Creation Stories: Reproductive Crisis and the “Birth / Abortive” of Science Fiction

ABSTRACT

This essay develops a genealogy of feminist science fiction as a revisionary reckoning with the enduring influence of patriarchal creation stories. Situating my reading practice in relation to the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, I consider scenes in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Lilith’s Brood in which characters negotiate fraught reproductive choices with acts of speculative story-telling. The allegorical embodiments of reproductive crisis, I argue, are monstrous, inscrutable figures—John Milton’s Chaos, Mary Shelley’s creature, and Octavia Butler’s Oankali-human hybrids—who stand for inherited violence but also the “abortive” potential of reproduction gone awry.

Notes

1 For example, Barbara Johnson considers the implications of interpreting Frankenstein as displaced maternal autobiography if the autobiographical impulse, self-replication, is yet another strategy for disavowing reproductive labor, “symbolically killing the mother off by telling … the lie that we have given birth to ourselves” (19). Alan Bewell positions the significance of “Shelley’s experience of pregnancy and loss” as always “social and discursive,” mediated through conflict over the male obstetric management of gestation and birth (106). Ellen Cronan Rose links the critical identification of the novel’s reproductive counterplots with a series of historical shifts related to the place of women in academia, anxieties about reproductive technology, and conflict over abortion.

2 Judith Butler, for example, interprets Frankenstein’s allegorical availability to revisionary retelling as expressing its internalization of a historical conjuncture defined by old hetero-reproductive relations, the “destructiveness [that] runs through every possible kin relation,” and a novel anxiety “that new kin relations,” remade by “technology,” “will destroy life,” an anxiety inseparable from a speculative longing for a “postfamilial form of kinship” (46, 50).

3 Palmer Rampell notes that “science fiction,” starting with Frankenstein, “serves as a kind of laboratory in which the proliferating cultural and legal analogies establishing personhood”—including fetal personhood—“can be tested, affirmed, or discarded” (224).

4 In Death Rights, Deanna Koretsky critiques the trope of the enslaved person committing “suicide as an act of political resistance” (99). As she writes, “framing the choice to die as a path to freedom only reinforces the structural antagonism between blackness and the human at the core of liberal modernity” (5).