This panel will feature two academic paper presentations followed by a live Q&A.
The Mothership: Embodiment of/as Domestic Space in Shawl and Little Badger Panelist: Tessa Crosby (she/her) Abstract: This project examines the “colony ship” trope in SF, from its imperialist, heteropatriarchal roots to its queer, feminist, decolonial resurrection. In its mainstream configuration, the colony ship distills and embodies the problematics of social reproduction: “her” raison d’etre is not only to maintain and reproduce humankind, but to maintain and reproduce the structures and hierarchies that “her” programmers believe will afford a productive labor force. This presentation highlights texts that challenge this trope’s logic and, more broadly, the logic of a genre that seems stuck in rigid, overdetermined formulations of love, care, and kin.
Speculative Reproduction in Joanne Ramos’ The Farm and Cherie Dimaline’s Hunting By Stars Panelist: Dana Smith (she/her) Abstract: This talk argues that speculative fiction is a prescient framework through which to analyze the critical and pressing stakes of the contemporary fight for reproductive justice. By analyzing two near-future speculative fiction novels, I demonstrate the inextricable nature of extractive capitalist practices and the state’s prioritization of heteropatriarchal reproductive futurity–and how this is deeply tied to settler-colonial projects which commodify vulnerable populations to reproduce whiteness. Yet, while each text reflects tensions between “choice,” power, and survival–differentially mediated by hegemonic constructions of cultural, gender, and/or racial difference–they also present the powerful potential of reproduction and kinship as resistance.
