With the recent resurgence of popularity in dystopian/utopian fiction (or, ustopian fiction, in Margaret Atwood’s terms) moral questions concerning personal agency over reproduction have become more prevalent and complicated; reproductive capability not only holds cultural and social capital, but, as we argue, its representation is often correlated with humanity itself, thereby reinscribing institutions of parenthood and motherhood as authoritative. In this paper, we examine Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as vehicles for questioning the experiences of the characters and their agency or ability to reproduce and/or parent children. Both The Giver and Never Let Me Go have seen a resurgence of recent interest, between the 2010 film Never Let Me Go and this fall’s upcoming release of The Giver. Their popularity lends itself to the question of what draws readership, and in both texts, the question of controlled reproduction rarely seems more than an aside or ‘yet another’ representation of social control, when it has come to stand in for humanity in disturbing ways that reinforce naturalizing views of procreation and reproduction.
In drawing from perspectives of bioethical and motherhood studies and in connecting these texts and theoretical approaches, we hope to shed light on the importance of reproductive control and how it reflects on how we naturalize and humanize parenthood. How do these discussions reflect the authors’ and our own social (mis)understandings of parenthood and bearing children and why do their reflections of ‘humanity’ revolve around the ability to reproduce? The naturalization of parenthood/motherhood for characters within the texts reflect cultural assumptions about how reproduction, choice, and parenting all play a role in the fulfillment of our ‘humanity’. These issues become crucial to understanding how and why people become the answer to a question and another means to an end.
About the presentersDrew Dumaine
Drew Dumaine is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Marquette University. In 2013 she received an MA from SUNY - Stony Brook in Medical Humanities, Bioethics and Compassionate Care. Her areas of interest include medical humanities,feminist philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of education.
Mikayla Nicholle Zagoria-Moffet
Mikayla Zagoria-Moffet is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her main areas of interest include speculative fiction, young adult and children’s literature, composition and the digital humanities, gender studies, and popular Victorian fiction. She is the co-chair of the Graduate Center’s seminar Possible Worlds, Alternative Futures: Utopianism in Theory and Practice, a member of the Writing Studies Tree initiative, and teaches at Baruch and John Jay Colleges in New York City. She received her BA in English, with honors, from Hamline University in 2011.