Naarah Sawers

Critical Fictions: Science, Feminism, and Corporeal Subjectivity Naarah Sawers

This work investigates the relationship betweenliterary fiction, particularly critical dystopianfiction, and the broader ethical landscape opened upby biotechnological advances and their implications. The research questions approaches to the body andmateriality through an interdisciplinary dialoguebetween feminist theories of corporeality and studiesof science, and through analysis of the fiction. Justas the child born of the surrogate body challengesbiological and cultural boundaries, the analysis offiction sets up a range of questions about the merelyautonomous and individuated self and the curtailmentof heterogeneous forms of knowledge. The scholarshipdiscovers that agency and subjectivity, likemateriality, extend in surprising, generative andconnective ways when the new spaces in which theydevelop are open to imaginative and ethical scrutiny. Through its bringing together of literary studies, feminist studies of corporeality and scientificdialogues, this work develops a new, interdisciplinary space enabling dialogue between thecultural, the scientific and the ethical.