Abstract
Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) intersects ecological problems with gender politics, in a dystopian portrayal of future reproduction and birth control. Retrospectively narrated by “Sister,” the novel depicts a bleak, near-future Britain, mostly underwater. The country undergoes severe economic depression, eco-disasters, lethal epidemics, and massive gender inequality. The trans-corporeal dissemination of toxicity in the country has provoked the despotic government, called “Authority,” to initiate involuntary sterilization. As a pretext of population control, a coercive birth control method is enforced on women. Drawing on Foucault’s work on bio-power, this chapter argues that the mandatory sterilization coil is a bio-political tool, using his theory as a perceptual framework to analyze the interface between complex networks of environmental policies and women’s reproduction as depicted in the novel.
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Notes
- 1.
I use this term in Stacy Alaimo’s sense, as developed in her book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Indiana UP 2010).
- 2.
See “A Conversation with Sarah Hall,” at the end of The Carhullan Army (2017).
- 3.
Some parts of this article are the revised and extended version of my article “Sarah Hall’un Carhullan Ordusu Romanına Materyal/Eko Feminist Yaklaşım” published in Turkish language in the Journal of Dil ve Edebiyat Çalışmaları (DEA), 2021 (24): 325–351.
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Kümbet, P. (2022). Environmental Sterilization through Reproductive Sterilization in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army. 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_4
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