Abstract
This chapter examines how reproductive futurist narratives are employed to control social and biological reproduction in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Future Home of the Living God. The first section of this chapter analyzes the novel through the lens of reproductive futurism and theories of biopolitics, biomedicalization, population control, and racialization. The second section reads the “queerly human” child in the novel as a symbol of the liveliness of matter that exceeds biopolitical controls and calls for a more ethical orientation to nonhuman materiality. The paper concludes by reading the novel through the lens of Indigenous futurism, arguing that the novel subverts reproductive futurist narratives of the future and progress by foregrounding alternative modes of kinship that engage the human and nonhuman.
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Notes
- 1.
For further information, see Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Archaeopteryx,” published November 7, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/animal/Archaeopteryx.
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Shaw, K. (2022). Reproductive Futurism, Indigenous Futurism, and the (Non)Human to Come in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_16
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