Prole(tarians) on the Edge of Time: Queer Social Reproduction and Utopian Kinship in the Speculative Fiction of Marge Piercy, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

Reproducción social queer y parentescos utópicos en la ficción especulativa de Marge Piercy, M.E. O’Brien e Eman Abdelhadi

Abstract

Feminist and queer speculative fiction operates as a political laboratory in which to contest an alternative organization of care, beyond the institutions of racial capitalism. Such is the case of the fictional futures imagined by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi in Everything for Everyone (2022). Through a hermeneutics shaped by queer and Marxist-feminist studies, we will study the utopian formulae that social reproduction has taken in these novels, whose creative power lies in their interaction with the radical perspectives of their respective times around gender liberation. On the basis of a future Mattapoisett, where all people mother and amniotic plasma is kept in a brooder until the New York Commune deprivatizes care work and gestation after a socialist revolution in 2052, the authors’ writing explore a practical critique of queer kinship. Reading «queer» in an expansive sense encompassing all anti-property modes of care (Lewis, 2022), these narratives become a privileged vantage point into the family and gender abolitionist horizons that resurface as we interrogate ourselves how we can best care for each other.