Reproductive Justice in the Era of the Anthropocene in Carole Maso’s Mother and Child and Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay examines Carole Maso’s novel Mother and Child (2012) and Marianne Apostolides’s memoir Deep Salt Water (2017) within the contexts of reproductive justice, environmental justice, and posthumanist discourse. Specifically, this essay argues that these experimental texts embody posthuman relationality between humans and nonhumans through their depictions of the reproductive body. Combining the authors’ personal experiences of pregnancy with fictional narratives and scientific facts, both texts portray the reproductive body as fluid and intrinsically attuned to its transcorporeal connection to the larger posthuman world. The fluid body challenges technonormativity and anthropocentrism and disrupts the dualistic thinking they produce. In doing so, these texts critically explore the main issues of reproductive justice: whereas Maso’s novel parallels the binary development logic of the Anthropocene with eugenicist thinking and criticizes the socioenvironmental conditions that undermine safe and sustainable parenting, Apostolides’s memoir reclaims reproductive agency beyond the polarized view on abortion as the narrator embraces grief and vulnerability after terminating her pregnancy. The reproductive body in the two texts thus functions as a site from which situated personal and local experience extend to reproductive and environmental praxis. The experimental writing techniques, including nonlinearity, fragmentation, and genre-mixing, additionally prompt readers to float through different chapters and create networks of meaning and reflect on their own individual lived experience. Ultimately, both texts demonstrate the potential to raise readers’ consciousness about reproductive and environmental justice in their critique of human exceptionalism.