The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yetunformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque conceptof the body (Rabelais and his World, 25-6). This putatively grotesque concept interfaces with the antagonism often vented towards olderwomen who wish to become mothers, which in Marge Piercy’s view “sounds just like the general hostility toward older women in our society,who are considered ugly and useless” (“Love and Sex in the Year 3000”, 2003, 134). While men often have children in their 50s, 60s and even70s, women’s reproductive years are much shorter, an aspect that is often perceived as not simply unfair, but as a distinct disadvantage when itcomes to career or other options. The scenario envisaged by Patchett provides an alternative, albeit "grotesque" and even, to some,"monstrous" vision of the Bakhtinian pregnant crone.Mothering Monsters: Technology, Reproduction, and the Maternal Body in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight RobberKathryn AllanIndependent ScholarLarissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) explore the ways that reproductive technologies have thecapacity to reshape human being in unexpected and frightening ways. Drawing on corporeal feminism (of Margrit Shildrick and Elizabeth Grosz,most notably), I interrogate the ways in which Lai and Hopkinson explore issues of monstrosity, maternity, and reproduction in posthumanworlds. Cloning meets reincarnation in Salt Fish Girl, as Lai traces the journey of durian-odoured Miranda from adolescence to motherhood. Iexamine the ways reproductive technologies, like cloning, intersect with environmental pollution and hybrid diseases to create a threateningmaternal body that has no need for men. Lai reflects that “now we step out of moist earth, out of DNA new and old, an imprint of what hasgone before, but also a variation. [...] By our strangeness we write our bodies into the future” (SFG, 259). Miranda’s struggles with corporealindeterminacy and “seepage” are reflected, I argue, in Midnight Robber’s Tan-Tan. Like Lai, Hopkinson exposes the particular vulnerability andmonstrosity inherent in maternity as Tan-Tan struggles with self-actualization and non-normative embodiment. Straddling the worlds oftechnology (Toussaint) and unadulterated nature (New Half-Way Tree), Tan-Tan becomes a contested site of the posthuman mother – her childis directly connected to the Grande Anansi Nanotech Interface: “[His] little bodystring will sing to Nanny tune, doux-doux. [He] will be a weavein she flesh” (MR, 328). Reading these two texts as exemplars of feminist post-cyberpunk SF, I ultimately propose that Lai and Hopkinsonsituate the monstrous maternal body as both vulnerable and technologically adaptable. Salt Fish Girl and Midnight Robber articulate thedangers inherent in adopting any new technology, but remain optimistic that the maternal body will continue to replicate on its own terms andin unforeseen ways.The Nuclear Family: Monstrous Domesticity in American Cold War Science FictionElizabeth LundbergUniversity of IowaThis paper investigates early cold war fears and anxieties surrounding domesticity, reproduction, and the female body as they play out inAmerican science fiction. My argument tracks several overlapping tensions: in the late 1940s and 1950s, at the same that there was a push inAmerican culture toward domesticity and family life, there also emerged fears of birth defects due to radiation exposure, and paranoia that anymember of one’s family could turn out to secretly be someone completely alien (a communist, a spy, homosexual, etc.). The American familywas seen as a tool for patriotism and containment but a tool that was constantly failing and betraying its nationalistic possibilities. TheAmerican woman’s body became a focal point for many of these fears and was coded monstrous, unpredictable, and abject, in need of controland regulation. The baby boom began in 1945, but women’s reproductive choices were more and more rigidly controlled: abortion wasregulated and prosecuted in the United States more than ever before starting in the 1940s, and the natural childbirth movement began inearnest in the 1940s as a reaction against the increasing medicalization of pregnancy and birth. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was feminizedin some of its American portrayals, depicted as a wayward woman in need of courting, domestication, and impregnation, adding anotherpolitical dimension to some of the era’s portrayals of female and feminized monsters and villains. American domestic or “housewife heroine”science fiction of the late 1940s and 1950s, by authors such as Judith Merril, Kit Reed, Alice Eleanor Jones, and Wilmar H. Shiras, registered andoften literalized cold war anxieties surrounding domesticity and reproduction. This paper examines such texts for what they reveal aboutcultural pressures on the American cold war family.55. (SF) Sex, Power, and Language in Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin OakChair: Adam GuzkowskiTrent UniversityMonstrous Love Affairs and Grotesque Genders in Samuel Delany’s Science FictionPäivi VäätänenUniversity of HelsinkiMonsters “ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward itsexpression,” notes Jeffrey J. Cohen (1996:20). This is especially true of Samuel Delany’s science fiction, where monsters and aliens neverconform to strictly policed identity categories or norms. In Delany’s sf, love – or sex – is often an integral part of really understanding the alien.The aim of this paper is to present a cross-section of grotesque love affairs with the alien and the monstrous in Samuel Delany’s science fiction,and demonstrate how his aliens promote tolerance toward difference. Cohen argues that monsters are frightful because of their ability tobreak down categories. Therefore, “the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatusthrough which individuality is constituted and allowed.” (Cohen 1996:12) Whether one sees that destruction as terrifying or desirable dependson one’s attitude towards the very cultural apparatus. This paper concludes that when it comes to Delany’s aliens, monstrosity is definitely inthe eye of the beholder.