Professor Weinbaum
ENG 541
Fall 2023
Meeting time: T/Th 12:30-2:20
Seminar location: MGH286
Office location: 408B Padelford Hall
Walk in office hours: T/Th 4:30-5:00
All other office hours are by appointment
Email: alysw@uw.edu
Zoom ID for office hours: 991 2097 3802
Reproductive Dystopia
This seminar examines dystopian writings that treat reproductive power and politics, eugenics and population control, reproductive sex, gestation and parturition, reproductive dispossession and insurgency, and, not least, “motherhood”. It is especially concerned with texts that imaginatively represent transformation and/or manipulation of the human reproductive process and/or body, and those that portend “the end of men” (as species, gender, sex, population). Over the course of the quarter we will consider a range of dystopian writings in order to meditate on the centrality of representations of reproductive violence and mayhem to reproductive dystopian fiction taken as a genre or sub-genre. We will consider the salient or defining features of this genre or sub-genre and explore what it means to claim texts as belonging to it. Above all, we will examine how various reproductive dystopias reflect and refract historical reproductive crises past and present and how they comment upon them. Alongside the literary fictions that will be our primary focus, we will take up Marxist, feminist, and literary critical and historical writings that treat human reproduction in the context of racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and the long histories of reproductive dispossession that characterize the modern world.
Readings
All novels on the syllabus have been ordered through the University Bookstore
All others readings can be found in the “files” folder on canvas.
Schedule of readings and assignments
This schedule is subject revision; changes will generally be announced in class. Please also keep abreast of changes by regularly checking canvas announcements.
Dystopia and/as History
Week 1
Thurs September 28
Introduction to the seminar
Week 2
Tuesday October 3
Fatima Vieira, "The Concept of Utopia" from The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010)
Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Dystopias and Histories" (2003)
Raffaella Baccolini, “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction,” (2004)
Lynne Segal, "The Utopian Pulse": https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-utopian-pulse/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers
Thursday October 5
No class meeting
[Read Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night]
Week 3
Tuesday October 10
Complete reading of Burdekin
Alexis Lothian, “Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and the Fascism of the Baby’s Face”
Thursday October 12
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”
[Start reading Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale]
Week 4
Tuesday October 17
Atwood to Chapter XII, Jezebel’s
Sian Norris, Introduction, chapters 1 and 2 from Bodies Under Siege: How the Far Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global (2023)
Atwood, “I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is Making it Real,” The Atlantic 2022.
Junot Diaz and Atwood interview: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/literature-culture-margaret-atwood-junot-diaz-make-margaret-atwood-fiction-again/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers
Thursday October 19
Atwood completed
Maria Varsam, “Concrete Dystopia: Slavery and its Others” from Dark Horizons (2001)
Rebecca Mead article on Atwood at time series broke: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-the-prophet-of-dystopia
Reproductive Labor and Racial Capitalism
Week 5
Tuesday October 24
No class meeting
Thursday October 26
Dorothy Roberts, “Reproduction in Bondage” from Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (1997)
Jennifer Morgan, “Partus Sequiter Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery” (2018)
Alys Weinbaum, “Human Reproduction and the Slave Episteme" from The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (2019)
Jennifer Morgan and Alys Weinbaum, “Reproductive Racial Capitalism,” forthcoming History of the Present (2023)
The Reproduction of Neoliberalism and Biocapitalism
Week 6
Tuesday October 31
Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”
Thursday November 2
Zakkiya Jackson, “ ‘Not Our Own’: Sex, Genre, and the Insect Poetics of Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’” from Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020)
Week 7
Tuesday November 7
Butler, Wildseed, complete Book I
Thursday November 9
Butler, Wildseed continued
Paper abstracts due on Friday by noon. 250-500 words.
Please include the start of your bibliography.
Send abstracts via email. No PDFs please.
Week 8
Tuesday November 14
Wildseed completed
Alys Weinbaum, “The Problem of Reproductive Freedom in Neoliberalism” from The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery
Mark Fisher, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” from Capitalist Realism (2009)
Thursday November 16
Individual meetings re: your paper abstracts
Meeting to be held at my office: 408 B Padelford
Week 9
Tuesday November 21
No class meeting.
Revised paper abstracts are due at noon.
These should include working bibliography
Thursday November 23
Thanksgiving break
Week 10
Tuesday November 28
Erdrich, The Future Home of the Living God
Thursday November 30
Erdrich completed
Sherryl Vint, “Introduction: Neoliberalism and the Reinvention of Life” from Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021)
Week 11
Tuesday December 5
3 seminar papers presented
Each presentation will be 20 minutes (no more than 8-10 double spaced pages)
Thursday December 7
3 seminar presented
Final papers are due Tuesday December 12th at noon.
Papers may be up to 12 pages in length. Endnotes and bibliography additional
Send papers via email, as attachments. No PDFs please.
Course Information
Contact and office hours
Walk in office hours will be held from 4:30-5:00 on Tuesdays and Thursday. If you wish to schedule time outside of these hours, contact me by email alysw@uw.edu to set up an in person or a zoom appointment. I try my best to reply to all emails within 24 hours on week days. Please do not expect response to email over weekends and breaks.
Seminar format and expectations
Although I will generally start each seminar meeting with a brief framing of the day’s readings, the majority of our seminar time will be devoted to discussion and collective working through of the readings. This means that a significant portion of your work for this seminar involves careful reading of materials in advance of each seminar. To be clear, I don't expect mastery of the readings prior discussion; however, I do expect you to have engaged with them to the best of your ability and to be prepared to treat specific passages, questions, and ideas.
I expect everyone to arrive on time and stay until the end of class. If, on a particular day, this will present a difficulty, please let me know in advance.
I do not allow electronic devices in class (neither phones nor laptops). I expect you to keep a dedicated seminar notebook containing reading and seminar notes. I also expect you to bring novels and print outs of pdfs to class so that you have texts readily at hand.
Student presentations [TBD. let’s discuss]
Written work
There are two options for fulfilling the writing requirement for this course.
Conference paper: This option is for those who wish to focus on a particular question or theme the seminar has raised by treating relevant materials from our shared readings in relation to this question or theme. While you may choose to work with a primary text that we have not read together, this paper option requires you to tie your argument to our discussions and to bring materials from the course directly into your paper. The paper should be “conference length” (no more than 12 double spaced pages. Endnotes and bibliography may be additional). It must advance an original argument; however, the argument may still be in-process, at a speculative or experimental stage. In other words, this is a chance to develop the beginnings of a what may yet become a longer argument to be pursued beyond this seminar. This paper should set you up nicely to present work in progress an academic conference.
Article length paper: This option is for those who feel ready to set the questions, themes and issues this seminar raises into dialogue with written work that is already underway. If you choose this option, you need to let me know by the start of week 3, at which time you should provide me with a copy of the essay you hope to develop further (this essay must not exceed 12 pages). We will meet in week 4 to discuss your plans for development of what you have into an article length paper (20-25 pages). If we both agree that the proposed expansion is germane to our seminar, you will submit a detailed plan in lieu of an abstract in week 7.
Religious accommodation
All requests for religious accommodation will be honored. No formal paperwork is required; however, I ask that you notify me of the dates you will be unable to join us before the start of Week 2 and that we together work out a plan for making up missed work.