In this Book
University of Minnesota Press
- Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies
- Book
- 2000
- Published by: University of Minnesota Press
- Series: Cultural Studies of the Americas
summary
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xii
- Introduction
- pp. xiii-xxiv
- Darwin's Dating Game
- pp. 1-44
- Conrad's Closet
- pp. 45-92
- Carpentier's Marvelous Conception
- pp. 93-134
- The Rainforest Rape
- pp. 165-188
- Conclusion
- pp. 189-194
- Works Cited
- pp. 211-230
Additional Information
ISBN
9780816691043
Related ISBN(s)
9780816634880
MARC Record
OCLC
567823092
Pages
264
Launched on MUSE
2015-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No