“‘How the World “Went to Shit’: The Representation of Infertility in Dystopian Literature”

Description

Katie Tobin and Ben Hammond turned to the work of Lee Edelman to consider the implications of reproductive futurism in an age of ecological crisis by exploring the possibilities and limitations embedded in the figure of the Child in dystopian fiction and film. Shifting away from ‘the weaponisation of childhood’ and its ideologised future, the paper suggested that real political possibility lies in the present—in figurations of childhood and motherhood that attend to a sense of ‘being in the world’. Living presently, though, is complicated; as Victoria Brewster suggested in her paper “Los Otros Are Coming: Indigenous Justice/Revenge and AI Discrimination in The Tenth Girl by Sara Faring”, representing the present or the future, in all its utopian or dystopian incarnations, requires attention to the past. Assimilating the colonisation of lands with the colonisation of bodies through AI, Brewster invoked a posthumanist lens to explore what it means to occupy a body, and what claims to citizenship and humanity are attached to different forms of embodiment.

Period	21 Apr 2022
Held at	University of Hull, United Kingdom