Estranging Social Reproduction in the Era of Mass Production: Science Fiction, Utopia, and the Reconstruction of and Resistance to the Labor of the Domestic Sphere.

摘要

Through the engagement with the formal shifts in the subgenre of feminist science fiction, the dissertation is able to map the creation of a disciplinary regime of domesticity. The project challenges a series of conventional assumptions within the historical materialist tradition, running from Marx through the work of Hardt and Negri. It posits that rise of a rationalized and scientific domestic sphere and the construction of a class of housewives is central to any understanding of the class struggles that occurred throughout the century. The dissertation begins with an exploration of the utopian novel, Herland [1916], written by domestic reformer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I draw substantially from the recent revisionist feminist interpretations of the text, ranging from Gail Bederman to Alys Weinbaum that reveals the racism implicit in her political project. However, my argument goes beyond those critiques to argue that Gilman's work, and particularly the utopian thread that runs throughout it, placing her work as an uncanny precursor to the rationalized, scientific domestic sphere that Betty Friedan linked with the concept of the feminine mystique. The dissertation moves to the post war period with the work of Judith Merril, who begins to engage with the ideological underpinnings of the mystique through a series of short stories heavily indebted to the sub-genre of domestic melodrama. Merril begins to reveal cracks and fissures within that sub-genre, using the structures of estrangement within science fiction to denaturalize the hidden assumptions contained within it. From there, the dissertation draws on the work of Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and Samuel Delany to explore the massive revolt against these new forms of heteronormative domesticity, the regimes of gendered representation linked to that matrix, and the tentative attempts to re-imagine social reproduction outside of the framework of the heteronormative and patriarchal family. I end with a chapter focused on China Mieville's Perdido Street Station that recognizes the collapse of the social movements that attempted to re-imagine the structures of social reproduction, and the collapse of the system that they revolted against, while recognizing their lasting influence, even while they lie in ruins.