Dystopia Now: The Past and Future Politics of Reproductive Control

My current book project, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2023-2027), examines the central role played by reproductive politics in contemporary dystopian fiction. 

In the last decade there has been a surge in novels published, mainly in the US, Canada and the UK, which portray a future, dystopian society fixated on reproductive control. Simultaneously, it has become commonplace to describe the state of reproductive politics in the US as dystopic, a trend that has only increased with the fall of Roe v. Wade. In contemporary literary and political visions, forms of reproductive control typically associated with past eras loom large in stories about criminalized abortion, coercive population control, and other acts of biopolitical violence. Dystopia Now looks at this relationship between literature and politics, tracing the recent rise of “the reproductive dystopia” as a subgenre of dystopian fiction, and analyzing the linkages it creates between past, present and future. Through close readings of novels by Leni Zumas, Sophie Macintosh, Louise Erdrich, Cherie Dimaline, Joanne Ramos, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Polly Ho-Yen, Jessamine Chan, and Annie Newitz, Dystopia Now argues that reproduction is at the heart of the larger nexus of political crises we currently face, from white supremacy to border militarization to mass incarceration to environmental destruction to gender policing