Birth
Birth
The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.
Keywords: American literature, Literary criticism, Science fiction criticism, Feminist science studies, Feminist science fiction, Vitalism, Somatic capitalism, Biopolitics, Reproductive futurism
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