Rebekah Sheldon
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816689873
- eISBN:
- 9781452955186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816689873.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? ...
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The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.Less
The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.
Charlotte Charteris
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621808
- eISBN:
- 9781800341265
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621808.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter draws on Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in an exploration of Forster’s most significant and productive inter-generational relationships of the 1930s, arguing that these queer ...
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This chapter draws on Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in an exploration of Forster’s most significant and productive inter-generational relationships of the 1930s, arguing that these queer alliances shaped – and were shaped by – not only the Maurice manuscript, but an emerging queer culture that embraced the homosexual’s ‘slantwise’ position in society. As a young queer writer struggling to reconcile the demands of his personal and professional lives, seeking a mentor and yet fundamentally dissatisfied with interwar paradigms of leadership, Christopher Isherwood found in Forster not just a friend, but a master – a model of homosexual writerly life. The master-pupil dynamics that would characterise the pair’s relationship for the remainder of their lives fused the personal with the professional, establishing an ethics of equality and mutual exchange that would ultimately underpin both Forster’s novel, and the collaborative queer aesthetic that would, under Isherwood’s care, finally bring it to birth. Having established the peculiarly generative power of their relationship, the chapter repositions both men within a complex queer dynasty, calling on contemporary theory to offer an affirmative answer to the poignant questioning in Forster’s Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson: ‘is there nothing which will survive when all of you also have vanished?’Less
This chapter draws on Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in an exploration of Forster’s most significant and productive inter-generational relationships of the 1930s, arguing that these queer alliances shaped – and were shaped by – not only the Maurice manuscript, but an emerging queer culture that embraced the homosexual’s ‘slantwise’ position in society. As a young queer writer struggling to reconcile the demands of his personal and professional lives, seeking a mentor and yet fundamentally dissatisfied with interwar paradigms of leadership, Christopher Isherwood found in Forster not just a friend, but a master – a model of homosexual writerly life. The master-pupil dynamics that would characterise the pair’s relationship for the remainder of their lives fused the personal with the professional, establishing an ethics of equality and mutual exchange that would ultimately underpin both Forster’s novel, and the collaborative queer aesthetic that would, under Isherwood’s care, finally bring it to birth. Having established the peculiarly generative power of their relationship, the chapter repositions both men within a complex queer dynasty, calling on contemporary theory to offer an affirmative answer to the poignant questioning in Forster’s Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson: ‘is there nothing which will survive when all of you also have vanished?’
