Rory Sharp

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between biological reproduction and the future in three works of science and speculative fiction, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men , Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga , and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood . Each work is shaped by an imaginative change to the operation of reproduction. Applying critical frameworks ranging from Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive to bell hooks’ “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” I argue that these narratives reflect contemporary cultural anxieties about who, and what, should be reproduced from one generation to the next. I begin by looking at Children of Men , a 2006 film that imagines an apocalyptic world characterized by almost two decades of global infertility. In the second chapter I shift my focus to Lois McMaster Bujold’s long-running Vorkosigan Saga , the plots of which are implicitly enabled by the invention of an artificial womb called the “uterine replicator.” In my third chapter I examine Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood . This series of novels follows the arrival of an alien race of trisexual “gene traders” in the aftermath of a global nuclear war. With each work I chart how reproduction is structured as the most significant relation to the future and show how this assumption determines politics, identities, and bodies.

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