Full Description
This volume presents the work of a group of international academics on the topic of reproduction and motherhood in contemporary feminist speculative fiction. While many works of feminist speculative fiction specifically address topics such as reproduction and reproductive control, these are currently understudied within the literature on the genre. As speculative fiction allows projection into other universes and times and imagination of different interpersonal relationships, in addition to questioning biological and gender(s) limits, it inevitably participates in the erosion of fossilized visions of motherhood, giving space to the search for new possibilities in places that we could identify as utopian or dystopian. It is in this fertile terrain where the contributing authors find room to explore other pressing issues such as reproductive biotechnology, ectogenesis or cloning, xenobiology, haploid organisms, grafts with living beings or with artificial entities, microchimerism and more that contemporary speculative fiction represents.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction : On Motherhood and Mothering.- Chapter 2 : The Travelling Mother : Naomi Mitchison and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.- Chapter 3 : Prole(tarian) M/others of the Future, Unite : Queer Social Reproduction and Utopian Kinship in the Speculative Fiction by Marge Piercy and, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.- Chapter 4 : Domination and Silence: Motherhood in The Handmaid's Tale and Cadáver Exquisito.- Chapter 5 : Reproductive Processes and Systemic Violence in Three British Science Fiction Novels : The Birth of Love, Intrusion, and The Growing Season.- Chapter 6 : Fairy Tale, Myth, and Reproductive Dystopia: Jane Rogers's The Testament of Jessie Lamb.- Chapter 7 : Mothering, Family and Survival: The Postapocalyptic World of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam.- Chapter 8 : Re-sculpting the Mother-Daughter Bond and the Idea(l) of the Female Body : A Reading of Madeline Miller's Galatea.- Chapter 9 : Posthuman Reproductive Futures: The Eco-Queer Kinship of Larissa Lai's The Tiger Flu.- Chapter 10 : Monstrous Maternities: Motherhood, Mothering, and Ectogenesis in "MOM" by Nieves Delgado.- Chapter 11 : "Why Do You Look at Me Like That, Mother?": Motherhood, Abjection, and Entrapment in Vivarium.- Chapter 12 : Mother Yourself: Cloned Women and Paternal Erasure in The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey.- Chapter 13 : Institutionalized Maternal Surveillance: Violence and Resistance in Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers.- Chapter 14 : Natural and Scientific Conception: Motherhood(s) in Louisa Hall's Reproduction Aline Ferreira.- Chapter 15 : Conclusion: Reimagining Motherhood through Feminist Speculative Futures.
