Infertilities
Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies
An original analysis of the role of female reproduction in the project of empire.
264 Pages, 6 x 9 in
- Paperback
- 9780816634880
- Published: November 7, 2000
- Series: Cultural Studies of the Americas
Details
Infertilities
Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies
Series: Cultural Studies of the Americas
ISBN: 9780816634880
Publication date: November 7th, 2000
264 Pages
9 x 5
An original analysis of the role of female reproduction in the project of empire.
In today’s global market, ideas about family, femininity, and reproduction are traded on as actively as any currency or stock. The connection has a history, one rooted in a conception of feminine identities invented through a science interwoven with the pursuit of empire, the accumulation of goods, and the furtherance of power. It is this history that Robin Truth Goodman exposes in her provocative analysis of literary and political representations of female infertility from the mid-nineteenth century to our day.
Goodman takes Darwin’s studies on sterility between species as her starting point, exploring evolutionary science as the intersection of a colonial worldview based on class struggle and the pathologizing of female identities that fall outside reproductive normalcy. She then examines how Joseph Conrad constructs a vision of feminism as a product of miscegenation, how Alejo Carpentier and Mario Vargas Llosa deploy female figures of miscegenation to recast Latin American literature as "difference," and how ecological devastation in the Brazilian Amazon is envisioned through failures in Indian marriage. Locating points of conjunction between queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories, Infertilities points to the role of lesbian representation and reproductive politics in ongoing critiques of globalism.
Robin Truth Goodman is an independent scholar who lives in New York City.
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