English Language and Literature ETDs
Publication Date
Summer 7-30-2024
Abstract
Using Judith Butler’s framework of grievability, this dissertation explores twenty-first-century science fiction by British, Irish, and Caribbean authors whose novels grapple with legacies of colonialism and imperialism that relied on dehumanization and subjugation. Beginning with Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts (2016), chapter one explores neocolonial rationales—purportedly based on health—which recreate colonial divisions of class and labor and enforce systems of diminishing grievability in a post-apocalyptic Irish context. Chapter two contends that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) illustrates the danger inherent to value systems that center “normative” embodiment in worlds that reconfigure hypercapacitated human beings as the norm; “disability” itself becomes unspeakable, even as ever-larger portions of the population are forced into conditions of nonnormative embodiment and diminishing life value. In chapter three, the dissertation examines Stephanie Saulter’s Gemsigns (2014) through the lenses of biotechnology, statelessness, and ablenationalism to illustrate the fallibility of “inalienable human rights” for those outside the protections imbued by citizenship. The fourth chapter analyzes the processes by which the young protagonist of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) experiences social death through natal alienation and abuse, ultimately arguing that her social incorporation with the alien douen demonstrates that conditions of social death and grievability need not reflect irrevocable destinations or identities. The dissertation critiques the inconstant nature of grievability for human and posthuman beings and is deeply critical of the arbitrary nature of systems by which humans deem “others” to be expendable.
Degree Name
English
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
English
First Committee Member (Chair)
Sarah L. Townsend
Second Committee Member
Jesús Costantino
Third Committee Member
Belinda Deneen Wallace
Fourth Committee Member
Ann V. Murphy
Language
English
Keywords
Citizenship, Colonialism, Disability, Grievability, Science Fiction, Social Death, Ishiguro, Griffin, Hopkinson, Saulter
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Reiff, Emily A.. "Grievability and the Contingency of Life Value in Twenty-First-Century Science Fiction." (2024). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/383
