“We Require Regeneration Not Rebirth”: Cyborg Regeneration in Feminist Science and Speculative Fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines a recent trend in contemporary science and speculative fiction to produce new and/or alternative iterations of reproduction that are not limited by biology, gender, or species. Through Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborg regeneration” and recent critical and theoretical revisionings of this concept, I investigate this trend in three key texts: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Larissa Lai’s long poem “rachel” from her book of poetry Automaton Biographies. Each of these authors offers representations of reproduction that counter gender stereotypes and essentialism and produce new cyborg maternal or explicitly non-maternal figures unbound to patriarchal models of repronormativity and colonialist constructions of the mother. By portraying these nonunitary maternal figures and/or non-reproductive bodies, I argue that these sf texts present new forms of procreation that further feminist conversations about gender, the body, the limits of the human, future populations, and desire.