Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction

Undergraduate / Graduate

Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis's account of "uterine geographies" and Michelle Murphy's work on chemical latency and "distributed reproduction" stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see 'biological reproduction' in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone's call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. SF authors may include Kate Wilhelm, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Naomi Mitchison, and M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.