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Reproduction and Queer Theory: Between Lee Edelman's No Future and J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Anca Parvulescu
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Abstract

In a queer-theory reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman relied on a narrow concept of reproduction as procreative heteronormativity anchored in heterosexual sex. He left untold the other story of reproduction: our daily reproduction in the service of capitalism. Marxist and materialist feminist theories of reproduction remind us that we all engage in reproductive work and that women have traditionally been considered natural providers of this work. A reading of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man, in which a male protagonist depends on the domestic labor of a migrant woman, provides a counterpoint to No Future.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 86 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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