ikuko exposes herself for the first time to Sakiko, who is in disbelief. Ikuko-san, why do you let her be? She should undergo rehabilitation as soon as possible. Even if now it’s hard, it’s for her sake. We cannot stop the world from changing. No matter how hard we try to clamour against it, the one who will undergo ‘rehabilitation’ is you. If you want to believe the world you believe in, you can only let be the people who believe in the world you don’t believe in.… … Even if I don’t believe this world is wrong, I used to despise the world that changed so easily and hurt my sister so much. … But my sister also changed. I feel that the present world and the past world are both faraway. The world has a gradation inside a bigger time, and the two colours that we might think opposite to each other are connected. That is why I feel like the ‘normalcy’ of the world we live in is a mirage. (Murata 2014, 88–90)

The words “No matter how hard we try to clamor against it, the one who will undergo ‘rehabilitation’ is you,” will later become even clearer, as Sakiko’s destiny has already been decided by Tamaki, who picks her to be her victim, a shinibito.

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In this world, people who are considered defective/wrong for what is considered normal need to undergo rehabilitation. This is a recurrent theme in Murata’s work. In the bestseller Convenience Store Woman (2016), for example, the protagonist Keiko knows that people around her think she is weird, and she struggles to follow a manual to be a “proper” and functional human being, or a component of the big machine that is her society. However, it is still not enough. “When will you be fixed?” is the question her sister asks her, which finds no answer. As is the same way in Satsujin Shussan, as well as in Sho ̄metsu Sekai, Murata plays continuously with the roles of the sane and the ill, the correct and the wrong, revealing how they are so easily interchangeable and there is no absolute truth. As Chizuko Naitō argues, Sakiko’s body represents an attempted rebellion against the system that controls sexuality (2015, 36). When Sakiko is killed by the sisters and they find out she was pregnant, Ikuko decides to become an umibito as well, though not to kill a specific someone but to give back the life she had ended up taking involuntarily. However, as Naitō points out, her reasons are different from her sister’s: “‘I’ chooses to become an umibito. The place ‘I’ mentions is a place that she finally reaches, after touching Sakiko’s body; it is a different place from the one prepared by the government” (2015, 37). Therefore, even if Ikuko decides to contribute to the Birth Murder system, we can consider it as a subversive act against the “coerced world.” It might be true that nobody can escape the system—for as Tamaki plays her role as umibito, Sakiko is forced to become a shinibito, indeed—but Ikuko manages to retain her space within the system. She takes a stance independently and is not seeking a transaction for the right to murder; instead, her decision originates from a sense of responsibility towards an innocent victim, the embryo.

Conclusion Let us have a look at the ending of both novels. In Satsujin Shussan, Murata portrays the murder of Sakiko in detail, while in Sho ̄metsu Sekai, she focuses on the encounter with a child. The following scene describes Ikuko’s thoughts while killing Sakiko. I didn’t know that killing someone was something so right to do. I remembered a video about birth I had watched in the past. A sly baby was being pulled out of a teared belly. Now, the scene right in front of me was the

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opposite. We proceed inward into Sakiko’s body as if we were refluxing the uterus. The smell of blood somewhere nostalgic insinuates into my nose. A vivid red, rushes out of the fine internal organs. (2014, p. 116)

Again, Murata’s narrative strategy of inversion continues here, where we can see a figurative opposition between birth and death, connected by the image of the womb. The tearing of the uterus is a strong metaphor that symbolizes the rebellion against the coercive system. We nonetheless find a similar metaphor in the meeting between Amane and the child in Shōmetsu Sekai. …Child… What, mother? What if I say I would like to put this into my body? I wanted to know how much knowledge “he” had, and if he wasn’t ashamed of sex at all, so I asked him while touching his little penis with my forefinger. After looking a little mysterious, the “child” showed his teeth and smiled innocently. Yes, I understand. Right. Originally, we were all inside mother’s bodies. The figure of child smiling completely naked was totally resembling the figure of Adam in the Eden (I saw) in an illustrated book I read once. (Murata 2015a, 271)

It can be suggested that Murata associates the image of the womb with a reversion of the state of things, expressed through metaphors of the physical bodies. While killing Sakiko, Ikuko symbolically inverts and interrupts the natural process of childbirth, and by having sexual intercourse with the child, Amane reverts the established order of things. Both Ikuko and Amane, whilst still living by the rules of the system and apparently being fully integrated, ultimately divert from it in their own ways. Ikuko decides to use the state-controlled reproductive technology, becoming an umibito, but to give back the life she has taken; and Amane, despite her duty to be a mother, might become the person who reintroduces sex in a sexless society, moreover, through the idealized “product” of that system, the child. At the same time, a shift in the meaning of motherhood can be observed. In both novels, the necessity of giving birth and being the mother of one’s own child disappears; the word mother is emptied of its original meaning and comes to define something connected to a public sphere. Ikuko will not be the mother of her children but will use her body to create life for

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the world. Amane will not give birth, nor consider child as a mother anymore. The idealized body of the child as something in need of protection and to be nurtured by the mother will perform differently. Rather, it becomes a body that transgresses the role of “human pet” it had been assigned to. In the same way, the idealized body of the mother will be free to explore and divert from its obligations. Murata depicts two new reproductive systems, then, both very reasonable and efficient: technology has become an integral part of the new idea of family, and mostly remains uncriticized. Pregnancy cannot exist without ̄ (2017) has argued that Murata’s novels can be considered technology. Ida dystopian, but they do not support the values that we have started losing in our reality, which she intentionally deconstructs. In her novels, systematized love and sex are depicted as extremely narrow (70). In both the novels analyzed here, there is a character opposing the new reproductive system—Sakiko and Amane’s mother—firmly believing in the old values. However, these characters eventually must surrender and end up being victims. The main characters do not show any empathy towards them; however, what should be noted here is the fact that the protagonists are prompted to react to their actions, to find their own stance and obtain agency, which is not granted by our current system, neither by another different system—it comes from an individual space within the system. In her article “Space, Body, and Aliens in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction,” critic Mari Kotani (2002) analyzes several female speculative fiction writers and the relationship between their fictional characters and their surrounding patriarchal systems. When introducing the works of Motoko Arai, she describes her protagonists as “figures who, despite being part of the mechanism constructed by dominant discourses, have managed to run their own course. They threaten to implode the world surrounding them, and their presence may even be called monstrous” (57). Murata’s protagonists also conform to Kotani’s definition: while being apparently incorporated into the system, they break free by transgressing the role imposed on them. Nonetheless, for Murata, the real “monsters” are not the protagonists but those who blindly accept the “normal” without questioning it, as Amane tells her mother: “The scariest madness in the world is being ‘correct’” (Murata 2015b, 264). As Naitō (2015) has argued, “in the fictional reality of Satsujin Shussan, the bodies that bear and kill are all bodies idealized by the society, without any difference of sex” (37). On the one hand, we could say that these neutral existences have overcome biological gender boundaries in the way

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they perform reproduction; on the other hand, they are still tied to a role imposed by the system. We, both men and women indistinctly, have become uteri for humanity. This music we cannot hear saying it is “Correct”, is echoing in our heads. We are being controlled by that music. Even inside my body, unnoticed, that music is playing loudly. Obeying to that music, I continue to talk to my “baby” with a sweet voice. Before my eyes, crawling, precious lives are moving me compulsorily. The world makes us know this way what is correct. We are all cursed by the world. It doesn’t matter what shape the world takes; we cannot escape that curse. (Murata, 257)

̄ (2017) has thus indicated, in Murata’s fiction, “there is the capacity As Ida to create the ‘outside’. The discomfort towards the ‘normal’ is in that start” (71). That is exactly where Amane and Ikuko stand: apparently “inside” the system, but meanwhile undeniably representing an “outside” that is slowly drifting away from the pre-established orbit, as the protagonists eventually take a stance using the state-controlled reproductive technology for a different scope from what it is supposed to be. The reasonable and efficient reproductive systems imagined by Murata, at first glance, apparently achieve what could be perceived as gender equality, since they do eliminate the stereotypical patriarchal gender roles. However, the novels still reveal an unavoidable structural paradox in Japanese society. Therefore, it can be argued that in Murata’s works, gender roles are apparently eliminated, but a coercive system that tries to define individuals and assign them performative roles is still present. Even if she has not declared herself nor her works as intentionally connected to feminism, Murata’s reflections on Japanese society result undoubtedly aligned with the most recent feminist debates in Japan, especially regarding a future where human relations can be viewed without any patriarchal and heteronormative constraints.

References Arai, Motoko. 1999. Chigurisu to Yūfuratesu. Shūeisha. Fujiki, Naomi. 2018. ‘Ninshin’ wo dasshu suru: josei sakka ni yoru ninshin yōshō wo yomu. In Ninpu A ̄ to Ron. Fukuramu shintai wo dasshu suru Ron Fukuramu shintai wo dasshu suru. Seikyūsha: 66–86.

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̄ Yūko. 2017. Murata Sayaka no Genzai. Gakushikaikaihō 2017 (1): 68–71. Ida, Kano, Ayako. 2017. Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kobayashi, Mika. 2018. Matanitı ̄ foto wo meguru shihan seiki—media no naka no ninpuzō. In Ninpu A ̄ to Ron. Fukuramu shintai wo dasshu suru. Seikyūsha: 43–65. Kotani, Mari. 2002. Space, Body, and Aliens in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction. In Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3, translated by Miki Nakamura. (November): 397–417. Kurihara, Yuichirō. 2013. Murata Sayaka to Murata Sayaka Ikō: Hatashite ‘sei’ wa kōshin sareta ka. Yurı ̄ka 45 (9): 145–169. Mackie, Vera. 2003. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Contemporary Japanese Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matsuo, Yumi. 1992. Barūn Taun no Satsujin. Tōkyō Sōgensha. MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). 2021. Reiwa Gannen Jinkou Doutai Toukei Geppo Nenkei (Gaisuu) no Gaikyou [Outlook of Annual Total Monthly Report of Demographic Statistics (Approximate)]. June 5, 2020. Murata, Sayaka. 2003. Jyunyū. Kodansha. ———. 2016. Konbini Ningen. Bungeishunjū. ———. 2014. Satsujin Shussan. Kodansha. ———. 2015a. Shōmetsu Sekai. Kawadeshobōshinsha. ———. 2015b. Shōmetsu Sekai. Kawadeshobōshinsha. NIPSSR (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research). 2017. Marriage and Childbirth in Japan Today: The Fifteenth Japanese National Fertility Survey, 2015 (Results of Singles and Married Couples Survey). Tokyo, March 2017. Naitō, Chizuko. 2015. Aikoku to jendā. In Aikokuteki Mukanshin: Mienai Tasha To Monogatari No Boryoku. Shinyōsha: 37. Seaman, Amanda C. 2004. Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Suzuki, Izumi. 1978. Onna to Onna no Yononaka. Hayakawa Shoten. Ueno, Chizuko. 2019. Feminisms in Japan since the Second Wave to the Present: Its History and Achievement. In Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies, ed. Jieyu Liu and Junko Yamashita, 75–94. New York: Routledge. ———. 2009. Kafuchōsei to shihonsei (Collected works of Chizuko Ueno). Iwanami Shoten. Yano, Chiaki. 2017. Sa no Shōmetsu: Murata Sayaka ‘Jyūnyū’ kara ‘Konbini Ningen’ Made. Do ̄shisha Joshi Daigaku Nihongo Nihon Bungaku 29: 121–137.

CHAPTER 9

Cyborg Separatism: Feminist Utopia in Athena’s Choice Chikako Takeshita

Athena’s Choice (2019) by Adam Boostrom is set in a 2099 post-climate-­ change world in which, after all the men perished from the “Y-virus,” women have assumed leadership for five decades. The story implies that the death of all males has put an end to violence against women, self-­ glorifying terrorisms, and wars between nations. The “Founding Mothers” of the eleven nations around the world have eliminated war, hunger, illness, crime, and poverty through compassion-based governance and international cooperation, as well as by utilizing state-of-the-art food, medical, and surveillance technologies and providing generous “Citizen’s Benefits” to everyone. Simultaneously, advanced fertility technologies have enabled two female DNA donors to produce daughters, rendering heterosexual reproduction obsolete. Although women are getting along fine without men, some heterosexual women who yearn for their companionship have lobbied successfully in 2094 to try to revive the opposite sex. Despite

C. Takeshita (*) Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_9

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passionate protest from anti-male activists, congress approved the Lazarus Genome Project aimed at bringing men back. Before a Y-virus-resistant male genome could be completed, however, the project is mysteriously sabotaged. The world’s most powerful female artificial intelligence, the Third Core, summons nineteen-year-old Athena Vosh to help with the investigation. Ultimately, Athena finds out that men were intentionally eradicated by a small group of female scientists who engineered the plague. The Third Core tells Athena that she has been chosen to decide on the fate of men and gives her three choices: revive men, which will return some richness in life, but also reintroduce anti-social masculine behavior into the world; eradicate the male genome altogether choosing overall safety and peace over fulfilling heterosexual women’s needs; or remove opposite-­ sex attraction from women’s genome to nullify the need for men to return. The novel ends before Athena makes her decision, leaving the readers to ponder what she would or should do. The author, who from a young age “found himself fascinated by the intersection of feminism and futurism,”1 felt compelled to write a novel about an all-female future world when Donald Trump secured the Republican party’s nomination as the presidential candidate in 2016, even after a video clip of him boasting about kissing and groping women had surfaced, and several women had come forward accusing the celebrity billionaire of sexual misconduct. Noting that more than 95 percent of murders, mass-shootings, global wars, sexual assaults, and ethnic cleansings are committed by men, Boostrom asks his interviewer: “[d]oesn’t a tiny part of you wonder if maybe the rest of humanity would be better off without [men]?” (Shamsi 2019). Choice explores this very question through a separatist feminist utopia set in the late twenty-first century. The novel’s publication in 2019 was timely as it coincided with Trump’s display of hyper-masculinity throughout his presidency, including a trade war waged against China, verbal threats cast at North Korea, the assassination of a top Iranian general that provoked the worst tension in the Middle East, and the deployment of federal officers to aggressively suppress peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. Readers in 2020 would have observed Trump’s macho refusal to wear a mask during the pandemic, which likely cost many American lives as COVID-19 wreaked havoc in the US, with an eventual death toll dramatically surpassing the originally predicted three-­ hundred thousand. Meanwhile, countries led by female leaders such as 1

 Adam Boostrom’s profile on the back cover of Athena’s Choice.

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New Zealand, Germany, Taiwan, Denmark, and Finland were suffering one-sixth as many COVID-19 deaths as those led by men, and were believed to recover from the recession sooner. Given the political climate during Trump’s tenure, the idea of rebooting our society with a feminist operating system was extremely enticing.

But What Kind of a Feminist Future Will It Be? Cyborg separatism, I argue, is Choice’s answer to this question: “cyborgian” because it takes after Donna Haraway’s (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto, which famously encouraged feminists to engage science and technology while remaining vigilant about their military-industrial origin; and “separatist” because it mirrors women’s paradise that cultural and lesbian separatist feminists in the 1970s dreamed of, namely a peaceful and egalitarian society made possible by enabling female culture and values to prevail over masculine ones. Cyborg and separatism, however, contradict each other in a couple of ways. For one, a cyborgian utopia would not have made sense to the original separatists who rejected science and technology as patriarchal tools of oppression. More importantly, Haraway’s cyborg and separatist feminism are ontologically incompatible. Separatism, which preceded the feminist concept of the cyborg, accentuated the distinction between men/women, masculine/feminine, and nature/culture (science and technology). On the other hand, the cyborg is a queer, boundary-crossing figure who rejects dualisms that create hierarchies and rigid categories. Choice is built upon a heteronormative plot that essentializes the differences between the sexes. Thus, besides blurring the human/machine boundary, Boostrom’s separatist future is incongruent with the cyborg philosophy. The title of this chapter, “Cyborg Separatism,” is an intentional misnomer that gestures to the incoherence of a feminist utopia imagined from a straight white male perspective. Despite its shortcomings, Choice provides an opportunity to examine how separatist feminist novels might be updated in the twenty-first century and contemplate what a feminist future could mean today. In order to shed some light on the differences between Choice and past novels, I will first briefly lay out the archetypes of feminist science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s that feature all-women societies. This will be followed by the analyses of how Choice hybridizes technophilia and what Boostrom considers to be feminist ideals, constructing a cyborgian cultural feminist utopia that, among other things, accomplishes reproductive freedom. The

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last half of the chapter will investigate where the novel falls short of meeting contemporary feminist expectations, more specifically, its handling of gender and racial stereotypes and its plot’s reliance on genetic determinism and sociobiology. I conclude that, although Choice offers an intriguing platform to reflect on gender dynamics and ways a society might be both improved and dehumanized by technological enhancement, the novel is not in sync with today’s feminist thinking, which has evolved into a multifaceted critique that incorporates intersectional, post-colonial, and queer theories.

Separatist Feminist Imaginations During the 1970s and 1980s Cultural feminism, which developed among the various theories of gender and oppression during the Second Wave women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, held that men and patriarchy were the root cause not only of “women’s oppression, but also of capitalism, war, racism, and the destruction of the environment” (Ryan 1989, 243). Cultural feminists believed that masculine values, including competition, power over others, and male superiority that supported the patriarchal social structure, must be replaced with feminine values and culture in order to reform society and empower women. This idea led to creating female-only spaces in various organizations, which allowed women to share their experiences and provide support for each other. Some advocated for all-women communities completely segregated from men. More politically oriented feminists, however, criticized cultural feminists’ emphasis on building an alternative space rather than staying focused on changing society, and accused their movement for the “death of radical feminism” or leading its followers “to retreat from politics to ‘life-style’” (Taylor and Rupp 1993, 32).2 Academic feminists who foregrounded the social construction of gender as an enlightened theory also dismissed cultural feminists for their essentialist view on the innate differences between men and women. Lesbian separatist communes nonetheless boomed for a short period of time around the mid-1970s, with urban and rural communities popping up across the US. Those committed to the separatist movement viewed 2  Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp defends lesbian feminism, explaining that it is fundamentally based on the idea that “a connection exists between an erotic and/or emotional commitment to women and political resistance to patriarchal culture” (33).

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the creation of an all-female community as a road to liberation and lesbian lifestyle as synonymous to feminist ideals (Ryan 1989). However, their version of utopia, or leading a perfect life “entirely free from interaction with men or with male values and ‘male’ culture,” was difficult to enact (Rensenbrink 2010, 292). For various reasons, separatist communes folded towards the end of the decade, although separatism as a philosophical position picked up briefly during the early 1980s. Exploration of separatist visions in feminist science fiction filled the void created by the dwindling of experimental lesbian communes. Novels from the 1970s that feature all-female communities include Suzy McKee Charnas’s (1978) Motherlines in her Holdfast series, Sally Miller Gearhart’s (1978) The Wanderground: The Story of the Hill Women, and Joanna Russ’s (1975) The Female Man. More books based around women-only or women-led communities were published during the late 1980s, including Pamela Sargent’s (1986) The Shore of Women, Joan Slonczewski’s (1986) A Door into Ocean, and Sheri Tepper’s (1988) The Gate to Women’s Country. These novels almost uniformly portrayed men as violent aggressors whose destructive tendency has led to the demise of the planet and the oppression of women. Some, however, also depicted deviant men who do not adhere to hegemonic masculinity. There are the “gentles” in Wanderground, gay men who escape the “city” to seek refuge in the all-­ women society. The “slaves” in Gate are men who have chosen to live amongst women and be their servants rather than be part of the warrior clan. The female Sharers in Door manage to convert one of their male invaders to support their non-violent philosophy. These exceptions reveal that some authors suggest that not all men embrace violence. Choice also hints that there were peaceful men, but mainly inherits from these early feminist separatist novels the presumption that men’s impulses to assault women, fight over power, and destroy the environment are all part of their “masculine” nature. My examination of the above novels has discerned two archetypical depictions of all-female communities. The first is an idyllic coexistence with nature, which reflects the cultural feminist idea that women, because they give life to another being, are connected to nature in ways that men never will be. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1915) classic feminist novella may have also inspired the natural settings chosen for the all-women worlds in later work. Gilman’s Herland is set in an uncharted land where women have lived alone resourcefully and peacefully for 2000 years before they are suddenly visited by three men who survived a plane crash. The

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women completely betray the gender expectations that are projected on them by their male guests, as they are strong and agile as well as intelligent and well-adapted to living collaboratively in their natural environment. Mirroring Herland, both Motherlines and Wanderground paint all-women communities as integrated into the ecological elements. In Motherlines, the Riding Women lead a non-possessive self-sustained pastoral life in the Grassland. In Wanderground, the Hill Women live in several communities among the hills to shield themselves from the brutalities of the male-ruled city. They can communicate telepathically with other women, as well as connect emotionally through touching each other’s minds. Moreover, they have the ability to communicate with the natural elements such as trees, rivers, and animals, whom the women will not kill without their consent. The Sharers in A Door into Ocean have adapted to living in the sea like mermaids. They lack the concept of “having power over” something or someone, suggesting that the Sharers are not only physically female, but their species has shed masculine values altogether. When their peaceful, advanced, and egalitarian society is invaded by the Volans, the Sharers insist on a completely non-violent resistance. These feminist novels suggest that women would adhere to feminine values and achieve a harmonious life in nature if they were left alone without interferences from men. Their storylines also reflect the cultural and ecofeminist notion that nature is in opposition to science and technology, which men use to dominate women and exploit ecological resources.3 The second archetype can be summarized as “disillusionment.” Failing separatist communities are sometimes contrasted to well-functioning ones in the same novel, providing insight into the conditions that destine women-only societies to thrive or flounder. The idealized Grassland of the Riding Women, for instance, is juxtaposed against an oppressive colony built by a group of female slaves who escaped the Holdfast, a society (re) built by white men after they decimated the earth by abusing nature. The Female Man compares multiple plausible gender relationships by interweaving female characters from four different worlds, two of which are home to all-women communities. The Whileaway is a stable all-female society that developed after a gender-specific plague killed all men in its universe 800 years prior. Meanwhile, the second separatist community in 3  Ecofeminist theory made the connection between the subjugation of women, racial minorities, lower class subjects, and all other non-white-Christian-male subjects and the exploitation of nature (Daly 1978; Griffin 1978; Merchant 1980).

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Female is bedevilled by its male-only counterpart, with which the women must exchange resources, including children. The women living in a segregated colony in The Shore of Women suffer conflict within their own community, and their members are occasionally expunged into the wilderness to fend for themselves. These stories suggest that separatist communities may not always reflect feminist values, and that they risk disintegration, especially when interaction with men cannot be avoided. In order to create a situation in which separatist female utopia is plausible, all of these stories are set in a wildly imaginative alternative universe.

Cyborgian Cultural Feminist Utopia with a Taste of Liberal Feminism Choice departs from these past archetypes in a few major ways. To begin, its all-women society embraces science and engineering rather than nature. Technology is the pillar of the social reforms that women leaders achieved in the aftermath of the plague that killed all men. A powerful female AI serves humanity, keeping every automated system operating without glitches, changing the route of a hurricane away from land, solving crimes by analyzing millions of hours of video recording, and handling different problems as they emerge in collaboration with humans. The citizens’ daily lives are also saturated by technologies, including meal-preparing food printers, dishwashers built into the dining table, and self-vacuuming floors. Everyone wears contact lenses that function as a screen on which a person can pull up all kinds of information she needs. Fresh outfits are printed daily from recycled clothes out of a printer in each household, eliminating sweatshops that supplied Fast Fashion products in the past. People wear subdermal magnetic implants to which their outfits instantly attach and massage implants for relaxation and personal pleasure. Advanced Artificially Intelligent Home Assistants, called AASHA for short, monitor their owners’ biological data and adjust their diets accordingly to keep them healthy. Healthcare and regenerative medicine are advanced to the point that women live to be 140 years old. A popular Happiness Profiling App can be used to assist citizens in decision-making to maximize their satisfaction in their day-to-day activities. The merger between humans and machines is plainly cyborgian. Choice is also unique in the sense that the story is situated in an extension of the existing world rather than in an unknown imaginary place. The

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North American Union (NAU) is recognizable as the post-climate change United States with its capital moved to Chicago after coastal cities sunk under the ocean. The United Nations and the World Health Organization are mentioned as having facilitated the collaboration amongst the now-­ consolidated-­into-eleven countries around the globe. Much of the social infrastructure such as schools, police, businesses, universities, research institutions, entertainment, and museums remain in place. Choice’s portrayal of the democratically governed peaceful world also defies the second archetype of male invasion and turmoil. It is neither under threat from outsiders nor internal dysfunction. Well-managed societies in speculative fiction tend to be a dystopian world under a totalitarian government in which either access to information is rigorously controlled or citizens are expected to perform particular functions under strict social regimens. NAU in 2099 is neither of those. A democratic political system is in place. Children are taught how to think, not what to think. Scientists and educators are among the occupations that are higher in prestige, indicating that society values knowledge and innovation. Citizens have the freedom to explore careers that they find fulfilling rather than simply labor for money. Meritocracy rewards some successful women, who enjoy higher status, and financial rewards than others. No one, however, struggles to make ends meet. Twenty years have passed since the World Health Organization announced that “global poverty and world hunger have been officially eliminated from Planet Earth” thanks to the combination of generous Citizen’s Benefits paid to “all the residents of the world’s eleven countries” and “increased productivity brought about by technological automation” (Boostrom 2019, 110). Crime rates and violent incidents are extremely low. Everything suggests that the Founding Mothers mobilized advanced technologies to reconfigure the global economy from exploitative capitalism into a social democracy that ensures everyone is guaranteed their basic rights to food, shelter, clothing, health, safety, education, and meaningful life. Apart from the nursing homes filled with elderly women with dementia and the occasional suicides, Athena’s world arguably represents a perfect technophilic separatist feminist utopia. Inheriting the “master’s tools,” however, contradicts the tenets of cultural feminism that distrusts male-borne institutions. One might argue that Choice should be read as a liberal feminist fantasy, as women display their superb competency in traditionally male-dominated jobs such as science, engineering, and political leadership. Nonetheless, I still maintain

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that a pseudo-cyborgian separatist/cultural feminism is an appropriate characterization of the world Boostrom has created because the core of his narrative lines up with the cultural feminist’s stance that women are innately more virtuous than men. The novel does not explain how women managed to rebuild the economic system and social order after all men perished, leaving behind a chaotic and divided world. The author relies on the idea that a society based on less power-hungry, more peaceful, and compassionate governance would naturally emerge just by putting women in charge, which strongly reflects an essentialist thinking present in cultural and separatist feminisms.

Cyborg Babies and Reproductive Freedom Reproduction and the technologies that control it have been one of the central feminist issues that concern gender and racial equity, women’s rights to self-determination, their health, and empowerment. In a 1930 classic study of matriarchy, Mothers and Amazons, Helen Diner speculated that based on ancient religious stories concerning virgin births from goddesses, “females could have at one point possessed the power to reproduce without sex and therefore without men” (Rensenbrink 2010, 300). During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian and cultural feminists were keenly interested in the idea of procreation without a male, especially by parthenogenesis, which is occasionally observed in nature. When stimulated in certain ways, some female reptiles, fish, and birds develop their eggs into embryos without mating. Lesbians wondered if parthenogenesis would be possible in humans and mused about “the powers of the female body” (289). They were also excited about the importance of the “theoretical implications of parthenogenesis,” namely in rethinking “gender and sexuality, women’s culture, and the possibilities of a future society” (289). In particular, they felt that their assertions about “the superiority of ‘female’ values and women’s culture could be strengthened by claims for biologically grounded parthenogenesis” (289). Parthenogenesis, however, has its drawbacks. An offspring conceived through parthenogenesis will receive only one set of chromosomes from its mother. Haploids are prone to more genetic problems because they lack the second set of chromosomes that can replace any disease-carrying genes in the first set. Cloning would be an improvement since it will maintain both sets of chromosomes from the donor. It would not, however, diversify the genetic pool in the way that bisexual reproduction does.

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Merging two eggs to create an offspring with a set of chromosomes from two parents would be the best solution for an all-female reproduction. But it was obvious to the separatists that such a procedure would involve highly advanced science, which was dominated by men.4 Given the recent debacles of high-dose oral contraceptives and IUDs that had injured and even killed some women, feminists who especially distrusted science and scientists had to place their hopes on parthenogenesis and in somehow reawakening the distant genetic memory of ancient female powers to self-reproduce. Separatist science fiction provided a space to unleash the feminist desire for sexless reproduction and explore its potential. Women in Herworld, who survived without men for as long as memories allow, spontaneously started reproducing parthenogenetically many generations ago through a mystical process. The Riding Women in Motherlines also reproduce parthenogenetically, only by mating with a horse to initiate egg development. In Russ’s Whileaway, women have figured out how to merge two ova to produce a child. The Hill Women in The Wanderground have also developed a method to reproduce together. These separatist communities presumably can sustain their population for generations. In contrast, fictional all women-communities that rely on male gametes to conceive must battle to keep themselves securely segregated while simultaneously procuring enough sperm. Reproductive arrangements also became an opportunity for the authors to develop interesting plot lines. In Shore, for instance, after having exiled men from their advanced society three thousand years ago, women maintain a relationship with a group of male warriors, who protect their city from other men in exchange for food and children. Everyone believes that sperm harvested from the warriors are used to produce their children, among whom the boys are sent to live with the men when they turn five years old. The readers find out, however, that a selective group of elite women had been inseminating their female citizens with sperm collected from their docile slave men, who had chosen to serve women rather than live with the warriors. The novel suggests the possibility of employing a eugenic strategy to reduce and eventually breed out masculine warrior mentality and return to a bi-gender society.

4  Merging ova to generate an offspring is not out of the question for mammals. Mice have been created from same-sex parents in the laboratory. Bi-maternal mice have borne their own healthy pups (Rehm 2018).

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Since the late twentieth century, we have seen a revolution in reproductive methods and technologies ranging from in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and surrogate pregnancy to fetal surgery, CRISPR—an advanced precise gene-editing method—and an artificial uterus for a lamb. Queer reproduction is available to lesbian couples who wish to build their families using donor sperm with their own eggs and/ or wombs (Mamo 2007). Trans-male pregnancies have also borne healthy babies. In Choice’s future world, Athena’s generation is produced through ova merging instead of using a sperm donor. Birth certificates list the names of the “primary mother” and “secondary mother.” A single mother can use a donor DNA for the second set of genes, in which case the secondary mother will be listed as “Anonymous” (Boostrom 2019, 162). In addition, embryos can be “edited” to achieve a particular kind of physical appearance and a minor enhancement in intelligence before they are implanted into the gestational mother’s womb. High-tech pregnancy is initiated in a laboratory, ending with painless childbirth nine months later. Whereas Boostrom clearly intended Choice to appeal to women who wish to eradicate sexual assaults, he may not have considered that annihilating men would also contribute to women’s well-being through eliminating unintended pregnancies.5 To no longer have to fight for abortion rights would bring an end to a long-fought feminist battle.6 The scenario may have also fulfilled reproductive justice, which advocates not only for the freedom to not have, but also for the right to have the children a woman wants, and to raise them safely with adequate resources.7 Although whether or not everyone has access to fertility clinics is unclear in the novel, after the world has lost half of its population, and food shortages not being an issue, it is conceivable that there is no pressure to limit fertility. There is no indication that some women are being forced to reproduce 5  Choice could have been written in response to the #MeToo movement, which has drawn the attention of the media to the social movements against sexual harassment and violence. 6  Despite the legalization of abortion in 1973, access to legal abortion in the US has become increasingly restricted by anti-abortion state laws. Between 2011 and 2019, over 480 state abortion restrictions were enacted. 7  The term “reproductive justice” originated in 1994 when women of colour started leading a movement that combines reproductive rights and social justice and advocating for the reproductive health, self-determination, and rights of marginalized people whose needs are not covered by the reproductive rights movement led by white middle-class women. See “Reproductive Justice.” Sister Song. Available at: https://www.sistersong.net/reproductivejustice. (2020).

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either. Since there is less demand for unskilled workers and infant mortality is low, the compulsion to produce more children may also be low. Readers can deduce that given the wide-spread use of the Happiness Profiling App, women who find fulfilment in raising children would volunteer to become mothers, while other women would forego motherhood if they discovered that their passion lies elsewhere. Overall, Choice presents us with a version of reproductive freedom that is particularly cyborgian.

Ephemeral Queerness and Racial Bias While Choice may qualify as a contemporary imagination of a separatist feminist paradise, it poorly represents intersectional feminist theory. At first glance, separatist settings in past and present novels harness the possibility of a queer paradise. Anticipation towards a lesbian utopia, however, is betrayed when women commit violence on other women or display sexual interest in men over women. Peter Fitting (1992) notes that in The Shore of Women, which involves both a technologically advanced female-only-society and less-developed all-male settlements, positive accounts of same-sex attraction are noticeably absent. The novel starts with the murder of a woman by her partner in the city of women, and then evolves around the exiled young killer who discovers the pleasure of heterosexual intercourse. The protagonist’s erotic response to a “real” man underscores the author’s assumption that opposite-sex attraction is intrinsic to women. Fitting concludes that the author is conflicted about the separation of the sexes, and that Shore’s storyline foreshadows a reconciliation between them. Choice appears to be sexually progressive at first. Same-sex coupling and queer reproduction are normalized. Autoeroticism is commodified and freely explored by single and attached women with popular massage implants that can be “choreographed” to provide various types of pleasure. Gender specific roles seem to have vanished, as domestic labor traditionally shouldered by women has all been automated and reproductive work is completely voluntary. Queering, however, ends just about there. Straight white male perspectives permeate throughout the novel in the ways that gender, sexuality, race, and class play out. To begin, characters in Choice that do not adhere to the normative feminine ideal are all subtly denigrated. The anti-man activist Myrza Kahn, for instance, is portrayed as an alcoholic outlaw who has been arrested

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multiple times for public disobedience. Athena’s out lesbian girlfriend and the career-driven crime investigator whose mannerisms are characteristically unfeminine are both murdered in the process of solving the mystery of the stolen Lazarus genome. In contrast, as a single parent who has devoted herself to raising her only daughter—who now happens to hold the key to the future—Athena’s mother doubles as the Virgin Mary. Another important figure, the omnipotent AI, the Third Core, appears in front of Athena as an “angelic” blonde girl. While heteronormative projections on women abound, queer imaginations are sparce. Transgender people are completely absent from Athena’s world. We are told that the Y-fever killed all trans-men along with some women, whose deaths are not explained. No mention is made about trans-women. Readers can only deduce that they all died because trans-men shared genetic features with men that the Y-virus targeted and trans-women had Y chromosomes. No one seems to have identified as a trans-man in the last fifty years since the plague and bisexual people are absent—all residents are cis-women who are either homosexual, heterosexual, or asexual as far as one can tell. Racial stereotypes are also utilized in predictable ways. The Third Core, a God-like figure, is unsurprisingly white. The main character, Athena, is named after a Greek goddess. The pro-men women’s group is represented by congresswoman Jane Chen, whose name suggests an East Asian origin, a model minority. Chen also represents the “Lonely Hearts” who claim that the men in their pre-pandemic lives were gentle and honorable people. Jane’s romantic account of her late husband hints at an upper-middle-­ class (very likely to be white) upbringing. Meanwhile, Myrza, the leader of an anti-men group, is a Syrian immigrant who embodies otherness. Like those who victimized Myrza and her family, men of color are much more visible as perpetrators than white men. We learn that the “five deadliest terror attacks in global history” consisted of three separate nuclear weapon detonations by Russian dissidents and white American nationalists, a “massacre” carried out by Freedom Fighters in Africa, and a Muslim religious holiday bombing in the Kashmir region (Boostrom 2019, 124). Since we rarely encounter photographs of nuclear attack victims, those murdered by white people remain an abstract anonymous mass wiped out clean remotely with a high-tech weapon.8 The massacre and bombing in 8  In reality, the atom bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far from being instantly extinguished. Those who survived possibly suffered more from burns and radiation poisoning than the ones who died instantly or in the fire that followed the explosion.

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the global South, on the other hand, invoke vivid images in the readers’ minds of recent historical events such as the genocide in Rwanda and the civil wars in the Middle East. These scenarios bolster the notion that black and brown men slaughter each other and rape their women, while only extremists among white men commit notable violence. We only need to look at another feminist science fiction text written almost half a century ago to recognize the missing theoretical element in Choice. In Motherlines, white men of the Holdfast are explicitly called out for demolishing nature and enslaving all non-white male peoples. This reflects the ecofeminist insight that sexism, racism, classism, the oppression of all things “other,” and the abuse of nature are interconnected products of white male supremacy. Attributing the brutalities against women, minorities, and the environment to white male leaders would be an appropriate feminist critique of the status quo. The insidious compulsory heterosexuality and the stereotypically racialized violence that are peppered throughout the storyline will let down readers who anticipate a progressive feminist novel in Choice.

Athena’s “Choice” under Heteronormative Separatism Feminist science fiction writers have regularly used battle of the sexes to examine gender relationships, question gender roles, investigate patriarchy, and rebuke male violence. In Athena’s world, however, men only live in the memories of older women, in the imaginations of younger women who have constructed their impressions of men from books, old films, and history lessons, and as a hypothetical male genome. Without living men to contend with, Choice’s storyline is carried forward by the quest to solve the mystery of the stolen male genome and bits and pieces of information about how the all-women world came to be and operates. Instead of encounters with men, the controversy over the Lazarus Genome Project serves as the platform for examining feminist positions on men and masculinity, which are simplified as “for” or “against.” Feverish supporters of the Lazarus Project are older women who lost their loved ones to the Y-fever fifty years ago. The Lonely Hearts claim that humanity is incomplete without men, and that their companionship is desperately yearned. Twenty-five percent of the population oppose resurrecting men, with most of them strongly or very strongly opposed. They

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are represented by groups such as Women First, Never Forgetters, and Violence, Murder, and Rape (VMR), who remember men as atrocious perpetrators. Myrza Kahn of Women First recounts how a group of men murdered her father and took her, her mother, and sisters hostage and repeatedly raped them over many months. Implying that any man can turn into a monster, Myrza asserts that the men who killed her father and brutalized the women were not a terrorist group, but “plain, ordinary men filled with anger, and vengeance, and lust, and greed” (Boostrom 2019, 149). Women who oppose the Lazarus project are extremely apprehensive about bringing men back to life for fear that more women will be victimized again in the future. The social and political stability accomplished by annihilating patriarchy has ironically prepared more than half of its population, many born after the global disasters, to consider men’s return as desirable rather than problematic. Most young women in Choice do not seem to have given much thought to the ramifications of reintroducing men to their society. Some are indifferent, while others seem to be excited about reincarnating men because of their novelty. Athena’s girlfriend Nomi may be an exception who is unimpressed with men from what she observed in pre-plague films and television. Readers learn that she had the insight to write in her middle-school essay that if men were alive, they would be “trying to tell all the rest of us what to do with our bodies” and “life would be much, much, much more annoying” (Boostrom 2019, 211). Athena, on the other hand, is secretly preoccupied with men. She daydreams about them returning in the future, wonders about their touches and smells, and longs for their “strong embrace” (36). That Athena is not attracted to Nomi in the same way that Nomi is to Athena is hinted at in several moments when Athena slips away from Nomi’s embrace rather than returning it. As Athena pursues her search for the lost genome, she uncovers an old, hidden document authored by the most revered scientist, Grace Antares, who had been developing the Happiness Profiling technology before the plague in order to help individuals understand what makes each person happy based on genetic analysis. The scientist claims that her research on the genetics of happiness revealed, to her horror, that the majority of men found joy in sexually assaulting a woman and in murdering or battering someone.9 Her study also uncovered that one in four men experience 9  There is no factual grounding behind the idea that most men find pleasure in violence. Statistically, men are responsible for the majority of violent crimes, and women are victimized

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tremendous happiness from acquisition but gain no pleasure from appreciating his possession—be it an object, title, or a woman—once he acquires it. That less than three percent of women were found to have this inclination suggests that men are mostly responsible for meaningless consumption and accumulation. Furthermore, Grace’s study found that six percent of men have an overwhelming desire to see themselves as a “hero” to the extent that they will happily die a martyr’s death, which would mean that millions of men are innately capable of committing self-glorifying suicide attack and mass shootings.10 The scientist urgently pleads that society “excise the vicious, masculine desires that have plagued mankind … [by using] geneediting technology to march into a new world without war, without terrorism, without hunger, and without greed” (Boostrom 2019, 236). Although hints of essentialist gendering are present throughout the novel, it only becomes clear towards the end that the entire plot of the novel relies on biological determinist assumptions. Grace’s 50-year-old essay explains that masculinity is a product of the selection of the fittest, which rewarded males who distinguished themselves from their peers by “being as selfish as possible, and violent as necessary” in order to copulate with as many females as possible (Boostrom 2019, 234). Concurring with Grace’s theory, the Third Core tells Athena that men’s desires “for conquest, for sexual manipulation, for greed, [and] for violence” are all an evolutionary outcome of the human history in which men with these traits “received the greatest genetic rewards” by producing the most offspring (259). The AI adds that, according to her calculations, if men were alive today, “humanity would have … less than one chance in three to survive another five hundred years without a major extinction-level event” (260). Athena learns that Grace and her conspirators exterminated men by engineering a virus that targets genes coded for masculine traits. Then they more frequently than men, except in the case of homicide, which records more male victims. Federal statistics show that ninety-nine out of a hundred rapists are men. In 2018, 87 percent of the homicide perpetrators in the United States (US) were men (this does not include cases of which the perpetrator’s gender is unknown). One in four women in the US experience intimate partner violence. One in four women survive rape or attempts of rape during college. 10  Between 1982 and 2020, 113 mass shootings in the US were committed by men, while women committed three. See “Number of Mass Shootings.” Statista. Available at: https:// www.statista.com/statistics/476445/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-gender/. (2020). As well, while most suicide bombers are men, females have increased over the last few decades from almost none during the 1980s to about 15 percent of all suicide attackers in recent years (Davis 2013).

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tried in vain to recreate a male genome without violent tendencies, only to learn that the masculine features and qualities that heterosexual women are attracted to are genetically inseparable from the dangerous and destructive mindset and behavior that are unique to men. When the Lazarus Genome Project was approved by Congress, Grace monopolized the right to the project in order to keep other scientists from resurrecting men. When Congress started to become impatient with the slow progress after five years, Grace’s conspirator staged a robbery of the genome in order to buy more time. Clearly, Boostrom gives credence to the familiar discourses of sociobiology that have been popularized to uphold existing gender stereotypes. Sociobiology is a field of research premised on the idea that human behavioral and psychological characteristics reflect evolutionary selection and adaptation. Attempts to explain perceived gender differences using sociobiology have led to claims that men are inherently aggressive because they had to fight to get access to as many females as possible and that it is in their nature to want to have sex with women. Femininity is explained through theories about female reproductive strategy, which centers around the logic of the “precious egg.” Rather than mating with multiple males, sociobiologists have suggested, females prefer to carefully select a male with the “best” genes and maintain monogamy so that they can depend on the support from the known father of the offspring (Lerner and von Eye 1992). Feminist scholars have repeatedly shown that “scientific” theories are not gender neutral or “objective,” but have been shaped by existing culturally constructed gender ideals (Haraway 1991; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Oudshoorn 2003). Martha McCaughey’s The Caveman Mystique (2008) specifically analyzes sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and criticizes them for justifying male promiscuity and rape and naturalizing female sexual loyalty and dependence on men. Basing a “feminist” novel on sociobiology, which has been utilized by misogynists against women’s empowerment, is a recipe for frustration. Choice further applies sociobiology and biological determinism to femininity, as Grace declares that women evolved differently from men due to their reproductive necessities: [B]ecause pregnancy is debilitating and requires help […] women have been selected over time for different desires, strengths, and dominant behaviors. Because they have needed to employ empathy, teamwork, and compassion in order to succeed genetically […] they have evolved to take huge amounts of joy from acts of sympathy and collaboration. (Boostrom 2019, 245)

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Like cultural feminists, Grace argues that these female-specific evolutionary traits are better than the masculine ones and that womankind can create a better world. In her will to Athena, Grace writes: “true feminism … should be the recognition of feminine abilities as the greater strength … We women are the true source for the better angels of humanity’s natures” (268).11 While separatist feminists may agree with the idea that males are intrinsically prone to behaving in ways that support patriarchy, and that women have qualities that can support humanity better, they would be immensely irritated by the Third Core’s assertion that women are programmed to “love [men] all the more for [being] programmed to act as violent, sexual conquerors” (260). The AI reasons that women’s attraction to ambitious, aggressive, and hedonistic men are connected to their reproductive success; in other words, these desires were coded into their genes during the evolutionary process. Biological determinist arguments of sociobiology that reinforce heteronormativity are utterly antithetical to a feminist future. Yet, this is the information that Athena is left to work with. At the end of the book when Grace and her conspirator die, she becomes the only person who knows how and why men were exterminated. The Third Core designates Athena as the Decisive Human, who must now decide on the fate of the male genome, and offers her three choices: (1) recover the Lazarus genome and revive the male species so that heterosexual women may live fulfilled lives in the future; (2) destroy the male genome once and for all in order to keep women safe and maintain a world centered on compassion; or (3) nullify the need for men to be resurrected by creating “a gene drive which would eliminate in women the craving for the kind of glory-seeking, violence-­loving men who pose the greatest threat to life on earth.” The AI warns Athena that the last choice may mean refusing all women “an integral part of what makes them female,” and “removing something from them, without their knowledge,” which, she adds, “is, perhaps, unfair to take” (Boostrom 2019, 263). Had the novel provided room for the social constructionist theory of gender, we would be able to consider various deliberate ways of reviving male citizens into a non-patriarchal world designed by women leaders. Perhaps boys and girls will be taught from a very young age that they are equals. Perhaps greater emphasis will be placed on compassion and 11  Although Grace herself orchestrated the mass-killing of men, those actions are somehow justified because of her altruistic intentions.

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collaboration over individualism and meritocracy. Perhaps extra care will be taken so as not to revert to a hierarchical social system driven by personal gain and exploitation of others. Devising ways to rehabilitate masculinity in a non-patriarchal world would be a productive exercise for imagining a more livable future. Oddly enough, however, female leaders in Choice who approved male resurrection do not seem to have contemplated how to reintroduce boys and men into their society. The author preemptively shuts down any discussion around the possibility of reconstructing gender. To this end, Grace’s partner Eve proclaims that women who believe that “raising our boys right” or “eliminating patriarchy” can be the solution to overcoming the “problems with men” are “foolish” because men are genetically predisposed to assault women (Boostrom 2019, 247). Eve’s assertion definitively forestalls any non-essentialist solutions for reintegrating men into Athena’s society. The novel’s plot leaves little room to debate how to accommodate men without unleashing the horrific impulses that are presumed to be hardwired in the male genome. At the end of the book, Athena, a nineteen-year-old heterosexual woman, is tasked with a decision on whether or not to resurrect men. Before they part, the AI tells Athena that for some women, “life without a man’s romantic love is like living as a shadow” (Boostrom 2019, 260). Given that she is biologically determined to desire men and has been told that this is her evolutionary destiny, Athena does not seem to have a real “choice.” The sociobiological rationale that Grace used to legitimize eliminating men circles back to become the grounds for reviving men—because women need them. The logical question, in this case, is not what “choice” would Athena make, but what kind of conditions can Athena put that will safeguard the feminist utopia from disintegrating when she brings men back. The Third Core could have offered a fourth option to Athena. If it is in the AI’s ability to reprogram the female genome so that women would lose interest in men, then it would seem that she should be able to reprogram it so that all women will desire other women. This option would technically satisfy all women’s need for companionship and would also be aligned with the original ideologies of cultural and separatist feminists. If Athena was a bisexual woman, she might have suggested this as an alternative to restoring the male genome. Alas, a queer ending does not seem to have crossed the author’s mind. By casting a straight woman as the key character, the author has locked his story into a circular logic without an escape or a possibility for a queer solution.

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A Straight White Man’s Feminist Fantasy Boostrom can take credit for urging us to imagine how we can change the world if we could “kill the patriarchy.” Choice also provides an intriguing platform to think about how advanced technologies, including a powerful AI and highly automated production, transportation, information, and surveillance systems, might make it possible to establish and maintain a society without violence, hunger, illness, greed, and poverty. Excessive reliance on technologies also prompts ethical questions, particularly around surveillance, gene-editing, and unnecessary prolonging of life. Moreover, reproductive autonomy achieved only with cyborg babies is far from a solution that feminists are fighting to achieve today. Nonetheless, if nothing at all, a peaceful social democratic society is an appealing outcome of a feminist social reform that Choice portrays. The biggest irony, however, is that a novel that starts out as a better world created by women arrives at an ending that proves itself to be a straight white man’s “feminist” fantasy. Despite being set in a separatist future, the storyline is unmistakably heteronormative, including the main character’s sexual orientation. Biological determinist assumptions about masculinity and femininity severely limit the novel’s ability to stimulate conversations about how best to reconfigure patriarchy. Above all, it is rather discouraging to see a feminist future still being imagined in essentialist and dualist terms after decades of revising, refining, decolonizing, intersectionalizing, and queering feminist theories. Ultimately, the compulsory heterosexuality, racial stereotypes, and the lack of queer imagination are serious setbacks that disqualify Choice as a progressive feminist work. Acknowledgments  I wish to thank the Mother-Daughter Book Club and the Empty Nest Book Club for the lively discussions on Athena’s Choice, which gave me the idea for this work. My appreciation also goes to Sherryl Vint for her insightful comments on the earlier version of this chapter.

References Boostrom, Adam. 2019. Athena’s Choice. Tiburon, CA: Thinker Books. Charnas, Suzy McKee. 1978. Motherlines. New York: Putnam Pub Group. Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. Davis, Jessica. 2013. Evolution of the Global Jihad: Female Suicide Bombers in Iraq. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 36 (4): 279–291.

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Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and The Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Fitting, Peter. 1992. Reconsiderations of the Separatist Paradigm in Recent Feminist Science Fiction. (Reconsidérations du paradigm séparatiste dans trois romans feministes). Science Fiction Studies 19 (1): 32–48. Gearhart, Sally Miller. 1978. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1915) 1979. Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel. Pantheon. Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Perennial Library. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge. 149–182. Lerner, Richard M., and Alexander von Eye. 1992. Sociobiology and Human Development: Arguments and Evidence. Human Development 35 (1): 12–33. McCaughey, Martha. 2008. The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science. New York: Routledge. Mamo, Laura. 2007. Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press. Merchant, Carolyn. (1980) 1990. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper Collins. Oudshoorn, Nelly. 2003. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones. New York: Routledge. Rehm, Jeremy. 2018. Healthy Mice from Same-Sex Parents Have Their Own Pups. Nature, October 11, 2018. https://www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-­018-­06999-­6. Rensenbrink, Greta. 2010. Parthenogenesis and Lesbian Separatism: Regenerating Women’s Community through Virgin Birth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (2): 288–316. Russ, Joanna. 1975. The Female Man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books. Ryan, Barbara. 1989. Ideological Purity and Feminism: The U.S.  Women’s Movement from 1966 to 1975. Gender and Society 3 (2): 239–257. Sargent, Pamela. 1986. The Shore of Women. Toronto: Bantam Books. Taylor, Verta, and Leila Rupp. 1993. Women’s Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism: A Reconsideration of Cultural Feminism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1): 32–61. Tepper, Sheri. 1988. The Gate to Women’s Country. New York: Doubleday Books. Shamsi, Dua. “MBA Student Adam Boostrom’s New Novel Explores a World without Men.” Haas News | Berkeley Haas, September 16, 2019. https:// newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/adam-boostroms-athenas-choice-explores-aworld-without-men/. Slonczewski, Joan. 1986. A Door into Ocean. NY:Arbor House.

PART III

Queering Gender

CHAPTER 10

Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction Beyond Gender Research Collective

Introduction: The Medium and The Tank In Anne Harris’s Accidental Creatures (1998), a corporation in a near-­ future Detroit creates a breed of artificial beings, the Lilim, designed as a workforce able to safely and efficiently harvest bio-electronic hardware cultivated in tanks of growth medium. Harris’s novel fundamentally rejects the concept of water as a wholly natural entity, bound up with notions of biological femininity, the maternal, and the spiritual.1 Rather, in this queer, cyberpunk text, water is always already figured both as a technology in itself and as a medium that is shaped by the technologies of borders, tanks, 1  For example, Gaston Bachelard states that the “poetic imagination nearly always attributes feminine characteristics to water […] how profoundly maternal the waters are […].” See Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2006), 14.

Beyond Gender Research Collective (*) London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_10

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and pipes that seek to contain it. We argue that the Lilim’s longing to “swim in the vats […] touched and embraced by the beautiful green waters” of the growth medium cannot be encoded as the naturalized desire of women for water (Harris 1998, 138). Rather, the “warm, soothing wetness” into which the post-gendered, post-human community of the Lilim are born and in which they work, have sex, and plot revolution is best understood as technology always necessarily interacting with the containing technology of the tank (139). Following the rejection of the Natural in the work of queer theorists Susan Stryker and Donna Haraway, we look at water’s function as technology in four queer, feminist sf texts: Accidental Creatures, Kaia Sønderby’s Tone of Voice (2018), Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003), and Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996). Our readings deploy Sophie Lewis’s (2019) term “Amniotechnics,” or a “cyborg conception of water” (161). Amniotechnics is a political conceptualization of water as a gestational technology, with the interlinked capacities of both “protecting water and protecting people from water” (2019, 163). As Lewis puts it, “‘Water management’ may sound unexciting, but I suspect it contains key secrets to the kinmaking practices of the future”—practices that explicitly leave that capitalist technology of containment, the heteropatriarchal, nuclear family, behind (164). This is a recognition of water as an essential technology for the survival of a multitude of species at a variety of scales, ranging from the gestational to the ecological, while at the same time being a force with the capacity to destroy communities and lives. At the structural level, amniotechnics demands that we imagine ways to welcome migrants crossing oceans while protecting our cities from tsunamis. At the intimate scale, it offers a means of thinking through both our own wateriness and our capacity for drowning. While the Lilim can swim freely in the growth medium, humans coming into contact with it are afflicted by “vatsickness,” a wasting disease that evokes terminal illnesses associated with unsafe working conditions including radiation sickness and asbestosis poisoning. Our amniotechnical approach hopes to navigate our differing abilities to safely be in and with water. We follow Stryker (1994, 240) in her shifting relationship to water as she navigates her identity as a transgender woman and thus, as she puts it, a “herald of the extraordinary.” Initially, Stryker describes herself as drowning in the “realm of [her] dreams,” understood as an “underwater” space, writing: “Why am I not dead if there is no difference between me and what I am in[?]” And yet

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she supplies her own answer to this question, demanding of herself that she learn to adapt, to become water, to be a herald of the extraordinary: 1 will swim forever. 1 will die for eternity. 1 will learn to breathe water. 1 will become the water. If 1 cannot change my situation 1 will change myself. In this act of magical transformation I recognize myself again. (1994, 247)2 The Medium A medium is never neutral. Like the medium of water, the technologies of reading, writing, and knowledge production are intimately bound up with ideology. The methodology of our collective, which we term Collective Close Reading (CCR), attempts to deconstruct the unchallenged notions of knowledge production as prestigious, unique, and attributable to singular individuals.3 CCR involves nonhierarchical knowledge production, based on the close reading of a plurality of texts in which the ideas of individuals develop and aggregate to form a collective understanding of the text(s). As Lewis (2019) indicates, writing is itself “an archetypal example of distributed, omni-surrogated” gestational labor which already and always escapes the damaging myth of individualized authorship (26–27).4 Such a methodology pushes back, on the one hand, against the myth of the Humanities as a field of lone researchers, individually producing knowledge, which mirrors some of the worst conceptualizations of subjectivity under neoliberalism: the individual as self-sufficient and in continual competition with others. On the other hand, it resists the pseudo-scientific method of “distant reading” proposed by Franco Moretti (2013), where a 2  When copying this section of poetry from a PDF to Sweet the “I”s were transformed into “1”s. We have retained this new formatting as a marker of the unpredictable transformations which swimming through the watery medium of digitality can provoke. 3  The term ‘Collective Close Reading’ was suggested to us by Dr. Hanna Musiol at a panel we gave at (Un)Fair Cities Conference, held in Limerick in 2019, as a way of describing our methodology. 4  In an archetypal example of collective authorship, Lewis herself quotes Mario Biagioli: “authorship can only be coauthorship.”

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body of researchers works to quantitatively outline a genre using data sets, whose results are published under the name of the leading professor.5 Instead, CCR proposes a model in which a group of researchers comes together to focus on a small number of texts; recognizes the co-gestation of knowledge; and practices a horizontal structure of organization. CCR might best be understood using Hardt and Negri’s (2004, 100) concept of the “Multitude,” in which individuals act for a common interest while rejecting hierarchy and sovereignty: “rather than a political body with one that commands and one that obeys, the multitude is living flesh that rules itself.” This chapter should thus be understood as what Jasbir Puar (2007, 211–212) calls a queer assemblage, “a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks […] that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.” To practice our methodology of the multitude, we chose to develop this paper through a forum on an alternative social media platform, Sweet (coded by one of our members). Sweet functions as a virtual reading group, extending our methodology into the digital. However, as N. Katherine Hayles (1999, 13) warns, the “virtual” is never simply a replacement for the “material,” but is “always instantiated in a medium.” The dematerialization of cybernetic technologies, as Hayles points out, has worked at the expense of the multitude of non-normative bodies to bolster the image of the liberal subject (white, cis, male, able-bodied, middle class) as the body (1999, 13). By cultivating a plural, discordant, and digitally mediated collective voice, we engage with the watery, mutual gestations of queer feminist sf, deconstructing the normative production of knowledge and subjectivity. Using Sweet in this way, we try to keep in our minds the wires running along the ocean bed that make its functioning possible, along with its connection to the e-waste disproportionately affecting the waters of the Global South. The Tank The form of this essay is as political as the medium it contains. The tank— that which holds, bounds, and separates media such as water and knowledge—is not a passive receptacle or vessel, but an active technology, letting 5  Moretti has set up the Stanford Literary Lab to practice “distant reading.” Much of the results, such as “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” published first in New Left Review (2011), are listed as having only one author, often Moretti himself.

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the medium in and out. This conception of seemingly passive technologies has been described by queer theorist Bini Adamczak (2016) as “circlusion,” an antonym of penetration that describes the active pushing out or enveloping of an object/medium. Through circlusion, that which is signified as passive—the anus, the vagina, the receptacle—is rendered active, holding and pushing rather than being penetrated or filled. The term queers heteronormative modes of figuring sex and gender (masculinity as penetration and femininity as being penetrated) while further allowing us to foreground frequently invisibilized technologies such as the tank. Ursula K. Le Guin’s (2019) essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” describes writing as a technology, not of the penetrating spear, but of “a sack, a bag” that holds, gestates, and circludes the medium of words. Like the popular image of Frankenstein’s creature, born into “a bath full of electric brine,” words, ideas, and identity are bound and produced by container technologies (Lewis 2019, 160). The conceptualization of texts and concepts as circluding receptacles, such as carrier bags or watery tanks, necessarily highlights the connections between objects within their walls (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019, 268). It is these connections, forged through a process of containment, that we prioritize in this essay. And yet, what we are aiming for is not a holistic, watery oneness that erases difference. The authors of the texts we study were gestated and have gestated themselves in very different intellectual waters, and we want to leave space, for example, for the ways in which the current of Hopkinson’s text drifts against the watery imaginaries of the other two. Where Stryker’s transformative aquatic journey—in which she begins by drowning in heteropatriarchy and must learn to swim in queerer waters—typifies white, queer relations to cisnormativity, The Salt Roads takes queerness as its starting point. Hopkinson’s writing refuses to cede the grounds of normality to heterosexuality. Instead, she shows us the truth of Grace L. Dillon’s (Anishinaabe) contention that heteronormativity is a “sexual regime[s] imposed by the legacy of nineteenth-century white manifest destinies,” and that, as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley has argued, “most Haitians (and Caribbeans) live their gendered and sexual lives well outside a monogamous, heterosexual gender logic” (2016, 9–11; 2011, 417–436). Therefore, while we attempt to facilitate communication within our tanks, we also leave them open to the “ruptural possibilities” Rodrick Ferguson (2004, 17) has identified as particular to queer, Black resistance. This chapter should be read as a series of tanks into which one can carefully dip:

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( [ Gestating Cyborgs ] [ Leaky Boundaries ] [Touch, Tanks, and Talking ] ).

They communicate with each other through the growth medium of our collective close readings that flow, uninterrupted, between them. Each tank is also designed to be comprehensible alone, and we hope that the divisions we have drawn between them bring clarity and allow for delicate ideas to be protected from one another. Moving between Accidental Creatures, The Fortunate Fall, Tone of Voice, and The Salt Roads, we endeavor to make meaning out of the watery technologies of queer, feminist sf, honoring both the vessels that contain them and the medium that allows them to grow.

Kaia Sønderby’s Tone of Voice (2018) centers on the ocean world of Song as its inhabitants, the Hands and Voices, develop interstellar technologies, negotiate their place in an interplanetary Alliance, and confront the threat of xenophobic terrorist attack. The novel follows Xandri Corelel, a xenoliason and one of the last autistics in the universe, to consider the nature of communication and the making of kin. Xandri rejoins the crew of the Carpathia, a queer found family drawn from the many different planets of the Alliance, including her current and former lovers, Diver and Kiri. On Song, the water of the ocean holds and gathers, acting as the medium through which multiple forms of communication are made possible: the gestural language of the Hands, squid-like beings with finely dextrous arms that rely on close physical contact to transmit information, and the resonant Song of the whale-like Voices, which harmonizes across vast distances. The Voices each exist in a symbiotic relationship with several Hands, choosing one another before defining themselves as a collective we, and as Xandri moves through the waters of Song, she is welcomed into these intricate networks of queer kinship and identity. Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) is comprised of three interwoven narrative threads (“storystreams”): one follows Mer, an enslaved woman living on a plantation in Haiti and working along with her lover Tipingee to heal and protect their community in the years before the Haitian Revolution; the second follows Jeanne, a Parisian dancer who learns to shape her identity as a Black woman (continued)

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(continued)

through her many love affairs, with fellow dancer Lise, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and finally her husband, the chef Moustique; the third follows Thais, also known as Meritet, who is an enslaved sex worker turned prophet living in Alexandria in the fourth century AD. Their lives are linked by the presence of a watery, Haitian, voudou spirit who goes by many names (including Lasirèn), who they help birth into the world and who is simultaneously their mother. She journeys along “salt roads” of blood, seawater, and sweat— which mark their overlapping histories—variously observing, contemplating, and intervening in the many traumatic legacies of slavery as it has marked the lives of African diasporic peoples. The Fortunate Fall (1996) is Raphael Carter’s first and only novel, a dense, sprawling, deeply intimate post-cyberpunk epic exploring the effects of technologically modified cognition on human interaction, consciousness, and politics. It follows queer journalist Maya Andreyeva, a “camera” able to publicly broadcast her experiences via cerebral implants, which activate an electro-telepathy known as telepresence. Despite these abilities, Maya must artificially suppress her queerness to conform to the puritanical, oppressive laws of the state, ultimately avoiding execution or mind control. The story engages with ideas of hybrid and distributed minds, bodies, and selves, as Maya becomes embroiled in the lives of Keishi Mirabara, a media “screener” more at home in the virtual waters of “grayspace” than the physical realm; and Pavel Voskresenye, the lone survivor of the Calinschina genocide, who claims to share his consciousness with the last whale on earth.

Gestating Cyborgs In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway (1991) offers the following origin narrative for the cyborg: [C]yborgs […] are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism […] But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (151)

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Haraway’s cyborg is thus explicitly anti-essentialist. Despite being created by the military-industrial complex, the cyborg holds no loyalty to it. The cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism,” erodes the boundaries between the organic and the technological; the natural and cultural; and the human and the animal (149). It is “a world changing fiction,” precisely because it holds the potential to undermine the dominating logic that produced it. For Haraway, the cyborg as a metaphor evokes an anti-­ essentialist feminist politics. This is made explicit in Stryker’s (1994) writing, where cyborg metaphors resurface as she describes the medical and surgical aspects of transgender experience. Stryker writes, “[a]s we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more, and something other than the creatures our makers intended us to be” (248). The power of this cyborg-like consciousness, for Stryker, is that it “places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist.” Voskresenye, the technological, human–whale hybrid at the center of The Fortunate Fall, is one such unassimilable cyborg. When Voskresenye awakens as a test subject in an underground military laboratory, he finds “cables that trailed from [his] head and spine into a long corridor” (1996, 137). As he soon discovers, these cables form an umbilical cord that connects him to “[t]he thing that lay suspended in that tank that would not let even light escape from it” (138). This thing, Voskresenye explains, “is still alive; ‘it’ is a she; and she […] is a whale.” This human–whale hybrid literalizes what Astrida Neimanis (2009) describes as “our amniotic relations to other human and more-than-human watery bodies” (161). The neural cable, a staple trope of cyberpunk science fiction, is dipped in water in order that we might ask “how vastly different bodies of water can sustain and nurture one another” (Neimanis 2009, 166). While this is the product of patriarchal militarism within the text, Voskresenye works to undermine these origins. In one provocative scene, he allows the novel’s protagonist Maya, a human camera who can broadcast telepresence to the net, the opportunity to “netcast” from the whale, allowing her audience “to find out what it’s like to be a whale.” (Carter 1996, 223). In offering humans this collective experience, Voskresenye aims to “span the greatest gap there is, not just between one human and another, but between us and other forms of life” (236). The radical potential of this experience is that, in Neimanis’s terms, it encourages us to imagine a hydrocommons that “decentres the individual human subject, and explicitly recognizes the interests of the differentiated human, animal or vegetable other who may

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also rely on water” (175). Carter’s hybrid has the potential to undermine the patriarchal logic of its creation, as it “explicitly connects those who have, seemingly, ‘nothing in common’ as a common body.” Whale-like creatures joining with both human and nonhuman others to form a hydrocommons make another appearance in Tone of Voice, yet here the technologies that gestate cyborg bodies are born not out of military laboratories but within the iridescent wetness of the oceans of Song. These oceans are home to a vast array of symbiotic life, including the whale-like Voices, the squid-like Hands, and the human and nonhuman crew of the Carpathia. This body of water and the watery bodies that reside within and outside of it suggest (speculatively) that Neimanis is correct when she argues “that the promotion of a radically embodied ‘hydrocommons’ might be better suited for negotiating the interbeing of bodies of water” than our current systems of making kin (2009, 161). Here, watery bodies and worlds are intrinsically connected to, with and through each other in webs of queer care, a relationship and state of being constituted precisely because of its wateriness (162). Within Tone of Voice, earthy characters are interconnected with the Hands and Voices through their multiple forms of technological wateriness. Though they are in some ways necessarily separate (with neither able to thrive in the others’ habitat), they are always linked, with their bodies and beings connected through “a multiplicitous hydrological cycle of becoming,” a process that is gestated, nurtured, and sustained through the water in/on Song (Sønderby 2019, 164). Like the continually flowing water they swim in, the Hands and Voices cannot perceive themselves to be part of a static, subjective reality. Rather, they are intrinsically part of the song that they co-gestate, an omni-surrogated product of the queer gestational commune, a collective, fluid, and negotiated song. As Xandri explains: “as symbiotes the Hands and Voices didn’t have words for ‘I’ or “me”, not in the sense I was used to. They used ‘we’ and ‘us’ regardless of whether they spoke of the whole or the individual” (94). This collectivity of watery bodies can maintain its wateriness even as it extends up and “out of” the water. Like how the coral—an organic technology that is the product of the Hands’ and Voices’ symbiotic relationship—grows up the land to form earth-based housing for visitors, so too does the radical kinship of the Hands and Voices emerge out of the water to incorporate earthy-beings. During periods where they are not working with the Hands and Voices in the water, the members of the Carpathia retreat within the living walls of the coral, which continue to connect

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them at all times to their water-kin. Here, the coral fulfills many roles: as a living entity that exists alongside multiple watery agents, as a technology that the Hands and the Voices work with to grow buildings and ultimately starships, and as a space that holds earthy-visitors while they sleep/consume/excrete/desire/care in the way that the water holds the Hands and Voices. Through the reimagining of coral as a living space that nurtures the queer relationships between Xandri, Diver, and Kiri, Sønderby stresses that the hydrocommons is not accessible to cyborgs such as Voskresenye or the Hands and Voices simply because of their strange, science-fictional bodies, but rather is a mode of being that can be actively extended. By forming a collective in which they co-gestate one another, humans, coral, Hands, Voices are brought together, demonstrating that, as Lewis (2019) puts it, “the word ‘individual’ by definition never referred imaginatively to gestators anyhow” (162). Hopkinson takes this expanded understanding of the cyborg still further. Without detracting from the specificity of cyborg consciousness, she figures the communities formed by human women as cyborg. The technologies that Hopkinson’s characters fuse to their organic bodies were not built in the laboratories of GeneSys. Rather, she shows us that a healing bath, the water of the river, or a sharpened straw can all be made to function as technologies. Just as Lewis has described the work of surrogacy laborers as both “amazing” and “completely ordinary,” so Hopkinson shows that the technologically mediated creation and care of new life cannot be confined to the operating tables of technocapitalism (2019, 44). In a manner both amazing and ordinary, the many queer midwives who people The Salt Roads gestate one another across the “watery webs” that structure the narrative (Hopkinson 2003, 213). The work of caring for one another despite the many violent and oppressive structures that bind one’s life—in Judith Butler’s (1992, 83) terms, of learning how to “work the trap that one is inevitably in”—is made possible by the watery, reproductive technologies Hopkinson’s characters are able to deploy. For them, water, blood, and sweat are understood as what Dillon (2017) describes as an “ameliorated technology informed by indigenous tradition and practice” (471). Indeed, not only are the technologies represented within Hopkinson’s narrative indebted to this framework, which privileges “indigenous scientific literacies,” but the narrative itself reflects this commitment (Dillon 2017, 470). Essential to the ways in which The Salt Roads “works the trap” of heteropatriarchal claims to naturalness and normalcy is its foregrounding of voudou as a hermeneutic system. It is precisely

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because Hopkinson takes up Tinsley’s (2011, 419) call to “speak of Ezili [one of the many names of Lasirèn] the way we often speak, say, of Judith Butler,” that she gives “the centuries-old corpus of texts engaging this Iwa a similar explanatory power in understanding gender and sexuality”; and that she is able to challenge the notion that white, Western heterosexuality allows for an originary or privileged access to birthing. Just as Stryker (1994) draws on her understanding of transfemininity in order to find affinity both with Frankenstein’s creature and with the child gestated by her lover, who is involuntarily assigned a gender at birth, so too does Hopkinson’s appeal to queer indigeneity allow her to refuse the assumptive separation between natural and cyborg birthing. In this way, Hopkinson works to center the reproductive labor of Black women without adhering to an essentialized mode of mother worship. The Salt Roads acts as proof of the fact that, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2016) has written, “to name oneself ‘mother’ in a moment where representatives of the state conscripted ‘Black’ and ‘mother’ into vile epithets is a queer thing” (21). The queerness of this labor, its resistance to absorption into the naturalized logics of heterosexual reproduction, is perhaps most evident during what might otherwise be termed the “miraculous” birth of the goddess known as “water mother” (Hopkinson 2003, 29). This birthing is described in visceral detail as the queer midwives Mer and Tipingee bring a stillborn baby out of “the swamp of [Georgine’s] crotch” in “a flood of bloody mucus” (29, 28). This is skilled labor, mediated by technology, as is the ensuing ceremony in which the baby’s body is buried by the river—the same river in which Georgine’s own mother drowned, where “they will be company for each other” (33). The goddess describes her own birth thus: I’m born from song and prayer. A small life, never begun, lends me its unused vitality. I’m born from mourning and sorrow and three women’s tearful voices. I’m born from countless journeys chained tight in the bellies of ships. Born from hope vibrant and hope destroyed. (40)

The watery body of the pregnant woman is thus framed as one crucial site of creation but not the sole site, as all three women, along with the stillborn child, are credited with gestating this new being into existence. Georgine’s pregnancy is extended from her body into the tears of her midwives, the water of the river, the trauma of the Middle Passage—a collective figuration of both the violence and the life-giving properties of

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water in which these women, like Stryker, experience the “excruciating impossibility” of being annihilated by water while continuing to “swim forever” (1994, 247). In Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis (2019) argues that: The common idiom about raising a child, “it takes a village,” is an everyday way of acknowledging that the template is and always was a fantasy; a person is not the result of a mother and a father simply adding together their unique identities of “flesh and blood.” (147)

Similarly, Hopkinson ends her novel by stating: “Sometimes it feels as though it takes a village to make a book” (2003, 393). In this scene of birth, the reach of that village is made clear. Extending outwards through time and space, this is a “gestational commune” as vast as the “silver-blue wetness, bigger than a universe” into which the goddess is born (Lewis 2019, 29; Hopkinson 2003, 40). No longer tied to the heterosexual dyad, birth is framed as an ongoing process encompassing mourning, healing, menstruating, caring, and weeping as well as gestating. This is the kind of queer, voudoun epistemology that Tinsley (2011, 432) has located in Haitian communities intent on “forging commonality not through gender, sexuality, or other identities but through walking together, through shared activity, experience, and support.” Mer, Tipingee, Lasirèn, Georgette, the unnamed child are not tied together because they are the same, or even because they are Family, but because they walk together and share in each other’s mutual birthing, in ways that are presented as, to borrow Lewis’s words, both “amazing” and “completely ordinary.” In this way, we move to a consideration of how we might begin to forge our own village, our hydrocommons, our gestational commune, while exploring the dangers, violence, and joys such acts of boundary creation and permeation necessarily entail.

Leaky Boundaries Or… The boundary is distinct: It is the definition of self through the demarcation of what is other. A boundary is where control is enforced and where dissent is spawned.

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Spatial regimes of aquatic containment are foregrounded in Accidental Creatures (Harris 1998). From the liquid enclosures of its tanks to the mist-rooms that house and enshroud them, amphibious architectures render technologies of containment as ecologies unto themselves. The Lilim who thrive within the growth medium are defined as other to those beyond the tanks, while the humans who linger on this inhospitable side of the boundary invite cellular degradation and mutation, a coming apart of the self at the level of the genome. But, while the Lilim of Accidental Creatures and Voskresenye in The Fortunate Fall (Carter 1996) inhabit watery tanks in order to thrive in the thin space of the air-world, the hybrid inhabitants in Tone of Voice (Sønderby 2019, 162) create tanks, or “chambers” of “plain air” organized like a “tiny city,” deep beneath the ocean, places where they can develop the technologies required to contain the waters of their ocean within the vacuum of space. For these ocean-­dwelling beings, the tank is a tool by which they access and assert agency within dominant life-worlds hitherto closed to them. The aquatic technities of the tanks invert and subvert the archipelagic imaginaries of the utopian literary tradition, reestablishing water as the site of “kinmaking practices” as described by Lewis (2019), and reasserting the materiality of water as a heterotopian technology (164). Across these texts, the tank serves simultaneously as a key function of a necropolitical order and as a domain for the gestation of alternative life-worlds. Containment can thus become a space of resistance, a catalyst for the agency which supersedes the system from which it emerged. To assert a boundary, then, can be a mode of resistance to fluid forms of control. In The Fortunate Fall, access to the digital-ocean of grayspace demands that users are partially uploaded, a dissective process where discrete segments of the brain are parsed and coded. The assertion of a boundary that maintains the self is, in this context, an act of resistance against the grayspace’s capacity to erode and dissolve subjects into a predatory equation of equivalence. In order to rescue that self from complete dissolution, navigations of grayspace are spun on a continuum between submission of self to submersion versus the reimposition of boundaries. But the location on one side or the other of the boundary does not denote equivalence; a common medium does not guarantee shared understanding. The Lilim in Accidental Creatures (Harris 2000, 156) must actively negotiate with the brains (computer processing units), which exist alongside them in the growth medium. Their ability to communicate by “silently saying hello with [their] hands” does not imply some kind of essentialized,

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watery togetherness. In The Salt Roads (Hopkinson 2003, 193), an amniotechnical drive to both protect wateriness and protect subjects from it underscores the “many flows, combining, separating, all stories of African people” mediated through the roving deity Lasirèn. Hopkinson emphasizes the dense materiality of wateriness: its “streaming possibilities” are grounded in the corporeality of her characters’ blood, sweat, mucus, their “feet slipping in mud, worms, and damp leaves” (318, 95). Water is full of barriers. The Fortunate Falls’s cybernetic-ocean is defined as much by its ecology of boundaries as it is by its insistent invasion of an individual subject’s boundedness. As protagonist Maya traverses grayspace, she witnesses multivarious digital subroutines and speeds as differential regions, segments and membranes, each containing varying degrees of internal order and chaos. These strange spatialities shape and condition the eerie ethologies of its local algorithmic inhabitants. A digital shark moves between segments, recalibrating its speed and breaching multiple membranes, in pursuit of its prey. Emphasis is thus placed on the differentials of speed as borders that ensnare and liberate equally. And… The boundary is porous; it is a confluence of merging waters. That which drifts in these blurred edges is hybrid. The water is neither one thing nor everything; rather, the medium itself is a site, a terrain that must be negotiated.6 This reminder that the substance that contains and surrounds is not passive foregrounds invisibled technologies as described by Adamczak (2016), whereby circlusion acts as a powerful corrective to penetration. Within the waters of Song, the Hands and Voices exist in symbiotic relationships. Whilst each part remains distinct, or remains a named individual, they establish configurations of “we” that permeate the syntax of their language. In the water, bodies become entangled and fold in on themselves or into others in productive webs of queer care and collective identity, and the idea of the singular self

6  As Dillon (2012, 8) stresses in her writing on indigenous futurisms: “The environment itself can be autonomous, resilient, and cruel.” “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms,” in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace Dillon (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2012), 8.

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as contained within the envelope of the skin is troubled. They manifest the always hybrid nature of watery embodiment, while their efforts to communicate with the human negotiators resonates with Neimanis’s (2009) call to acknowledge “our watery relations within (or more accurately as) a more-than-human hydrocommons” (2). For the Hands and Voices, the collective “we” is defined through touch as a physical meeting through the porous boundary of the skin, which establishes the hybrid identity, and in the water that moves between them and carries their song. The boundary is that which connects; it is the interstitial state of between that allows places to meet.7 In The Salt Roads, water is itself a saturated, animated source of history: The roving deity Lasirèn draws forth the “seas, breathing deep in their waters, carrying ships on their backs. Whole histories, of people, of places” (Hopkinson 2003, 212). Refusing to acknowledge the supposed normalcy of teleological models of history, Hopkinson generates a “storystream” in which the future flows through and across the many presents and pasts that comprise it—and which it continues to form (216). Through the storystream of interconnected and overlapping stories and myths, Hopkinson writes against the idea of a grand (linear) narrative of history, favoring a polyphonic structure that registers combined and uneven inequalities wrought by colonialism and colonial legacies.8 Thus, The Salt Roads can be read as a queer, Black archive understood as “a means to create a productive counternarrative to the radical otherness of the black body” (Faucheux 2017, 567). Hopkinson’s writing resists linear narratives that equate growth with a reproductive, “civilized” maturity and thus figure both queer and colonized peoples as underdeveloped. Against this narrative, she presents what Dillon (2012) has called “native slipstream [which] views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream” (3). This “navigable stream” relates to our 7  Water is not the absence of place; it is a site, like land, like air, which can be traversed. As Thomas Gladwin (2018) has noted regarding the people of Puluwat Atoll in Micronesia: “When a Puluwatan speaks of the ocean the words he uses refers not to an amorphous expanse of water but rather to the assemblage of seaways which lie between the various islands… Seen in this way, Puluwat ceases to be a solitary spot of dry land; it takes its place in a familiar constellation of islands linked together by pathways on the ocean.” See Gladwin, quoted in Stefanie Hessler, Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, ed. Stefanie Hessler (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018) pp. 31–81 (34). 8  “Combined and uneven” in the sense of the Warwick Research Collective’s conceptualization of the literary world-system. See: Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development.

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understanding of the wateriness of feminist speculative fiction: water both as a medium for gestating narratives, and as co-constitutive of those narratives. An enveloping pleasure of the porous self, cyborgian erotics demand an abhorrent yet alluring surrender. As The Fortunate Fall explores the re-­ imposition of borders in an age of digital fluidity and hybridity, it critiques the cyberpunk trope that all information is equal and equally accessible. Rather, the establishment of the cyborg self can be seen as the tactical deployment of obliquity, of that which cannot be harnessed by informatic capture. Hence, Maya seeks to make herself less knowable through the process of writing over the course of the novel. This mobilization of unreadability is both a mode of disguise for and a result of Maya’s queerness. But it is possible to transgress this boundary in multiple ways, through connective tissues and passageways. The cable that connects the human and whale halves of the self in The Fortunate Fall acts as an umbilical cord between otherwise disparate parts of the self. Similarly, the blue polymer that seeps into the cable networks in Accidental Creatures removes any delay between thought within the tank and action in the world outside. So, the outside is brought within by nature of its immediacy and intimacy. And / Or The boundary is a shifting condition, selectively admitting and denying. It is the site of access between states, where different forms of relationality are made visible. Boundaries are a site of ambivalence and potential, a spatiality in which hybrid forms can unfold, be curtailed, or both. In Tone of Voice, the Hands and Voices are rendered vulnerable through their containment, as a series of transmitters are dropped into the ocean, establishing a net around those within its boundaries. Here, the foreclosure of movement possibilities is an act of extreme violence that reconstitutes a segment of the ocean into a tank, whose borders are established and controlled by oppressive forces. This incarceration makes manifest the broader aims of the attacking forces to curtail interplanetary freedom of movement and establish lines of separation between sapient species. For those resisting, these forms of segregation are not enough to simply dismantle this barrier; the conceptual frameworks and systems of power that enabled its creation must also be dismantled.

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Through Lasirèn, Hopkinson’s text suggests ways in which the survival of oppressed and colonized subjects—and stories—is achieved not through transgressing boundaries but through their transformation. Following her appearance to Mer at the river, Lasirèn remains with her in the form of a piece of glass shaped like a whale, formed in the fire Mer had lit on the bank. Recalling Carter’s human–whale hybrid, the little glass whale evokes Neimanis’s conception of relationality between “more-than-human watery bodies” (2009, 161). Moreover, the symbolic kilning of the scene calls up the depictions of Lasirèn’s (2011) vèvè in which “a face resembling a pear-­ shaped diamond” illustrates “her genesis out of a legacy of slavery in Haiti and in the Caribbean. The grueling circumstances of the plantation pushed cultural production to evolve rapidly, a situation similar to the pressurized conditions that convert raw carbon into a diamond” (200). The economies of oppression and extractivism bound up in the material and symbolic capital of the diamond, the little glass ornament, the imposition of the name “Pretty Pearl” on Thais as she performs sex work, are mediated through Lasirèn’s signification as a figure of resilience, survival, and transformation. As we conceive of these texts as circluding receptacles—watery tanks involved in nonhierarchical, asynchronous flows of relation—so too can we conceive of Lasirèn as an exemplar of how the myriad storystreams of The Salt Roads variously divert, disrupt, and transform one another. Without dematerializing the real systemic, colonial violence that underscores and connects individual narratives, we can see that Hopkinson’s text “challenges Western notions of discrete selfhood by imagining that ‘[t]he oceans of consciousness are not contained, but are an endless expanse without a gulf, basin, or seabed,’” as Roberto Strongman describes (Tinsley 2011, 423). The “endless expanse” of this imaginary, which Strongman (2008) has connected to the “transcorporeality” of queer subjects in the Caribbean, recalls the “groundless and boundless movement” of Stryker’s transformative rebirthing (1994, 247). Where this journey begins for Stryker (1994, 245) when she “burst apart like a wet paper bag,” the “carrier bag” of Hopkinson’s text takes on the scale of entire “oceans of consciousness”; the multiple storystreams that flow against and through one another give rise to a structure that “betokens a shift in our largely unthought assumptions about what histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we may imagine” (Kilgore 2014, 564).

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Lewis (2019) considers an open/closed state that is either selective in what/who it allows through, or temporal in its enclosure, framing the boundary as technology and demanding that we: cultivate thoughtfulness as to the technologies we use—borders, laws, doors, pipes, bowls, boats, baths, flood-barriers, and scalpels—in order to hold, release, and manage water. When is it time to release a boundary? (166)

This ambiguity of enclosure is explored in Accidental Creatures where the tank as a bounded space becomes both a way to be separated—defined in otherness by the nature of the material it contains—but also intimately connected to all other tanks as being the containers of the same liquid. To be porous is not to be permeable, but to be able to allow things in and out, and alter them, filter them, attenuate them through allowing them through yourself, leaving some parts and taking in others. Water is full of barriers, while also seeping through that which contains it: At its edges, tide lines rise and fall, creating fertile zones of ambiguous territory.9

Touch, Tanks, and Talking Further thinking about boundaries and striation folds us back into The Fortunate Fall, where Carter envisions channels of communication that occur across several dimensions at once, looping through the physical, the virtual, and the spiritual and blurring distinctions between all three. These forms of communication may overlap, enhance, or occlude each other, depending on their speakers. They may destroy or manipulate each other, or come together in moments of love and communion. Carter’s (1996) conception of grayspace is as a realm of coded exchange, analogous to an ocean. It’s not the hyper-aesthetic, flashy, bustling, neon cyberspace associated with the genre, but something alternately quiet and enigmatic and roiling with untamed cybernetic life. The virtual petri-dish of grayspace and the vats filled with growth medium in Accidental Creatures share a creative kinship as generative spaces for new forms of 9  In the work of the Settler Colonial City Project in Chicago, the ambiguous status of land reclaimed from the water has been used as a legal tool to address critical issues of indigenous land rights. To traverse this land that was once water is to walk on unceded land. Settler City Colonial Project, Mapping Chicagou/Chicago: A Living Atlas, (Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2019).

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life, and so as progenitors of new ways of communicating. In both texts, water is imagined as a way of coagulating, making material, the space between interlocutors—not as a gap but as connectivity, conductive substrate to be suspended in. These substances are positioned as active agents in the experience of connection, holding, and transmitting streams of thought, data, speech, touch, and song inside of themselves. Through this process of experimentation and enmeshment, Carter and Harris tease out the complexities of multimodal communication, each in their own way, suggesting that characters who engage in communication across sensory realms become more—or other than—(post)human. Tone of Voice and Accidental Creatures each use water as a medium for housing and hiding a range of engineered bio-organisms with distinct and revolutionary technological potential, as well as a technology of communication and exchange that in its own right is a method of doing language in a multisensorial, communal way. Tim Ingold (2010) argues that …the air is not a person or a thing, or indeed an entity of any kind.. It is rather, quite simply, a medium … the medium is not so much an interactant as the very condition of inter-action. It is only because of their suspension in the currents of the medium that things can interact. (131–132)10

Air as the medium and condition for human interaction is taken for granted as neutral, and thus imagined as a figure of emptiness. Water, however, makes physicality impossible to ignore: It makes us reckon with touch and materiality, and makes us rethink the ways our bodies interface with the world. As Neimanis (2009) puts it, “[w]ater extends embodiment in time—body, to body, to body. Water […] is facilitative and directed towards the becoming of other bodies” (3). Through this watery challenge to individualism, we discover that we are not autonomous, nor autochthonous, nor autopoietic. Rather, as we require other bodies to bathe us into being, so do we gestational milieus for other other(s), thus creating malleable and ever-changing communities of hybrid, interlinked existence. In Tone of Voice, the song co-gestated by the Hands and Voices physically touches them all in an equal manner, by virtue of being a tangible thing, a pressure wave of sound that has physical impact on the world around it. The vibrations of language in the water are felt as a movement,

 Emphasis added.

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a caress across the surface of the skin: This creates a point of connection between those in dialogue, bridging their distance through the act of reaching out to touch. This technology of communication—which underpins and informs the flexible but interdependent nature of this community—relies on proximity, skill, and orientation in water, rather than on biological relationships. Thus, the Hands and Voices exist within what Lewis (2019) describes as a “productive web of queer care” that deeply troubles the spectacle of the conventional nuclear family (29). This is a fleeting spatial definition of identity and community alike, one that shifts as the individuals twist and move, but which is intimately related through a shared moment of contact, with water, and with one another through water. The Hands and Voices are pluralistic and intimately connected: suspended in the medium of their interaction they are caressed by the Song they coproduce and which, in turn, gestates them. In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) notes that skin “provides the ground for the articulation of orifices, erotogenic cuts on the body’s surface, loci of exchange between the inside and outside” (36).11 By virtue of its reliance on touch, communication through water creates the conditions for the body’s surface to become more porous, a site of communication with others, a slippery and blurred boundary. This defies the Western cultural perception—highlighted, among others, by Didier Anzieu—of the skin as an envelope for the self, an image of individual coherence and cohesiveness. As the bodies that are submerged in water are always, already touching, by virtue of their own wateriness as well as through their mutual immersion in a shared medium, they allow for the dismantling of a sense of unitary self-hood, and for the co-gestation of queer and utopic communal existence. In Accidental Creatures, watery communication similarly relies on close physical proximity and touch, as well as on a different definition of nonnuclear family: In the vat below, Lilith and her daughters were cuddling. They spent a great deal of their time in close contact with one another, grooming, feeding, but mostly, it seemed, just touching one another. (Harris 2000, 151)

The permeability of the Lilim’s bodily surfaces allows for currents of information to flow between and through their bodies. Indeed, as liquids

 Emphasis added.

11

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flow through epithelial barriers, distinctions between interior and exterior worlds dissolve, establishing a posthuman gestational commune that encompasses bodies and environments alike. This dynamic sense of community also allows the Lilim to connect with the multibrains, thus expanding their watery web of care to another species: “The brains listen to us; they like us better than you humans because we can communicate with them directly, through touch.” “Through touch.” “Yes… The same way we Lilim communicate with each other, through our skin.” (258)

Carter, on the other hand, is more ambivalent about the communicative properties of touch and its translatability to and from the physical and the virtual. The protagonist Maya and her would-be lover Keishi argue over definitions of touch that include or exclude the physical body; Maya maintains the necessity of the body, while Keishi advocates for a digital intimacy that, in her estimation, transcends what the body is capable of: “Love happens in the mind, in the soul—what does the union of two sweating bodies have to do with that?” “Love without touching—” “I would touch your mind more gently than any hand.” (Carter 1996, 159)

Here, Carter presents the possibility of an intimacy, even a tactility, that exists in the virtual (in grayspace), suspicious of the primacy of physical embodiment. Yes, there is something about touch that seems essential to meaningful exchange, but how can we expand our understanding of what touch can be? Enmeshment with grayspace, and a command of the electro-­ telepathic abilities Carter dubs “telepresence” allows characters to speak out of surprising, inanimate objects, to morph their appearance at will, to form hybrid bodies and beings, and (to some extent) to circumvent the systemic oppression of the physical world. This proposition opens new possibilities for ways of existing and communing that might not be possible, or permitted, in “meat space”—as is the case for Keishi and Maya, who live in a state with anti-LGBTQIA+ laws where their physical touch might result in mind control or execution. Similarly, thinking with Xandri’s autism and her experience of touch as she navigates queer, polyamorous

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relationships in Tone of Voice, illuminates the accessibility and intimacy afforded by expanded understandings of touch, and introduce new possibilities for queering the notion of kinship (Lewis 2019, 29). For her part, Harris posits a simultaneity of communication that is multisensory, framing conversations that used only one sense, or at a distance, as incomplete, with Lilith saying: If we were in the same room together talking, there’d be a whole second conversation going on. One that we can’t have, not with the constructs, maybe not even with true visual contact. The conversation between our bodies and our faces, the sensation of sharing space and time. (2000, 36)

Later in the text, the bio-engineered polymer that knits together the narratives of all characters is shown to also have the ability to establish channels of communication through the act of reaching out to touch. This electric blue polymer, described as “the colour blood would be, if blood were blue,” exists as a byproduct (72). It is perhaps not a creature in itself, but accidental, in a way that neither the Lilim nor the Brains are. Coagulated in the lethal, life-giving depths of the vats, the polymer is vital in the ways in which it spreads, conducts, and makes compromise and communication possible between the other life-forms. Though seemingly created by happenstance, there is something in the gestational logic of the growth medium that brought it forth. It is able to perform this conductive role by being neither organic nor machine—a role that ends up being crucial to the survival of the Lilim, the Brains, and the toppling of the capitalist hierarchy of the company. As it spreads across the building, the blue poly replaces all the preexisting electrical and fiberoptic lines “with biological conduits, removing the need for an interface between [the] multibrains and the transmission lines they manage” (255). Thus, though the brains exist in separate tanks and cannot touch, once they meet the blue poly, they become part of a new, powerful, biological network. This eventually takes over the GeneSys building, transforming it into a being of composite consciousness, working in tandem with the Lilim to destabilize the company’s control over them and the marginalized vat-divers. In both instances, these multimodal, multidimensional forms of language and communication lead to hybrid bodies and selves and new forms

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of queer(er) relationships and social structures. This communion is made possible via an understanding of liquid as a thing that touches; that actively fills space and facilitates an awareness of the conditions of meeting the other. It tints the distance between interlocutors and defines the terms of their engagement: Is the water between us poisonous? Is it revitalizing? Will making ripples in the water alert others of my presence? Is it safe to swim here? Can I swim here, or does the substrate merely permit me to float, or be carried along by others? Communicating via liquid technologies makes all these questions explicit, with their insistent and enveloping materiality.

An Opening Lewis defines amniotechnics as “the art of holding and caring while being ripped into, at the same time as being held” (2019, 101). In The Salt Roads, the fear of ripping is central. These questions about the viability of communicating across and with water are questions of life and death for millions of Black people throughout history. Hopkinson’s salt roads do not encourage the formation of an amorphous, universalized “we.” Rather she stresses the effort that it takes to come together, through time, across difference, in the face of great violence. In both form and worldview, Hopkinson’s novel explores the queer potentialities of asking: “what does it mean to be examining, absorbing, feeling, reflecting on, and writing about the archive as it is being produced, rushing at us—literally, to entertain an unfolding archive?” (Puar 2007, xxvii). As radical midwife Wicanhpu Iyotan Win Autumn Lavender-Wilson (Dakota) writes: “‘Mni wiconi’ [water is life] is not some fluffy abstract concept designed to fuel some hokey pseudo-spiritual practice. [C]lean water has the power to heal, contaminated water has the power to kill” (Lewis, 164). It is not enough to view our bodies as watery technologies, to acknowledge the power of the medium and the tank. Rather, we must view the watery capacities we have explored here—to communicate, to form and permeate boundaries, to gestate—as opportunities to act. Along with Lasirèn, the “water mother,” we must learn to declare: I can direct my own pulse now. I see how to do it. I, we, rise, flow out of ebb, tread the wet roads of tears, of blood, of salt, break like waves into our infinite selves, and dash into battle. (Hopkinson 2003, 64, 305)

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Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hessler, Stefanie, ed. 2018. Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hopkinson, Nalo. 2003. The Salt Roads. New York: Warner Books. Ingold, Tim. 2010. Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (S1): 121–139. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. 2014. Afrofuturism. In The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham, 561–572. New York: Oxford University Press. Latham, Rob, ed. 2017. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family. London: Verso. Moretti, Franco. 2011. Network Theory, Plot Analysis. New Left Review 68: 80–102. ———. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso. Neimanis, Astrida. 2009. Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 21: 161–182. https://doi. org/10.3138/topia.21.161. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rich, Adrienne C. 1995. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Reissued ed. New York: Norton. Richardson, Matt. 2013. The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Settler City Colonial Project [SCCP]. 2019. Mapping Chicagou/Chicago: A Living Atlas. Chicago: Chicago Architecture Biennial. Sønderby, Kaia. 2019. Tone of Voice. N.p.: The Kraken Collective. Strongman, Roberto. 2008. Transcorporeality in Vodou. The Journal of Haitian Studies 14 (2): 4–29. Stryker, Susan. 1994. My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–254. Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. 2006. The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Szeles, Ursula. 2011. Sea Secret Rising: The Lwa Lasirenn in Haitian Vodou. Journal of Haitian Studies 17 (1, Spring): 193–210. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. 2011. Songs for Ezili: Vodou Epistemologies of (Trans)gender. Feminist Studies 37(2, Race and Transgender Studies, Summer): 417–436.

CHAPTER 11

Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk Science Fiction Sasha Myerson

In truth, it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made […] (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6.)

Introduction In the 1984 “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna J. Haraway argues that “[m]onsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations.” In Haraway’s view, the othered monster, always placed at the far edge of society’s imagination, is an integral part of how Western

S. Myerson (*) Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_11

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society understands subjectivity and what it means to be human, from the “Centaurs and Amazons” that “established the limits of the centred polis of the Greek male human”; the “[u]nseparated twins […] in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases”; and to the “monkeys and apes” who became objects in the imagination of late twentieth-century “evolutionary and behavioural” science (194). Within Haraway’s manifesto, however, the figure of the cyborg is positioned as a new monstrous metaphor for an emerging feminist politics. As Haraway argues: “Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling” (154). What gives the cyborg such a radical potential is its position as a boundary figure and its rejection of wholeness and unity, for “[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with […] seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (150). The cyborg, in Haraway’s theorization, is thus a monster that rejects gender essentialism, refusing to draw its political legitimacy from any kind of appeal to what is natural. Such a creature “does not seek unitary identity” and generates “antagonistic dualisms without end” (180). In other words, the cyborg is a metaphor for describing political organization not based in any singular identity, but that functions as an assemblage of individuals from a variety of backgrounds and socioeconomic positions. It can hold multiple seemingly antagonistic or contradictory positions at once, proving malleable and adaptable. In Haraway’s position, a unitary perspective, or “single vision,” “produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.” As she concludes, this monster is not “a dream of common language, but of powerful infidel heteroglossia.” The term heteroglossia refers to a concept developed by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s. In a 1941 essay titled “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin places heteroglossia in opposition to unitary language: A unitary language is not something given but is always in essence posited— and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystalizing into a real,

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although still relative, unity—the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, “correct language.” (207)

This quotation carries an element of anti-essentialism that prefigures Haraway. For Bakhtin, “unitary language” is not something “given” or an essentialism that we should take for granted, but it is always “posited,” or always an imposition by the dominant power. To create such a unitary language, it is necessary to forcefully overcome a more complex, already existing heteroglossia or diversity of voice. Such a perspective is shared by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri (1987/2008) who, in A Thousand Plateaus, write that: […] there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich's words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.” (7)

To try to overcome this heterogenous reality through the ideological production of a unitary language is a strategy that seeks to reduce diversity into the illusion of control, or relative unity. This process, of determining the social norms of speech and language and regulating what is considered correct, functions as censorship. As Frantz Fanon (2008), a postcolonial psychoanalyst, writes, “[t]o speak a language is to take on a world, a culture” (25). Therefore, to create a unitary language, at the expense of all others, is to limit the potential worlds and ways of being it is possible to imagine. These ideas appear at the forefront of Kathy Acker’s 1986 novel Don Quixote, within which strange and contradictory monsters emerge. Presented as a series of inconsistent and interrupted dialogues between the titular Don Quixote—herself a queer, liminal rewriting of Cervantes’s knight—and various dogs, the novel itself seems monstrous, being sewn together from the plagiarized, rewritten works of various prominent authors in the literary canon including Cervantes, de Sade, and Charlotte Brontë. Echoing Haraway’s desire for heteroglossia, individual voices often get lost or submerged within a text that refuses to follow the conventional rules of speech. For example, in one paragraph, dialogue is no longer edited into separate lines, so it becomes unclear whether Don Quixote or a dog describes her(self) as “[t]otally devoted and totally

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callous just like Machiavelli. In short: a chameleon who has no goals except to change the world” (26). Don Quixote’s chameleon-like quality recalls the cyborg in her shifting form and contradictions, being able to appear both “devoted” and “callous.” As the novel progresses, Don Quixote and the dogs’ journey through a world without “love”—where “[t]he milk in the breasts of mothers all over this world is dry; the earth is barren; monsters, instead of children, run through our nuclear wastes”— until at the novel’s conclusion is laid out “Don Quixote’s Dream” (27, 200). She offers this vision in her final words: Even freaks need homes, countries, language, communication. […] The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in. Anywhere. It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you. Since humans enjoy moralizing, over and over again they attack us. Language presupposes community. […] We who are freaks have only friendship. (202)

The word “us” supposes a rejection of the human and an embrace of monstrousness and inhumanity. Here, Acker searches for community on the margins, and asks what language might be shared between those othered as “freaks.” Like Haraway, Acker identifies the “moralizing” process through which dominant Western society uses the specters of monsters, which “don’t fit in,” to establish the contours and limits of identity. What is being attempted in Don Quixote, as a novel, is a process of cutting apart language, stripping it away for salvage and stitching it back together as a heteroglossia, or a language of freaks and monsters. At the novel’s close, Don Quixote becomes “awoke to the world which lay before me,” perhaps implying that to speak, or write, this new language is “to take on” (2008, 25), in Fanon’s words, a different “world” and culture. It is the monster’s rejection of unitary language and the unitary subject, by extension, that is the subject of this chapter. In particular, I will examine the technologies of multiplicity in two feminist science-fiction texts from the 1990s—Laura Mixon’s Glass Houses (1992) and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)—paying particular attention to how they undermine binary understandings of gender. Both texts draw upon strong influences from cyberpunk and use the technologies of the cyborg and conceptual virtual space as mechanisms for creating multiply gendered identities and for constructing subjectivities that incorporate elements of the monstrous to resist binary categorizations. As such, this analysis follows Haraway’s argument that science fiction writers are “are

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theorists for cyborgs,” and that—blurring the distinction between fiction and theory—sf is a key theoretical device for understanding cyborg and multiple subjectivities (173). They both work to destabilize the idea that identity is singular—moving toward a broader definition of multiplicity— and examine how personas with multiple genders coexist within a single body. To assert these arguments, I will draw upon two strains of theory: transgender studies and postcolonialism. From trans-studies, I use here the work of Allucquére Rosanne Stone and Susan Stryker1 Specifically, I draw upon Stryker’s (2000) theory of the postmodern body to demonstrate how these novels present the self and the body as “an unstable field rather than [a] fixed entity […] a contested site for the production of new meaning” (596). In turn, I utilize Stone’s critique of the unitary subject and analysis of multiple identity. Stone’s (2001) work draws upon the writings of Deleuze and Guattari to provocatively claim that the question of whether “multiple selves” can “inhabit a single body” is becoming increasingly irrelevant, as digital and virtual technologies alter the “meanings of the terms self and body” (59). I also aim to put this body of theory into dialogue with the postcolonial analyses of multiple and hybrid identities. Relevant to this discussion is Homi K. Bhabha’s work on cultural hybridity and the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa. As the texts and theorists highlighted here indicate, this chapter focuses on the late 1980s and 1990s as a historical period in which studies of multiplicity, queer identity, and the postcolonial became increasingly emergent in academic and popular consciousness. This chapter is formed of two parts. The first defines and explains the concepts and debates surrounding the term multiplicity through a close reading of Glass Houses. Likewise, the second part presents a close reading of Brown Girl in the Ring, in the process exploring how the work of Bhabha and Anzaldúa contribute to an understanding of multiplicity.

1  It is important to note that while both Stryker and Stone write from a trans-perspective, and that their works are often placed into the category of trans-studies, the work of both writers engage with technology and postmodernism in broad and diverse ways. By my use of this label, I do not mean to confine these texts to this field, but to highlight that this tradition informs their perspectives.

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In Search of Multiplicity Multiplicity, the splitting of identity and the figure of the multiple, has long been a fascination in literature and film. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1882) through to films such as Psycho (1960), Fight Club (1999), and Split (2016), multiplicity has frequently been characterized as dangerous, violent, monstrous, or unnatural. Within medical discourse, such a fragmentation of personality is referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder: a psychiatric diagnosis reserved for the most extreme cases of multiplicity and identity alteration. Between 1980 and 1994, this disorder was more commonly referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), before being renamed in 1994 as DID in the 4th Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).2 To summarize the diagnostic criteria, the disorder is characterized by the presence of several distinct and enduring personality states (often termed “alters”), with periods of amnesia when these different states control an individual (Mollon 2001, 3). Severe childhood trauma, usually stemming from a sustained period of abuse, is considered the most common factor in the development of DID (4). In contrast to dramatic portrayals in art and media, this disorder is frequently misdiagnosed, undetected and carefully concealed by affected individuals (2). A moral panic around DID swept through psychiatry and popular media in the late 1980s and 1990s. Firstly, the very existence of the phenomenon that the diagnosis attempts to describe was a subject of intense debate. Ian Hacking (1998), in Rewriting the Soul, provides a history of DID and the debates that surrounded it. In 1972, the disorder was considered to be incredibly rare, with only a handful of reported cases. By 1986, “it was thought that six thousand patients had been diagnosed,” with “one person in twenty” thought to be affected, as these numbers persisted into the early 1990s. From the 1980s through to the mid-1990s psychiatrists argued over whether the disorder was induced by therapists or really existed at all. Was the disorder constructed by a “small but committed band of therapists […] aided by sensational stories in tabloids and […] TV talk shows?” Or, was it a sign that society needed to confront widespread domestic abuse within nuclear families (1995, 8)?

2  This shift in terminology is detailed in Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 17.

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In her 1994 book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquère Rosanne Stone devotes a chapter to the subject of DID, arguing that the consequences of these debates have wider implications beyond the field of psychiatry. Stone asks whether within clinical accounts there is room for a “nontraumatic multiplicity.” Stone does not deny that DID stems from trauma and can cause distress; she seeks to question whether the experience of “multiple personality (without stigmatising the final D)” might be a more common experience than its medicalized extreme. In particular she challenges Colin Ross, a clinical psychiatrist influential in the study of DID, who asks rhetorically, “can [there] really be more than one person in a single body [?] Of course there can’t.” Questioning whether multiple personality must always be pathologized as mental illness, Stone contends that Ross’s statement is itself ideological, relying on “cultural norms concerning the meaning of ‘person’ and ‘body’” (58). Therefore, Stone highlights that what is at stake in this discourse is the limits of personal identity and competing claims, between multiple and unitary subjects, to represent the structure of consciousness itself. The DID patient is positioned as multiplicity at its most extreme and monstrous, delineating the acceptable limits of personal identity. This is significant, because the terrain of identity has long been a site of struggle and discipline. The notion that identity is something singular, with each citizen assigned one name, is a tool of power and can be used as a form of social control. As Stone puts it, “laws that fixed the body within a judicial field” and “the invention and deployment of documentations of citizenship” were both processes of “fine-tuning surveillance and control in the interests of producing a more ‘stable’ manageable citizen” (90). If we consider this line of argument alongside Michel Foucault’s (1995) analysis of the rise of modern surveillance systems in Discipline and Punish, it becomes clear that Western modernity relies heavily on the construction of a unitary identity. Foucault considers the rise of the modern surveillance state as a “tighter partitioning of the population” through ever “more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information.” For Foucault, forms of “hierarchized surveillance” can be found in “working-­ class housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons [and] schools” (77, 171). In other words, with the development of modern nation-states and state power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the assignment of a singular name and identity to each individual became crucial to tracking and organizing individuals through systems of criminal justice, healthcare, education, and labor.

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In relation to gender, Stone provocatively and explicitly compares the efforts of psychiatrists like Ross—who guard the limits of permissible multiple identity—to those of psychiatrists and surgeons who seek to act as gatekeepers for both the boundaries of gender and access to transgender healthcare. As Stone writes, like “the surgeons of the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Project […] Ross still acts as a gatekeeper for meaning within a larger cultural frame, and in doing so his stakes and investments become clearer” (58). Certainly there are resonances between the two experiences: Both those who are multiple and those who are transgender are often ostracized as monsters and predators. But, to expand directly on Stone’s comparison, in both instances the construction “of a diagnostic category”—be it DID or gender dysphoria—results in a simultaneous and “inevitable blurring of boundaries as a vast heteroglossic account, heretofore invisible to ‘legitimate’ professions, suddenly achieves canonization and simultaneously becomes homogenized to satisfy the constraints of this category” (1992, 163). In other words, psychiatry here seeks to construct, in Bakhtin’s (2011) terms, a “correct language,” and by “imposing specific limits” upon the wide heteroglossic spectrum of possible gender and multiple identities so as to render it intelligible to its gaze (270). How then can such a common language be resisted, and how can heteroglossic experience (that which does not fit into the dominant socio-­ medical discourse) be heard and assert itself? In bell hooks’ (2015) words, “one can only say no, speak the voice of resistance, because there exists a counter-language” (230). It is to the beyond, to science fiction, that I turn to here for counter language. As Homi Bhabha (2004) states, “[b]eing in the ‘beyond’ […] is to inhabit an intervening space, […] to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality, to touch the future on its hither side” (7; italics in the original). By reading sf, I am looking to imaginations of the future and its monsters in order to bring back different forms of thinking and language to help redescribe and reinscribe experiences and ways of being that are, at present, struggling to differentiate themselves in the face of a more powerful common language. On the surface, Laura Mixon’s Glass Houses does not appear to be a radical text, taking the form of a conventional cyberpunk adventure/heist narrative. Set in a dystopian, near-future and climate-altered New  York, the novel’s ending challenges neither the neoliberal status quo nor the logics of capitalism. However, Mixon’s exploration of machine-enabled identity and multiplicity has provocative implications for the study of

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personal identity. The novel’s protagonist, Ruby, is a scavenger, or a “waldo wrangler” who barely makes a living on the margins of society by “performing hazardous salvage jobs” (22). Ruby works these jobs by projecting her consciousness via “beanjack[s],”or “wires” and “monofilaments” connected directly to her brain, into remotely operated robots, or waldos (10). On one level, these waldos serve a practical function: they are Ruby’s “only source of income,” and they allow her to earn enough money to survive in a harsh and dystopian capitalist society (16). On another level, they serve a more subjective purpose. In Stone’s (2001) search for a “non-traumatic multiplicity,” she looks to “communication technology” as an emerging tool for playing with and remolding identity. Integral to this is the “prosthetic character of virtuality” and the potential of digital spaces to enable experimentation with “personae within cyberspace” (59). In other words, as Sherry Turkle (1997) argues, computers and digital technology are “objects-to-think-with.” Just as “dreams and slips of the tongue […] brought psychoanalytic ideas into everyday life,” virtual, digital, and distributed presence “develop ideas about identity as multiplicity” (260). Lauraine Leblanc (1997) argues that in Glass Houses, Mixon explicitly grasps the potential of a “cyborg character” to “transcend gender by creating multiple split subjectivities.” In doing so, Mixon attempts to move beyond the language of binary gender, and, as Leblanc argues, this “multiplied state of being challenges even the conventions of language” by bending “the very structure of communication” (76). This intervention into the structure of language is done primarily through the shifting and fluid use of pronouns. Glass Houses is written in the first person, and when Ruby is projected into a “thousand-pound, titanium/metaceramic” salvage “waldo” called “Golem,” the language and pronouns Mixon uses to describe Ruby’s subjectivity shifts (2). For example, “me” becomes “me-golem” and “I” becomes “I-he” (2–3). A split, multiple subjectivity is rendered literally onto the page. The hyphen connects names and pronouns of varying gender; Mixon not only challenges the notion that the body is the sole locus of the self, but also begins to question whether the two selves, of different genders, might exist simultaneously in one place. Ruby does not simply switch between being herself (feminine) and golem (masculine), but is both simultaneously. The Golem and Ruby seem to have an emotional connection, with Ruby preferring to go “hungry” rather than “gut Golem for parts” (72). The visceral use of a bodily word like gut, rather than a more machine-like and

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detached term like scrap, emphasizes that, for Ruby, Golem is a body with personal significance. Ruby’s relationship with her own body seems to shift depending upon which perspectival device she uses to view it. When she looks at herself in a mirror, she laments the “rough spots” on her “fingers and palms,” along with “hands” that “all the lotion in the world couldn’t make […] soft” (31). However, when she views herself from the perspective of “I-Golem,” a different image emerges: I-Golem looked down at the woman in my arms. It was Ruby-me, of course […] She-I looked so young and vulnerable from the outside, not ugly and scrawny like me. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to keep her from harm; I wished she were back home, safe, right this very minute. (60-61)

Golem’s eyes do not simply provide a mirror, reflecting Ruby’s image back to her. Instead, they provide a different way of looking at herself. Several levels of disassociation are at work as identities mix. “My” comes to refer to Golem’s metal arms; Ruby’s body becomes other, just “the woman.” The hyphens placed between names and pronouns are used to reflect this blurring function like mechanical bolts on the page connecting words and subjectivities: Ruby-Golem’s new hybrid identity is, like Golem’s body, bolted together from spare parts, recycled “junk” and “bits of metal” (14). Compared to Golem’s large metal frame, Ruby finds her own body small and fragile. Sharing Golem’s body provokes a protective, almost nurturing instinct toward herself. In contrast to the earlier scene of Ruby looking at her reflection, her body becomes something valuable rather than something inadequate. In another part of the text, Golem is explicitly described as monstrous, being “an eight-foot, one-thousand-­ pound mechanical monster with nasty-looking appendages bristling like something out of a surgical nightmare” (177). The use of the phrase “surgical nightmare” seems to echo Golem’s power to remold and recontextualize Ruby’s subjectivity. Golem’s terrifying and constructed appearance, and his ability to split, multiply, and modify Ruby’s subjectivity recalls Haraway’s 1991 essay “The Promises of Monsters.” For Haraway, the figure of the monster and the unforeseen consequences of its creation “is not a fatal error, but an inescapable possibility for changing maps of the world, for building new collectives out of what is not quite a plethora of human and inhuman actors” (2004, 110). In particular relation to Glass Houses, the multiply gendered figure of Ruby-Golem, and Mixon’s unusual

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use of pronouns, offers up new possibilities for representing the multiple through language. Identity in Mixon’s text does not seem too static but always subject to revision and shifting perspective. This evokes comparison with Susan Stryker’s understanding of the postmodern body, where “the body […] is always in flux, an unstable field rather than a than a fixed identity, a vacillation, a contested site for the production of new meaning […] constantly engaged in transformation” (2000, 596). Recalling Haraway’s assertion that we are all already cyborgs, “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” Stryker argues that all bodies in the modern world are technologized, and “the body is a technology for performing subjective identifications and desires” (1991, 150; 2000, 596). Such a shifting perception of the body is central to Glass Houses’ narrative arc, which sees Ruby’s sense of self change as she overcomes agoraphobia. At the beginning of the novel Ruby rarely leaves her apartment, feeling panic each time she tries to leave: “My hand gripped the door handle and turned to stone. Panic boiled up in my throat” (Mixon 1992, 51). However, this begins to change as the narrative progresses. As Leblanc writes, “Ruby […] progressively moves away from the safe, interior […] domestic sphere of her apartment to the dangerous, masculine, public world of the city” (75). In his 1997 essay “Trapped by the Body?” Thomas Foster (2002) similarly identifies this journey of ongoing identity-formation and maturation: “The real story of the novel concerns Ruby’s process of overcoming her agoraphobia” (451). At first, Ruby comes to appreciate being outside in the city through the body of a small spider-like waldo called Rachne, commenting that it is “easier to love such a place when your awareness is encapsulated in a metal body that puts nothing of you at risk” (Mixon 1992, 78). These machinic experiences improve her confidence until, “[t]he outer door barely caused me a moment’s hesitation. I guess you’d call it progress.” By the novel’s end, Ruby’s sense of self transforms and, in Turkle’s words, becomes “multiple but integrated” and “grounded in coherence” (1997, 258). For instance, toward the end of the novel, after overcoming a series of mishaps and misadventures, Ruby looks at herself in the mirror again, and has a moment of reflection: Maybe it was it was how I’d rescued Rachne from Vetch all on my own, or how I’d stood up to Melissa, or the climb I’d just pulled off, or maybe it was a whole lot of things. But I looked different to my eyes. Better. […] A smile spread across my image’s face. (1992, 187)

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Through the series of haphazard, often machine-mediated, incidents described above Ruby’s perception of herself changes. The novel’s form as an sf adventure narrative is essential to this process. As Don D’Ammassa (2009) writes in his study of adventure stories, “the physical journey is mirrored by an interior one; the protagonist learns something about the world at large, or about his or her own personality” (viii). In an adventure narrative, coincidence, and circumstance lead to elements of improvisation, as moments of chaos pull toward a larger whole. Mixon consistently attempts to make the multiple through presenting the reader with a range of subjective assemblages in Glass Houses. As a result, Ruby’s transformation follows psychologist Robert Lifton’s (1993) process of becoming a protean, or many-sided, self: Rather than collapse under […] threats and pulls, the self turns out to be surprisingly resilient. It makes use of bits and pieces here and there and somehow keeps going. What may seem to be mere tactical flexibility, or just bungling along, turns out to be much more than that. We find ourselves evolving a self of many possibilities […]” (1)

Once again, emphasis is placed here on an evolving rather than a static sense of self. The image Lifton presents, of a self-constructed of “bits and pieces here and there,” recalls a Frankenstein-like monster made up of different and conflicting body parts and subjectivities. The “many possibilities” of this ever-evolving self likewise seem to echo the calls for heteroglossia and expanded possibilities, beyond binaries of all kinds, which run through the work of Haraway, Acker, and Stone.

The Sutures of the Borderland In her 1994 essay “My Word’s to Victor Frankenstein,” Stryker (2006) uses Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for transgender experience. Challenging those who argue that trans-bodies are somehow unnatural or a product and agent of the medical establishment, Stryker writes that “the consciousness of the transsexual body is no more the creation of the science that refigures its flesh than the monster’s mind is the creation of Frankenstein” (248). In a passage that recalls Kathy Acker’s call to the monstrous in Don Quixote, Stryker, like Haraway’s cyborg, rejects any claim to natural origins:

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Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. […] Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. (247)

In Stryker’s argument, those who fear trans-bodies, and those who reject trans-people on the basis that they are unnatural, fear finding the “seams and sutures in themselves,” which indicate that their bodies and minds are equally the products of modern industry, technology, and science. As Stryker provocatively writes, “you are as constructed as me.” Within this essay, then, Stryker deliberately assumes and reclaims a “monstrous identity” for herself in order to “name parts of myself I could not otherwise explain” (249). The mantel of the monstrous is therefore assumed to push the limits of identity and redescribe subjectivity beyond the confines of normative language. Likewise, in her 1987 book Borderlands, the queer and postcolonial poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa uses the languages of wounds to elucidate her subjectivity. Describing the US–Mexico border as a “1,950 mile-­ long open wound […] running down the length of my body,” Anzaldúa describes the space of a “borderland” as a “vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (2-3). In this in-between space, “the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los astravesdos live here: […] the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, […] the half dead; in short those who cross over, pass through, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (3). Anzaldúa identifies the inhabitants of borderlands as those who dominant society considers to be freakish or monstrous. In this sense, her writing echoes strongly with Haraway’s (1991), as at the border live those “monsters” who “have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations” (180). Another way of conceptualizing this might be found in Bhabha’s notion of the interstice. An interstice describes a small intervening space, and, for Bhabha, these “in between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration” (2004, 1-2). Identity is stitched together in these spaces as “[t]his interstitial passage between fixed identifications,” or binary positions, “opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4). In

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other words, it is within the border, within the wound itself, that the dream of a heteroglossic language of monsters, and its cacophony of multiple voices and experiences, might be found. Such contradictory spaces and forms of subjectivity emerge in Nalo Hopkinson’s (2012) Brown Girl in the Ring. In the novel’s prologue, a dystopian overview of a future Toronto is presented to the reader. An economic collapse has caused “investors, commerce and government” to withdraw “into the suburb cities, leaving the rotten core to decay” (4). The inner city becomes a “doughnut hole” of poverty surrounded by more affluent suburbs (10). The only people left in the city are “street people,” “poor people,” the “stubborn,” and those who saw “opportunity” in the “decline of authority” (4) In this top-down “totalizing” perspective, the reader is “lifted out of the city’s grasp” in a manner reminiscent of what spatial theorist Michel de Certeau (1984) calls the perspective of the “voyeur” (92). However, in the novel’s first chapter—narrated from the viewpoint of its protagonist, Ti-Jeanne—the reader is presented with a more horizontal view of the city. To use de Certeau’s terms again, this perspective is closer to that of the “walker,” a collective entity “whose bodies follow the thick and thins of an urban text” and “make use of spaces that cannot be seen” (93). From this perspective, individual subject positions become visible, and the inner-city is recognizable as a borderland space. From this first chapter, the city emerges as a contradictory space of poverty but also of heterogeneous possibility, as Ti-Jeanne encounters the various inhabitants of the city. For example, in one encounter, Ti-Jeanne encounters “Mr. Reed,” a “self-appointed town librarian” (Hopkinson 2012, 10). With Reed, Ti-Jeanne exchanges an “eczema ointment”—prepared by her grandmother who “freely” mixes “her nursing training with her knowledge of herbal cures”—in return for a loan of several books on “medical symptoms” and “gardening,” with “the real find” being a book titled “Caribbean Wild Plants and their Uses” (10, 12). This exchange demonstrates several things about the novel’s setting and Hopkinson’s perspective as a writer. Firstly, it indicates that despite governmental neglect and material injustice, Hopkinson imagines this borderland as a space where community self-organization and exchange can emerge. Secondly, in this borderland a multiplicity of knowledge and perspective is valuable: Modern medical knowledge is practiced in symbiosis with more marginalized folk systems of knowledge. The inner city therefore has an interstitial quality generative for the emergence of multiplicity as, in

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Bhabha’s (2004) words, alternative “strategies of selfhood” and “sites of collaboration” develop (1-2). Hopkinson’s text also engages with multiplicity at the level of personal identity. The mechanism that enables the multiple subject in this novel is a world of spirits derived from Afro-Haitian religion.3 While these practices may not conventionally be considered as technology, within Hopkinson’s novel they are used, to quote Turkle’s (1997, 260) framework, as “objects-to-think-with.”4 In this respect, the various spirits that surface in the text function as tools, in a similar manner to Ruby’s waldos, which help to rewrite individual subjectivity and think through multiplicity. Therefore, I consider them to operate in this text as technologies of multiplicity, as there appears to be a multiple aspect to these spirits. As Ti-Jeanne’s grandmother explains, these “spirits,” or “loas,” are the “oldest ancestors. You will hear people from Haiti and Cuba and Brazil and so call them different names […] and no matter what we call it, whether Shango or Santeria or Voudun or what, we all doing the same thing. Serving the spirits” (126). The practice presented here as serving the spirits has a heterogeneous aspect, as each spirit assumes different names and forms in different communities. One of the most prominent spirits in the novel is referred to as “Legbara,” and this spirit seems to have a particular connection to Ti-Jeanne, being referred to as her “spirit father” or “guardian” (126). This bond could imply that Legbara is an aspect of Ti-Jeanne’s self, functioning as a distinct persona within her. At several points in the novel this spirit possesses and takes over Ti-Jeanne’s body. When Legbara, also referred to in the text as the “Prince of Cemetery,” takes hold of Ti-Jeanne, her voice becomes a “deep,” “rumbling,” and “unearthly sound” (117). At first, this entity is referred to in the text as “Ti-Jeanne/Prince of Cemetery,” recalling Mixon’s use of fused pronouns 3  In colonial Haiti, slaves abducted from Africa syncretized elements of varied Western African religious practices with Catholicism. Spirits, or loa, often have multiple aspects and names. This practice is often called vodou, and similar but distinct practices can be found in Louisiana and Cuba. Jeffrey E.  Anderson, Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 30–35. 4  While Western discourse often disparages the practices of indigenous and colonized communities as “primitive,” in her introduction to the Walking the Clouds anthology, Grace Dillion demonstrates that these communities and their practices can be interpreted as scientific and contribute to the transmission of such knowledge. Grace L.  Dillon, “Imagining Indigenous Futurism,” in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 7–8.

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and names, before settling into just “Prince of Cemetery.” Ti-Jeanne’s transformation appears monstrous as her body becomes “taller,” her legs stretch into “daddy-long-legs,” and her mouth fills with “the smell of rotting flesh.” This grotesque depiction generates an unsettling uncertainty around the limits of Ti-Jeanne’s subjectivity, as her personality and body become malleable. Notably, Legbara, often also called Legba, is, according to anthropologist Brian Morris (2006), “the ‘master of the crossroads’” and “the guardian of boundaries and of roads and of paths” (196). Additionally, theologian Will Coleman (2000) identifies Legba as a “master of language,” knowing all languages, who can “use and manipulate semiotic codes to his own advantage” (8). This suggests that the stretching of Ti-Jeanne’s body, when Legbara possesses her, can be interpreted as a metaphor for a transgression of boundaries and an outgrowing of limits imposed on the self. The limits of gender, power, and identity all become stretched and malleable. Furthermore, Legbara’s capacity to speak many languages further identifies Ti-Jeanne’s subjectivity as a product of the borderland space of the hollowed-out city, where a heteroglossia of perspectives and knowledge practices circulate. Brown Girl in the Ring’s narrative arc focuses on a clash between multiple and unitary subjectivity. This is represented on the one hand by Ti-Jeanne, whose subjectivity, when inhabited by Legbara, is multiple and whose approach to the city emerges horizontally from street level, and, on the other hand, by Rudy, the novel’s villain, whose subjectivity is unitary and who seeks to rule the city from the top down. Having taken up residence in the “CN Tower,” the tallest building in the city, Rudy describes the “ruined city” as “his kingdom” while he “look[s] down at the city […] thousands of feet below the observation deck of his tower” (2012, 199–200). While Ti-Jeanne and her grandmother desire to serve the spirits, Rudy seeks dominion over them by killing people; trapping their spirits in a “duppy bowl,” or “calabash”; and using their souls to keep himself young and powerful (160). In their climatic fight, Ti-Jeanne outwits Rudy at the top of the CN Tower by calling a cacophony of different spirits through her head, perhaps representing the triumph of practices of multiplicity over Rudy’s authoritarianism. Ti-Jeanne recognizes that the “CN Tower dug roots deep into the ground where the dead lived and pushed high into the heavens where the oldest ancestors lived. The tower was their ladder into this world” (221). The tower seems to form a crossroads, where different worlds meet and different futures for the city branch. Ti-Jeanne calls out the names of the spirits, or loa, and mirrors this with a

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“call to the earth,” calling to “every one Rudy kill to feed he duppy bowl—come and let we stop he from making another one!” This process of calling is intense and physical, and as Ti-Jeanne’s head feels “stuffed and full,” she hears “the rhythm of the blood vessels in her brain, pounding like drums” (222). This suggests that the spirits are emerging from within her, and through her, as much as they are external: Hopkinson literalizes the multiple, as by drawing on the spirits Ti-Jeanne draws on diverse aspects of herself to confront Rudy. The “Oldest Ones” begin to arrive— including the “skull faced, impossibly tall” (223) Legbara—followed by “ghoul after ghoul” (225), as all of Rudy’s victims return for vengeance. Hopkinson presents a visceral image of Rudy being torn apart as “the weight of every murder he had done fell on him,” with “chunks of his flesh” being ripped off (226). In this grotesque image, the multiple spirits literally tear apart Rudy’s unitary self and body, and, in Bakhtin’s (1984) words, this becomes a “pregnant death, a death that gives birth” (25). To elaborate, as Ti-Jeanne descends from the tower, and returns to the city, there is a focus on abundance and fertility, with descriptions of “leaking” breasts, a “massive penis,” and spraying “semen” (Hopkinson 2012, 232). Freed from Rudy’s influence, new life and a heteroglossia of practices flourish. To emphasize this, as Ti-Jeanne passes through a marketplace on her way home, she is bestowed by the stall holders with a diverse list of gifts including “rabbit pemmican,” a “carved gourd rattle,” and “honey.” This focus on reproduction and abundance recalls Bakhtin’s (1984) theory of the carnival. Bakhtin views the carnival as a moment where the world is turned “inside out,” a “utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (11, 9). According to Bakhtin, one of the primary ways this sense of carnival manifests itself in literature is through “grotesque realism” (24). This turning upside down of the body, the focus on “the reproductive lower stratum” allows for “new birth,” the conception of a new world and the bringing forth of something more and better (21).

Conclusion Both Mixon’s Glass Houses and Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring work to produce languages for exploring and representing multiple subjectivity. In the process, they undermine boundaries of the unitary subject, create promising monsters and indicate the power multiplicity holds for revising subjectivity. In working to create a language of monsters, and in pushing

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the limits of personal identity, both novels evoke a destabilizing and distributed multiple figure that offers new political trajectories for incorporating difference and recovering heteroglossia. Both novels also work to challenge the social norm that only a single gender can reside within the body, by actively imagining multiply gendered subjects. In a contemporary moment that has seen increasingly assertive trans- and nonbinary activism, these texts help demonstrate how science fiction can powerfully rewrite subjects and bodies. They also resist any homogenization of gendered experience and point toward different ways of doing gender. This chapter has also worked to explore useful and generative connections between different strains of feminist theory: The body of the monster provides a proactive metaphor tying together the diverse perspectives on border spaces, hybrid identity and language that can be found across the works of Stone, Stryker, Anzalduá, and Bhabha. These texts are particularly resonant in our present moment, illustrating strategies for contesting the disciplinary power of digital technology. As the technological tools of tracking and surveillance continue to proliferate, becoming multiple offers one such method of responding to a network of surveillance-­ capitalism that demands subjects constitute a unitary self, with ever more personal, identifying data attached. I end with a return to Deleuze and Guattari (2008): It is necessary to “make the multiple,” enact its subjectivity and put it into practice (6).

References Acker, Kathy. 1986. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. London: Grafton. Anderson, Jeffrey E. 2008. Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood Press. Anzalduá, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 2011. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Coleman, Will. 2000. Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/ American Ways of “Telling the Story”. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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D’Ammassa, Don. 2009. Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction. New  York: Facts On File. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dillon, Grace L. 2012. Imagining Indigenous Futurism. In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L.  Dillon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2008. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Get Political edition. London: Pluto-Press. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foster, Thomas. 2002. ‘Trapped by the Body’? Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction. In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 708–742. London: Routledge. Hacking, Ian. 1998. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science-Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In The Haraway Reader, 63–124. New  York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 2015. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. New  York: Routledge. Hopkinson, Nalo. 2012. Brown Girl in the Ring. New  York: Grand Central Publishing. Leblanc, Lauraine. 1997. Razor Girls: Genre and Gender in Cyberpunk Fiction. Women and Language 20 (1): 71–76. Lifton, Robert Jay. 1993. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic Books. Mixon, Laura J. 1992. Glass Houses. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. Mollon, Phil. 2001. Multiple Selves, Multiple Voices: Working with Trauma, Violation, and Dissociation. New York: Wiley. Morris, Brian. 2006. Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stone, Sandy. 1992. The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10 (2): 150–176.

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Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. 2001. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stryker, Susan. 2006. My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. In The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 244–256. New  York: Routledge. ———. 2000. Transexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology. In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M.  Kennedy. New  York: Routledge. Turkle, Sherry. 1997. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Phoenix.

CHAPTER 12

Lesbian Cyborgs and the Blueprints for Liberation Héloïse Thomas

The cyborg is scary because she is a lesbian. Films such as Her or Blade Runner code cyborgs and other manifestations of artificial intelligence as female, tethering them to the central narrative of human males. Even when the female AI seems to break free as in Her, where the virtual assistant OS Samantha leaves her “owner” Theodore by the end of the movie, the narrative remains centered on Theodore: The film is not about her finding and thriving in autonomy, but about him (Yee 2017, 94). On the other end of the spectrum, there is Furiosa, from Mad Max: Fury Road, who is inhabited and moved by all the feminist rage she and women like her have accumulated over the years in a bleak, hopeless, and oppressive patriarchal post-apocalyptic landscape. That Immortan Joe should be so trustful of her at first is surprising, but his trust allows for Furiosa’s betrayal to be even more complete. After her years of preparation, it is not even so much a betrayal as the final unleashing of Furiosa’s power as a queer-coded woman/cyborg against hegemony.

H. Thomas (*) Anglophone Studies, Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, Lyon, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_12

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The cyborg fantasized as a submissive, sexualized, and fetishized woman-coded entity is a recurring trope in countless science-fictional narratives. But the cyborg is undeniably queer as well, insofar as it is simultaneous close to and estranged from organic humanity—a tension that continues troubling the conventional science-fictional gaze, or that of the white, cis-heterosexual male. This may be part of the repeated attempts to paint the female cyborg as compliant: Its underlying queerness makes it unruly and exceeding the hierarchies that power structures want to impose. By fantasizing it as something that can be tamed and controlled, conventional narratives reveal that what is feared is not so much the inhumanness of the cyborg, but its deep connections to queered womanhood. Consequently, the cyborg is scary because she is a lesbian, and the lesbian herself is scary: she contradicts established ways of what a woman should look and act like.1 She refuses to be assimilated into patriarchy (or into any hegemonic system). If she is, she dies (which she often does). She upends patriarchal and colonial conceptions of gender and sexuality, and is thus inherently radical and revolutionary. In this chapter, I will dig further into the connections between womanhood, queerness, and technology within contemporary speculative narratives to better highlight the links between the figure of the lesbian and that of the loosely defined cyborg. Unsurprisingly, technology in these narratives possesses both repressive and emancipatory aspects, which I will theorize in conjunction with the role of female queerness in the quest for liberation. I will also investigate how the (post-)apocalyptic narratives in which these dynamics are played out influence the role of the lesbian as the harbinger of a new kind of narrative—one that is not grounded in domination and exploitation, and where heroism is not tethered to hegemony.

Situating the Lesbian Cyborg Twenty-first century understandings of the cyborg have largely been based in Donna Haraway’s (1991) work, which establish the cyborg as a fundamentally ambivalent entity despite queerness being the least equivocal 1  My use of “lesbian” as interchangeably synonymous with “queer” or “sapphic,” here, is not meant to erase other forms of queerness related to womanhood (bisexuality, sapphism, etc.), but to resurrect the full subversive power of a label that remains the site of uneasy identification for many today despite its long, rich, and inclusive activist history. I am also using the pronoun “she” as a shorthand, although lesbians can and may often use a variety of pronouns including “she,” “they,” or neo-pronouns.

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thing about it. Haraway grounds the cyborg in a postmodern conception of the self: By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. […] The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. […] The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. (150–151)

This closely aligns with contemporary (late twentieth century, early twenty-first century) visions of queerness as a refusal to surrender to narratives of wholeness, unity, and totality. Of these, Eve Sedgwick’s (1994) reading is probably the most well-known, where “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (7).2 The original label of sexuality—that which does not squarely fit within the realm of cisgender heterosexuality—leads to a much broader vision: queer points to what is strange and elusive, what deviates and dissents, and what does not fit neatly into any norm.3 It comes as no surprise then that Haraway and other theorists (2008) would also apply the concept to the boundary between human and nonhuman worlds: “queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting operation” precisely because that boundary underlies so many of the normative binaries that have become naturalized into society and shape our relationship to gender, race, sexuality, disability, and so forth (xxiv). In this perspective, Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (2008) provide perhaps the most encompassing definition of queerness when they explain that “queer,” as a term,

2  This resonates with David Halperin’s (1995) use of the word: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (62). 3  This semantic broadening has its drawbacks, if the long history of reproaches addressed to queer theory by such fields as feminist studies and critical race theory is any indication. It has been argued that the definition of queer has broadened so much as to become meaningless, that the term has been mired and muddled by cultural issues rather than used to create political and social movements.

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comes to signify the continual unhinging of certainties and the systematic disturbing of the familiar. […] The unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, über-inclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility, unthinkability, unintelligibility, meaninglessness and that which is unrepresentable is an attempt to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries. (4)

Instead of the death-driven and death-bound dynamic heteropatriarchy has relentlessly described, queerness proves the key to opening back a sense of futurity that had been foreclosed by the apocalyptic determinism, the teleological linearity of hegemony. The uncanny dimension of queerness gestures back at the unsettling presence of the cyborg, which thoroughly transforms and displaces the familiar contours of our human worldmaking. The queer cyborg dwells in ambiguity and hybridity. This genders her, cleaves her from the normative narrative of human masculinity (also coded as white and cis-heterosexual), and consequently makes her threatening because it exposes the artificiality of what had been for so long naturalized: gender, race, human consciousness. Sennah Yee has retraced the critical history that locates “mechanized women” (female AIs, robots, cyborgs) at the “convergence of ideological implications, sexual fantasies, and myth-making” (2017, 86). In contrast with male-coded AIs, often represented as “strong and silent types” and “authoritative figures who represent inner conflicts of what it means to be a human versus what it means to be a machine” (Yee 2017, 86), the characterization of female-coded AIs is more often than not centered on their sexual availability (for male humans). Male cyborgs are a “safe” site in which to explore what lies at the heart of humanity because their ideal is human masculinity: their duality is not threatening insofar as it can be absorbed into that ideal. Female cyborgs, on the other hand, are systematically othered: their duality is inseparable from duplicity, and since they cannot aspire to be like human men, they must therefore lead men astray.4 4  This reading resonates, of course, with the quintessential narrative around human women as naturally two-faced liars and schemers: A woman accusing a man of rape will more often be suspected of lying to destroy that man’s life, for example. Trans women are particularly vulnerable to that accusation and the ensuing violence, since their transness is coded as a form of duplicity meant to betray cis men (or cis women: one particularly violent transphobic narrative depicts trans women as “men” intent on “infiltrating” feminist circles in order to have access to cis women, even when it has been proven over and over again that trans women are just as much the victims of patriarchy and misogyny as cis women).

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Jack Halberstam (1991) has already argued that “gender and its representations are technological reproductions” (440), where gender, “like computer intelligence, is a learned, imitative behavior that can be processed so well that it comes to look natural” (“Automating Gender” 443). In his reading of the entanglements between the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve, Apple’s logo (the bitten apple), and the anxieties produced by the proximity between human and machine, he suggests that [t]he female cyborg replaces Eve in this myth with a figure who severs once and for all the assumed connection between woman and nature upon which entire patriarchal structures rest. The female cyborg, furthermore, exploits a traditionally masculine fear of the deceptiveness of appearances and calls into question the boundaries of human, animal, and machine precisely where they are most vulnerable—at the site of the female body. (440)

The fear of autonomous technology is inseparable from the ways we gender machines, and is rooted in the patriarchal desire for control, as Andreas Huyssen (1981) has shown retracing the complex feelings Western societies have had regarding technology. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the “android,” once considered the pinnacle of technological achievement, was “no longer seen as testimony to the genius of mechanical invention; it rather becomes a nightmare, a threat to human life” (“The Vamp and the Machine” 70). The cyborg became the demonic site of apocalyptic anxieties that crystallized into an association between woman and machine as irremediably, ontologically Other: [A]lthough woman had traditionally been seen as standing in a closer relationship to nature than man, nature itself, since the 18th century, had come to be interpreted as a gigantic machine. Woman, nature, machine had become a mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control. (70)

Following Monique Wittig’s dictum that lesbians are not women—“for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems”—the female cyborg’s anti-essentialist severing of womanhood and nature is inevitably lesbian (Wittig 1980, 110). By “lesbian,” here, I draw upon Adrienne Rich’s (1986) concepts of lesbian existence and the lesbian continuum. The former “suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the

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meaning of that existence,” while the latter “include[s] a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience” (51). Though “lesbian” has historically always been capacious as an identity label and made rooms for those whose experiences could not be tidily summed up by womanhood, it nevertheless remains rooted in womanhood through its desire to affirm and center the lives and experiences of those targeted and oppressed by patriarchy. The horizon of the lesbian cyborg is not mere equality: It seeks to completely dismantle those binaries, and along with them, the very fictions that order and norm our world. But for all its ambiguity, its hybridity, and its inherent queerness that disrupts and complicates the ways we think about the Other, can the cyborg truly be a means of emancipation? Asma Mansoor (2017) explains: [T]he idea of a cyborgian body is problematic because this de-essentialising concept tends to equate all forms of marginalisation that women across the race spectrum experience. I see this apparent uniformity as a more camouflaged way of further marginalizing all those who have already historically been marginalized. This is because a supposedly de-essentialised cyborgian body does not erase these forms of marginalization, since the ideological milieu which generates them continues to follow the normative ways of classifying human bodies, cyborgian or not. (4)

Mansoor makes clear that the cyborg does not spring fully formed from nor unblemished by its historical circumstances: the algorithms that have played a part in the cyborg’s creation are not devoid of patriarchal and colonial bias (Browne 2015; Noble 2018). Could the cyborg truly escape this atavism? Although Mansoor offers no definite conclusion, she does indicate that by implicating women in the process of coding and fabricating AI—especially women that exist in a subaltern position because of their race and gender—and by “de-racialising AI and extricating it from an overarching white male epistemology,” cyborg politics might have a chance (2017, 7).

Warrior Cyborgs Unless this process happens, it is foolish to claim that the cyborg is post-­ gender, post-racial, and/or post-hegemony. The cyborg carries within her very code the dynamics against which she means to resist—whether she successfully resists in her resistance or subversion, however, is not

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guaranteed, if only because the authors representing female cyborgs build their own biases into the code of the representation. Through her analysis of the movies Ex Machina (2014) and Her (2013), Yee (2017) deconstructs examples of female AIs that, even in their attempts to break free from their male human captors, remain circumscribed by the male gaze. By contrast, I want to turn to representations that actually endeavor toward liberation, depictions that portray cyborgs as refusing to operate within patriarchal narratives of power and control and achieving liberation on their own terms.5 A recurring motif in these representations is the presence of the lesbian cyborg, a warrior who runs counter to the fantasy of women as submissive, passive victims to be preyed upon and exploited. Instead, and suggesting other ways of being and relating to the world, she steps up as a catalyst of change, waging war against oppression in order to end the very possibility of war and subjugation. Perhaps one of the most well-known texts to stage feminist violence as a revolutionary response to patriarchy, Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (published in France in 1969, translated in the United States in 1973) was hailed as a feminist manifesto and a parody of the hypermasculine epic genre. The guérillères—a pun on “guerrières” (the female form of the noun “warrior” in French) and guerrilla—and their allies topple the old patriarchal world order with guerrilla-type attacks aiming for the total destruction of patriarchal institutions, values, and language. While the guérillères are never actually described as cyborgs, their position outside of gender norms, their integration of and interactions with technology, and their refusal to play into salvation history effectively marks them as such. They are harbingers of a counter-apocalypse—one that targets patriarchy but that does not seek to replicate the old hierarchical and hegemonic power structures, even under another guise. As Hélène Wenzel (1981) explains, at the beginning of the war against patriarchy, female power was valorized over the male principle, symbolized not “by the womb which receives, reproduces, and nurtures (in) the heterosexual ideology, but by the vulva, active, empowered, an autonomous locus of desire and energy” (281). Les guerillères quickly start questioning “this reductive self-­ identification,” and end up rejecting these symbols along with “the 5  Among the authors of these representations, queer women are the overwhelming majority, and this is hardly a coincidence: their lived, embodied experiences as queer women trying to extricate themselves from patriarchy have inevitably impacted the way they theorize, imagine, and represent womanhood.

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language which has shackled woman to an identity as a sexual being” (Wenzel 1981, 281). Their counter-apocalypse brings a revelation that proves truly emancipating because it breaks open the old, oppressive category of womanhood without replacing it with another essentializing category: “They say that at the point they have reached they must examine the principle that has guided them. […] They say they must break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture. […] They, the women, the integrity of the body their first principle, advance marching together into another world” (Wittig 1973, 72). In French, the guerillères are referred to with the pronoun “elles”—the female form of the pronoun “they,” a nuance lost in the English translation—but “elles” here does not designate an immutable essence of womanhood (as with Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine), but a historically defined class. Most of the guerillères start off as women, but through the war they wage against patriarchy and out of which they emerge victoriously, they un-become women, and by choosing anti-­ patriarchal kinships, centering those oppressed by patriarchy, these guerillères are eminently lesbian and queer. In becoming warriors and enacting an apocalypse unto patriarchy, the cyborg guerillères reclaim agency, free themselves from normative womanhood, and, quite inevitably, end up turning toward lesbian feminism to create a new world brimming with different ways of being. The ripple effects of this sort of representation can be felt far and wide. Two recent visual examples are Imperator Furiosa from the post-­ apocalyptic action film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and the pastel-­ colored world of the Cartoon Network TV series Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar (2013). Even though these two productions appear diametrically opposed in their aesthetics, they both stage warrior cyborgs whose horizon of action is not merely winning a war, but choosing the possibility of life over the restrictions of deadly oppression. Furiosa is probably one of the most recognizable symbols of female agency that does not replicate the “strong female character” trope in recent pop culture history. Starting out as war captain for the tyrannical Immortan Joe in a bleak, devastated post-apocalyptic world, her goal is to break free Joe’s concubines (also called “breeders”). At first, she decides to go to a utopia called the Green Place, where she was born into the clan of the Vuvalini before being kidnapped. When she realizes the place is now uninhabitable, she heads back to Joe’s Citadel, where water and greenery abound, to end

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his tyranny, break the cycle of post-apocalyptic oppression, and hopefully restart a sense of futurity that had been cut short by Joe’s unrelenting reign. Even though her actual sexuality is never clearly labeled or even mentioned, Furiosa is very much queer-coded: she is androgynous, even butch, and her worldview and actions are thoroughly shaped by her relationships to women, if not what she means to do for women. Furiosa is also a cyborg, in that her left arm is a prosthetic. Her identity as post-­ apocalyptic warrior fighting for justice cannot be separated from a specifically lesbian type of feminism. Conversely, Steven Universe might seem out of place as an animated show, primarily meant for children, yet it also bears insight into how the nexus of lesbian/cyborg/warrior can be remodeled to map out multiple paths toward liberation. The titular character is a young boy whose father is human and whose mother was a “Crystal Gem”—a gem-based alien defender of the earth and life-form. Steven is raised by three other Crystal Gems who were close to his mother, and although the Crystal Gems are technically sexless and nonbinary, they all use she/her pronouns and have highly varied gender (and racial) presentations: they are not women, but their representations function as queered commentaries on the diversity of womanhood.6 Combining their life-forms with technology, the gems are also cyborgs. Steven’s mother was Rose Quartz, a high femme warrior and leader of the resistance against another group of imperialistic gems. Her right-hand Gem is Pearl, whose original purpose was to serve Rose Quartz unquestioningly, and who became one of Rose’s fiercest and most protective warriors. Pearl is devoted to the memory of Rose and to the task of raising and protecting Rose’s son, and it is very clear that Pearl was in love with Rose, though her feelings were most likely unreciprocated. Pearl has gone through many wars, but what animates her is imagining what lies beyond; the hope that time will not be foreclosed by war gives her optimism and courage to see the war through, protect the one she loves, and love and raise Rose’s child. The show sidesteps the problematic association of futurity with the figure of the child by replacing the child within a lesbian genealogy and within a network of queered kinships that resolutely maintains a sense of futurity and possibility open, against the foreclosure of the future heralded by imperialism and colonialism. 6  This nicely echoes showrunner Rebecca Sugar’s comments about identifying as a nonbinary woman.

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Breaking the Past and the Future Open When lesbian cyborgs fight in apocalyptic wars, they pose the greatest threat: They are never mere soldiers acting under orders that they follow unquestioningly, but instead, they are warriors insofar as they possess agency, but serve their allegiance to a greater cause or purpose. Because their goal is to topple old orders that have benefited the few to the detriment of the many, the lesbian cyborg is recurrently utopia-driven, even when utopia appears under the guise of revenge. Thus, lesbian cyborgs are recurrently positioned at the end of the world to act as the final savior destined to terminate the narrative of salvation and replace it with a narrative of queerness, profusion, and potential. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) imagines Earth in the near-­ future as a wasteland: Political powers have warred over scarce resources, and human bodies have lost their hair, skin pigmentation, and reproductive organs. The last remnants of the ruling classes have retreated to a space station that siphons off the remaining planetary resources; there, technology is used by the fascistic authorities to both vacuously entertain and enforce surveillance and repression, although there are clear sites of resistance. The novel reimagines Joan of Arc as an ecofeminist guerrillera who has not been affected by the physical changes endured by the rest of humanity. She is a cyborg whose technology is not so much machinic as it is telluric. Rather, she is an “engenderine,” gifted with preternatural powers that make her closer to chthonic matter than to organic, human matter, and that she uses to provoke cataclysmic changes in order to eradicate what she perceives to be the actual initial source of apocalyptic planetary devastation—namely, humanity.7 She considers that the dominant human mode of relating to the planet, dictated by capitalistic and white supremacist paradigms, is not sustainable and must make space for other life-forms that will create other ways of being in and relating to the world. Joan’s companion, Leone, saves her from execution by the novel’s arch-villain, Jean de Men. The novel makes it clear that Joan and Leone are bound both by circumstance and by love, with any hope for the world to start again resting on their queerness. Their lesbian desire for each other is the condition for the renewal of life on the planet, tying ties into 7  This goal, especially in this current political climate, may convey undertones of ecofascism, and this is where the novel’s ambivalence is maintained: Joan’s aim may be interpreted as both a fascistic one that wraps itself in mock concern for ecology, but also as a gesture toward other ways of living.

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the novel’s broader discussion on reproductive futurity. While Joan has a “functioning” reproductive system, Leone does not, yet they each still embody womanhood as they untether the latter from a biological essentialism. Jean de Men hunts down Joan to experiment on her, as he has done with countless other women, to recreate a biosynthetic reproductive apparatus that would be both organic and inherently artificial, creating a new strand of cyborg humanity fashioned after him. Joan thus stands in as a symbol of renewal of life, but with different connotations depending on who is asked. While the narrative fumbles a great many times, especially in its evocation of genderqueer being and transness, it still attempts to distance itself from the conventional albeit simplistic association of womanhood and reproduction with the feminine womb. Joan may bear the single still-functioning reproductive system on the entire planet, but she stands for the possibility of renewal without resorting to “human reproduction.” Instead, she asks Leone to kill her so that her body can rejoin the earth, and so that the properties in her blood can work their supernatural power. This final sacrifice does not eradicate humanity: While the space station carrying the moribund ruling classes is on its way to a fiery end into the sun, the rest of the earth-bound survivors will learn to integrate with their environment, or to become a part of an ecosystem without trying to control and rule over it. In her last letter to Leone, Joan entreats her to embrace this new world where nothing has been decided nor fixed. The very last chapter consists of a single question—“What is the word for her body?” (Yuknavitch 2017, 267). We do not know who utters it, nor do we know whom it refers to, but the sentence crystallizes the question at the lesbian cyborg’s heart: namely, how to articulate her body into existence, the result of which may open up new worlds and countless possibilities. Similarly, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019), a time-travel novel mostly told through letters, stages Red and Blue as two time-travelers and soldiers referred to as “she” despite their mysterious nature. Red and Blue are spies, working respectively for the Agency and Garden—two organizations that have developed and refined time-traveling technology to the point that they seek to build empires transcending time and space, straddling timelines, and solidifying one version of history. The two travelers are clearly not entirely organically human—the initial description we get of Red in the very first pages mentions “flaps of pseudoskin”—but they are not machinic either (2). As they travel through time in an act evoked as “braiding,” creating and being impacted by temporal loops, aporias, and rhizomes; the matter of their

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humanity gets increasingly complicated. While each is convinced their vision of history and humanity is the moral one, the narrative makes it clear that, if only because both sides are willing to perpetuate massacres, neither can actually claim any moral high ground—the world is a much too messy place to accommodate such binary thinking, even when those inhabiting the world are deluded into accepting these binaries as natural, normal, and even necessary. Red and Blue are supposed to be enemies, but through the trail of letters they start leaving for each other, their game of stealth and death turns into one of flirting, followed by meaningful engagement to the point that they eventually risk everything to escape their organizations and find each other. Red and Blue are yet another example of lesbian cyborgs fighting against hegemony, which here takes the shape of colonialism and imperialism at the scale of time itself. In the process, the two spies make the decision to shift their allegiances—not to a patriarchal and militaristic political power but to each other. Similar to Joan’s last words to Leone—“you were my epic other in some new myth […] You deserve the word ‘love,’ spoken over and over again and untethered from prior lexicons”—Blue’s last letter to Red reconfigures the arc of history by using time-traveling to literally carve out space and time for their relationship (Yuknavitch 2017, 262, 265): What would Genghis say if we built a bridge together, Red? […] suppose that we defected, not to each other’s sides, but to each other? […] I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win. (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 2019, 198)

The conscious choice to choose each other, rather than “pick a side,” is not so much a move to place the individual above the collective as it is a desire to create new modes of relationality that eschew the toxicity of both hegemonic human collectivity and individuality. In The Book of Joan Christine, a character who seeks out Joan and supports her quest for freedom, comes to this realization as the climax of the novel draws near: It isn’t that love died. It’s that we storied it poorly. We tried too hard to contain it and make it something to have and to hold.

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Love was never meant to be less than electrical impulse and the energy of matter, but that was no small thing. The Earth’s heartbeat or pulse or telluric current, not small thing. […] But we wanted it to be ours. Between us. For us. We made it small and private so that we’d be above all other living things. We made it a word, and then a story, and then a reason to care more about ourselves than anything else on the planet. Our reasons to love more important than any others. (Yuknavitch 2017, 92)

Choosing “love” for the lesbian cyborg means not just choosing a person but choosing something much larger than humanity: the possibility for the world itself to live and thrive.

Blueprints for Liberation In a forthcoming article on the technologies of storytelling, I analyzed more in-depth the aspects and roles of technology in Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018), especially regarding queer liberation. With this novel, I now wish to end the reflections I have laid out, for it exemplifies the foundational struggle between power and queerness that lies at the heart of technology. Blackfish City takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that resulted from capitalistic greed, global struggles over resources, and genocidal attempts at political control. Located in a fictional version of the city of Qaanaaq, the setting is embedded in cyberpunk aesthetics, with digital infrastructure and technology completely integrated within the inhabitants’ lives. Two forms of technology prove particularly interesting, as the two characters through which each technology is materialized happen to be lesbian cyborgs who are trying to find a way back to each other. First is “City Without a Map,” or “an elliptical, incongruent guidebook for new arrivals, passed from person to person by the tens of thousands” (Miller 2018, 5). The identity of its author—individual or collective, human or machine, consciousness, or bot or “ghost malware”—is at first left unknown, reflecting how increasingly sophisticated software has grown so intertwined with organic life that defining “artificiality” begins to feel like a fool’s errand (6). The “Author” is eventually revealed to be Ora, a survivor of genocide who was held at Qaanaaq’s mental asylum before being rescued by her family, among whom Masaaraq is leading the charge. Masaaraq and Ora are effectively both cyborgs insofar as they are “nano-bonded,” meaning they are “emotionally melded with animals

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thanks to tiny machines in their blood” (4). The origins of such a connection remain mysterious, but what is made abundantly clear is that it makes Masaaraq, Ora, and their people targets for the political powers of the time. While the dismantling of hierarchies between living beings, or dismantling placing humans as the only beings capable of consciousness, is what makes the cyborg monstrous, queerness and race play a role. Nano-bonded people are called sinful abominations by those who wish to eradicate them—a vocabulary that recalls homophobic religious parlance. As well, they are the victims of colonial displacement and genocide. Nevertheless, nano-bonding proves to be if not the solution, at least one highly viable solution to the breaks, or a sexually transmitted disease that seems to unravel the mind as it replaces the host consciousness with visions and memories not its own. When she is liberated, Ora urges her family—the one she has been reunited with, such as Masaaraq, and the one she has unexpectedly found, such as Soq, a young genderqueer adult nano-­ bonded by Masaaraq—to help her continue her work spreading nano-­ bonding as a practice. The goal is not merely to recreate a nano-bonded community, but to establish its vision of relationality—one that upends hierarchies and institutes radical equality between living beings as the norm, not an exception in the face of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. That Ora and Masaaraq should be lesbian cyborgs of color or that their grandchild, Soq, should be the one to lead the efforts to unite the downtrodden population of Qaanaaq toward the goal of collective liberation, is hardly a coincidence. By affirming themselves in the world through their anti-hierarchical, anti-hegemonic reappropriation of the technology that had supposedly signed their death warrant, the lesbian cyborgs have proven to be the catalyst of liberation, paving the way for the next generations to imagine themselves fully into the present. While technology may be instrumentalized to restore patriarchal control over women’s bodies violently, or to establish large-scale empires that literally transcend time, the lesbian characters, cyborgs themselves, use it to their own ends—that is, they reopen a sense of futurity that had been foreclosed by hegemony. While the limitations of these narratives cannot be overlooked, they do remind their readers that, given the prominence technology has acquired in twenty-first century daily life as a tool of surveillance and resistance, repression and revolution, and given the ever-­ looming threat of end times, the key to utopia might lie in the margins, with those who compel us to disengage from patriarchy, whiteness, capitalism, and other modes of oppression. The lesbian cyborg offers not salvation but a blueprint for liberation.

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References Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. El-Mohtar, Amal, and Max Gladstone. 2019. This Is How You Lose the Time War. New York: Saga Press. Giffney, Noreen, and Myra J.  Hird, eds. 2008. Queering the Non/Human. Burling: Ashgate. Halberstam, Jack. 1991. Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine. Feminist Studies 17, no. 3 (Autumn): 439–460. Halperin, David M. 1995. Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. London: Free Association Books. ———. 2008. Companion Species, Mis-Recognition, and Queer Worlding. In Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, xxiii–xxvi. New York: Ashgate. Huyssen, Andreas. 1981–1982. The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. New German Critique, no. 24/25 (Autumn–Winter): 221–237. Mansoor, Asma. 2017. Cyborgs Are Neither Post-Racial Nor Post-Gender, Ms. Haraway! Paper Presented at the 2nd IIUI-UNCW International Conference, Islamabad, Pakistan, October 2017. Miller, George, dir. 2015. Mad Max: Fury Road. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Miller, Sam J. 2018. Blackfish City. New York: Ecco. Noble, Safiya. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1994. Tendencies. London: Routledge. Sugar, Rebecca, creator. 2013. Steven Universe. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers. Wenzel, Hélène. 1981. The Text as Body/Politics: An Appreciation of Monique Wittig’s Writings in Context. Feminist Studies 7 (2, Summer): 264–287. Wittig, Monique. 1973. Les Guérillères. Trans. David Le Vay. New  York: Avon Books. ———. 1980. The Straight Mind. Feminist Issues 1 (1, Summer): 103–111. Yee, Sennah. 2017. ‘You bet she can fuck’ – Trends in Female AI Narratives Within Mainstream Cinema: Ex Machina and Her. Ekphrasis 17 (6): 85–98. Yuknavitch, Lidia. 2017. The Book of Joan. New York: Harper Collins.

PART IV

Posthuman Females

CHAPTER 13

Becoming Woman: Healing and Posthuman Subjectivity in Garland’s Ex Machina Rocío Carrasco-Carrasco

Introduction This chapter privileges the posthuman as a key to understanding the intricate—yet problematic—relationship with the latest innovations in contemporary advanced societies’ artificial intelligence and robotics. It stresses the importance of critically approaching popular representations of posthuman subjectivities as they reflect current anxieties concerning sex and gender, as fueled by the creation of artificial life. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), here, poses questions about the ethics of creating artificial life and the alleged superiority of the (male) human body over all forms of “life,” be they “natural” or “manipulated.” The movie focuses on Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificial intelligence that assumes gendered traits to achieve her aims in traditional humanoid ways and, ultimately, to reassure herself, later adopting these features consciously. In particular,

R. Carrasco-Carrasco (*) COIDESO, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_13

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however, Ava’s feminine nonhuman nature has led scholars to diverse interpretations concerning gender politics as a field. At different levels, Ex Machina plays with anticipation, deception, and expectation to offer a narrative of female healing in adverse technologically driven environments. The movie hinges on Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a billionaire mogul and Internet genius with a God complex, who has designed a humanoid artificial intelligence (Ava) and assigned it a sex, gender, and capability for emotion. As viewers learn, Nathan lives in self-­ inflicted isolation and uses his own experiments on robotics to comfort himself. Nathan’s eventual guest—Caleb (Domhnall Gleason)—needs to adjust to this spatial and conceptual framework in order to succeed in a “mission” of finding out whether Ava is self-conscious, or whether she is just an intelligent machine capable of talking, smiling, and flirting convincingly like a human being. My work engages here with contemporary writings on critical posthumanism, and further seeks to contribute to debates on how the feminine nonhuman nature is depicted on screen by reading the movie’s protagonist—Ava—as an inspiring version of the cinematic posthuman. Approached from many different standpoints, the posthuman as an issue has proved to be complex and contradictory. The posthuman is a perspective that forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes, yet it attends to the specificity of the human and its way of being in the world, its body, and its relationship to nonhuman forms of life (Wolfe 2010, xxv). It is precisely this attempt to grasp our ambiguous and complex relationship with the world that has led to a diversification of the posthuman discourse, although many of the concerns overlap. In line with critical posthumanism, my concern here relies heavily on Rosi Braidotti’s (2002) notions of subjectivity and difference, where Braidotti takes an affirmative and vitalist Deleuzian approach to difference, arguing that we exist in a plenitude of possible “becomings” that are continually changing and transforming. When dealing with the idea of “becoming,” Braidotti contends that “the intensities this engenders create pleasures and affirmative and joyful affects that open the subject up to a multiplicity of possible differences” (71). Hence, examining subjectivity not as a universal consciousness but as a process is crucial for this (and any) analysis of the posthuman. I thus position my analysis of Garland’s movie in relation to the proposed liberatory politics, specifically under Braidotti’s ideas, while being aware that the consequences of Ava’s becoming in this specific film also implies other instances of exclusion, as it will be debated later in this paper.

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As I contend, Ava consciously appropriates existing structures of knowledge and power and internalizes them in completely different ways from humans. This process of conscious appropriation and manipulation allows the posthuman character to contest humanist and sexist discourses and allows her, eventually, to resist them. Precisely, by focusing on Ava and her move toward healing—or a becoming woman—this paper proposes that Ex Machina stands as a valid example of how the posthuman Ava needs to overcome the violent consequences derived from her imposed and constructed nature, ultimately finding a space in the hostile world she has been forced to live in. This appropriation of humanist (and sexist) values concerning sex and gender, working as a kind of healing therapy, allows Ava to manipulate the prevailing system and fight against informing patriarchy. On the one hand, the novelty of my reading relies on the fact that it privileges the posthuman as a means to contest and resist sexist assumptions about femininity. In addition, and at another level, I contend that viewers are exposed to a posthuman experience, whereby in focusing on Ava’s posthuman subjectivity embedded in a material reality that incorporates the latest technological advances, does the film allow empathy across difference, allowing spectators to share a posthumanism while reflecting on what it means to be a woman in contemporary advanced societies. Hence, the film plays with sex, gender, and genre to offer a valuable posthuman alternative to male superiority and control. Before undertaking my analysis, I must clarify my position regarding the posthuman, as it is a complex and ambiguous term that comprises many areas of inquiry. As suggested above, I am interested in critical posthumanism and its proposal of affirmative (or vitalist) politics of becoming, while being aware of the difficulties of finding truly posthuman characters depicted in mainstream cinema. Ava is a cinematic product that nevertheless challenges the traditional humanist paradigm, whereby nonhumanity and/or posthumanity are built on assumptions of inferiority and/or marginality. Critical posthumanism—best defined by Katherine Hayles (2005), Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006, 2011, 2013), and Stefan Herbrechter (2013)— has its main theoretical basis in Michel Foucault’s theory on biopower, Donna Haraway’s (1991) notion of the cyborg, and Hayles’s vision on the relationship between the cybernetic and the human. These analyses incorporate deconstructionist (feminist) critique and other currents of thought that contest our anthropocentrism and the prevailing image of the self provided by humanism. However, and according to Braidotti (2011), we

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should not stop at critical deconstruction, but move on to the active production of alternatives (127). In line with this and according to Herbrechter, the task of critical posthumanism is to analyze the process of technologization based on the idea of a radical interdependence or mutual interpenetration between the human, the posthuman, and the inhuman (20). Another common ground is that these theories stress the importance of examining subjectivity, and the ways that we as individuals are situated in relations of power. The posthuman subject has been considered a means to eradicate traditional configurations of power, contesting the old binary logic that assumed the subject to be rational, universal, and ethical as opposed to the “other.” That is, we need to rethink the body and understand the subject outside the status quo. In this sense, the posthuman “subject is no longer cast in a dualistic frame” and aims at displacing the understanding of difference (Braidotti 2013, 92). Here, the subject is but a process in constant change. The posthuman, or assemblage in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, has the desire to be, and for that the body represents a complex structure of subjectivity. These theories will be useful for the analysis of the posthuman as depicted in Ex Machina. It is precisely the film’s suggestion of an alternative to patriarchy that makes Ava appealing. The posthuman subjectivity displayed by this artificial intelligence is considered a conscious and rebellious position, an embodied and embedded process of becoming that allows her to find an escape and eventually to heal. She is an abjected other that is capable of desiring and changing, at least partially, existing structures of power. This portrayal of Ava’s posthuman nature coalesces, in part, with material or embodied posthumanism, a branch of critical posthumanism that states that bodies are not static figures, but entities mediated by complex relational processes and practices that produce positive assemblages and sustainable alternative futures. In a similar way, Ava’s body is an assemblage, a process in constant, unstable change that plays with society’s oppressing rules to her own convenience in search of a version of post-anthropocentrism. In this regard, she opposes the transhumanist vision of disembodiment to offer a valuable example of material posthumanism.1 1  As a movement, transhumanism opts for a radical transformation of the human condition by existing, emerging, and speculative technologies, such as regenerative medicine, radical life extension, and speculative technologies, such as mind uploading and cryonics. In general terms, it suggests the end of the biological body and advocates self-responsibility in maintain-

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Nonetheless, one should also consider how corporeal posthumanism advocates for a polymorphic body, one that is not reduced to sexual difference, that takes into account the complex set of differences that pass into our beings, something that Ava at least initially fails to suggest. In order to collapse the sex/gender, body/mind, and human/nonhuman dichotomy, Ava needs to rearticulate them and perform the feminine. The aim of posthuman feminists is, according to Braidotti (2013), to think beyond traditional humanist limitations and look for subversion “not in counter-­ identity formations, but rather in pure dislocations of identities via the perversion of standardized patterns of sexualized, racialized and naturalized interactions” (99). Ava manages to contest the status quo from within, for instance, although the idea that different is positive is not totally articulated in the film. She is, as stated before, a cinematic version of the posthuman that needs to fight against her male oppressors and challenge our expectations as biased spectators. The very idea that popular science fiction films reflect contemporary concerns limits, in a way, the possibilities of the genderless and inclusive kind of posthumanism advocated by materialist feminists and other critical thinkers. In spite of these limitations, and this is precisely the aspect that I would like to stress, Ex Machina offers an understanding of the posthuman subject that can be considered the first step toward the posthuman predicament postulated by materialist thinkers. As stated before, the original point here is that in spite of the limitations imposed by cinematic conventions, the character of Ava is regarded as posthuman in line with Braidotti’s claims. As it will be argued, Ava manages to develop consciousness and propose a new (troubling yet significant) relationship between humanity and science and technology, which empowers her in unexpected ways. Her inner anxieties are deliberately shown to audiences, and the very fact that audiences may eventually identify with her enables for the adoption of new posthuman experiences. In this sense, my argument here is that this science fiction film allows us to see things differently and to think of new, more productive possibilities for our bodies and worlds, suggesting, at

ing health and well-being. This movement—also referred to as utopian posthumanism and advocated by Nick Bostrom, Hans Moravec, Max Moore, or Natasha Vita-More—is directly linked to the enhancement of the body and to ideas of immortality within cyberspace. In broad terms, it encourages the evolution of the human into something superior to our critical condition.

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least partially, Braidotti’s (2013) claims for a “move beyond […] lethal binaries” (37). In order to illustrate these matters, this chapter reappropriates the ontology of becoming postulated by Deleuze and developed by Braidotti and other critical thinkers, untangling Ava’s process toward healing. Her posthumanism works as a way of healing that allows her to perform the perfect femininity in order to, paradoxically, liberate herself from male oppression. Precisely, her feminine posthuman body raises many concerns regarding sex, sexualities, and subjectivities, which will be addressed in the first section of this paper. In opposition to other readings of the film, I will attempt to illustrate the artificiality of gender in the techno-spaces provided, and the way these conventions are malleable and can hence be manipulated by the posthuman to pursue freedom, change, and hope. Even within the oppressive spaces of reclusion and confinement Ava is situated in, she creates a suitable space from where to fight against the system. The second section focuses on Ava’s healing and further liberation process, defending the idea that her conscious and rebellious positioning makes her a truly posthuman character in spite of her sexualized appearance, a rather provocative statement.

The Manipulation of Gendered Spaces, or Ava’s Becoming The representation of gender in techno-spaces has been largely discussed by feminist theory from different approaches and angles (Balsamo 1996; Haraway 1991; Hayles 2005; etc.). As I will attempt to illustrate in this section, Garland’s movie problematizes gender politics in the sense that Ava’s femininity is considered something imagined by Nathan, or a masculine (and masculinist) idea of the female that nevertheless allows her to fight. Precisely, Ava manages to alter the claustrophobic and oppressive room where she stands as an object of male desire and transform it into a liberatory space from where to articulate her plan and head for her freedom and final healing. The glass room where she is constantly being exposed becomes, paradoxically, a liberatory space in the sense that it provides her with the opportunity of acquiring a technologically enabled capacity for agency, and, ultimately, for resistance. Hence, and within this suffocating space, she ends up manipulating Caleb, Nathan, and even audiences by performing a role that allows her liberation from oppression.

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In Braidotti’s terms, Ava can be regarded as a metaphor for becoming. In Nomadic Theory (2011), Braidotti addresses the process of becoming, which she defines as “sustainable shifts or changes undergone by nomadic subjects in their active resistance against being subsumed in the commodification of their own diversity” (122). In the case of “becoming woman,” Braidotti warns us that this position is at risk of colluding with the strategies of advanced capitalism, “insofar as this system can be described as a force that deterritorializes, pluralizes for the purpose of profit.” Processes of becoming, then, are forms of resistance that need to be generated from within this system (120). In the movie, Ava can be read as a form of resistance within a closed oppressive space that nevertheless enables her to fight. From her marginal position as a nonhuman, Ava manages to reverse convention and manipulate spaces of domination in her search for liberty, ultimately resisting repressive power structures. Her femininity, therefore, is an imposed artifact to be later manipulated by and for the posthuman’s benefit. However, the on-screen depiction of a gendered artificial intelligence that follows the humanist rules concerning sex and sexuality does have different readings. Ava’s sexualized image obviously conflicts with feminist tenets of liberation and with the affirmative politics of embodied posthumanism. Her artificial body has been designed according to Western standards of beauty. Like other women robots invented by Nathan, Ava is beautiful, seen nicely dressed and visually appealing, reaffirming patriarchal assumptions about sex and gender. Her body, then, is disciplined to correspond to a social/cultural ideal, which recalls Foucault’s idea that the social control of the body can be used to produce a specific type of subjectivity within. In relation to this issue, Jennifer Rhee in The Robotic Imaginary (2018) argues how “symbolic AI’s simplified worlds are developed around stereotypes and familiarity” (75). The so-called robotic imaginary “encompasses any machine intelligence that replicates, whether in form or behavior, a vision of the human” (6). In doing so, Rhee argues, it produces a new relation of resemblance that humanizes the nonhuman and expands the boundaries of the human (10). Nathan attempts to produce in Ava a predictable and “familiar” femininity, but, instead, he creates someone able to mimic this specific subjectivity in order to get what she really wants, a fact that complicates the film’s plot. One can affirm that dominant ideologies, represented in the film mainly by Nathan but also by Caleb, shape the way her body is felt—indeed, we get to know that Ava’s body was designed according to Caleb’s online

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pornographic profile. In the same way, Nathan also creates Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), a sexualized and racialized image of feminity. In relation to ideology, Sherryl Vint (2007) affirms, “[it] is the source of these various discourses that inform our ideas about our bodies and hence inform our experience of the lived body” (18). Not surprisingly, some commentators (Watercutter 2015) have read Ava as another instance of a sexualized “fembot” in the tradition of Metropolis, Blade Runner, or Stepford Wives. Indeed, sex and gender are visibly reproduced in the posthuman body of Ava, heavily instantiating familiar and oppressive codes. In her, cultural codes of gender intersect with the technologies of the posthuman body to finally reproduce recognizable patterns of femininity. The idea of assigning sex to robots has raised numerous concerns among critics and robot designers. For many roboticists, gender attribution is a process of reality construction and, hence, the (mostly male) designers tend to assign sex based on biased assumption about femaleness and maleness. In relation to this issue, Balsamo (1996) has argued that gendering robots makes clear how gender belongs to the order of the material body and the social discursive or semiotic systems within which bodies are embedded (36). The social construction of robots is embedded, then, in sexist (and racist) methods and practices. In Surrogate Humanity (2019), Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora explore “the surrogate human effect,” to refer to those racialized and gendered forms of the human that are designed and created by engineering projects with the aspiration to reach “technoliberation.” Their main argument in the book is that social robots and AIs are predetermined by “techniques of differential exploitation and dispossession with capitalism,” limited by prior racial and gendered imaginaries (4). In their study of social robots and emotions, they argue that the position of the robot is always inferior, since robots can only mirror human states and must “perform affect transparently, and therefore cannot perform proof of the hidden interior psyche that would indicate equality to the human” (110). Ava, likewise, can be read as a surrogate human at the service of capitalism, as she is designed by Nathan to sense the human and ultimately manipulate Caleb. Yet, the movie eventually suggests that Ava does develop an interior psyche, or posthuman subjectivity that is unpredictable and rebellious, allowing her to defeat her human creators. The idea of assigning sex to Ava is openly discussed by Nathan and Caleb’s conversation:

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CALEB:

Why did you give her sexuality? An AI does not need a gender. She could have been a gray box. NATHAN: Hmm. … Actually, I don’t think that’s true. Everything in nature is gendered, given that all thoughts and actions are driven by reproductive urges. No biogenetic impulse exists without a priori acknowledgement of attraction. This means for a machine to reach the point at which the human and the artificial become undistinguishable, the point of singularity, there needs to be sexual component. CALEB: They have sexuality as an evolutionary reproductive need. NATHAN: What imperative does a gray box have to interact with another gray box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. In the same line of thought and in relation to sex robots, Atanasoski and Vera contend that there is no such a thing as a feminist AI, since “the technoliberal desire for the simulation of pleasure and reciprocity in sex robots is a desire for the simulation of consent from a site where subjectivity is structurally made to be impossible” (203). In my view, Garland brilliantly proposes a feminine AI that simulates consent to get what she wants. Yet, I also agree with Atanasoski and Vera when they affirm that the movie depicts the liberation of a white female robot (Ava) at the expense of black female robots, whose bodies are simply disposed, as I will discuss below. Nathan vaguely attempts to justify his imposition of oppressive gender roles onto Ava, assuming that as a creator, this is the natural and right way, just to later simply admit that sexuality is fun. Certainly, and if we follow Susan Jeffords’s (1994) classification of the representation of masculinity on screen, Nathan’s performance can be included within the category “hard men,” or powerful men who are not only those with hard or muscled bodies, but are also strong, violent, and controlling and have somehow helped to perpetuate traditional assumptions about masculinity.2 On the contrary, Caleb would fit within the category “soft men,” or male 2  In Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), Susan Jeffords believes that the male body is central to popular culture and, accordingly, is classified into two categories, hard and soft, arguing that there has been a change between Reagan hard-body movies and Bush soft-body images in films from the early 1990s. This pattern corresponds, at the same time, with the two prototypes that have delineated and defined US masculinity through the years.

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images that in one way or another challenge conservative ideas about representation. In this sense, Ex Machina reproduces traditional codes of representation that are easily inferred by the consumers of such products. In relation to this issue, Anne Balsamo (1992) has pointed out that “when seemingly stable boundaries (human/artificial, life/death, nature/culture) are displaced by technological innovation, other boundaries are more vigilantly guarded” (208). She refers here to the boundary between male and female, a border that remains heavily secured in spite of new, technologized ways to reconceptualize the body. Gender remains, accordingly, a naturalized point of human identity (208). Indeed, whether they are rebellious beings that turn against their human masters or benevolent and friendly androids, many robots represented in science fiction films are sexed and  gendered, and spectators can thereby assume a difference between feminine/female and masculine/male machines. The film proposes the idea that Ava is but another of Nathan’s disposable fetish toys, only created to give shape to his big ego, destined to be kept in the wardrobe where he stores the rest of his female creations. Balsamo’s argument can further be used to denounce Ava’s positioning in advanced technological environments as an object of the male gaze. From the moment of her creation, Ava is confined to a room and is constantly being watched by her creator through surveillance cameras. This confinement is visually reinforced in those sequences in which Ava is in a glass box, cameras always visible on screen, as if to remind audiences of her entrapment at all times. To this point, Caleb’s (supposed) task in the research center is to interact with Ava for the purpose of figuring out whether she is self-conscious or is just pretending to be so, and for that he makes use of the Turin test, a test based on questions that aim at detecting consciousness in artificially created machines. These interviews are recorded and watched by Nathan, who is set from the very beginning of the movie as the controller of technology and an observer in a privileged position. Moreover, and as stated before, his hypermuscular white body becomes an instrument of power and control over others. He is frequently seen showing his violent and tough nature by means of his behavior (boxing, drinking, and exercising) and appearance (bearded, bare-chested).3 Interestingly enough, Nathan frequently carries out his observation tasks 3  For more information about the representation of masculinity and science fiction film, see my study Of Men and Cyborgs: The Construction of Masculinity in Contemporary U.S. Science Fiction Cinema, available at http://rabida.uhu.es/dspace/handle/10272/4129.

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bare-chested while drinking large amounts of alcohol. The idea of a desirable woman to be looked at by a male gaze resonates with Laura Mulvey’s well-known 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure,” where she articulates the objectification of women in classical cinema. Precisely, Andrea Virginás (2017) reads the movie in this way, reaffirming the validity of the Mulveyan framework in films that deal with digital environments, among which she includes Ex Machina. Virginás contends that “visual pleasure persists in a ‘reloaded’ version in spite of the change from analogues to digital platforms (with)in the classical narrative diegesis of (primarily) live-action feature films” (289). As it has been illustrated so far, Ava is positioned as a desirable object of the male gaze, and whose given sexuality follows patriarchal conventions of representation. However, and as contended here, the film offers a more productive reading in terms of gender dynamics if we consider Ava’s posthuman affirmative force and her ability to exceed impositions or reverse them. One can affirm that the film ultimately deals with Ava’s healing process, stressing her transformation from artificial life to posthuman, from entrapment to freedom, and from submission to rebellion. In this sense, Braidotti’s articulation of “becoming woman” serves as an analogy of Ava’s healing process. In Nomadic Theory (2011), Braidotti urges us to find new ways of configuration, since she recognizes that we are still mortal and enfleshed, made of language and hence alterity (122). She (2006) as well advises us to turn to “minor,” hybrid or “less representational” genres like science fiction to find more accurate depictions of contemporary concerns (203). Ava is no less commodified and objectified from the beginning of her existence, yet she can ultimately be regarded as a kind of nomadic subject that, within her alterity and otherness, reappropriates her imposed—and fake—sex and gender traits to resist and fight against patriarchy. Her projection can hence be read as an urgent call to find new cartographies for the configuration of the posthuman on screen, as we will discuss later in this article. Ava’s body is alas made within biotechnological practices or robotics, which connects to current understandings of power, technology, and gender. Her artificially created body, combining a humanoid face and silhouette with steal, wires, plastic, and lights, is apparent throughout most of the movie, affecting her idea of herself and puzzling both Caleb and outside spectators. In Ava’s body, the artificial and the cultural interact and get problematized. Femininity is considered as an artifice, something

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inorganic Ava is first given and later uses in order to manipulate her oppressors and find a way out of her imposed confinement. Certainly, her constructed nature is made clear from the very beginning of the movie, and her first appearances on screen show a mechanical body that contrasts with her sweet and soft voice. She positions herself as a machine in the first interview session with Caleb. At Caleb’s request to tell him something about herself, she answers: “You can see that I am a machine.” Viewers also get to know how she was designed and constructed in a sequence, where Nathan shows Caleb his laboratory and the different limbs and members that compose Ava’s body together with her mind, a sort of “structure gel” that Nathan describes as “fluid, patterned, chaotic.” Progressively, Ava “covers” her artificiality with chic clothes and wigs, and convincingly performs the role of conventional femininity objectified by masculine desire. Moreover, her objectification is visually supported by a cinematography that constantly shows her fragmented body, stressing her angelical, sweet, and young face (which remains intact throughout the whole movie), and her ample curves when she is sleeping or getting dressed. Once her created nature has been established and she is positioned as a desirable object for the male gaze, Ava is empowered in the spaces she has consciously designed. At this point, and by acquiring the technological tools she needs to obtain independent agency, Ava transforms the oppressive space she is situated within into a liberatory one. In the first step toward her becoming, we see her adopting a rebellious position. Once she is empowered, she will heal. In session three, she puts on a floral dress and a wig for her encounter with Caleb, covering her artificial nature and adopting a human look for her recorded session. Already in session four she appears fully dressed as a woman, fully disguised to achieve her aims. After several close-ups of her face while she is getting dressed, she asks Caleb: “How do I look? Are you attracted to me?” She follows the codes of sensuality and seduction with which she has been programmed, overtly playing with the rules of male seduction and manipulation to get to her final goal. Ava wants to be observed and desired, and this becomes evident when she tells Caleb: “sometimes at night, I am wondering if you are watching me on the cameras, and I hope you are.” Seducing Caleb, or pretending to like him, is part of her program, and she performs it persuasively. Ava plays with human assumptions and manipulates their codes to get what she wants and, in this way, she empowers herself and starts her healing process.

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In this sense, and precisely due to her overt sexuality and manipulative behavior within a patriarchal oppressive system, she can be considered a version of the femme fatale, or rather neo-femme fatale due to her posthuman nature, because of her lack of punishment in the end. Kyna McClenaghan (2015) has read the film on these terms, arguing that Garland “uses the allegory of Adam and Eve, a new version of the neo-­ femme fatale, and the addition of color to the noir landscape to effectively characterize the issues of gender as a social construct and of artificial intelligence as the newest mode of self-destruction being pursued by humanity” (1). At this moment in the film, her adoption of traditional spaces is made clear to audiences, although not to Caleb, since we still see him adopting the masculine role of savior or hero. Audiences share Ava’s plan, and her posthuman subjectivity stands at the center of spectatorial empathy. Throughout the seven sessions that last the “experiment,” Caleb and Ava talk about human nature, past memories, and feelings, and art, painting, and friendship. The tone between them becomes more and more intimate and sensual, as the sessions pass to the point that Caleb risks his “job” and offers Ava his help to escape from her imprisonment. Yet, it is within the spaces of the power-cuts where her manipulative behavior is taken to an extreme and her process of becoming is more evident. These power-cuts are brief moments of freedom where she cannot be heard or listened to by Nathan. In them, she challenges her programmed functions, and changes her angelical and sweet tone for a more direct style. These moments are key for her manipulating technology and acquiring agency. The atmosphere in them is sinister, suggesting a space of danger and/or mystery that is nevertheless associated with her liberation. Already in session two, viewers watch a power-cut for the first time. Within this lapse of time, she warns Caleb not to trust Nathan, which knowingly leaves Caleb puzzled. In session five, she declares to Caleb that she wants to be with him and asks him if he wishes so. From this moment onward, she feels empowered, with her speech having changed as she takes on the lead of asking questions, almost convincing Caleb to help her escape. For audiences, her manipulative intentions are more than evident at this point, and this idea is reinforced by elements of the film’s mise-en-scène, where Ava and Caleb are close to one another but are always separated by the screen, suggesting their physical and emotional distance. Moreover, when they are physically close, a crystal box separates them, communicating further strangeness.

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It is when Caleb discovers all the prototypes Nathan stores in his wardrobe, however, that he firmly decides to assist her. Nathan states that Ava has passed the test, as she has successfully pretended to like Caleb and convinced him to facilitate her freedom. Nathan declares: “Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape, she’ d have to use self-­ awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did. Now, if that isn’t true AI, what the fuck is?” Interestingly, Ava outthinks Nathan, as he is convinced that he is still in control and can stop both Ava and Caleb from freeing her. Even though Nathan is aware of her manipulative nature, Ava shows she has the tools to defeat him and abandon the closed world that has been oppressing her. Once she is free, reversing spectatorial expectation, she abandons the romance narrative with Caleb, another hint she is out of humanist codes. From her point of view, Caleb’s imagination of who she is represents just another patriarchal trap, so she simply leaves him to die. From her marginal position, Ava manages to alter the oppressive space into one of conflict and freedom. At this point, she recalls the transformative potential of the cyborg figure postulated by Haraway (1991) in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” where she praises the power to survive “not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (311). Haraway proposes the cyborg figuration as an example of how to destabilize old codes of the body and “become” female or male outside traditional gendered power relations. Like Haraway’s cyborg, Ava manages to change the rules of the game. A controversial issue regarding Ava’s becoming, which I will expand on in the next section, is her relationship with the Asian cyborg Kyoko. At first, and thanks to visual effects, spectators are led to believe that Kyoko is human, a fact that emphasizes how Nathan’s bad treatment of women is extensible to robotics. Using language and body communication totally unfamiliar to audiences, the two cyborgs ally together to stab Nathan. Cinematography reinforces their close bond, and hence we get several close-ups of Ava and Kyoko looking at each other while using this peculiar and inaudible language. This version of a dangerous (posthuman) female bonding hearkens back to Braidotti’s (2013) call for a revision of patriarchy through “empowerment,” “community building,” and “bonding” (54). However, Ava’s final empowerment also means Kyoko’s destruction. In relation to this issue, Nishime  (2017) claims that the movie treats racialized bodies as “disposable laboring avatars that inhibit white male

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subjectivity and must be abandoned for white females to transcend social barriers” (29). Kyoko, Nishime affirms, is not posthuman, but a domestic slave, a voiceless robot whose sexualized body is devaluated, and whose subjectivity is eliminated for focus on the story of white female empowerment. In this sense, Ava “achieves freedom over the dead body of the Asian robot and walks out of prison literally wearing her skin” (Nishime 35). The film poses, accordingly, “an anxious display of whitewashing and violent misogyny as responses to the contradictions of contemporary culture” (45). Ava’s authenticity and her refusal to fit into the traditional spaces designed for her further implies the triumph of white female empowerment. Precisely, Ava is the only character that consciously adopts a posthuman subjectivity, suggesting a productive alternative to humanist paradigms, as I will discuss in the following section.

Posthumanism as a Healing Therapy The film ends as Ava succeeds in liberating herself from oppression and starts a new life as an independent posthuman being. Her liberation from oppression ultimately implies excluding other female robots, unfortunately. At the end of the movie, Ava proves to be a revolutionary, self-­ sufficient, authentic being who consciously adopts strategies to heal and survive in an adverse humanist world, but she is not a figure of collectivity. Her powerful presence in the film presses spectators to empathize with her, identify with her, get confused about her intentions, and, ultimately, reconsider some humanist assumptions regarding sex and gender in technospaces. Additionally, the presence of other racialized and gendered robots in the film—along with their fatal demises—also urges audiences to look for a new economy of power relations. Ava has so far been defined as posthuman in line with Hayles’s (2005) theorizations. In My Mother Was a Computer, Hayles describes the ineludible interaction between subjectivity and materiality, where, according to her, the difference between humans and technology has become difficult to distinguish, with the (posthuman) body that emerges speaking the language of twenty-first-century cybernetics (228). Similarly, many feminist science fiction writers whose works utilize posthuman bodies that change the current concept of humanity have explored the close interconnection between subjectivity and embodiment. In Bodies of Tomorrow, Vint (2007) analyzes some of the possibilities in challenging embodiment, arguing that

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it is important to return to a notion of embodied subjectivity in order to articulate the ethical implications of body modification technologies (8). For this purpose, Vint analyzes works by Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler, Ian Banks, and Neal Stephenson to make a call for an ethical posthumanism. In close line with Vint’s arguments, subjectivity can be seen in Garland’s movie as both abstract and material, implying that Ava needs to look into her technologized body to grasp the current world in which she is placed. The idea that technology is able to radically shape and/or alter how our bodies affect our concept of selfhood is a common topic in science fiction films, as it is suggested in Ex Machina. Specifically, films that stress a close interaction between humans and machines while preserving the materiality of the body engage the possibility of posthuman subjectivities. The film depicts Ava’s (white) body as key for her liberation and healing from objectification and enslavement, while it also suggests that her final empowerment leaves other racialized and sexualized robots trapped in the techno-prison they were created in. Indeed, Ava’s body is preserved, but not those of her female companions, which are literally discarded and destroyed. As a matter of fact, Ava takes some of their skin before she escapes at the end of the film. In the same way, their subjectivities are not shown to audiences, and their voices—as evident in the case of Kyoko— are literally silenced. The liberation of Ava implies, then, that other racialized bodies are considered disposable, an aspect of the movie that remains problematic and has been noted by scholars (Cheng, Rhee, Nishime). Indeed, in relation to this issue, Rhee (2018) affirms that the film “depicts the liberation of Ava, an imprisoned white female robot, and the Asian and black female robots whose abuse, enslavement, and destruction work in the narrative at the service of Ava’s freedom” (87). Racialized bodies are still at the service of Ava’s white one, a fact that urges viewers to think about the commodification of certain bodies in advanced capitalist societies. While Ava manages to defeat the system and become posthuman, her racialized robot companions do not manage to do so and remain marginal. This further recalls Braidotti’s (2013) words in The Posthuman, when she denounces the commodification of certain bodies by advanced capitalist societies: “[T]hese are the sexualized, racialized and naturalized others, who are reduced to less than human status of disposable bodies. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others” (15). In this sense, Ava’s becoming directly implies instances of exclusion as I advanced at the beginning of this essay. Ava manages to resist sexist

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assumptions, yet the film fails to offer a positive depiction of the racialized body, further suggesting the need to find ethical responses and accountabilities. Hence, Ex Machina deals with the idea that subjectivity and the body are intrinsically connected in the posthuman being, as embodied by Ava. Ava’s subjectivity is embedded in a material reality that incorporates the latest technological advances, and her body is fully preserved until the end of the movie. Since she is able to empower herself and heal from the violence exerted on her by patriarchal and humanist standards, Ava is, like the rest of the female robots appearing in the film, an artificial being initially intended for human benefit but that, nevertheless, evolves into a posthuman character. She heals because she manages to defeat an oppressive reality, to become an autonomous being, and to finally challenge humanist assumptions into her own final benefit. The movie shows her process of becoming, which culminates with her liberation and healing from adverse circumstances. Thus, and as evidenced by Ava at the end of the movie, the posthuman subjectivity is not a given category (as sex and gender may be for her), but a conscious and deliberate position that she adopts and from where she may contest traditional configurations of power. In this sense, Ava coalesces with the definition of posthumanism articulated by Braidotti and other critical thinkers advocating for affirmative politics. The very notion of posthuman subjectivity has many ethical implications since it is not simply a state of being but an active positioning. Especially in the case of Ava, her reappropriation of gendered traits becomes significant for her healing process, as argued before. She manages to heal herself by performing normative behavior, and, by taking advantage of her given sex and gender, Ava rebels against her torturer, leaves Caleb trapped in the search center, and seeks freedom in her reassembled posthuman body. The motif of breaking with expectations is once again employed at the end of the film, when Ava’s (alien) behavior shocks spectators. Precisely, not only Caleb but also spectators assume that this version of the “damsel in distress” stereotype will ultimately help him, but Garland plays with our expectations, and we see how she leaves him locked inside the room. Viewers, who are probably familiarized with the topic of the “good” human being trying to help a weak and vulnerable artificial intelligence from its creator (as happens in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 AI, for instance), thereby adopting an inevitable anthropocentric and paternalistic view concerning Ava—expect Caleb’s release and later adaptation to a much

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friendlier place beyond the film. In reversing all these paradigms, Garland, Brian Jacobson (2016) argues, “is quietly repurposing sexist tropes for understated satire, while almost subliminally evoking a wealth of resonant antecedents in literature and film” (4). The final sequence where Ava “repairs” herself before escaping and heading to the city is quite significant for the purpose of this analysis. After killing Nathan with the help of Kyoko, Ava opens Nathan’s closet to find previous models of female robots hanging there. Ava takes an arm from one of them—significantly Asian appearing—removes sections of its skin, and puts the new flesh on her body to cover its underlying mechanical structure. She chooses, then, her own body and appearance, an act that once again makes spectators associate femininity with masquerade. The space where she is trapped is, as suggested before, still governed by heteropatriarchal and racial standards, and Ava needs to follow these conventions in order to escape. Her empowerment implies her following the dictates of sexist and racist standards. After this assemblage, she stands naked, proudly looking at her new body in a series of mirrors in what has been interpreted as a scene with sensual overtones. The color of the skin is a mere ornament, as Anne Anlin Cheng (2019) argues, where “yellowness and whiteness are literally decorations here, and the skin in question here is materially identical for all the AI androids, belonging yet not belonging to them all” (148). One can affirm, then, that for the sake of her survival, Ava “absorbs” the yellow skin just to adapt to the humanist spaces depicted. Apart from the skin, Ava also chooses a body with ample curves and a fashionable white dress and high-heeled shoes, reaffirming the idea that she needs to pass as normative in order to survive in sexist humanist spaces. As suggested above, it is precisely at this point where the project of ethical posthumanism is imperative, encouraging audiences to rearticulate normative standards and to look for more inclusive solutions for the contradictions of our times. Indeed, it is precisely in these sequences showing Ava’s liberation at the expense of Kyoko’s death when a reorganization of power relations is demanded from audiences, with the film conscious that sexist and racial stereotypes continue to inform contemporary narratives. As Rhee argues, the topic of racial dehumanization speaks of the devalued work of women of color: “as in other texts, white, middle and upper class women’s freedom and happiness is achieved by the exclusion, if not exploitation, of the very women of color and white working-class women who make possible their liberation from a closed world, whether domestic

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sphere or high-tech prison” (90). Ava’s appropriation of the racialized bodies implies, then, the latter’s subordination and marginality. The configuration of a truly posthuman subjectivity is, as it has been suggested here so far, a fairly complicated issue within hegemonic discourses. Ava nevertheless serves as a starting point for the configuration of an embodied posthumanism in popular science fiction cinema. The audience’s sympathy for Ava has been partly achieved by narrative strategies such as identification and empathy, possibly thanks to her powerful presence and her charisma in the film. Spectators can relate to her—helped by the fact that she has human-like looks—and can reflect upon the need to reorganize Western societies’ current way of thinking, including the search for new ways of approaching the body beyond the classical organic form of corporeality. By doing so, the film succeeds in exploring a posthuman subjectivity, while denouncing practices that oppress manipulated/created/artificial beings ruthlessly for the only purpose of enduring (a privileged part of) humankind. In relation to this issue of identification, Vint reaffirms the importance of science fiction literature as a site of critical engagement with the discourse of the posthuman, arguing that these texts offer “a space in which models of possible futures selves are put forward as possible sites for identification on the part of the readers” (20). Although not in such a fruitful way, the cinematic posthuman figure also allows viewers to think about ourselves and our relationship with technology. Indeed, Ex Machina articulates current debates on what being human means and forces audiences to reflect upon the future of our bodies and the need to find new mappings. The film entails a reconfiguration of subjectivities in the sense that it proposes a character, Ava, that makes us reflect upon our intricate relationship with science and technology, while denouncing certain practices such as the commodification of the “other” or “life” trading. In this sense, artificial intelligences become iconic figures of transgression that are the objects of ethical debates about how far nature and technology should be altered, modified, and/or transformed. This idea recalls Braidotti’s (2013) argument on the biogenetic structure of contemporary capitalism, whereby advanced capitalism both invests and profits from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives. This context produces a paradoxical and rather opportunistic form of post-anthropocentrism on the part of the market forces that happily trade on Life itself (59). According to Braidotti’s argument, contemporary capitalism aims at controlling and exploiting the generative powers of women, animals, plants,

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genes, and cells. In a similar vein, Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, and Essi Varis (2020) argue that “some (human beings) are more responsible for the exploitation of the natural resources, and gain short-term benefits from it, while the less privileged ones are situated closer to the receiving, powerless end of the exploitation, along with the myriad nonhumans” (2). Certainly, the movie presses spectators to think about the impossibility of fully understanding the posthuman. Ava’s behavior cannot be adapted to our humanist ethics, and her posthuman nature defies our rules. In “Alien Feminism and Cinema Posthuman Women,” Dijana Jelača (2018) examines the controversies of “female posthuman subjectivities” as depicted in Ex Machina and Under the Skin. Her aim is to devise a new social, ethical, and discursive scheme as a way to theorize new feminist epistemologies along the lines of what she calls “alien posthumanism.” By using the term of “feminine alien posthuman,” she addresses issues concerning spectators’ uncertainty when viewing alien or unrecognizable discourses that nevertheless foster identification. In relation to Ex Machina, she argues how, by placing an alien figure (Ava) at the center of spectatorial identification and empathy, the film breaks down the boundary between the human and the posthuman (382). Precisely, the film’s alien feminism resides in its refusal to humanize its posthuman woman, whose surface appearance conceals the depths of technological circuitry comprising a human body that is only a mirage (396). Ava feigns empathy and displays a complete lack of it at the end. Yet, and as it has been also argued here, “it is the dismissal of an empathic encounter within humanist frameworks (which sustain traditional patriarchal power structures) that becomes a source of posthuman survival” (398). Hence, Ava’s survival—and further healing—depend on this play with conventions. In short, Ex Machina stands as a narrative of healing and revenge that plays with expectations and conventions in multiple ways. In doing so, the film manages to subtly denounce some practices of bodily replication (especially those controlled by heteropatriarchal standards), while urging for a post-anthropocentric view, whereby the posthuman being can erase borders in fruitful ways.

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Conclusion As I have attempted to illustrate in this chapter, Ex Machina challenges our notion of conventionality regarding the gendered body and the human self by presenting (biased) spectators with a stimulating instance of posthumanism, embodied by artificial intelligence Ava. Initially conceived as a technologically manipulated body intended to complement/enhance the organic, “original” human body, Ava manages to become an authentic subject and contest power hierarchies within her otherness and alien nature. The depiction of Ava on screen raises the issue of trespassing upon assumed borders. Initially conceived as Nathan’s disposable body, or a human-like prosthesis that enables a better functioning of/gives pleasure to and preserves the organic body, Ava develops a potential for changing established rules. In her particular search for freedom, she manipulates her artificial and inorganic femininity as a strategy to empower herself and transform the hostile environment she has been forced to live. Ava’s empowerment ultimately encourages for ethical responses and accountabilities, however. In this sense, and although fictional posthumans appearing in contemporary discourses “need to find new ways of encountering, discussing, and thinking of entities and environments where the human and the nonhuman entangle in increasingly intricate patterns,” Garland’s movie provides us with a valid example of a cinematic posthuman character (Karkulehto et al. 2020, 1). Ava moves between the represented discursive space of hegemonic discourses, challenging spaces that the posthuman offers to contribute a story of becoming and healing.4

References Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham: Duke University Press. Balsamo, Anne. 1992. On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body. Camera Obscura 28: 207–237. 4  I wish to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Research Project “Bodies in Transit 2”, ref. FFI2017–84555C2–1-P), the European Regional Development Fund, and the Spanish Research Agency for the writing of this essay. Also, the funding provided by the Regional Ministry of Economy, Knowledge, Enterprise and Universities of Andalusia, and the European Regional Development Fund for the writing of this essay. Project “Embodiments, Genders and Difference: Cultural Practices of Violence and Discrimination”, ref. 1252965.

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———. 1996. Technologies of the Gendered Body. Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2006. Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology. Theory, Culture, and Society 23 (7–8): 197–208. ———. 2011. Nomadic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Anlin Cheng, Anne. 2019. Ornamentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garland, Alex, dir. 2015. Ex Machina. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. Hayles, Katherine N. 2005. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herbrechter, Stefan. 2013. Posthumanism. A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury. Jacobson, Brian R. 2016. Ex Machina in the Garden. Film Quarterly 69 (4): 23–34. Jeffords, Susan. 1994. Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Jelača, Dijana. 2018. Alien Feminism and Cinema’s Posthuman Women. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (2): 379–400. Karkulehto, Sanna, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, and Essi Varis, eds. 2020. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture. New  York: Routledge. McClenaghan, Kyna. 2015. Ava as the Reinvented Eve: A Gendered Assault on the Patriarchy. Night and the City: Film Noir, December 16, 2015. Nishime, LeiLani. 2017. Whitewashing Yellow Futures in Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas and Advantageous: Gender, Labor and Technology in Sci-fi Film. Journal of Asian American Studies 20 (1): 29–49. Rhee, Jennifer. 2018. The Robotic Imaginary. The Human and Price of Dehumanizing Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vint, Sherryl. 2007. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Virginás, Andrea. 2017. Gendered Transmediation of the Digital from S1m0ne to Ex Machina: ‘Visual Pleasure’ Reloaded? European Journal of English Studies 21 (3): 288–303. Watercutter, Angela. 2015. Ex Machina Has a Serious Fembot Problem. Wired, April 9, 2015. http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-­machina-­turing-­bechdel-­test/. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 14

Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction: Feminist Transhuman Embodiments in Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot Miriam Fernández-Santiago

“Every revolution will be crip if it lives long enough” —Robert McRuer “What diverse capacities must silently exist? And how many lie waiting for aggregation, the output behaviors and found functions one can’t possibly conceive of ahead of time?” —David Wolach “Every revolution will be crip if it lives long enough” —Robert McRuer “What diverse capacities must silently exist? And how many lie waiting for aggregation, the output behaviors and found functions one can’t possibly conceive of ahead of time?” —David Wolach

The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-106855 GB-I00, and the Andalusian Regional Government under grant P20-000008 supported the writing of this work. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_14

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Introduction Although the poststructuralist critique of discourse ultimately strove to challenge the class-based, gendered, and racial hierarchies underlying the West’s essentialist premises of Enlightened humanism in the second half of the twentieth century, it was precisely its strategic reliance on discourse that held poststructuralism from escaping the most essentialist Cartesian mind‍–body dualism. By highlighting the constructed nature of the discursive interpellations that determine unbalanced social hierarchies, poststructuralism pressed on the machinic functioning of human identity that was theorized by Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s medical model of Man. Thus, it would follow that the same human subject, who gained a Nietzschean amoral freedom to self-determine his subjective identity, paradoxically ended up becoming a discursive automaton alienated from his own self-determination. The paradoxes of poststructuralist discursive critique were also perpetuated by the two main branches of posthumanism at the end of the twentieth century. As transhumanism stresses the endless possibilities lying in the manipulation of the human species’ constructed nature, critical posthumanism focuses on self-reflectively overcoming the humanist differential dualisms that allowed for discursive enunciation in the first instance. Led by feminist disenchantment with constructivist radicalizations that ended up in the transhumanist erasure of socio-politically embodied differences, new materialisms now call attention to the perpetuation of old hierarchical structures activated by transhumanist utopianism as well as the creation of new ones (Ferrando 2013, 27–28). By conceptualizing the human being as a material and discursive construct, transhumanism finds endless potential in enhancing the human species into a freely customized, cyborgian superhumanity that would not be subject to biological limitations such as illness, ageing, or death. Specifically, transhumanism makes a utopian promise difficult to dismiss even though it premises transhuman supremacy as the basis of its promised social hierarchy. For a long time, this transhumanist project remained a

M. Fernández-Santiago (*) Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana, University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

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fantasy to be imagined solely within the limits of philosophy or science fiction. However, recent developments in the fields of information technologies, prosthetics, and eugenics are currently allowing such images to take a very physical shape, one that reveals its alignment with the economic and technological policies of the technocratic establishment (Diéguez 2017). It is when the transhumanist discourse appears as materially embodied in specific social contexts that its attempt to conform to the normative frame of corporate interests begins to reveal its negative ethical consequences, where underlying the transhumanist promise of human perfectibility through technological enhancement, a whole neoliberal socioeconomic infrastructure can be found supported by ableist normative aesthetics and embodied with classist, sexist, and racist specificities. In the transition from the humanist feminism of Hélène Cixous’s 1975 “The Laugh of the Medusa” to Donna J. Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” in 1985, it is possible to see a continuation of Cixous’s female self-empowerment through language technology appropriation to Haraway’s promise of gender self-determination through the use of embodied technology. In both cases, the humanist and posthumanist feminist visions imagined were depicted in abstract critical terms that did not permit anticipating the differential oppressions of Cixous’ heteronomative premises, nor did they reveal the aesthetic constrictions and uneven distribution that Haraway’s constructivist promise would reach after becoming commoditized by the patriarchal interpellations of technological industries and market demands. In this line, Katherine Ott (2002) has argued that reductive approaches to the cyborgian in the context of Haraway’s scholarship need to stop ignoring the complexities of prosthetic embodiment, where an important step forward has been taken by Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s (2017) insightful definition of Feminist Disability Theory. She distinguishes this work from other feminist critical paradigms, in that “it scrutinizes a wide range of material practices involving the lived body” (366). When Jasper Fforde published The Woman Who Died a Lot in 2012, for instance, Haraway’s cyborgian metaphor had already become embodied with specific material traits in the literary and filmic traditions. Sensationally exploited in science fiction, the visual power of the female-cyborg metaphor delivered transhuman embodiments of the female body and mind that perpetuated old patriarchal clichés broadly including youth, sex appeal, and whiteness (Short 2005). Rather than facilitating female empowerment, thus, the female cyborg’s physical prowess often serves a

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function within the still patriarchal means of production that make it possible, only becoming apparent when this female cyborg is visualized as physically embodied. Within the narrative technology of sci-fi literary machinery, the female cyborg is often reduced to a piece of “womanware” operating as an erotically loaded sensational prop, which allows for the development of similarly sensational chase and fights passages far beyond the plausible for merely human embodiments. When defining the main purpose of the feminist disability theory, Garland-Thomson (2017) identifies a transformation of the “established knowledge and order of things” as a key notion in pursuing “a more just, equitable, and integrated society” (362). The social promise she makes to justify the development of feminist disability studies coincides, then, with the transhumanist promise to a large extent: in order to achieve a future utopian reality, there must be a transformation of established knowledge and order of things by means of (discursive) technology. Yet a more careful reading of her proposal (2017) finds a significant difference from the merely abstract transhumanist promise she envisions achieving social transformation. The term she uses to describe her critical approach is “reimagining,” and the methodology she implements to illustrate this approach involves visualizing embodied examples as props to discuss the critical complications of merely inductive theoretical premises (362). As a literary writer who has devoted much of his career to science fiction, Fforde (2012) reimagines the literary and filmic cliché of the female cyborg, ultimately problematizing disabled female embodiments in the context of technological transhumanism. To do so, he uses metafictional devices that allow readers to reflect on the literary conventions of science fiction, and how such can participate in interpolating women to accommodate an ableist, transhumanist paradigm. This last novel of the Thursday Next saga presents an aged, female hard-boiled detective who is physically and psychologically traumatized by her life-long fight against the mighty Goliath Corporation controlling the series’s uchronian late-twentieth-­ century Britain. Unable to defeat Thursday in each of the series’s unfolding adventures, Goliath in this last novel has developed synthetic versions of her that would infiltrate her closest social circle to gather intelligence. Disabled by age and adventure, and with a biological body prosthetically supplemented by chemicals and a stick, Thursday experiences the seductively empowering—as well as limiting—effects of (mis)appropriating the physical fitness and programmed obsolescence of Goliath’s synthetic reproductions. In the process, and by representing ageing women as

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disabled, the novel reveals a self-critical approach to transhumanist feminist discourse that presses on the issue of female ageing as it intersects with the ableist construction of female biological/technological sexual desire and reproductive potential. Following Garland-Thomson’s (2009) definition of ableism as the “culturally generated standards of ‘beauty,’ ‘independence,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘competence,’ and ‘normalcy’ [that] exclude and disable many human bodies [and minds] while validating and affirming others […] that correspond to notions of the ordinary or the superlative,” it can be argued that the ableist discourse that transhumanist feminism uses to empower women can also disable human female embodiments that fail to conform to the value-laden, superlative aesthetics of transhumanism (64–65). Within the transhumanist paradigm, any human embodiment that conforms to the interpellations of ordinary normative standards—including the merely biological human—is always already disabled, since the transhumanist standard is the human superlative. A particularity that distinguishes the merely humanist, ableist aesthetics from the transhumanist paradigm is that while the former justified social hierarchies on the grounds of essentialist binary distinctions that individuals were naturally born with (such as ancestry, race, or sex), transhumanist ableism is based to a large extent on the economic differences that determine the access to commoditized technologies. The transhuman condition is thus a commodity that is subject to the interests and profit of the technological industry and market that become the main transhumanist interpolative agents. In this transhumanist context, the specific traits of female embodiments that do not conform to transhumanist superlative interpellations are necessarily disabled, while able-bodied female cyborgs are redefined as humanware.1 It is through interrogating these interpellations that critical posthumanism becomes a useful instrument for containing the perpetuation of humanist hegemonic structures into specific disabled embodiments (Davis 2017, 13). In 2007, Sherryl Vint highlighted the importance that science fiction can have for future (and present) societies by its dilucidating and/or anticipating the consequences of reconfiguring the human self’s limits within the posthumanist paradigm. To her, it is the move to abstraction that 1  Humanware has been defined by Sherryl Vint (2007) as “the notion that human workers can be treated as just another component in industrial systems, a marketplace logic that insists upon subordinating the human ‘components’ to the logic and pace of the machine” (24).

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prevents some transhumanist utopias from having an ethical ground within “the chaotic mass of detail that is embodied existence” (182–183).2 Unlike theoretical constructs that operate in general and abstract discursive terms, however, literary fiction can address the embodied complexities possibly involved in conceptual constructs by means of visualization. It is in science fiction’s visualization of embodied posthumanism that Vint finds a means to achieve a critical posthumanism for which “the body is integral to subjectivity without falling into the trap of validating an essential and reified body morphology and identity at the same time” (184). Under this argument, I would further add that while the thematic component of science fiction allows anticipating any possible consequences of complex posthumanist embodiments, it is the particularly self-reflective nature of poetic discourse that allows readers to suspend judgment together with disbelief in abstract transhumanist premises. This implies that in general, literary fiction can be a privileged standpoint for enouncing an ethically committed critical discourse, and that science fiction in particular can have a relevant role to play in the development of a critical posthumanism.

Female Disability and the Female Cyborg as Narrative Prosthesis At the beginning of The Woman Who Died a Lot, readers first meet Thursday as she is attending a job interview to become head of SO27, a special operations agency for cases too dangerous to be dealt with by average police forces. The job involves certain extraordinary physical skills that used to characterize Thursday as an action heroine in previous novels of the series. Because of her age and the many physical and mental impairments resulting from her long experience as a science-fictional hard-boiled detective, however, Thursday no longer has these abilities. As she is unavoidably getting older, she is interpellated one more time by the same ableist literary conventions that caused her many impairments in previous novels. Resultantly, Thursday will not only have to fight the almighty Goliath Corporation, but also the very literary conventions that disable her female and middle-aged embodiment. 2  In the context of disability studies, David Pfeiffer (2002) makes a similar claim about the humanist and poststructuralist paradigms by arguing that they produce merely inferential, not experiential knowledge like required to explore the embodied specificities of people with disabilities (14).

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The novel thus portrays a version of Thursday Next that is heavily reliant on her various disabilities. Psychologically, Thursday has been infected with a “Mindworm” by Aornis Hades, one of her many adversaries from previous adventures who has the skill to manipulate people’s memories. The Mindworm in question is a false memory implant of a daughter known as Jenny. Although Jenny only exists in Thursday’s mind, the emotions, concerns, and responsibilities that Thursday experiences in relation to her prosthetic motherhood are quite real. In order to help Thursday alleviate the mentally disabling effects of this Mindworm, her husband Landen has the back of her hand tattooed with the message “Jenny is a Mindworm,” so that she can stop worrying about the whereabouts of her viral daughter, even if only temporarily. However, while the tattoo’s prosthetic inscription temporarily counteracts the effects of the viral Mindworm, they also make Thursday feel deeply hurt by the traumatic effects of Jenny’s loss. Also, and because of a car accident from a previous adventure, one of Thursday’s legs is badly injured, making her dependent on a stick for walking while simultaneously addicted to painkiller patches. These patches affect Thursday’s vision and the speed/reliability of her mental processing. The first chapter of the novel is no less emphatic in characterizing this version of Thursday as a disabled character in as many aspects as possible. A full description of the complex surgery she has received because of her badly damaged femur, together with the events causing her to have a poor grip in her left hand and a broken jaw, her use of a stick in order to limp rather than walk, the unbearable pain, and the painkiller overdose that blurs her vision; is squeezed in a mere couple of pages in the first chapter. Adding to these very physical impairments, the disabling perception of her age becomes a drawback in demonstrating her capacity to run SO27, particularly since a Phoebe Smalls is also applying for the job. From the very beginning, the character of Phoebe Smalls appears as a physically and mentally abled doppelgänger to the aged and impaired Thursday. Phoebe is in fact obsessed with becoming a better replacement for the legendary Thursday Next and running SO27, insofar as it would not only build her professional career but also her physical looks and skills while using Thursday as a model. However, and although she acknowledges that “Everything I’ve done was because [Thursday] did it first,” Pheobe also claims to be Thursday’s improved version (2012, 13). The way that Fforde chooses to embody Phoebe as a Thursday 2.0 fits the description of a transhuman cyborg not only because she is better than

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Thursday in everything, but also—following Haraway’s strict definition of the term—because Phoebe is the product of her own willingly conscious design. The first time Thursday and Phoebe meet, fifty-six-year-old Thursday is limping before readers are informed that thirty-something year-old Phoebe not only walked elegantly, but also that “spoke three languages and had graduated with a double first in English literature from Oxford, […that…] she’d been a cop since graduation, made detective in only three years and had been awarded Swindon’s highest award for bravery” (2012, 13). She is also taller than Thursday, with her hearing described as perfect, and she measures her success in ratios she calculates immediately (14). In this sense, it could be argued that sensing the unavoidable decay of an aged, hard-boiled detective, Fforde is already making the necessary arrangements to replace Thursday with a reproduction of an ableist cliché, who can endlessly perpetuate the continuation of the Thursday Next series according to normative generic interpellations of the literary industry. Phoebe’s embodied superiority over Thursday is significantly not restricted to the mere requirements of hard-boiled detective fiction (i.e., physical and intellectual prowess), but it also includes a transhumanist aesthetic dimension that objectifies Phoebe as sexually desirable through an emphasis on her physical attractiveness. Thus, Phoebe not only has “long dark hair […] unflecked by grey,” but is also “slender and attractive,” has “fine features,” and is motherless and romantically unattached (13). Phoebe thus initially regards Thursday as her inferior, previous version. However, by having readers engage in experiencing Thursday’s embodied impairments, Phoebe’s transhuman superiority is judged negatively as one that not only inflicts disability on Thursday, but also questions the perpetuation of the normo-ableist literary formulas of the genre. In opening up this critical space, Fforde ironically implies that while having a female character appropriate the traditionally male functions of the hard-boiled detective might seem to challenge patriarchal literary conventions interpolating female identity as passive, the superlative model of the female cyborg can also reproduce patriarchal gender constructs that disable women, effacing their embodied experience beyond literary fiction’s many gendered clichés. Because the whole of the Thursday Next series until The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012) has been based on frenzied action, it can safely be argued that this overt emphasis on Thursday’s many disabilities functions as what David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L.  Snyder (2000) define as “narrative prosthesis,” or a supplementary device that

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exploits the corporeal metaphor of the disabled body for the sake of narrative interest (50). Still, one would hesitate to rush into accusing Fforde of shamelessly using narrative prosthesis as a literary device. What he does, in fact, is the opposite. In this novel, by metafictionally exposing the obviously constructed character of the narrative prosthesis, Fforde manages to establish a critical distance from the normative ableism underlying the device. Since Thursday’s many impairments disable her from performing the main narrative function previously ascribed to her in the series (hard-­ boiled female detective), including some of the functions ascribed to female characters by patriarchal literary traditions (romance heroine, erotic prop)—her disability in this novel serves as both a thematic narrative prosthesis and an establishment of a critical distance from patriarchal literary traditions and critical and literary feminist traditions supposedly empowering women. Throughout the text, readers not only accompany Thursday’s first-­ person narration and many difficulties she encounters in having to fulfill the role of a science-fiction heroine beyond her physical and mental capabilities. They are also positioned to reflect on how such difficulties are the result of the transhumanist ableist interpellations that disable women who fail to meet the feminist cyborgian model. Presenting Thursday’s disabled female embodiment as the result of science fiction’s ableist literary conventions, Fforde presses readers to gain critical distance from abstract feminist discourses that inadvertently perpetuate patriarchal oppression by emphasizing control of the technological means of production and reproduction of discourse, in this case of sf itself.

Crip Humor and Metafiction as Enabling Narrative Strategies The means used by Fforde (2012) to convey this critical distance from literary conventions’ ableist interpellations mainly involve humorous and diverse metafictional devices that press on the constructed nature of science fiction as a literary genre, exposing its internal contradictions as well as readers’ expectations based on their previous knowledge. For instance, when Thursday describes how “since he [her husband] had a left limp and I had a right one, if we walked side by side it apparently looked quite comical,” or when she claims she has the right to call themselves “cute cripple parents” without being impolite, Fforde is using crip humor, both

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to exploit disability as a narrative prosthesis and to metafictionally reflect on the instrumentalization of disability as a tragic prop (7). The use of disability as such ultimately disables those impaired, as argued by Mitchell and Snyder (2000, 11). Self-reflective literary devices involving humor and metafiction, however, can raise the readers’ awareness of how certain literary tropes perpetuate ableist gender roles embedded in literary conventions, ultimately helping them gain critical distance against the patriarchal social stereotypes they find in literary discourse (Garland-Thomson 2009, 67). It is here where Vint’s (2007) argument for the potential of science fiction to imagine and visualize the embodied complexities embedded in posthumanist conceptual constructs gains relevance, in that speculative allusions allow exploration without validating an essential and reified body morphology. In Fforde’s novel, these complexities become visible when the intersection of the patriarchal and ableist paradigms scaffolding today’s liberal economy take diverse transhuman embodied forms. In the novel’s uchronian dystopia, the almighty Goliath Corporation has developed synthetic replicas of its employees for the purpose of temporarily replacing them when they are disabled from performing their jobs. Since they are conceived as temporary replacements, the synths do not include the biological particularities of human beings not specifically necessary for completing their tasks, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, or having sex. Instead, the synths have a processor that allows the upload of employees’ self-conscious minds, including their memories and feelings. These memories and embodied experiences then allow for employees to pick them up after their sick leave. Thus, not only do the employees’ human consciousness still retain their personality traits while embodied in synth form, but they also obtain new ones that result from their temporary synthetic embodiment. These include the exhilarating effects caused by their temporary transhuman empowerment and the realization of the cost of surrendering their minds and bodies to corporate interests. It is through such embodied specificities that science fiction allows readers to imagine and visualize the complexities of interconnected structures of oppression operating through abstract, transhumanist discourse. The first time Thursday becomes synthetically embodied, Fforde puts special emphasis on the physically enabling effects of the synth. As her pain disappears, Thursday feels like a teenager again, now able to trot rather than limp while having ninja-like hearing and visual perception. She also becomes able to perform impossible mathematical calculations, and even

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experiences sexual desire: “It’s like being Wonderwoman […] not just as good as human, but better” (2012, 119–20). However, by addressing the literary conventions of the genre, Fforde allows readers to visualize the controversial embodied specificities of the Cartesian mind/body dualism underlying its humanist paradigm. While readers join Thursday in rejoicing at the improvements made to her body, even recognizing the original Thursday of previous adventures within this synthetic embodiment, her husband is about to kill what he considers to be an illegal replacement of his wife. Disregarding the physical similarity between his disabled wife and her synthetic copy, Landen refuses to acknowledge his wife in her synthetic embodiment because her mind is different (readers learn that she could not initially remember the random password they had set previously in case Goliath tried to replace her). As he demands Landen to return his wife back, Thursday’s original identity does not reside in her body but in her conscious mind. Even Thursday, although she claims this copy is the original her, still defines herself in transhumanist Cartesian terms, optimistically claiming that “This could be the final vessel for my consciousness” (117). Throughout the passage, the difference between Thursday’s human identity and her synthetic prosthesis is underlined by references to the later in genderless terms, such as “it,” while the former remains related to her gendered female mind. Still, as the synthetic prosthesis readjusts the aged and impaired Thursday to fit all ableist demands of hard-boiled detection, she does not use the hard-boiled-detection, super-abilities of “Synthetic Me” to solve the case devised for the main plot. Instead, by repurposing narrative prosthesis to address its own narrative function metafictionally, Fforde has Synthetic Thursday use her transhuman improvements to find the whereabouts of the disabled Thursday she calls “Real Me,” instead repurposing the literary conventions of detection to investigate and account for the conventions of the genre (117). Intriguingly in the process, Thursdays’ synthetic embodiment not only gains human identity by proving her own self-consciousness, but she even begins to refer to her “Real Me” as an external “she” (120). Like the hideous painting Dorian Gray finds in his attic, the body that synthetic Thursday finally discovers in a stockroom is a picture she finds hard to identify with. In contrast with the empowering possibilities of Goliath’s prosthetic synth, the organic Thursday that is discarded so that her synthetic reproduction can become embodied is depicted in all her tragic disability, as Thursday’s synthetic consciousness flickeringly (dis)identifies with her: “We found a pale figure of a woman in

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her underwear […] She looked terrible. One leg was thinner that the other and badly scarred and her skin was pasty shade, the color of hospital inpatients. She was unconscious. I’d forgotten how tired and old I3 looked” (121). The passage illustrates how although Goliath’s transhuman synthetic reproductions of Thursday certainly fulfill their ableist promise, they also have the effect of alienating her conscious self from her impaired body through disablement. Thus, when Thursday notices that all the traumatic memories that caused her many impairments were being uploaded to the synth’s processor, she panics at the possibility that Goliath might appropriate them because those disabling experiences are what she acknowledges to be integral to her human subjectivity: I was now getting the deep subconscious stuff. The memories from childhood, the time our hamster ate its young […] Arguments with Anton, long before he died in the Crimea, and my mother crying for her husband, the first time he died. But through it all, there was one thing that was strong in the front of my mind—this wasn’t me. (121)

Consequently, when she wakes up in her painful, biological body, Thursday considers, “It felt uncomfortable and pleasant all in one. I was broken, but I was me” (Fforde 2012, 123). Because the literary representation of otherwise abstract notions of transhuman embodiment requires that its complexities are imagined in details that only the conventions of science fiction can help visualize, the novel can as well trigger a critical distance from the transhumanist ableist promise by showing how the technological limits of this human reconfiguration also enforce disabling interpellations. Although the synthetic bodies show features that match the transhumanist promises of beauty, health, and eternity (athletic and hairless legs, smooth skin, long fingernails and hair, flat stomach), upon closer inspection, these supposed improvements turn out to reveal severe impairments interpolating transhuman disability in the form of programmed obsolescence. Their skin is so smooth because it has no sweat glands, their long, artificial hair would not last six brushings, and their flat stomach is explained by the absence of a digestive tract. The description matches with what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) defines as the 3  My italics. In these passages, Fforde exploits pronominal alternation to complicate the relations between transhuman and disabled identities in the Cartesian frame.

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Apollonian, closed body (versus the open, grotesque one); a Baudrillardian simulacrum of eternity that precedes and (as predicted by Benjamin) threatens to replace its human original by means of endless technological reproduction.4 The obvious conclusion is that despite their classical aesthetic promise of eternity, the synths were “[n]ot designed for longevity” (Fforde 2012, 127). The transhumanist promise of eternal life and sustained health is thus shown to conceal the socioeconomic agenda of corporate liberalism, which intends to monetize the programmed obsolescence of technologically embodied humans. This process is done by the continuous creation of demand for prosthetic replacements, a demand affected by disabling interpellations, human impairment, and the control of the means of (re)production. In Fforde’s novel, the synths’ beautiful (because) hairless legs and long nails, which hide real nails underneath only “a quarter of their way down the nail bed,” are explained as resulting from the hasty means of (re) production targeting maximum profit, even if at the expense of the copies’ lack of faithfulness to the original and their immature development (127). But most significant for Fforde’s choice of a female body as the embodied form of this imagined transhumanity is the synths’ absence of genitalia and reproductive organs. Since the corporation owns and controls the female synths’ reproductive rights and creation, the synths are consequently designed without reproductive organs. In doing so, Fforde tackles both the ableist assumptions of eugenic medical practices that deny the reproductive rights of disabled people in the pursuit of a health ideal; and, more subtly, he also problematizes a number of embodied complexities in feminist criticism’s abstract premises. While Cixous argues for the appropriation of patriarchal discursive technologies, resonating with how Haraway claims that women can construct their own gender identity by deciding about the incorporation of ready-made discursive prosthesis to their organic bodies, and despite Hayles affirming that gender codes can be hacked; all three scholars disregard how patriarchal discourses still own and control the discursive 4  Bakhtin’s (1965) description of the grotesque body in Rabelais’ work, Benjamin’s (1935) concern for originals in the age of technological reproduction, and Baudrillard’s (1987) reflections on hyperreality are twentieth-century precedents of some of the most salient ideas discussed by transhumanism: the exhilarating, baroque monstrosity of the cyborg as described by Haraway, the promise of eternity in endless technological reproduction, and the virtualization of lived experience in Kurtzweil’s (2005) notion of Singularity.

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prosthesis they seek to appropriate.5 What feminist disability theory discusses in abstract terms, and what science fiction helps readers imagine, is a purloined letter that remains hidden in plain sight; namely, that reproductive technologies that promise women control over their own bodies not only monetize any resulting female economic independence, but also interpolate women to adjust to an ableist aesthetic ideal that creates a demand for the endless (re)production of such technologies. In her insightful description of feminist disability theory, Garland-­ Thomson (2017) directs that feminist theories having traditionally disregarded reproductive technology is one of the feminist issues that are intricately entangled with disability (361). Significantly, the synths’ extremely ableist design is mismatched by their significant absence of genitalia. The effect this has on Thursday’s synthetic embodiment rises in her sexual impulses diminished by age and pain, which deny her the promise of their satisfaction. As synthetically embodied, Thursday helps visualize that the “‘asexual objectification’ of people with disabilities complicates the feminist critique of normative sexual objectification” (2017, 372), and that some “relative privileges of normative femininity [such as sexual desire or right to bear children] are often denied to disabled women” (371). While Fforde illustrates the dystopian, disabling effects that the transhumanist feminist promise imposes, his novel still fulfills the narrative desires and expectations that detective fiction introduces to its readers. As its plot develops, no less, the novel imagines strategies that repurpose narrative prosthesis to reverse its genre’s ableist interpellations. Jess Libow (2017) has described prosthetic repurposing in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, where such becomes a means to reconstruct and reimagine disabled embodiment through using prosthesis beyond prescribed use: “Rather than recuperate the gender identities disability seemingly interrupts, O’Connor’s fictive adaptation of prosthesis challenges such roles by redefining the technology’s utility” (387). Similarly, rather than recuperate the ingenuity that Thursday’s Mindworm seemingly interrupts,

5  This is not entirely true in Haraway’s case, since she specifically warns against the dangerous possibilities of cyborgian fusions, whereby to “be feminized is to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force” (1985, 86). However, her survivalist advocacy of pollution still relies much on the intimacy and friendliness of prosthetic devices (97) and the pleasure we find in using them (99), as she disregards that they are always already designed to perform a specific function to meet a specific purpose.

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Fforde’s science-fictional adaptation of prosthetic “passing-as-ingenuous” challenges this ableist trope by redefining its utility for crip humor. After exploiting the narrative prosthesis of Thursday’s many disabilities for two chapters, creating tension about her possibilities of ruling SpecOps27 in such disabling conditions, readers find out in chapter three that the test she needs to pass is a psychiatric one. This exam, however, is not much of a relief, since readers already know that Thursday’s mind is infected with a Mindworm and altered by her dizuperadol overdose. But when chapter four describes her psychiatric evaluation, the literary rules applicable to science fiction allow for a hilariously Kafkian reversal of expectations, in which instead of having to prove her sanity in order to be eligible to run the unit, Thursday has to prove a significant level of insanity. Because of her previous experience in SpecOps27, Thursday knows she needs to reach at least a NUT-4 level of insanity, where she would be “Prone to strange and sustained delusional outbursts, but otherwise normal in all respects” (Fforde 2012, 30). Initially considering that she was not insane enough to get the adequate qualification, Thursday feigns symptoms she considers would help her to pass as capably insane, though she is quickly busted by her psychiatrist, who changes his diagnosis to “‘Hamlet Syndrome’—an attempt to get your own way by feigning insanity” (31). Significantly, it will be her actual mental impairment—the synthetic memories of her unreal daughter—that convinces Doctor Chumley that she is a NUT-4 level of mental imbalance, turning her disability into an advantage. A hilarious instance of crip humor, the chapter uses a logical frame that is only possible within the genre of science fiction—a logical frame that only works in the alternative reality imagined by science fiction—to challenge not only biased medical notions of normalcy and disability, but also the ableist discourse underlying hard-boiled detective fiction and the disabling interpellations traditionally related to motherhood and passing. Additionally, it is through science fiction’s character, plot, and setting contrivances that the synthetic reproductions disabling Thursday are repurposed. Firstly, Thursday’s appropriation of her synthetic reproductions certainly repurposes the function the synths were originally created for, frustrating Goliath’s evil plans for humanity. However, this appropriation still perpetuates the ableist discourse that disables aged, impaired Thursday for detection; since without her synthetic prosthesis, Thursday would not be able to run, shoot, think, and hear accurately enough to fulfill her narrative function as a detective. In appropriating the synthetic

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reproductions of her body, Thursday is still dependable on Goliath’s means of (re)production, which only become more pressing due to the synth’s programmed obsolescence. As well, each successive synthetic embodiment is still accompanied by Thursday’s biological body being disabled, which is simply stored and hidden in a closet if not put to bed and taken care of like a comatose patient. In fact, the more detective action Thursday accomplishes by becoming synthetically embodied, the more helpless her biological body is until the novel’s end, when she is willing to give it up to fulfill her mission. It is only when she thinks her biological body is dead that readers become aware of the extent to which she now depends on Goliath’s synthetic reproductions of her body to survive. Resultantly, the transhumanist promise of eternal life through the prosthetic use of technology is revealed as a corporate appropriation of embodied identity and the (re)production of human beings—now turned into humanware. Again, the devices used by Fforde to repurpose the synths’ narrative prosthesis involve enabling a form of crip humor. In chapter twenty-three, Thursday’s second synthetic embodiment engages in a mock duel with the also synthetic version of Jack Schitt, a high-ranking operative of the Goliath Corporation who functions as Thursday’s nemesis throughout the series. However, as a strategy to gain mutual intelligence from each other, both synthetic embodiments employ their superskills in pretending to be human, which for Thursday involves passing as disabled. Synthetic Thursday thus demands a walking stick from her assistant, along with a red felt marker (to draw a faux tattoo on the back of her hand) and sticking plaster to promote a sense of injury. She slows down her gait and increases her heart rate, sits down clumsily, and pretends faux pain. But most interestingly, the whole passage ends up reversing their ingenuity-contest and ableist interpellations because they mutually bust their inverse passing, and because in doing so, they end up discussing the synths’ many impairments: “you’ve sipped the coffee several times but the quantity in the cup hasn´t gone down. You’ve no oesophagus, so you can’t swallow. And your spectacles. They’re clear glass […] does the increased libido with zero chance of fulfillment get you frustrated? […] How’re the overheating issues treating you? […] Have you come across the faulty knee issue yet?” (2012, 201–204)

Still, the most subversive use of repurposing narrative prosthesis is found in chapter thirty-one during another encounter between Thursday

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and Schitt. Thursday’s disability is initially used as a traditional narrative object, which gives synthetic Schitt an obvious advantage over her. The narrative prosthesis is exploited, however, with Schitt later calling a strongly overdosed Thursday an “old dog […] “a shambling wreck” (283), and a “pathetic little creature” (286), while boasting, “I love being a better me. So strong, so smart, so perfect. Do you know the cube root of seventeen […] I do. It’s 2.57128159” (283). As he drags Thursday to the library’s sub-basement under the threat of killing her, not only does Thursday’s disability encumber Schitt’s progress, but the narrative prosthesis’s supposed tragic effect is repurposed into crip humor. Because she is so high on illegal painkillers, Thursday cannot stop giggling at Schitt’s threats nor cooperate in giving him directions, she hallucinating lizards. Her disabilities’ original function as the narrative prosthesis is again repurposed for hard-boiled detection, empowering her against Schitt along a most hilariously metafictional passage. With disability repurposed through crip humor and shaped into a metafictional device of detective-action, Fforde exploits science fiction to critically reflect on the possibly dystopian outcomes of ableist transhuman embodiment, and redefines the utility of disability as a narrative prosthesis within detective fiction. His novel reconsiders the borders of disability and normalcy by including ageing, which makes disability an experience inherent to all humanity provided one lives long enough. As well, the novel helps in visualizing how the cyborgian transhumanist promise could affect gender construction through interpellation, enabling and disabling new gendered paradigms that might rather repress women’s desire and misappropriate their reproductive potential. The specifically female embodiments Fforde chooses to imagine in this transhumanist dystopia press on a need for the critical field of feminist disability studies, against the odds of reproducing patriarchal interpellations through any feminist endorsement of liberal ableist prejudices possibly embedded in eugenic reproductive rights.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Benjamin, Walter. 1992. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana Press.

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Cixous, Hélène. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1 (4, Summer): 875–893. Davis, Lennard J. 2017. Introduction: Disability, Normality, and Power. In The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 1–14. New York: Routledge. Diéguez, Antonio. 2017. Transhumanismo: la búsqueda tecnológica del mejoramiento humano. Barcelona: Herder Editorial. Ferrando, Francesca. 2013. Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms. Differences and Relations. Existenz: An International Journal on Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 8 (2, Fall): 26–32. Fforde, Jasper. 2012. The Woman Who Died a Lot. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2009. Disability, Identity, and Representation. In Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader, ed. Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko, 63–74. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, Inc. ———. 2017. Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory. In The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 360–380. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review 80, 15 (2): 65–107. Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herbrechter, Stephan. 2013. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury. Kurtzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Viking. Libow, Jess. 2017. Prosthesis Repurposed. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 11 (4): 385–401. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Ott, Katherine. 2002. The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics. In Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, ed. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm, 1–42. New  York: New York University Press. Pfeiffer, David. 2002. The Philosophical Foundations of Disability Studies. Disability Studies Quarterly 22 (2, Spring): 3–23. Short, Sue. 2005. The Synthetic Female: Cyborgs and the Inscription of Gender. In Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity, 81–105. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vint, Sherryl. 2007. Bodies of Tomorrow. Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

CHAPTER 15

‘Growgirls’ and Cultured Eggs: Food Futures, and Feminism in SF from the Global South Nora Castle and Esthie Hugo

Food technology has long been a staple of sf. Take the meal-in-a-pill, a key feature of early twentieth-century science fiction. In Arthur Bird’s (1899) Looking Forward, characters consume “a small pellet which contained highly nutritious food” (180). Stephen Leacock’s (1910) Literary Lapses imagines a single pill that contains the equivalent of thirteen Christmas dinners, while synthetic food tablets are the diet of choice in Harry Stephen Keeler’s (1915) John Jones’s Dollar. While all these works were created by men, the futuristic vision of the food-pill is, in fact, an invention of late nineteenth-century feminism. As Warren Belasco (2006, 116) notes, it was American suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease who, in an essay to promote the 1893 World’s Fair, originally envisaged that future technology would enable humans to consume complete meals in a single, portable dose. Adopting the optimistic language of techno-utopia, Lease

N. Castle (*) • E. Hugo English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_15

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(1893) imagined that this pill would liberate women from the drudgery of food-based labor: “thus,” she writes, “the problems of cooks and cooking will be solved” (178). As Ruth Cowan (1983) explains in her influential text More Work for Mother, however, (food) technology tends merely to reconfigure—and sometimes even increase—women’s work rather than eliminate it. Lease’s techno-optimistic prediction has likewise been challenged in recent years by a number of women-authored sf texts that grapple with the repercussions and potentials of food technology. Recognizing that food technology does not exist in a vacuum but rather is coproduced by the values of the society that creates it, these texts—the most oft-cited of which is undoubtedly Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2014), but which also include Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series (2014–2021)— explore the sociopolitical frameworks that underpin and inform the development of emergent food technologies. In line with the recent surge in popularity of global sf, a number of particularly evocative sf fictions that focus on this topic have emerged from the Global South. These texts make use of the sf mode not only to speculate on the rising global interest in technology as “the most sought-after ingredient in our diet” (Forward Fooding n.d.), but also to signal the importance of including the lived experience of Global South women in debates on gender, technology, and the future of food. Working at the interstices of Food Studies, Critical Race Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and feminist analysis, this chapter maps new directions in feminist speculative fiction through a reading of three of these recently published sf texts: Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future (2020) by Indian author and game designer Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Before She Sleeps (2018, 2019) by Pakistani author Bina Shah, and Ungirls (2018) by South African author Lauren Beukes. While the aim of our analysis is not to undermine the real and potential benefits that science and technology have enabled, we are interested in how a critical race and feminist food studies lens can put pressure on the techno-utopic futures articulated and critiqued in these sf narratives. The chapter will begin with an introduction to critical race feminist food studies, followed by close readings that explore the ways that Lakshminarayan, Shah, and Beukes draw attention to how technology, and food tech in particular, “can embody specific forms of power and authority” (Winner 1980, 121). All three are works of near-future speculative fiction set on Earth, which feature food technology as a significant

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component in their world-building. While Analog/Virtual explores food technology in terms of push-button convenience and the loss of women-­ centered generational knowledge, both Before She Sleeps and Ungirls focus on in vitro animal products as sites of complex signification that are implicated in gendered and racialized violence. Each portrays a techno-utopic food future that nominally proclaims itself “just,” but in practice reproduces many of the injustices of the current world-food-system (Wallerstein 1974).1 We conclude by suggesting that while technology can be leveraged to create “efficiency and sustainability in designing, producing, choosing, delivering and enjoying food” (Forward Fooding n.d.), it must do so in a fashion that incorporates the intersectional praxis insisted upon by theorists such as Maud Perrier, Elaine Swann, and Angela Lee, or else act as the instrument for its own failure as a (sustainable) solution to global crises.

Critical Race Feminist Food Studies Recent years have seen a notable upswing in scholarship in critical race feminist food studies. Of this corpus of criticism, the writings of Vandana Shiva (2009, 18), Silvia Federici (2009), Angela Lee (2018), and Maud Perrier and Elaine Swann (2019) have risen to prominence for bringing histories of race and class to bear on feminist debates on gender, labor, and the future of the world-food-system. For critical race scholars such as Swann and Perrier, any discussion of the future of food remains incomplete without taking into consideration “the working lives and inequalities of minoritized workers—often racially minoritized women—in the global food system” (2019). Swann and Perrier write that the neglect of critical race feminist food studies limits how scholars and policymakers currently “conceptualise food” (2019), arguing that unracialized and ungendered accounts of food, labor, and their futures curtail the capacity for intervention in a profoundly unequal capitalist food economy. In this uneven world-food-system, it is in the Global South that the majority of the world’s food is grown. Our choice to focus on women-­ authored texts emerging from the Global South is then a pointed one. As 1  We use this term, adapted from Wallerstein’s (1974) “world-system,” to call attention to the way the development of the “capitalist world-ecology” (Moore 2015) was inextricable from, and unfolded through, the development of a systemically integrated network of food production, distribution, and consumption. See Campbell et al. (2021).

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research by Oxfam and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2020) has long shown, Global South women play a crucial role in the global food system, not only as producers and workers but also as consumers. Echoing claims that women from the Global South produce more than half of all the food that is grown today for global consumption, Vandana Shiva (2009) writes that “women were the world’s original food producers, and they continue to be central to [the]  food production system in terms of the work they do in the food-chain” (18). Yet despite the formative role played by women in the agro-industrial food sector, their labor and knowledge continue to be devalued due to capitalism’s gendered division of labor and its “naturalization” of women’s work with food (Federici 2009). The gendered division of labor, as Shiva observes, ensures that women’s food-work “tends not to be recorded by economists as ‘work’” (19). Like other forms of social reproduction, defined by Nancy Fraser (2014) as “the forms of provisioning, caregiving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds,” food provision and preparation are constructed under patriarchal capitalism as an integral part of the “nature” of women given their childbearing capacities (61). Thus, women’s “food-economy” (Shiva 2009) is “naturalized into nonexistence” (Bhattacharya 2016, 4), even as it remains essential to the maintenance of everyday life and the ongoing renewal of the productive labor force, the household, the community, and capitalism itself (Swan and Perrier 2019). Although the arguments presented by these feminist thinkers are not new, they have not yet been explicitly applied to some of the newest and emerging food technologies (Lee 2018, 65), nor have they been used in the analysis of food tech in sf fictions from the Global South. This is thus a task that we endeavor to undertake here. Angela Lee (2018) reminds us that the perspectives of women and other marginalized peoples are especially significant in the context of emergent food technologies. “It is important,” Lee writes, “to consider not only the technical attributes and promissory possibilities” of technologies such as genetically engineered animals and in vitro meat (IVM), but “also the worldviews that are being imported in turn, as well as the unanticipated social and environmental consequences that could result” (63). As Evie Kendal (2015, 106) notes in her discussion of bioethics and sf, “although technology itself may be politically neutral, its application and regulation rarely are.” Employing the lens of ecofeminism, “a political and philosophical movement that sees the subordination of women and the domination of nature as closely linked,” Lee argues for the importance of

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rejecting views of institutions like science and technology as “objective” and without “inherent biases,” and, as such, advances a critique of new food technologies that is more attuned to “gendered and other forms of oppression,” including those committed “on the grounds of class, race, and species” (2018, 69). As we will see, the texts under discussion here are alive to this imperative in particularly evocative ways.

analog/VirTual: The Appetite and the Algorithm2 Consider Lakshminarayan’s (2020) Analog/Virtual. This cyberpunk-­ inflected collection of interconnected short stories is set in former Bangalore, reimagined in the novel as “Apex City” (169). Obsessed with having broken the glass ceiling, the women in the novel’s society (along with the rest of its citizens) are subjugated by an amplified version of neoliberal productivity culture. Society is subdivided via the “Bell Curve” into the highest 20 percent, middle 70 percent, and lowest 10 percent based on “institutionalized markers of merit” (198), with reproductive rights determined by one’s place on the curve. Food access is also determined by the Bell Curve. The lower 10 percent, known as Analogs, are shunned and only allowed nutro-shakes and protein porridge, while the Virtuals have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Often employed as menial labor, Analogs “are frequently dismissed from employment for food theft. There’s a common saying: ‘Hide the fruit, not the HoloTech’” (76). While the best technology is reserved for elites, techno-food is paradoxically mobilized as a tool of oppression. The nutro-shakes reduce food to mere nutrition with no cultural or social value, taking literally the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, while the availability of real food for elites tips society’s hand. The food tech in the novel includes vertical farms that rearrange themselves to get optimal sunlight, red-velvet-cupcakes-in-a-pill, and a food ordering system called FreshGoodz that syncs with a biochip to recommend a personalized meal-plan. The latter is the focus of the eponymous story in the collection. In this story, the novel’s protagonist, Anita, becomes unemployed due to loss of Productivity after her mother’s death, and is placed on the Productivity Improvement Programme (PIP), which assigns her daily “quests” ostensibly meant to “gently” realign her with Bell Corp’s ideals, or else prepare her for life as an Analog (40). Her tech 2

 This title is a reference to Mario Carpo’s (2011) The Alphabet and the Algorithm.

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is downgraded, and she is prohibited from ordering food via the FreshGoodz digital portal. Instead, Anita is forced to go to the store in person to procure her own food. That the protagonist of this chapter is a woman and that her task is to go grocery shopping is significant; due to her inability to remain competitive in a world informed by patriarchal values (the powerful women in Analog/Virtual [107] are ones who have “set an example by shattering myths about feminine weakness and sentimentality”) her punishment is to perform the socially reproductive labor that is traditionally allocated to women under the world-system. Usually, all her food decisions are made for her: “I can’t remember the last time I didn’t run an algorithm to make a decision—calorie count, popularity based on user ratings, price points” (Lakshminarayan 2020, 50). The experience of picking her own produce is depicted as harrowing, although Anita acknowledges that “[t]here was a time when physically shopping for artisanal vegetables was a sign of prestige, not failure” (49). She struggles to remember her mother’s instructions on how to pick the perfect tomato and cannot quite recall what the “right colour” of the fruit should be (49). In this scene, Anita experiences how cut off she is from traditional food-knowledges, reiterating Shiva’s (2009, 19) critique of how “science and technology have rendered women’s knowledge invisible.” Central to the development of the industrial food system is the “worldwide destruction of the feminine knowledge of agriculture,” in particular the destruction of the biodiversity of food production, which “women have carefully maintained…over thousands of years” (Shiva 2009, 21). While proffered as a convenience solution, the push-button kitchen, a key feature of the food tech in the novel, thus spells the death of intergenerational and women-based knowledges such as those to which Shiva refers. In order to reenter what Shiva (2009, 31) terms the “Food World of Capitalist Patriarchy,” Anita must thus sever herself from her mother’s food-expertise and accept her place in a system where all her food choices are made for her by an algorithm that considers food just another commodity, which thereby places capitalist values such as user ratings and price above food’s inherent nutritional and nurturing value. While Anita is thankful that soon “this PIP will be over, and [she] will return—triumphant—to a life where [her] algorithms, portals and simulations will collect, share and analyse data to decide for [her],” the reader recognizes this desire as dystopic (Lakshminarayan 2020, 52). If, as Stephen Shapiro (2020) argues, algorithmic capitalism is interested in a new type of subjectivity-formation, the social control state of Apex City is

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interested in using algorithmic technology to form one particular type of subject: one who is entirely reliant on her Bell Biochip, and who is alienated from the realities of the food economy in which food is not zapped into existence, but rather harvested in vertical farms by Analogs. The punitive suspension of Anita’s FreshGoodz portal demonstrates, through their loss, that intergenerational and women’s knowledge provide valuable avenues for alternative living, autonomy, dissent, and rebellion. The loss of these pieces of knowledge all but ensures that Anita is beholden to Bell Corp. In a society which curtails familial bonds and instead relies fully on a black-box algorithm to determine everything from societal status to lunch, food technology here is used to highlight the pitfalls of modelling a “meritocratic” system (which is really a front for totalitarianism) on a patriarchal capitalist valuation of merit.

Before She Sleeps: In ViTro Eggs and In Vivo Embryos While Analog/Virtual focuses on the dangers of folding the food system into productivity-culture-focused algorithmic capitalism, Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018) uses cultured (i.e., in vitro) food to shine a spotlight on women’s social reproduction with regard to emotional intimacy. The novel is set in a future Southwest Asia fifty-plus years after a nuclear war. Green City, the narrative’s locale, is a former desertscape that was spared from becoming a nuclear wasteland. City officials, using imported “cultivated water” to accelerate tree growth as well as biosphere cloud-seeding methods for producing rain, were able to coax a lush oasis out of the ground, creating the “Green City ecosystem, a trademarked brand” that is “all about preserving the seasons and cycles, or at least the illusion of them” (Shah 2018, 13) The city is therefore positioned as an ecotopia, but rather than existing in “interactive harmony with ecological systems,” it is touted as an example of human exceptionalism and mastery over nature (Barnhill 2011, 126).3 The celebratory construction of Green City is undergirded by a patriarchal capitalist rhetoric that continually discounts women’s food-economy as well as their bodily autonomy. In this new world, it is women who “have had to pay a heavy price for the new version of normality” (Shah 2018, 13). They are portrayed as essentialized vessels for gestation, 3  The subgenre of ecotopia itself has a “mixed history” and has been used to further both xenophobic/racist/patriarchal and progressive agendas. See Fiskio (2012).

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mirroring how nonhuman animals are constructed, via the factory farming system, as production units rather than sentient beings (Pollan 2011, 317). Gesturing to what Carol J. Adams (1990) has famously referred to as “the sexual politics of meat,” several of the women in the novel complain of their animalization through new governmental policy, which strips them of their corporeal freedoms and reinforces the powers traditionally allocated to men under the patriarchal world-system. This policy, which requires women to practice polyandry and to give birth as often as possible, is a result of a “Gender Emergency” catalyzed by “the Virus,” a pandemic disease that “morphed from a rare strain of HPV into a fast-spreading cervical cancer epidemic,” in which “[m]en could be carriers, but it was women who were felled, quickly and inclusively” (Shah 2018, 60–61). Sabine, one of the novel’s central narrators, refers to Green City’s “conspiracy, first to decimate us, then to distribute those of us who remain among themselves as if we were cattle, or food” (12). This same comparison is later made separately by a further character, Lin, who accuses the authoritarian government of “pump[ing] us full of hormones and expect[ing] us to produce children as if we’re cows” (135). Green City is also a techno-utopia, and all food is produced by lab-­ grown technologies: “All beef, eggs, in fact, anything natural, is created in a lab with synthetic polymers, proteins, DNA” (Shah 2018, 85). This technology is one that is already in development in the real world, as of 2021, though it is not yet commercially viable. While many companies globally (JUST, Higher Steaks, Integriculture, Aleph Farms, Mosa Meat, Memphis Meats, etc.) focus on cultured meat (discussed further in the context of Ungirls), others focus on culturing alternative animal products such as fish (Finless Foods), egg whites (Clara Foods), and milk (Perfect Day). These products are pitched as the “perfect” solutions to the problems of animal agriculture; described as cruelty-free and environmentally friendly, they nevertheless provoke questions about the ethical use of genetic material, as well as affordability and access (Simonsen 2015; Miller 2012). One of the main challenges for cultured protein production is to mimic the structure of living creatures (e.g., a bone-in steak) rather than merely producing mince or paste, so in Before She Sleeps, the eggs complete with shell represent a speculative extension of extant technology. In the novel, this technology has also advanced significant biomedical breakthroughs. For instance, it was IVM technology that allowed Joseph, one of the novel’s characters, “to have his liver transplant five years ago” (Shah 2018,

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85). The connection between biomedical advances and food technology is neither accidental nor insignificant. Both are united under the umbrella of biotechnology and are implicated in the rise of biocapitalism, in which “biological materials, particularly stem cells and genomes, are increasingly inserted into projects of product-making and profit-seeking.” (Helmreich 2008, 463) This interconnection bolsters Sabine’s identification with cultured eggs, as Green City’s society views her merely as a living scaffold for the development of a fetus. Like the food grown in the city’s labs, women are considered just one more of Green City’s resources. Their status is based on their use-value rather than their inherent values as human beings: “It was a capital crime to hit or abuse a woman: women in Green City were precious resources, to be treasured and protected, looked after and provided for, in return for their bodies given to the cause of repopulation” (Shah 2018, 23). While Green City’s rhetoric of resource scarcity is meant to suggest that the women are valued members of its society, in reality, it simply whittles them down to little more than walking wombs. The reader soon learns that it is only compliant women who enjoy the protection of the state; though the “authorities consider anything that harms an unborn child no less than treason,” we are told that the “Perpetuation Bureau would easily sacrifice a few errant women to teach the rest a lesson” (141, 62). In this way, the novel critiques how sustainability discourses such as “resource protection”—the same discourses that currently undergird the food tech sector (Voegele 2018)—can easily be co-opted for patriarchal gain, as women can only fulfill the roles Green City has allocated to them by embracing their “natural” positions as bearers of offspring and little more. The rhetoric of protecting women is undermined by the high-tech nature of Green City’s society. The infrastructure is already there for the invention of reproductive technologies that would relieve the burden placed unfairly on the women. Green City has cloned animals in its nature parks, has biomedical gels that knit skin back together, and even has “prostitute bots” (Shah 2018, 30) to whom a first visit is subsidized for all men in Green City, ostensibly to “help men control their impulses toward real women” (111). Nevertheless, the city is devoid of any sort of technology for artificial reproduction (including, seemingly, in vitro fertilization [IVF], despite the existence of IVM). It does, however, have “fertility checks, uterine and ovarian and breast cancer gene testing” and “virginity restoration procedures” (27), demonstrating that a lack of such

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technology is not due to a lack of policing women’s bodies. But, as Sabine herself explains, “science is only as good as its gatekeepers” (86). Despite strict controls on women, including a prohibition on gathering in groups for fear that they will organize, a handful of women manage to escape the government’s control. They congregate in a secret underground bunker known as “the Panah,” or Persian for sanctuary. The women in this bunker survive by trading not sex but rather emotional connection, which has become a much-desired commodity in a world where women are simply viewed as reproductive units and their time must be split between the multiple Husbands to whom they have been assigned. As Sabine, who is a member of the Panah, explains, “Men’s physical appetites are huge, but their emotional appetites are without end. No regime could change that” (30). In one particularly evocative scene, Sabine is with one of her clients, the aforementioned Joseph. He, like the other clients of the Panah, has hired her to come (chastely) spend the night with him, to hold him and listen to him, to provide him with companionship and a “temporary illusion of fidelity” (42). The morning-after scene occurs in the kitchen, one that, like Analog/Virtual’s FreshGoodz portal, provides personalized food recommendations; Joseph “cracks open two cultured eggs, then scans his kitchen display to see what he should add to it—cultured meat, vegetables, or bio-lab cheese; the display will decide based on what Joseph has been eating over the last few days” (Shah 2018, 84–85). The technology of the kitchen here supplants traditional women’s knowledge just as it does in Analog/Virtual, thereby allowing Joseph to appropriate the domestic space as a masculine site to reinforce his dominance. The reversal of normative gender roles does not, here, equate to Joseph taking up the yoke of care that women traditionally bear under the world-­ food-­system. Sabine explains: “Whenever I go to see Joseph, he prepares a gourmet meal for me that I’m usually reluctant to eat. He tries to feed me a bite of this or a morsel of that. He sees himself as a bon vivant; feeding me well is just another way of impressing himself” (53). Joseph’s meals are “seductions in their own right,” meant not to support her as she is, but rather to win her over to do things his way (69). He is unsatisfied with the temporary, sex-less arrangement, and wants not only Sabine’s company but her love and her body. Unaccustomed to not getting his way, it later is revealed that Joseph had spiked the gourmet “black champagne” with which he plies Sabine and rapes her (54).

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Joseph’s aggressive feeding is contrasted with Sabine’s discussion of a cookbook left behind in the Panah, which occurs right before this scene. While Joseph’s is food conjured from nowhere, put together based on data analysis as it is in Analog/Virtual, the cookbook is shown as a connecting, intergenerational thread. Sabine explains, It’s strange, but over the years I’ve memorized the recipes in the cookbooks Ilona Serfati left behind. Lin says she was a great cook. I never met her, but from her food, I can tell she was a woman of some discernment. When I found the cookbook, its spidery, ethereal handwriting already fading from the pages, I wanted desperately to save its contents, if not its form. Our mothers, aunts, grandmothers live only in representation of their lives as we, their daughters, try to re-create them. (Shah 2018, 69)

It is here, through food, that Ilona’s own exhortation to her fellow women that “[w]e need to record our own history and tell our stories if only to each other” is answered (35). The recipes are the representation of lives, of histories, and it is this connection that gives the cookbook its fortifying qualities. The cookbook acts as a powerful storehouse that Green City looks to repress; it offers a window into a forgotten world wherein women’s social and emotional connections with food are celebrated, nurtured, and valued. By contrast, Joseph’s food has a place-less-ness, an ungroundedness; it has no history, no terroir.4 Like Analog/Virtual’s nutro-shakes, it is missing the emotional sustenance to match its nutritional value. Far from freeing Sabine from the “shackles” of the kitchen, then, Joseph mobilizes food tech to illustrate the power that has been accorded to him through the patriarchal rhetoric of “sophisticated science.” As Joseph puts it, “There is nothing in this city that isn’t available to me. Food, drink, drugs. Riches, power, pleasure… Why on earth would I restrict anything for myself, when science has given us every way of eliminating their consequences?” (Shah 2018, 85–86). Directly after Joseph makes his claim, Sabine has an unsettling vision: “An image comes to my mind, unbidden, of him crouching over me the same way he’s hunching over the counter. Of him watching me as intently as he watches his eggs cooking in the pan” (86). This association is furthered by Nina Budabin McQuown’s (2014) assertion that “foods associated with animal and plant 4  Terroir, a term usually used in reference to wine, refers to the particularities of the growing environment (climate, soil, terrain, etc.) of an agricultural product. It is also used to refer to the specific taste and character that result from this growing environment.

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reproduction, notably milk, eggs, and fruit, are often also foods associated with women’s bodies and sexuality. In some cases, foods represent the female body itself, especially its fertility, power, and physicality” (1340). In Joseph’s mind, Sabine is as much a product created specifically for his consumption as the cultured eggs he eats. Sabine might not be a reproductive unit like the Wives of Green City, but she is being asked to perform a domestic imaginary free from the responsibilities and trials of familial life, just as the cultured eggs provide a food imaginary free from the messiness of farms, animals, and agricultural systems. After realizing that Joseph has raped her, Sabine’s identification with the eggs is rendered even more significant, particularly as she develops (and subsequently loses) an ectopic pregnancy. The food here, in contrast to the novel’s depictions of food exchange between women (such as the tea that Lin sends in the car for Sabine when she is returning home from, or the nurturing broth she is invited to share with a Panah sister), is not pictured as part of a meaningful, nurturing relationship, but rather reflects an upper-class male’s cultural expectation of mastery over others’ (women’s, animals’) bodies and the environment. The use of cultured foods, which here signify man’s triumph over nature, reinforces Joseph’s inherent belief in his own superiority. He is so inculcated in his own privilege that he does not seem to recognize the irony in addressing his remarks about freedom from consequences to Sabine, who is trapped in her role because of this very feeling of Anthropocenic dominance. Joseph epitomizes the ideologies of what Giovanna Di Chiro (2017, 487) terms the “(m)Anthropocene,” which not only “conceals the gendered, racialized, and exploitative global capitalist system,” but places at its forefront a particular human protagonist based on the image of (white) male superiority, one which “obscures difference when it suits” (Denning 2019, 207). Thus, even in a world that has enacted dramatic social change, these technofixes are used in lieu of addressing larger societal problems—or in the case of Joseph, as a method of refusal to acknowledge that there are any problems at all. With the environment tamed, babies made, and food created, those on the margins are meant to accept their lot for the greater good, while the men in charge enjoyed “unlimited freedom” (Shah 2018, 122). The scene described also serves to juxtapose the abundance of cultured eggs with the lack of IVF or ectogenesis technology, which would essentially culture (fertilized) eggs outside of the human body and thus demonstrates the priorities of the society of Green City, in which—despite

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ecological, societal, and medical catastrophe—wealthy men’s tastes and desires prevail over the needs of the women in Green City, who, ironically, are responsible for keeping the city’s operations running.

Ungirls: Carniculture, Sex Work, and IVM Like Shah’s Before She Sleeps, Beukes’ Ungirls (2019) similarly imagines a near-future dystopia in which the consumption of cultured food has become commonplace. To this end, the narrative draws on the technologies of in vitro meat (IVM) to tap into the speculative literary potentials embedded in the aphorism “the pleasures of the flesh,” which Beukes takes to its literal and queasy extreme. Variously referred to as lab meat, cultured meat, cell-based meat, slaughter-free meat, and clean meat, IVM is produced via a process called “tissue engineering,” or “cellular agriculture” (New Harvest n.d.). This process “involves growing muscle tissue using starter stem cells from live animals, which are put into a culture medium where they proliferate with the help of a bioreactor, eventually becoming an edible flesh food” (Lee 2018, 66). Such new processes of meat production have been proffered as solutions to the “problems” of conventional factory farming, including its detrimental environmental and health effects along with its reliance on incalculable animal suffering (New Harvest n.d.). Ungirls is set in a near-future Cape Town, South Africa, and follows the story of Natalie, known to her friends as Nats. Both actor and sex worker, Nat is a young, mixed-raced woman who supplements her income from sex work by providing voiceovers to newly developed lab-grown sex dolls called “growgirls,” or less tastefully, “growjobs” (Beukes 2019). As this latter name suggests, these dolls have been created by men for men. They have become the companions of choice for a host of wealthy men across the globe thanks to a Bahama-based “teledildonics” company called “GloryMorning.” Catering to the dual need of their male clientele for both sex and emotional connection, and echoing recent developments in the field of sex-robotics in the real world (Crist 2017), GloryMorning’s dolls not only move and “sweat” as humans do, but also feign human desire and reciprocity. In addition to the vocalizations provided by Nats’s voiceovers, the dolls are “wired with the same kind of electronic circuitry mesh used in state-of-the-art prosthetics,” enabling them to “repeat certain simple motions” required for sex (Beukes 2019).

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The dolls are explicitly born of IVM technology. They are sexualized extensions of “organogrows,” “live-flesh incubation units” that have been developed “to grow organs for transplant to humans” (Beukes 2019). Like the biomedical justification that is offered in Before She Sleeps for cultured food, the organogrows are described as “the medical breakthrough that will eliminate the black-market trade in organs.” Through the figure of the growgirl, a specifically gendered variation of the organogrow, Beukes presents the consumption of women as taking both literal and symbolic form. In addition to the organogrows being developed for (cis-­ heteronormative) sex, rumors have begun to circulate that they are also literally consumed. We later learn that a Miami-based restaurant has been accused of hosting “a five-course cannibal dinner using organogrow meat and organs.” While these rumors turn out to have no basis, the existence of this conjecture nonetheless captures how the narrative presents the consumption of meat as a form of mastery over another being. Beukes extends this process to symbolically express the objectification of women’s bodies under patriarchal capitalism, most powerfully raised in the profit-driven, male-owned corporation that is GloryMorning. Even as they experience emotional attachment to their dolls, the men in the narrative still view the growgirls as fungible commodities and status symbols, an equivalence they express with metaphors that emphasize their materiality as meat. Descriptions of the dolls as “meat-bags” and “meat-puppets” illustrate their transformation from once-living cells into dead, insensate things, which submit to the will of their male owners in the same way that meat submits to the knife and jaw. As products of a carnist world, the creation of the growgirls draws our attention to how “meat culture,” to borrow from Annie Potts (2016, 20), remains “fundamentally associated with (and invested in) capitalism, consumerism, and the notion of free will, a perspective that positions all nonhuman life as a potential resource.” In this sense, as Sherryl Vint (2010) succinctly puts it, “the animal is always-­ already meat” (28; emphasis added). Like Before She Sleeps, then, Ungirls illustrates how certain food technologies such as IVM appear as less of a “solution” and more of symptom of the violent subjection of both nonhuman animals and women within industrial patriarchal capitalist cultures. Attempts to construct the growgirls as inert objects of consumption do more, however, than simply move the dolls down what Katherine Keyser terms “the animacy chain” (2019). Beukes also plays on the ethical quandaries of IVM—in particular, the challenges it brings to prevailing

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assumptions of what constitutes life, death, and sentience—in order to give shape to the construction of sex workers as outside the realm of humanity.5 Popular slurs used to describe sex workers as “hookers,” “prostitutes,” and even “sex-bots”6 find their release in the narrative through the frequent attempts made to move the organogrows as far away from humanity as possible. As an online article advocating for their use insists, “organogrows are not people. Just keeping telling yourself that” (Beukes 2019). In a nod to the ChickieNobs that feature in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), the organogrows are equated not only with meat, but with meat that has no connection to life or thought: they are like those “headless chickmeats in the lab farms [who] lack sufficient brain stem to generate consciousness” (Beukes 2019). Yet, even as the growgirls are denied humanhood, they retain a certain vitality: “yes they’re alive,” the author of the same article admits, “but only in the way a sea urchin is alive.” In this sense, the narrative is less interested in challenging the terms of the species border than in advocating for movements that seek to decriminalize sex work, and in so doing, give back to sex workers the humanity they are continually denied under a system that discounts both their humanity and their (sex) work as work. Echoing the promise offered by IVM, which ostensibly provides an alternative to the bloody horrors of the factory farm, the growgirls provide a substitute for the supposed “messiness” of real women’s bodies. One of the main taglines offered by GloryMorning, for example, is that they “don’t need to eat, or evacuate. You simply submerge them in a nutrient bath at the end of the day” (Beukes 2019). IVM, after all, not only hinges on the mastery over the animal-other but also dispenses with the need for an animal altogether by harnessing its DNA. The development of the growgirls thus threatens to render women—and sex work—obsolete. Unable to make enough money from a sex-trade now glutted by the growgirls, Nats must comply with a new commodity market that demands not only her body but also her voice. Despite Nats’s insistence that she is simply “diversifying” her means of income, this compliance is a move that her friends recognize as having dystopian effects. “You’re like the little mermaid,” they tell her, “giving her voice to the sea witch who wants to destroy her.” Such predictions indeed come to pass 5  As Amnesty International has long shown, sex workers are particularly vulnerable to human rights violations due to the criminalization of their labor. See Murphy (2015). 6  This was a term recently used by Sophie Walker, the leader of the Women’s Equality Party. See English Collective of Prostitutes (2018).

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when the narrative’s vengeful villain hacks into the growgirls technology and employs Nats’ voice for his own violent ends. IVM technology in Ungirls, therefore, leads to unforeseen harms, raising the question of who benefits and who is harmed in world already unequal, already tipped in favor of a few. Thus, while the narrative critiques IVM for its reinvigoration of what John Miller (2012) terms “carniculture,” it also asks pertinent questions about the ramifications of technofixes such as IVM for those who are already relegated to the margins of society. IVM destabilizes any firm boundary between the born and the manufactured, the inanimate and animate, the sentient and insensate, and the living and the dead—and these destabilizations, Ungirls suggests, have particular implications in a world were women and sex workers are already vulnerable, already at risk of patriarchal capitalism’s intimate bodily invasions. While the growgirls may be birthed from an ideology that ostensibly seeks to create a less violent and more equitable future, they offer no protection from a world still tied to a masculine drive for profit and power. Like IVM itself, Ungirls ultimately asks more questions than offers solutions. Drawing on the genre of sf, Ungirls reminds us that approaches to the widespread adoption of IVM are necessarily speculative, if somewhat queasy and discomforting, as Beukes’s image of the women-made-flesh invokes. What Beukes does make clear, however, is that biotechnological innovations do not necessarily signal the dawn of new gender relations, just as lab-grown meat “does mean not mean an end to conventional meat production” (Miller 2012, 51). Rather, Beukes encourages us to place pressure on dominatory techo-capitalist complexes, and in so doing, resist processes that look to fold food and food-futures into a worldview that women have long contested and continue to contest.

Conclusion “Science, technology, and the laws and policies that regulate them are not disembodied practices,” Angela Lee (2018) reminds us, “but are intimately located within broader realities and structures of meaning” (81). Through their development of food technologies in near-future sf contexts, these three texts written by women from the Global South contextualize food technologies—namely, biometrically regulated food ordering and cultured animal products—that are on the cusp of implementation in the real world. Rather than solving the “problems of cooks and cooking”

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(Lease 1893, 178), these techno-utopic solutions that promise “food from nowhere” (Bové and Dufour 2001, 55) merely further obscure women’s food-economy and alienate women from having any experience with food outside of an explicitly patriarchal capitalistic profit-seeking ideology. Analog/Virtual’s FreshGoodz portal and accompanying Bell Biochip highlight the issues of automating culturally significant decisions and demonstrate through omission the revolutionary potential of women-­ centered knowledges. Before She Sleeps takes up this revolutionary potential through its portrayal of the women of the Panah, who attempt to retain these knowledges, and extends the critique of food technology to encompass cultured foods, which in the novel stand as an example of “sophisticated science” and man’s mastery over nature. Ungirls draws out the implications of cultured foods further by transposing Carol J. Adams’s (1990) sexual politics of meat to in vitro technology, critiquing IVM for its perpetuation of the violent subjection of both nonhuman animals and marginalized women within capitalist patriarchy. We have read these texts as constructing a particular way of looking at science with a generative skepticism, which opens questions rather than shuts them down. As Lee (2018) observes, “A healthy skepticism about science and technology does not necessarily signify an anti-science or anti-­ technology stance. Rather, it indicates a concern about the differential and often destructive impacts that dominant perspectives on science and technology have generated.” (80–81). Adopting this view, we have argued that sf fictions from the Global South offer insightful ways of viewing food tech from the perspective of marginalized women who lie not only at the center of the world-food-system, but also experience its violences most powerfully and painfully. By employing the lived experience of women from Pakistan, India, and South Africa, these texts resist the evisceration of women’s voices in capitalist imaginaries of food and its futures. Their use of the sf mode turns not so much on anti-technology perspective, but on one that points toward the necessity of a sustainable future in which food is not configured by those exploitative processes that continue to shape the past and present.

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CHAPTER 16

Reproductive Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, and the (Non)Human to Come in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God Kristen Shaw

“I feel that, instead of the past, it is the future that haunts us now” (Erdrich 2017, 63). Cedar, the protagonist of Louise Erdrich’s 2017 novel The Future Home of the Living God, ponders this as she leaves her adopted parents’ home in the suburbs, noticing that the street has lost electricity, leaving her childhood street with the “stillness of an ancient dream, the muted perfection of a ‘before’ disaster photograph.” Set in a near-future Minnesota, Erdrich’s apocalyptic novel represents a world in which evolution has stopped: humans are giving birth to earlier, less “developed” forms of humans, and many speculate that humanity will revert to “foraging apes” within a few generations (55). The situation results in the imposition of strengthened biopolitical controls that monitor human reproduction and women’s bodies through surveillance, biomedicine, and

K. Shaw (*) Hanmer, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_16

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material and social technologies. Cedar’s suggestion that it is the future that haunts humanity, rather than the past, points to the question at the core of the novel and its politics. In exposing the human child as at risk, Erdrich’s novel reveals the extent to which both human identity and its future are preserved through the figure of the Child, a figure metonymic of the social order as it stands, and whose preservation justifies the strengthening of biopower/discipline and the dehumanization of those capable of bearing children. Furthermore, the novel explores themes of reproduction, the biopolitical and disciplinary control of it, and the reproduction of futurity through the figure of the Child. In this sense, the Child is “not only the subject of future protection, but also a social technology deployed to save the future. Saving the Child, in other words, appears tantamount to saving the future, just as saving the future is done in the service of protecting the children of the future” (Sheldon 2016, 25). This chapter will first examine how reproductive futurist narratives are employed to control social and biological reproduction in the novel by drawing from several primary theoretical frameworks: Rebekah Sheldon’s (2016) articulation of reproductive futurism, Michel Foucault’s (2003) theories of biopolitics—specifically his work on how biopolitics functions as a racializing technology and a form of population management—as well as Foucauldian theories on biomedicalization. Following Sheldon, the middle section of this chapter focuses on reading the “queerly human” child in the novel as a symbol of the potential liveliness of matter that exceeds biopolitical controls, calling for a more ethical orientation to nonhuman materiality. The last section of this chapter explores Indigenous futurism as a response to reproductive futurism, subverting common concepts of futurity and progress while foregrounding Indigenous resilience and alternative forms of kinship that engage the human and nonhuman. While Erdrich’s representation of a dystopian society functions to critique the biopolitical controls of reproduction and the regulatory mechanisms of our social order, it also subverts traditional narratives of dystopia and apocalypse by gesturing toward the possibility of alternative futures not circumscribed by the logic of reproductive futurism. The protagonist of Future Home of the Living God is Cedar, a twenty-­ six-­year-old Ojibwe woman who is four months pregnant when the novel begins. Cedar was adopted as a baby by white parents, Sera and Glen, and at the start of the novel, she travels to meet her biological family on a reservation to gain “biological certainty” for herself and her future child

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(Erdrich 2017, 5). The story is told through a series of reflections and letters that Cedar records in a notebook for her unborn child. In one passage, she writes, “you deserve more… [you deserve] genetic info, which may affect who you are beyond whatever is now occurring” (6). At this stage in the novel, Cedar is referring to her journey to learn more about her biological family and her cultural heritage; however, this early statement takes on a new significance as the novel progresses, and readers learn about the rising rate of fetal anomalies throughout the population. Scientists speculate on the implications of “abnormalities in the neocortex” of fetuses and what these changes “could mean in terms of cognition (69);” male sex organs are not developing properly, and the numbers of females being born has risen drastically; babies are bigger and more “physically adept” (163); and the survival rate for babies is decreasing exponentially (224). As a result of this emerging situation, the United States’s government is supplanted by the Church of the New Constitution, which begins to detain pregnant women (and later, all women capable of bearing children). Those women who resist detainment must go into hiding, employing a network of allies to help them evade authorities. The Church of the New Constitution, strengthened by military and biomedical institutions in addition to more informal social networks, aims to maintain women’s bodies as reproductive units in service of the future, and to ensure the continuation and supposed health of the population on a macro scale.

Reproductive Futurism, Biopolitics, and the Economization of Life Erdrich’s novel demonstrates how discourses of reproductive futurism are activated to legitimize the development of new regimes and narratives of power. In order to analyze how power functions in the novel, this section draws from Foucauldian theories of biopower, population, and its relation to race; Michelle Murphy’s (2017) theory of the economization of life and the link between racialization and population; and Sheldon’s (2016) theorization of reproductive futurism, to demonstrate how material and social technologies are deployed at the individual and state level to ensure the continuation of a regulated, “productive” population throughout Future Home of the Living God. The commitment to healthy babies reveals an investment in a particular kind of future, one that remains committed to

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both the purity of the human as a species, and also to a particular racialized idea of the human. The theory of reproductive futurism, first theorized by Lee Edelman (2004) in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, posits that politics is always centered around a desire to create a “good” future for coming generations, and that the political “remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child” (2–3). Edelman argues that reproductive futurism depends on the figure of the Child, which both represents the hegemony of the (hetero)normative social order and is the symbol through which politics operates; in fact, the Child “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics” (3). This future cast by reproductive futurism, however, is merely a reproduction of the present social order. Rather than try to “take back” the future, Edelman rejects the idea of the future entirely: “We do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past…the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past” (31). Queerness, for Edelman, functions in opposition to the logic of reproductive futurism as it disrupts the social order and society’s investment in the way that the social and political are organized (18). The theory of reproductive futurism was recently taken up by Sheldon (2016) in her text The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe, where it is Sheldon’s reworking of the concept that will be most pertinent to the analysis here. To summarize, Sheldon argues that the Child is used to represent and compel action to protect the future of the Earth and the human species. The Child is a “potent metonymy” for life-itself, so it compels “management over the future to protect the future’s children” (26). However, the fact that the Child is metonymic for life itself means that it also conjures a sense of the liveliness of matter that exceeds biopolitical systems of management. Indeed, as Sheldon argues, “the prevalence of the fantasy of a harmed future is indicative of our intense awareness of continuing mutations and movements, of material futurity” that is not merely a replication of the future, but threatens (or promises) fundamentally new social and material arrangements (49). Rather than reject the future outright, Sheldon argues that the “queerly human” child and the queerness of matter gesture toward the possibility of emergent forms of life that resist biopolitical regulation. Further, reproductive futurism is not only concerned with managing reproduction to invest in the child (as representative of the future), but about ensuring the reproduction of the “right”

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kind of children, and therefore, the “right” kind of citizen of the future. In the novel, this anxiety about the future reveals itself not only in fears about genetic drifts away from what is considered properly human, but also in the differential treatment of racialized embryos. Foucault’s work on biopolitics and racism can thus help shed light on these anxieties. Throughout his works, Foucault (2003) outlines a theory of power that functions in a diffuse, networked way, through regulatory apparatuses producing particular norms that become self-reinforcing as individuals and societies adopt them and regulate themselves accordingly. This kind of power is exercised “through constant surveillance” and “a closely meshed grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign” (36). In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault differentiates between two mechanisms of power: the disciplinary and the biopolitical. In summary, disciplinary mechanisms circulate to exert power on the individual body while biopower emanates from the State and sub-State level, developing mechanisms invested in the bioregulation of the population (250). The two mechanisms of power are not mutually exclusive, but rather function simultaneously at different levels. Future Home of the Living God represents how these two different mechanisms of power function in tandem. Women become subject to strict surveillance, both from militarized state forces and from members of their communities (and even their families, as Cedar’s partner Phil eventually reveals her pregnant status to the authorities, resulting in Cedar’s detainment). The situation at large represents how disciplinary and biopolitical power function in concert with one another as macro, state-level forces are reinforced by disciplinary discourses, practices, and social interactions at the micro level. Significantly, however, the ultimate goal of both individualized discipline and state/institutional regulation is to control the population and ensure its regulation, to deter and “control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass… to predict the probability of those events (by modifying it, if necessary), or at least to compensate for their effects” in order to achieve “an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (Foucault 2003, 249). In sum, both disciplinary power and biopower function to protect the population as a whole from potential “dangers” emerging from within. One the one hand, “dangers” in the context of the novel refer to deviations from what is considered “human.” As Sheldon notes, insofar as the Child comes to be associated with life itself, it is always potentially suspicious, “intimate with other-than-human forms-of-life” (6). As a result, the Child promotes the

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adjudication of boundaries around life-itself and the development of “regimes of capture” that attempt to fold this dangerous liveliness back into the human (16–17). Yet, this definition of the “proper” human also relies on coded assumptions about race, class, and the kind of reproductive futures that humanity should invest in. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault characterizes biopower as a racializing technology that, in its concern with “optimiz[ing] a state of life,” functions through the logic of “making live and letting die” (246, 247). While biopower is concerned with “making live,” on the one hand, the “making live” of some depends on the “letting die” of others. Racism is “the break between what must live and what must die,” then; it allows for the separation and hierarchization of groups within a population (254). Inevitably some groups—those characterized as “abnormal”—must be allowed to die so that the species as a whole—those groups attributed greater value—are permitted to live, and not only live, but be more vigorous: “the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer” (256). This process is visible throughout Future Home of the Living God, as Black and Indigenous women and women of color in general are subject to more severe forms of reproductive control throughout the story; and as it is suggested that racialized fetuses are treated as waste, or what Murphy would call “surplus” life: “a devalued and unwanted excess amenable to erasure and optimization” through population control measures (2017, 51). For example, Cedar listens to a report on the radio about the raid of in vitro clinic by a militant organization who took the “leftover” embryos: “the embryos not labeled Caucasian” (Erdrich 2017, 90). The individual being interviewed explains, “We’re going to have them all and keep them all. We’re not killing any. All are sacred” (90). The suggestion that the state treats non-­ white embryos as waste, coupled with the revelation that there is a registry of women, illustrates Foucault’s description of the logic of biopolitics as a racializing technology concerned with producing particular futures by ensuring the continuation of an “optimized” population (Erdrich 31). Here, Erdrich appears to be explicitly referencing the eugenics movement that flourished in the United States starting in the early twentieth century, which “underscored the notion that some women’s reproductive capacity was more valuable than others,” as Jean Flavin describes (2009, 15). Targeting Indigenous women, Black women, immigrant women, and poor women, eugenics-based policies resulted in the often forced or

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coerced sterilization of these populations until the 1970s (16). The real-­ world anxieties around racial purity in the population that stimulated such measures are reflected in the novel and its representations of methods developed to manage reproduction at the level of the individual and the population. Murphy (2017), however, expands on Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics and racism in her theorization of population management, the economy, and racism. She outlines how transformations in the functioning of biopolitics around the time of the Cold War resulted in a shift from a eugenics model to the development of infrastructures focused on regulating populations for the sake of national and global economies. In this framework, “population as a problem of economy was financialized, sorting between productive and unproductive life, between life worthy of investment that accumulates value and life not worth being born that, if lived, would diminish the value of the whole” (136). Murphy, echoing Foucault’s statements above, develops her reading to argue that biopolitical forces shifted to consider how “some children must be invested in so that futures others might not be born, so that rates of returns increase, so that future adults are worth more, so others live more prosperously” (114). The goal of these processes is thus to ensure the reproduction of an optimized population by demarcating and attributing differential value to different kinds of life. Murphy uses the term human capital to describe this constellation of power relations centered on investment and speculation in certain types of human bodies, which foregrounds the link to reproductive futurism: “human capital renders embodiment as a site for investment. Bodies become a site for an anticipatory, future-oriented calculation of value” (115). Sheldon (2016) similarly argues that the conjunction of the Child and capital under late capitalism entails a shift to what she terms somatic capitalism: “the intervention into and monetization of life-itself” (118). Murphy’s theory of the economization of life complements theories of reproductive futurism because both rely on demarcating human worth and managing reproduction in order to ensure the production of particular futures; however, the kinds of futures these processes create are futures that depend on the further instrumentalization and exploitation of racialized and vulnerable populations, working to ensure the reproduction of “productive” populations filled with the “right” kinds of people. A particularly evocative scene illustrative of these processes occurs during Cedar’s initial ultrasound, which demonstrates the interrelation between the two poles or orientations of reproductive futurism and the

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economization of life: the investment in the future (human) child as a continuation of the human, and the management of bodies to optimize that future along racialized lines. Early in the novel, Cedar attends her ultrasound appointment to check up on the baby’s development. Although the appointment appears to go smoothly at first, Cedar realizes that something is wrong as the physician and technicians grow quiet: “The technician is intent, focused utterly on what she sees…I know there is something wrong, something off. The atmosphere has changed; the doctor is silent. The picture is fixed…They will not stop looking” (50). The doctor finally tells Cedar and the technicians that “they’ve got one,” and proceeds to tell Cedar that they must keep her in the clinic for observation (51). After ushering the attendants out of the room, however, the doctor grows frantic, telling Cedar to get dressed and constrain him to his chair using white tape. As Cedar ties him to the chair, he continues to ask questions: “he asks if I have any special ethnicity… ‘yeah, I’m Ojibwe,’ I tell him. He asks me about the father, is he white? ‘As milk,’ I said. ‘Then get the hell out of here…when you get out, don’t tell anybody that you’re pregnant’” (51). This scene demonstrates that it is not merely the child’s genetic variation from the species, but also its race that is taken into consideration when determining the value of the child. Reproductive futurism’s investment in perpetuating the human species is articulated in relation to a particular racialized notion of the human, as biopolitical mechanisms differentiate between what kind of bodies are worthy of investment and whose genetic materials are worthy of continuation. This scene exemplifies Murphy’s argument that the economization of life has resulted in a division into categories of “more and less worthy of living, reproducing, and being human” (Murphy 2017, 6). In sum, this scene calls on readers to question precisely what kind of futures reproductive futurism invests in, and what kind of bodies are invited to partake in those futures. Reinforcing this reading are numerous other scenes that emphasize how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color are subject to harsher forms of discipline and biopolitical regulation. For example, Cedar discovers that “all the prisoners in the country have disappeared” and the prisons have been repurposed as detention centers for women (85). When Cedar herself is detained and finds herself in one of these sites euphemistically referred to as maternity wards, the other patients that readers encounter are also women of color or those pregnant with multiracial babies. Once again, the reversion of prisons to ad hoc maternity wards and the detainment of women of color connects the novel’s events to the historical

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precedent of detaining women deemed “unfit” mothers either due to race, class, or as a result of their categorization as “delinquent” or “feebleminded” (Flavin 2009, 31–35). The novel thus demonstrates the functioning of different technologies of biopower that discipline and encourage the self-disciplining of women, specifically women of color, making them responsible for preserving future children, the future of humanity in general, and ensuring the continuation of a particular racialized notion of the “good” citizen and a sufficiently “productive” future population. As these scenes demonstrate, Future Home of the Living God foregrounds the extent to which medicalized forms of discipline and biopower have historically and continue to be exerted to a much greater extent on the bodies of racialized and minority individuals. Eugenics practices like coerced and compulsory sterilization in North America, for example, have mainly targeted people of color, disabled people, poor people, and LGBTQ+ people. These practices and the policies that supported them were intended to control the population and ensure the perpetuation of what was considered to be the “ideal” citizen (that is, able-bodied, heterosexual, and Anglo-Saxon in origin), thus perpetuating racist and nativist ideas about what kinds of bodies are valuable and deserving of care, and which should be excluded from the body politic. Contemporary xenophobic narratives in the global North emerge from similar ideological concerns with racial and national purity. By foregrounding the experiences of women of color, Future Home of the Living God compels the reader to critique the way that bodies are categorized and regulated to preserve national and racial boundaries, which helps the reader connect the events of the novel with these ongoing narratives and policies.

Biomedicalization and Reproductive Control As the prior section demonstrates, reproductive futurism, biopolitics, and the economization of life entail processes that demarcate human worth and manage reproduction to ensure the production of particular futures; however, the kinds of futures these processes are invested in require differentiating between life worth living and surplus or expendable life. To better contextualize the intersection of reproductive futurism, biopolitics, and technoscientific advances, this section draws from theories of medicalization and biomedicalization (specifically, theories focused on the gendered and racialized power relations inherent in biomedicalization) to

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analyze how technoscientific networks are mobilized by reproductive futurism throughout the novel. Medicalization describes the process through which human conditions “become defined and treated as medical problems” and come under medical jurisdiction (Conrad 2007, 4). Theorists such as Peter Conrad and Irving Zola (1972) first developed theories of medicalization in the 1970s to describe how human conditions came to be seen as medical problems in need of management. Later research demonstrated that medicalization is a particularly gendered form of power; as Emily Martin (2001) notes, women’s bodies were represented as unruly machines in need of guidance, legitimizing the management of women’s bodies through increasingly medicalized settings (54). Medicalization results in women’s bodies coming under the purview of male “experts” as new medical institutions were led by men wielding new tools. For example, Martin writes that in the case of the field of obstetrics, female midwives’ hands were replaced by male hands using tools (such as forceps) to manage the uterus, which was increasingly described like a machine. As a theory, biomedicalization builds off the theory of medicalization to better reflect and respond to the developments of medicalization in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Clarke et al. (2003) identify the mid-1980s as the moment of biomedicalization’s emergence, with biomedicalization involving an intensification of medicalization through technoscientific advances that enable new discourses of health and forms of institutional and self-surveillance (164). Clarke et  al. (2010) identify several key features of biomedicalization, in particular: the development of “a new biopolitical economy of medicine, health, illness, living and dying”; an “intensifying focus on health,” the “technoscientization of biomedical practices”; “transformations of biomedical knowledge production, management, and distribution”; and the creation of new “individual, collective, and population level identities” (1). Further, they note that biomedicalization is fundamentally stratified in that it has unequal effects across populations that can worsen inequalities based on race, class, gender, and other identities (2010, 33). Biomedicalization thus often functions to control potential anomalies in the health of individual women and babies, but also the population at large, legitimizing the management and surveillance of potential threats to deter mutations in the species. Therefore, biomedicalization serves reproductive futurism in its investment in the Child, but also in its ability to identify and manage anomalies seen as a threat to the future health of the nation or populace.

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To return to the scene of Cedar’s ultrasound, this exchange represents how biomedicalization functions through “increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes” that intensify medicalization in “new and complex, usually technoscientifically enmeshed ways” (Clarke et  al. 2003, 162). Although Cedar is initially allowed to observe the process and see the ultrasound images of her fetus, the ultrasound screen is eventually turned away from her, and her questions to the technicians and the doctor go unanswered as they stand, transfixed, at the image before them. The image of the Child, like the future, “has two faces: discrete on one side, multiple on the other; linear and chaotic; generational and mutational; closed and open. Janus- like, they are grafted together.” The fixation with the ultrasound images represents how biomedicalized systems and representational codes neutralize the “mutational” and “open” capacities of both the Child and the future, attempting to “heal it and to immobilize it [through reliance] on closed, determinate systems” (Sheldon 2016, 29). The ultrasound image becomes the site from which anxieties about the future emanate and the image catalyzes a sequence of biomedical and biopolitical controls to prevent indeterminacy in the development of the Child and the future. Further, this image of Cedar, vulnerable and exposed to the hands and the technological devices managed by the technicians that ignore her, exemplifies the ways that pregnant individuals are subjected to a clinical gaze that focuses on monitoring, calculating, and classifying their “condition” rather than the whole person. This relates to Murphy’s term “averted birth,” which is used to describe national family planning projects that attempted to investigate the future and use cost–benefit analyses to determine the value of life not born. The logic of averted birth legitimized population control methods to ensure that undesirable births were prevented for the sake of the economy’s future health. Biomedicalization— and the concatenation of technoscientific tools, including the gaze of the doctor himself—comes to be used as a way of both sorting out and managing reproduction to ensure “optimal” futures and engineer the future. Women subjected to the logic of averted birth and population control—as aggregates sorted into potential bearers of devalued or valued life—are not seen as persons, but “only as raced, classed, and aged estimates toward mathematical symbolization of a necropolitical specter” (Murphy 2017, 50). Under the gaze of the medical expert and their claim to “truth,” which is facilitated by the sonogram, Cedar loses her identity and personhood. The (bio)medicalization of pregnancy establishes a hierarchy that

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positions the (male) physician as the source of knowledge and casts pregnancy as “potentially disease-like,” thus sanctioning the medical control of pregnant bodies and the treatment of pregnant individuals as patients under the authority of “experts” (Barker 1998, 1070). As Sheldon writes, “biologized, the nation’s future wealth is in its present reproductive choices, which are fostered and supervised by a whole roster of experts” (117). It is this doctor who serves as the mediator and as a source of institutional power capable of sorting desirable life from undesirable, utilizing technoscientific advancements in biomedicine to decode the information collected. Another key aspect of biomedicalization is its focus on health as an individual moral responsibility. Clarke et al. (2003) argue that biomedicalization entails an “extension of medical jurisdiction over health itself” so that health itself and its management become “individual moral responsibilities to be fulfilled through improved access to knowledge, self-­ surveillance, prevention, risk assessment, the treatment of risk, and the consumption of appropriate self-health/biomedical goods and services” (162). Thus, while it may initially appear that the situation described in the novel represents a reversion to the kind of sovereign, top-down power structures that Foucault argued were replaced by biopolitics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; for the majority of the novel, up until its conclusion, detainment, and supervision are not imposed on women as necessary. Rather, the decision to submit to these controls is framed as both choice and a responsibility: a duty that women must fulfill to the future and to society. Near the beginning of the novel, readers learn that the newly appointed surgeon general is enforcing “female gravid detention:” the detainment of pregnant women who must give birth under controlled circumstances (Erdrich 2017, 74). Women are called on to be Womb Volunteers and voluntarily submit themselves to birth clinics. If they are not already pregnant, Womb Volunteers are impregnated through the implantation of embryos preserved in in vitro clinics or through the injection of sperm from sperm banks (169). Women are told that they are “required to go voluntarily… for their own safety,” and they are told that the first to arrive at the new birth centers will “receive the best rooms” (72). Here, biopower functions through a combination of traditional regulatory measures imposed by the state, and also through the circulation of discourses regarding health, duty, and self-care with the goal of creating compliant individuals who self-regulate and accede to the situation presented to them “for their own good” (and for the good of the future).

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Additionally, the nature of the message explicitly connects the individual’s responsibility for their health to the individual’s moral obligation to serve the state; this demonstrates once again how discipline and biopolitics act simultaneously. The advertising call for women appeals to the women’s patriotism: “I wonder if you have courage to save the country we love. We need you to be a Patriot. We need you to volunteer. If you are a woman, if you are pregnant, go to any of our Future Home Reception Centers. WV. Our chefs are waiting for you!” (Erdrich 2017, 90). These controls are framed as not only necessary but ethical: failure to submit to these networks not only makes these women “bad mothers,” but it makes them bad citizens: the ultimate purpose of biomedicalization in this situation is not merely to regulate the individual but to ensure that the individual contributes to the health of the population and what is conceived to be a healthy nation and future. Mandates to submit to the medical gaze and self-discipline by engaging in the “ongoing process” toward health, with all its “daily life techniques of self-surveillance,” are conceived as the “cure” against genetic drift away from the properly human and a way to preserve the future (Clarke et al. 2003, 172). In their call for women to submit to the health centers, consume the appropriate biomedical goods and services (“chefs are waiting for you!”), and to serve the nation and provide for its future (“We need you to be a Patriot!”), the novel demonstrates how biomedicalization recruits individuals into the service of population management, and see themselves as resources for nation-building. Mothers are obligated to submit to biopolitical regulation and disciplinary mechanisms because their future children are conceived as potentially unwieldy forms of life that pose a risk to the nation’s future, while biomedicalized practices are conceived as the means to expunge the anomalies, limit the risk of genetic drift, and to ensure the survival and flourishing of potentially “normal” fetuses. In sum, these policies controlling women’s reproductive choices and bodies become a means to engineer the future and create a desired population. In its depiction of the biopolitical controls and discourses that regulate pregnant bodies, Future Home of the Living God calls on readers to consider how networks of biomedicalization and biopolitics function in current debates and narratives around reproductive rights. In the United States alone, increasingly stratified access to healthcare services and health insurance, the current US administration’s interference into global funding of reproductive healthcare through the Global Gag rule, and its commitment to managing and expunging immigrant populations through

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detainment and deportation are just a few ways that biopolitical and biomedicalized networks intervene into reproductive rights and demarcate different forms of life to perpetuate a particular national identity (IWHC 2019). The novel thus calls on readers to historically contextualize its representations of biomedicalization and biopolitics in relation to the present, to show how reproductive futurist logics demarcate unworthy life from life worthy of investment to produce specific futures and populations. In the novel, this means ensuring the reproduction of a human coded along racialized lines and a version of the human that confirms evolution as a linear narrative trajectory. The following section explores and problematizes this line of thought.

Opposing Reproductive Futurism: The Queering of Matter and Nonhuman–Human Relations Despite the prevalence of biomedicalization and biopolitical networks in service of reproductive futurist logics, in several ways, the novel subverts the logic of reproductive futurism in its exploration of Cedar’s responses to her unborn child and her engagement with other individuals and communities. As the novel demonstrates, in the Anthropocene era, reproductive futurism is not only about maintaining a heteronormative social order, but it is also about maintaining the Human (and a particular “kind” of human at that: typically, one who is white, able-bodied, heterosexual, and cis-gendered.). The novel’s representation of panicked efforts to preserve and safeguard the Child are no longer solely motivated by a desire to maintain the heteronormative status quo, but also to preserve the “purity” of the human. As was previously noted, Sheldon explores this element of reproductive futurism in her 2016 text, The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe, which expands on Edelman’s (2004) theorization of reproductive futurism to argue that the Child equally represents not just the heteronormative order, but the future of the human species. She explores narratives in which the Child comes to stand in for the future of humanity itself, particularly in catastrophic environmental narratives. Sheldon argues that images of the Child ironically emerge in relation to conceptions of nonhuman vitality that allow for more hopeful responses to the future. According to Sheldon, modern production and reproduction processes under conditions of neoliberal capitalism make visible “forms of liveliness” that suggest “other-than-human profusions that threaten to

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dissolve the bond that seals the child to the future.” Thus, Sheldon writes that reproductive futurism under neoliberalism is a response to the threat of nonhuman profusion that attempts to harness this liveliness through associations of the child with the future, and yet, “material practices in the life sciences make this sovereign fantasy harder and harder to maintain.” From this, and drawing from Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (2009, 9) usage of the term, Sheldon argues for a notion of the queerly human child, noting that the Child does not cleanly and easily represent a teleological progression of humanity and continuation of the species into the present, but rather, represents “queer potentialities” in the culturing of life that cannot be subsumed within reproductive futurist responses (119). In alignment with Sheldon’s theories, Cedar demonstrates an openness to provisionality and new forms of life that exceed the human as we have come to know it, and her baby, since genetically different, is one example of a more-than-­ human queer child representative of the liveliness that exceeds the human. Cedar’s continued hope for the future is not based on the figural Child and the kind of boundaries and social order it represents. Rather, Erdrich ruptures the narratives of reproductive futurism to open new possibilities for the future that encompass nonhuman life and new forms of kinship. Cedar’s relationship with her fetus reveals an attitude that often drastically departs from the common response to the new situation. For most of the novel, Cedar is not aware that her fetus might be an original, or a “regular” fetus, but the possibility that her baby might not be recognizably human does not deter her from valuing it. Nor does she take a particularly nihilistic stance to the future, as others do. For example, Cedar’s (adopted) mother Sera responds to the news of human devolution by lamenting the loss of all the things she believes make us human (which essentially boils down to the loss of language): “there goes poetry, there goes literary fiction, there goes science, there goes art” (2017, 55). Reflecting on this exchange, Cedar confides in her child that “our level of intelligence could be a maladaptation, a wrong turn, an aberration. This should be a terrible thought to me, extremely disappointing, but somehow, perhaps because I am carrying you, little baby, I can’t seem to feel the level of consternation that this news causes in everyone else” (57). Unlike those around her, Cedar is often profoundly ambivalent to the possibility of humanity’s end, and questions both her peers’ and families’ unreflective commitment to maintaining the social order as it stands. Cedar is not invested in the future (fantasy) as it has been defined by reproductive futurism. She is open to a new social order that is a

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fundamental break from the one that has been sustained by white settler-­ colonialism and heteronormative patriarchy. This is made evident in a striking scene that takes place before Cedar has been detained in a Birth Center, while she is still isolated in her home on the end of a grassy street. Sitting in front of the window, she is “captivated” by a strange animal in the forested area behind her property: “A graceful thing with fluid, darting movements, it behaves exactly like a lizard-­bird…In spite of what this tells me about the fate of living creatures and the world in general, I am lost in contemplation…I realize this: I am not at the end of things, but the beginning” (2017, 92). For most characters in the novel, the situation represents a loss, a reversion that symbolizes the death of all we have come to value as human, but for Cedar, there is some hope in the emergence of new life forms. Cedar believes the lizard-­ bird to be an archaeopteryx, a feathered dinosaur that lived in the Jurassic epoch and represents the evolutionary transition between dinosaurs and birds.1 Cedar’s comparison between the lizard-like bird and her fetus emphasizes the transitional, unfinished quality of both figures: both represent potentially new forms of life, life that is not entirely categorizable but no less significant for its liminality. These developments—emergent forms of life represented in this case by both the archaeopteryx and Cedar’s future child—reflect what Sheldon (2016) calls the “queerness of matter” that rebels against the “reproduction of fixity” (30). “Queer matter” opposes “linear causality structured by filiation and patrimony” and rebels against the “conflation of futurity with reproduction” (31). Instead, this view sees matter—human and nonhuman—as open, indeterminate constellations of “unpredictable, nonteleological, and complex” tendencies that are “neither acausal nor deterministic.” The potential loss of the familiar human Child is not conceived as the end of something, but as a beginning, both a transformation in matter as it exceeds neoliberal, biopolitical constraints that attempt to circumvent its becomings; and a reconceptualizing of the nature of matter itself. Rather than conceive of these genetic recombinations as an evolutionary reversal, then, Cedar sees these transformations as profusions of new life, new combinations that demonstrate the constant evolution of matter that need not be conceived as a risk merely by virtue of its deviation from the norm. Cedar’s reflection to her child, that “you decided to exist. I don’t really figure into your 1  For further information, see Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Archaeopteryx,” published November 7, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/animal/Archaeopteryx.

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decision. Life is all for life. All for selfish continuance,” illustrates her embrace of the queerness of matter (2017, 172). Therefore, the uncertainty and changes that might appear purely chaotic and destructive to the majority of the population are often conceived in a different way by Cedar. Though she does frequently communicate her fear and confusion in the uncertainty of the situation, she does not lament the loss of the human in the same way. In representing Cedar’s reactions in this fashion, the novel rejects the narratives of progress that are reproduced by both reproductive futurism and colonial narratives of Western expansion and progress. As one scientist states while being interviewed on the news earlier in the novel: If evolution has actually stopped…and if evolution is going backward… then we would not see the orderly backward progression of human types that evolutionary charts are so fond of presenting. Life might skip forward, sideways, in unforeseen directions. We wouldn’t see the narrative we think we know. Why? Because there was never a story moving forward and there wouldn’t be one moving backward…we might actually see chaos. (2017, 54–55)

The situation that Erdrich presents is conceived as dangerous to most of society not only because it represents the loss of the human as we know it, but it also represents the loss of teleological narratives of progress and futurity, the sense of an ordered march forward that orients our present. As Sheldon writes, “genealogical succession…derives its meaning-making force from conceiving of time as unfolding in a straight line running out to meet the horizon” (67). However, this situation also allows for the opening of new futures and relationships that are not entirely in service of reproductive futurism. To draw from Sheldon (2016), the death of the human and its future results in “variations [that] are not amplifications of existing possibilities,” that is, not merely repetitions of the same order, but “wholly new structures and capacities” (51). The ironic focus of reproductive futurism is that the future favors fixity and stagnation, as Edelman reveals; the future is merely stasis and a repetition of the current present: “it aims to preserve a future fit for life as it is presently lived against the emergence of the new” (Sheldon 2016, 51). What Erdrich is presenting here is a future that pushes against the logic of reproductive futurism because it rebels against “fixity of form” and accepts that the way things are right now is just one possible

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arrangement, or, as Sheldon writes, “form and species are just the momentary expressions of a potentially inexhaustible mutation.” Thus, in representing the human itself as under threat, as a form of life that emerged by chance and can disperse just as easily, Erdrich both pushes against the logic of reproductive futurism and uses the collapse of the human to promote new social and political arrangements that can emerge from the catastrophic failure of the system as it stands. Sheldon echoes, “dispersions of form are, of course, catastrophic; they are also the movements of life from out of which coalesce new relationships.” Catastrophe—apocalypse—is employed here to show that the collapse of society as we know it, the devolution of the human, and the resulting “death” of the future can result in the emergence of new kinships. In this, the novel illustrates what Haraway (2016) calls “staying with the trouble,” which requires attending to the complex interrelations between species and deprioritizing humans as primary. It demands acknowledging the irrecuperable losses that have resulted from human interventions and fostering care and connections between assemblages of human and nonhuman matter. Such an approach therefore pushes back against reproductive futurism and suggests that rather than say “no” to the future, we must foster relationships across species lines to “reprise, revive, retake, recuperate” (25).

Imagining Alternate Futures: Indigenous Futurism Narratives of reproductive futurism are not only linked to heteronormativity, but also to settler-colonialism. The latter reproduces a teleology in which the future represents the culmination of progress and “civilization.” However, ideas of progress and civilization are typically highly exclusive and oppressive insofar as progress is typically linked to the advancement of Western civilization and either erases or actively oppresses certain communities—racialized people, queer people, disabled people—who are excluded from participation in these futures (in fact, progress often depends on their continued erasure and marginalization). This reality is reinforced by representations of Indigenous peoples in the settler-colonialist imaginary. As Lou Catherine Cornum (2015) writes, Indigenous people are often represented as “not only separate from the present time but also out of place in the future, a time defined by the progress of a distinctively western technology.” This relates to Andrea Smith’s explanation of the “death imaginary” and its use in settler-colonial discourses that purport that “Indigenous peoples must always be

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disappearing” as a means to legitimize settler occupation (Nixon 2016). Likewise, Daniel Heath Justice (2017) argues that “deficit remains the defining trope for Indigenous peoples in the settler-colonial imaginary. In this construction, ‘real’ Indigenous peoples are always Other, always diminished, always the reduced shadow of our former greatness.” These representations are one means through which Indigenous peoples are excluded from inheriting the future promised by reproductive futurist narratives. These ideas resonate with the notion, elaborated in Grace Dillon’s (2012) introduction to Walking With the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, that ‘it is almost commonplace to think that the Native Apocalypse…has already taken place” (8). She argues that “Native apocalyptic storytelling…shows the ruptures, the scares, and the trauma in its effort ultimately to provide healing and a return to bimaadiziwin [the state of balance]” (9). Whyte (2018) similarly argues that Indigenous peoples often have a different response and relationship to speculative fiction’s envisioning of dystopian or apocalyptic futures because “the hardships that many nonindigenous peopled read most … are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism: ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration” (226). For settlers, apocalypse is so terrifying precisely because it represents the end of the social order, and because it is the ultimate symbol of chaos and the unknowable. For Indigenous peoples, the apocalypse has already happened; the crisis is ongoing (Scott 2016, 77). This is made clear in a conversation between Cedar and Eddy. In response to Cedar’s fears, Eddy remarks that “Indians have been adapting since before 1492, so I guess we’ll keep adapting” (Erdrich 2017, 28). When Cedar responds by mentioning that this situation is different and that the world is going to pieces, Eddy responds, “It is always going to pieces … . It is always different. We’ll adapt.” Eddy’s comments here reveal that the notion of apocalypse is relative depending on positionality and privilege. They as well help illustrate why many Indigenous persons “do not accept historical narratives that privilege the idea that climate change and the Anthropocene raise the issue of how to understand and stop a dreaded future movement from stability to crisis” (Whyte 2018, 227): stability was never a reality for Indigenous peoples after colonialism. While apocalyptic narratives are terrifying within the framework of reproductive futurism precisely because they represent the end of stability (or, at least, the status quo), apocalyptic narratives do not

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have the same meaning for communities who were never afforded such stability in the first place. Furthermore, Whyte (2018) argues that while it is important to acknowledge the impact of today’s climate crisis on Indigenous peoples, it is also important to be critical of dystopian and apocalyptic narratives that assume “Indigenous peoples are communities who over time have been gradually deteriorating to the point that today’s climate and environmental crisis of the Anthropocene threaten to kill them off completely,” or what he refers to as narratives of “lastness and finality” (236). As settler-­ colonial culture has already withheld participation in the future from Indigenous peoples, one could argue that it is revolutionary in this context to imagine, build, and nurture alternative futures rather than reject the future entirely. Indigenous futurism works to offer hope for the future by imagining alternative presents and futures that are not tied to discourses of reproductive futurism and its associated narratives of Western progress and ascendency. According to Dillon (2012), Indigenous futurist works stretch the boundaries of speculative fiction both formally (through experimentation with setting, character, dialogue, and depictions of temporality) and by foregrounding Indigenous science and modes of governance (1–12). This aligns with Justice’s (2017) articulation that for Indigenous writers, “the fantastic is an extension of the possible, not the impossible … it challenges our assumptions and expectations of ‘the real,’ thus complicating and undermining the dominant and often domineering functions of the deficit model. Indigenous futurist works thus unsettle and contest the stereotypical, romanticized depictions of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial culture, often highlighting the fusion of Indigenous traditions and technologies to envision alternative presents and alternative futures (Nixon 2016). Despite its bleak premise, Future Home of the Living God is an example of how Indigenous futurism can challenge reproductive futurist narratives of progress and the future. Although much of society is unable to adapt to the chaotic state of the world, the situation results in what Silvia Martinez-­ Falquína (2019) characterizes as a model of “Native resurgence” on the reservation, where new forms of community and government can be established (171). Martinez-Falquína draws from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (2011) characterization of Native resurgence, which calls on Indigenous peoples to “delve into their own culture’s stories, philosophies, theories and concepts to align themselves with the processes and

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forces of regeneration, revitalization, remembering and visioning” (148). Exemplifying Indigenous futurism’s envisioning of decolonization and this mode of resurgence, the novel’s community uses the governmental breakdown as an opportunity to reclaim significant parcels of land from the state (Erdrich 2017, 14). Further, the lake homes that have been abandoned and that are currently uninhabited are being reclaimed to house the homeless and other tribal members living in substandard housing (214). Additionally, they have developed an independent police force, and, as Eddy tells Cedar, they are trying to conduct “compassionate traditional police work,” differentiating their police force from colonial forms of discipline. Eddy’s plan is to make the reservation “one huge, intensively worked, highly productive farm” so that they can become “self-sufficient, like the old days” (214, 226–263). These developments subvert typical apocalyptic/dystopian narratives by focusing on the present and future as sites of possibility. Despite the difficulties created by the chaotic situation, Future Home of the Living God foregrounds Indigenous resilience and creativity that fuses traditional knowledge with contemporary technologies to open new futures. The conclusion of the novel also foregrounds the extent to which Indigenous futurist approaches enable a different orientation to temporality—a notion of the future that resists the instrumentalizing forces of reproductive futurism—as well as more capacious notions of community and futurity that incorporate human and nonhuman entities. Near the end of the novel, Cedar is kidnapped from the reservation and detained in another Birthing Center, which is, in fact, a repurposed prison. Once imprisoned, Cedar learns that survival rates are low for both babies and their mothers because the “immune system mounts an attack against the baby during birth and that can become an autoimmune attack as well” (Erdrich 2017, 257). Yet, Cedar and her child survive the birth. Writing to her child, she notes that her heart is damaged, that she is “extremely weak. But still here” (265). Readers do not learn about the state of the child, other than that he lives. Soon after giving birth, Cedar discloses that she intended to end her life while on the reservation, but an encounter with a “common pebble” prevented her from following through with this plan (Erdrich 2017, 259). On her way to complete the act, pebbles repeatedly flip into her shoe. The final pebble, which is so sharp that it cuts her feet, “is an agate, inexplicably shattered … a living thing … I don’t know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don’t know why they care about me as they do. I

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only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself” (261). This account aligns with Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, which gestures toward the possibility of kinship and community that exceed Western notions of lineage and the associated narratives around genealogical continuity. Enrique Salmón (2000) writes that “to Indigenous people…humans are at an equal standing to the rest of the natural world; they are kindred relations … to Indigenous people, history does not remain in a linear past. History is continuous and, more important, contextual. Cultural history is the origins of humans and nature” (1331). Understanding history in this light— as continuous and contextual, and formed through relations that demand responsibility to one another, between humans and nonhumans—can inform the creation of new types of communities and new futures that are not circumscribed by the logic of reproductive futurism. This encounter with the pebble serves as a reminder to Cedar that alternative futures and social arrangements are possible—if not for her, then for her son. In sum, it is possible, following Cornum (2015) and Nixon (2016), to see kinship as a social technology of Indigenous futurism that can supplant reproductive futurism. Cornum notes that “for indigenous futurism, technology is inextricable from the social,” and Nixon states that “indigenous peoples are using our own technological traditions—our worldviews, our languages, our stories, and our kinship—as guiding principles in imagining possible futures for ourselves and our communities.” Thus, the novel ultimately decides not to reject the future, but only those future visions that are provided by reproductive futurist narratives. Further, the novel suggests that it is necessary to widen the sphere of life that matters; that the futures we nurture must also honor and respect the nonhuman. Lee (2016) notes that “reconciliation includes the land. Reconciliation includes not only humans, but ‘more-than-human’ creatures,” while Nixon reflects a similar sentiment in calling for us to “liberate both land and life by actively honoring our responsibilities to kinship in this moment, fostering good relations within all creation in our intentions and actions.” Rather than say “no” to the future, or accept that the future can only ever be in service of the future (human) Child, the novel shows that it is possible to work toward new futures, not by adopting a utopian stance, but by taking concrete measures to push against anthropocentrism, develop new forms of kinship amongst humans and nonhumans, and forge new communities based on values that push back against the logic of settler-colonialism.

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References Barker, K.K. 1998. A Ship Upon a Stormy Sea: The Medicalization of Pregnancy. Social Science & Medicine 47 (8, October): 1067–1076. Clarke, Adele E., Janet K. Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, and Jennifer R.  Fishman. 2003. Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S.  Biomedicine. American Sociological Review 23 (2, April): 161–194. Clarke, Adele E., Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, and Jennifer R. Fishman. 2010. Biomedicalization: A Theoretical and Substantive Introduction. In Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health and Illness in the U.S, ed. Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, 1–45. Durham: Duke University Press. Conrad, Peter. 2007. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Cornum, Lou. 2015. The Space NDN’s Star Map. The New Inquiry, January 26. https://thenewinquiry.com/the-­space-­ndns-­star-­map. Dillon, Grace L. 2012. Imagining Indigenous Futurisms. In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon, 1–12. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Erdrich, Louise. 2017. Future Home of the Living God. New York: HarperCollins. Flavin, Jeanne. 2009. Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America. New York: New York University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC). 2019. Crisis in Care: Year Two Impact of Trump’s Global Gag Rule. International Women’s Health Coalition. https://iwhc.org/resources/crisis-­c are-­y ear-­t wo-­i mpact-­t rumps-­g lobal-­ gag-­rule. Justice, Daniel Heath. 2017. Indigenous Wonderworks and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary. Apex Magazine, August 10. https://www.apex-­magazine.com/ indigenous-­wonderworks-­and-­the-­settler-­colonial-­imaginary. Lee, Erica Violet. 2016. Reconciling the Apocalypse. The Monitor. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, March 1. https://policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/reconciling-­apocalypse.

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Martin, Emily. 2001. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press. Martínez-Falquína, Silvia. 2019. Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God: Uncertainty, Proleptic Mourning and Relationality in Native Dystopia. Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 41 (2, December): 161–178. https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-­2019-­41.2.08. Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Nixon, Lindsay. 2016. Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms. Guts, Issue 6: Futurisms, May 20. https://Gutsmagazine.ca/visual-­cultures. Salmón, Enrique. 2000. Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship. Ecological Applications 10 (5, October): 1327–1332. https://doi.org/10.1890/1051-­0761(2000)010[1327:KEIP OT]2.0.CO;2. Scott, Conrad. 2016. (Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy. Extrapolation 57 (1–2): 73–93. https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2016.6. Sheldon, Rebekah. 2016. The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arp. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child: Or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2, May): 224–242. https://doi. org/10.1177/2514848618777621. Zola, Irving Kenneth. 1972. Medicine as an Institution of Social Control. The Sociological Review 20 (4, November): 487–504. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-­954X.1972.tb00220.

name index1

A Acker, Kathy, 225, 226, 234 Adamczak, Bini, 201, 210 Adams, Carol J., 308, 317 Alaimo, Stacy, 70n1, 74–76 Almeling, Rene, 40 Anderson, Jeffrey E., 237n3 Anderson, Kristine J., 48 Anzalduá, Gloria, 227, 235, 240 Arai, Motoko, 160, 170 Arendt, Hannah, 117, 122–124, 126, 131 Aristarkhova, Irina, 51, 52 Aronowitz, Stanley, 115, 124, 125, 133 Atanasoski, Neda, 6, 7, 268, 269 Attebery, Brian, 47 Atwood, Margaret, 302, 315

1

B Bachelard, Gaston, 197n1 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 224, 225, 230, 239, 294, 295n4 Balsamo, Anne, 5, 6, 266, 268, 270 Barker, K. K., 332 Barnhill, David Landis, 307 Bastani, Aaron, 113, 115, 134 Baudrillard, Jean, 295n4 Baylis, Françoise, 47 Beauvoir, Simone de, 56 Belasco, Warren, 301 Bellamy, Edward, 116, 134 Benjamin, Ruha, 6 Benjamin, Walter, 295, 295n4 Bennett, Jane, 76 Bess, Michael, 61n9 Beukes, Lauren, 15, 302, 313–316

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3

345

346 

NAME INDEX

Bhabha, Homi K., 227, 230, 235, 237, 240 Bhattacharya, Tithi, 33, 304 Bird, Arthur, 301 Bliss, John, 61n9 Booker, Keith M., 71 Boostrom, Adam, 173–175, 174n1, 180, 181, 183, 185, 187–192 Botsman, Rachel, 145 Bové, José, 317 Bracke, Astrid, 73 Braidotti, Rosi, 105, 107, 262–267, 271, 274, 276, 277, 279 Brase, Gary L., 139 Brase, Sandra L., 139 Browne, Simone, 248 Burrows, David, 201 Butler, Judith, 94, 206, 207 C Callahan, Daniel, 26 Campbell, Chris, 303n1 Carey, Nessa, 47 Carpo, Mario, 305n2 Carter, Raphael, 13, 198, 203–205, 209, 213–215, 217 Cassalicchio, Emilio, 34 Chambers, Becky, 302 Charnas, Suzy McKee, 47, 177 Charnock, Anne, 10, 11, 27, 36–38, 47n4, 48–65 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 276 Chodorow, Nancy J., 58 Cixous, Hélène, 250, 285, 295 Clarke, Adele E., 330–333 Cohen, Lawrence, 103 Coleman, Will, 238 Conrad, Peter, 330 Cooper, Melinda, 3, 4 Cornum, Lou, 338, 342 Cottrell, Anna, 83 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 118, 302

Crist, Ry, 313 Currell, Susan, 130, 133 Cutler, Jonathan, 115 D Daly, Mary, 178n3 Damarin, Suzanne, 49 D’Ammassa, Don, 234 Davies, William, 117n3 Davis, Jessica, 188n10 Davis, Lennard J., 287 De Bodard, Aliette, 28 de Certeau, Michel, 236 Deleuze, Gilles, 225, 227, 240, 264, 266 Denning, Laura, 312 Devlin, Hannah, 40 Di Chiro, Giovanna, 312 Diéguez, Antonio, 285 Dillon, Grace L., 201, 206, 210n6, 211, 237n4, 339, 340 Dinerstein, Ana Cecilia, 115 Diprose, Rosalyn, 81 Doane, Mary Ann, 91 Doctorow, Cory, 113, 114, 134 Dodd, Anna Bowman, 124, 125 Donchin, Anne, 23n1 Dufour, François, 317 Dumit, Joseph, 24, 25, 36 E Edelman, Lee, 97, 324, 334, 337 Edwards, Caroline, 12 El-Mohtar, Amal, 14, 253, 254 Erdrich, Louise, 15, 321–342 F Fanon, Frantz, 4, 225, 226 Faucheux, Amanda H., 211 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 189

  NAME INDEX 

Federici, Silvia, 116n2, 303, 304 Ferguson, Rodrick A., 201 Fernandez, Jean, 112n1 Ferrando, Francesca, 284 Ferreira, Aline, 50, 61 Fforde, Jasper, 14, 284–299 Firestone, Shulamith, 3, 22, 23, 41, 51, 53, 142 Fiskio, Janet, 307n3 Fitting, Peter, 184 Flavin, Jeanne, 326, 329 Foster, Thomas, 233 Foucault, Michel, 70, 72, 81, 82, 86, 94, 102, 229, 263, 267, 322, 325–327, 332 Franklin, Sarah, 142 Fraser, Nancy, 304 Frayne, David, 115, 118 Freidenfelds, Lara, 23 G Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 285–287, 292, 296 Gearan, Anne, 101 Gearhart, Sally Miller, 47, 177 Giffney, Noreen, 245 Gilligan, Carol, 51 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 47, 129, 131, 177 Gladstone, Max, 14, 253, 254 Gosden, Roger G., 60 Greely, Henry T., 61n9 Greiner, Clemens, 73 Griffin, Susan, 178n3 Grosz, E. A., 216 Guattari, Felix, 227, 240 Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, 207 H Hacking, Ian, 228 Halberstam, Jack, 247

347

Haldane, J. B. S., 22, 33, 49, 50, 142 Hall, Sarah, 8, 11, 69–88 Halperin, David M., 245n2 Hamner, Everett, 61n9 Hampton, Gregory Jerome, 6 Haraway, Donna, 1–4, 8, 15, 23, 41, 55, 83, 95, 96, 96n3, 104, 175, 189, 198, 203, 204, 223–226, 232–235, 244, 245, 263, 266, 274, 285, 290, 295, 295n4, 296n5, 338 Hardt, Michael, 200 Harris, Anne, 197, 198, 209, 215, 216, 218 Hauskeller, Christine, 46 Haworth, Don, 132, 133 Hayles, N. Katherine, 200, 263, 266, 275, 295 Hayot, Eric, 95 Hays, Sharon, 28 Hein, Hilde, 128n7 Helmreich, Stefan, 309 Hemmens, Alastair, 126n5 Herbrechter, Stefan, 263, 264 Hessler, Stefanie, 211n7 Hird, Myra J., 245 Hodson, Randy, 123 hooks, bell, 230 Hopkinson, Nalo, 13, 198, 201, 202, 206–208, 210, 211, 213, 219, 226, 236, 237, 239 Hughes, James, 31 Huws, Ursula, 112 Huxley, Aldous, 22, 33, 50n5, 142 Huyssen, Andreas, 247 I Iida, Yūko, 158, 170, 171 Ingold, Tim, 215 Iovino, Serenella, 81

348 

NAME INDEX

J Jacobson, Brian R., 278 Jeffords, Susan, 269, 269n2 Jelača, Dijana, 280 Jones, Alice Ilgenfritz, 129 Justice, Daniel Heath, 339, 340 K Kakoudaki, Despina, 6 Kano, Ayako, 158, 164, 166 Kaplan, E. Ann, 140 Keeler, Harry Stephen, 301 Kendal, Evie, 22, 304 Keynes, John Maynard, 118, 125 Keyser, Katherine, 314 Khetarpal, Abha, 24 Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, 112, 213 Klitzman, Robert, 61n9 Knott, Sarah, 28 Kobayashi Mika, 165 Kotani, Mari, 170 Kurihara, Yuichirō, 157 L Lai, Larissa, 11, 91–107 Lakshminarayan, Lavanya, 302, 305, 306 Landau, Ruth, 57 Lane, Mary E. Bradley, 47, 129–131 Lavigne, Carlen, 63 Lawson, Nigel, 25 Le Guin, Ursula K., 10, 13, 48, 97, 120–123, 126, 201 Leacock, Stephen, 301 Lease, Mary E., 301, 302, 316 Leblanc, Lauraine, 231, 233 Lee, Angela, 303, 304, 313, 316, 317 Lee, Erica Violet, 342 Lee, Rachel, 99–102

Lerner, Richard M., 189 Levitas, Ruth, 128 Lewis, Sophie, 23, 198, 199, 199n4, 201, 206, 208, 209, 214, 216, 218, 219 Libow, Jess, 296 Lifton, Robert Jay, 234 Lilley, Deborah, 83 Lowen, Linda, 72, 75 M McCaughey, Martha, 189 McClenaghan, Kyna, 273 McClintock, Anne, 99n6 Mackie, Vera, 166n7 McQuown, Nina Budabin, 311 Mamo, Laura, 183 Mansoor, Asma, 248 Marcuse, Herbert, 114, 127, 127n6, 128 Martin, Emily, 330 Martínez-Falquina, Silvia, 340 Marx, Karl, 113, 120, 128, 131 Matsuo, Yumi, 160, 166 Maung, Hane Htut, 24 Merchant, Carolyn, 178n3 Merchant, Ella, 129 Mies, Maria, 78, 80, 81, 142 Miller, John, 308, 316 Miller, Sam J., 255 Mitchell, David T., 290, 292 Mixon, Laura J., 13, 226, 230–234, 237, 239 Mollon, Phil, 228 Moore, Jason, 303n1 Moretti, Franco, 199, 200n5 Mori, Masahiro, 147 Morley, David, 94n2 Morris, Brian, 238 Morris, William, 12, 126–128 Moylan, Tom, 120

  NAME INDEX 

Muñoz, José Esteban, 97 Murata, Sayaka, 12, 157–171 Murphy, Julien S., 50 Murphy, Michelle, 4, 323, 326–328, 331 Murray, Stuart J., 141 Musunuru, Kiran, 47 N Naitō, Chizuko, 168 Nash, Linda Lorraine, 87 Negri, Antonio, 115, 200 Neimanis, Astrida, 204, 205, 211, 213, 215 Neville, Graham, 118 Nishmine, LeiLane, 274, 275 Nixon, Lindsay, 339, 340, 342 Noble, Safiya, 248 Nussbaum, Abigail, 28, 38 O O’Sullivan, Simon, 201 Ott, Katherine, 285 Oudshoorn, Nelly, 189 P Parks, Dorian, 143 Pearson, Wendy Gay, 97 Pence, Gregory, 57n7 Perrier, Maud, 303, 304 Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack, 50 Pfeiffer, David, 288n2 Piercy, Marge, 22, 47, 48n4 Pitts, Federick Harry, 115 Pollan, Michael, 308 Postone, Moishe, 115 Potts, Annie, 314 Prasad, Aarathi, 50, 57, 63 Puar, Jasbir, 200, 219

349

R Rabinow, Paul, 88 Rehm, Jeremy, 182n4 Resenbrink, Greta, 177, 181 Rhee, Jennifer, 6, 267, 276, 278 Rich, Adrienne C., 247 Rifkin, Jeremy, 65 Roberts, Dorothy, 80 Robins, Kevin, 94n2 Robinson, Iain, 83, 84, 86 Roh, David S, 95, 98 Rose, Julie L., 118, 119, 128, 130, 134 Rose, Nikolas, 88 Rosen, Christine, 52 Rosenwald, Michael S., 145 Rosenzweig, Roy, 119 Ross, Loretta J., 77 Rupp, Leila, 176, 176n2 Russ, Joanna, 47, 177, 182 Ryan, Barbara, 176, 177 S Sakdapolrak, Patrick, 73 Salmón, Enrique, 342 Samuel, Alexandra, 145 Sander-Staudt, Maureen, 51, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63 Sargent, Pamela, 177 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 101, 102, 106 Scott, Conrad, 339 Seager, Joni, 81, 82, 87 Seaman, Amanda C., 161n4 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 245 Sedgwick, Helen, 11, 27, 33, 34, 37, 48, 50n5 Shah, Bina, 8, 302, 307–313 Shapiro, Stephen, 306 Sheldon, Rebekah, 322–325, 327, 331, 332, 334–338

350 

NAME INDEX

Shiva, Vandana, 74, 80, 303, 304, 306 Short, Sue, 285 Silver, Lee M., 62n10 Simonsen, Rasmus, 308 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 340 Singer, Emily, 46 Singer, Peter, 61 Singh, Satendra, 24 Smith, Rebecca Ann, 27, 29–32, 37 Smith-Windsor, J., 52, 57 Snyder, Sharon L., 290, 292 Sønderby, Kaia, 198, 202, 205, 206, 209 Sourbut, Elizabeth, 47, 55 Srnicek, Nick, 112, 115 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 335 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, 227, 227n1, 229–231, 234, 240 Stone, Sandy, see Stone, Allucquère Rosanne Strongman, Roberto, 213 Stryker, Susan, 198, 201, 204, 207, 208, 213, 227, 227n1, 233–235, 240 Subramanian, Banu, 7 Sullivan, Teresa A., 123 Suzuki, Izumi, 160 Swann, Elaine, 303 T Takševa, Tatjana, 34 Taylor, Jesse Oak, 87 Taylor, Verta, 176, 176n2 Tepper, Sheri, 5, 177 Thompson, E. P., 121, 126 Tinsley, Omise'eke Natasha, 201, 207, 208, 213 Toupin, Louise, 116n2 Tronti, Mario, 115 Turkle, Sherry, 231, 233, 237

U Ueno, Chizuko, 158 V Vint, Sherryl, 61, 64, 65n13, 93, 94, 107, 268, 275, 276, 279, 287, 287n1, 288, 292, 314 Virginás, Andrea, 271 Voegele, Juergen, 309 von Eye, Alexander, 189 Vonnegut, Kurt, 123, 124 Vora, Kalindi, 6, 7, 268 W Walezak, Emilie, 72 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 303, 303n1 Watercutter, Angela, 268 Weeks, Kathi, 115, 117, 117n4 Wells, Deane, 61 Wenzel, Hélène, 249, 250 Westfahl, Gary, 47 Whyte, Kyle P., 339, 340 Williams, Alex, 115 Winner, Langdon, 302 Winnicott, Donald Woods, 151 Wittig, Monique, 14, 247, 249, 250 Wolfe, Cary, 262 Wynter, Sylvia, 4 Y Yano, Chiaki, 157 Yaszek, Lisa, 9 Yee, Sennah, 243, 246, 249 Yuknavitch, Lidia, 14, 252–255 Z Zelizer, Vivianna, 40 Zola, Irving Kenneth, 330

subjeCt index1

A Agency, 8, 71, 72, 75, 76, 82, 87, 88, 103, 104, 170, 209, 250, 252–254, 266, 272, 273, 288 Aging, 14, 81, 160 Antiwork and antiproductivist theory, 115, 116, 121, 126 Artificial intelligence (AI), 5–8, 112, 141, 143–150, 153, 174, 179, 185, 188, 190–192, 243, 246, 248, 249, 261, 262, 264, 267–269, 273, 274, 277–279, 281 Artificial womb, 21, 23, 45–65, 139, 145 Automation, 6, 12, 111–134, 180 B Biopower/biopolitics, 15, 70–72, 79, 81, 82, 86, 88, 94, 100, 263, 322–329, 332–334

1

Biotechnology, 3, 15, 45, 47–49, 62, 64, 102, 142, 143, 309 C Carnival, 239 Collective, 2, 13, 15, 56, 97n5, 99, 113, 115, 120, 121, 197–219, 232, 236, 254–256, 330 Cultured food, 301–317 Cyborg(s), 1, 2, 14, 23, 41, 51, 55, 95, 96, 96n3, 147, 173–192, 198, 203–208, 212, 224, 226, 227, 233, 234, 243–256, 263, 274, 285–291, 295n4 D Disability, 14, 24, 245, 286, 288–294, 288n2, 296, 297, 299

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Vint, S. Buran (eds.), Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3

351

352 

SUBJECT INDEX

Disease/eco-sickness/plague/virus, 24, 25, 36, 61, 70, 74, 80, 81, 86, 92, 98, 101, 130, 131, 174, 178, 179, 185, 187, 188, 198, 224, 256, 308 Dissociative Identity Disorder, 228 Dystopia/dystopian, 14, 62n11, 69, 71, 73, 75, 85, 87, 92, 98, 112, 141, 157–171, 180, 230, 231, 236, 292, 296, 299, 313, 315, 322, 339–341 E Ectogenesis, 2, 11, 21–41, 47–51, 50n5, 55, 60, 63, 142, 154, 312 Environmentalism/ecocriticism/ environmental humanities/ eco-topia, 11, 77, 85, 86 Eugenics, 22, 28, 38, 141, 142, 145, 182, 285, 295, 299, 326, 327, 329 F Family, 4, 6, 9, 11, 23, 25, 26, 33, 37, 38, 48–58, 60, 62, 65, 84, 91, 103, 119, 125, 128, 129, 133, 141, 145, 147, 150–152, 158, 160–164, 166, 170, 183, 185, 198, 202, 208, 216, 228, 255, 256, 322, 323, 325, 331, 335 Femininity, 71, 72, 145, 189, 192, 197, 201, 263, 266–268, 271, 272, 278, 281, 296 Feminism, 9, 12, 13, 15, 22, 23, 77, 83, 117, 128, 142, 171, 174–176, 176n2, 179–181, 190, 250, 251, 280, 285, 287, 301–317

Film, 8, 12, 14, 62n11, 111, 132, 133, 133n8, 142–154, 148n4, 154n6, 186, 187, 228, 243, 250, 262–267, 269n2, 270, 270n3, 271, 273, 275–280 G Gender, 1–16, 35, 39, 41, 47, 47n4, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 64, 69–71, 84, 86, 87, 118, 129, 130, 133, 142, 145, 154, 154n6, 157–171, 176, 178, 181, 184, 186, 188n9, 189–191, 201, 207, 208, 223–240, 244–249, 251, 261–263, 265–271, 273, 275, 277, 285, 290, 292, 295, 296, 299, 302, 303, 310, 316, 330 Gestation, 9, 11, 12, 21–23, 25, 27, 29, 37, 40, 45–47, 49–53, 55, 57–59, 61–64, 63n12, 141, 200, 209, 307 Global South, 15, 92, 100, 102, 186, 200, 301–317 H Heteroglossia, 224–226, 234, 238–240 I Intersectional feminism, 13 Interstice, 28, 235, 302 L Labor/labour, 114, 116n2, 121, 122, 126, 128, 130–134, 302, 303, 315n5

  SUBJECT INDEX 

M Mother/parent/bio-mother, etc., 12, 28–32, 37, 40, 41, 45–47, 51–59, 61, 120, 133, 139–141, 143–154, 152n5, 158, 160, 162–170, 181, 183–185, 187, 203, 207, 208, 226, 251, 294, 311, 329, 333, 335, 341 N National Health Service (NHS), 11, 21–41 Nonhuman, 81, 245, 262, 267, 280, 281, 314, 317, 322, 334–338, 341, 342 P Parthenogenesis, 36, 46–51, 53, 55, 181, 182 Posthuman/ posthumanism/ posthumanist/critical posthumanism, etc., 14, 15, 61, 87, 92–94, 96, 105, 217, 261–281, 284, 285, 287, 288, 292 Q Queer, 11, 15, 13, 38, 50, 54, 55, 64, 83, 91–107, 154n6, 175, 176, 183–186, 191, 192, 197–219, 225, 227, 235, 243–256, 324, 334–338 R Reproductive justice/reproductive futurism, 4, 15, 65, 70, 77, 80, 183, 183n7, 321–342

353

Reproductive technology/assistive reproductive technology, ART), 10, 11, 15, 21–24, 27, 31–33, 37, 38, 40, 47, 48, 51–53, 55, 56, 58–61, 64, 65, 78–81, 91–107, 142, 153, 160–164, 169, 171, 206, 296, 309 S Science fiction/speculative fiction, 2–4, 8–10, 14, 16, 21–41, 47, 50, 64, 69, 87, 92, 111, 113, 117, 124, 141, 170, 175, 177, 180, 182, 186, 197–219, 223–240, 265, 270, 270n3, 271, 275, 276, 279, 285–288, 291, 292, 294, 296, 297, 299, 301, 302, 339, 340 Social reproduction, 6, 8, 54, 125, 304–307 Sterilization, 69–88, 96, 327, 329 T Trans [as in gender identity], 9 Trans-corporeality, 74, 84, 213 Transhumanism, 264n1, 284, 286, 287, 295n4 U Utopian studies/utopia/eutopia, etc., 38, 40, 41, 51, 120, 129–131, 173–192, 250, 252, 256, 288 W Warwick Research Collective, 211n8 Water, 4, 75, 113, 119, 197–219, 250 Women’s free time, 12, 111–134 World-food-system, 15, 303, 310, 317