Rabble-rousing over interfaith marriages and inter-caste liaisons is the first step towards totalitarian reproductive futurism
By Pramod K Nayar
When politicians speak of controlling birth rates or express anxiety over the population growth of some groups — as they do frequently in increasingly rabid voices — it is the harbinger of the worst kind of politics: biopolitics, the politicisation of populations in medical, economic and political terms.
Much dystopian fiction of the 20th century has been concerned with the future of humanity and the biopolitics around it. Novels discussing mass sterility, such as The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) or Children of Men (PD James), worry about a future where humanity can no longer be assured of continuity. A gendered plot, needless to say, the horror imaginary of these novels depicts what the critic Rebekah Sheldon calls ‘reproductive futurism’, a ‘two-sided salvation narrative: someday the future will be redeemed of the mess our present actions foretell; until then, we must keep the messy future from coming by replicating the present through our children’.
‘Reproductive futurism’ has two contexts, both relevant today.
Age, Anxiety
First, ours is an age where biological matter, from tissues to embryos, has been thoroughly commercialised. Termed ‘biocapital’, the triad of the state, the medical profession and the corporates invests in human futures, and speculates in the biology of such futures. Second, the anxiety over the reproductive rates of specific ethnic groups and communities who then may overrun the country — and this demands greater attention.
Reproductive futurism appeared historically as legal measures to control breeding, and eventually eugenics. When Adolf Hitler declared that ‘in my state, the mother is the most important citizen’, he was spot on. The ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ (1934) allowed for the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who manifested any one of a list of genetic disorders:
“any person suffering from a hereditary disease may be rendered incapable of producing children by means of a surgical operation [sterilization], provided it is established . . . as very highly probable that any children he might produce would inherit some serious physical or mental defect.”
When Irene Schönbein of Freiburg wanted to marry a doctor in 1938, she had to, in adherence to a 1931 law, obtain a certificate from the health authorities. One form had an inventory of ten physical characteristics, with a list of associated values in descending order of desirability. For instance, for ‘Body Type,’ the physician could choose ‘muscular (athletic), plump, slim, or puny’. For eye color, there were the following options: ‘blue, gray, greenish, light brown, and dark brown.’
Irene was awarded nine out of ten of the attributes with the highest value, and it was concluded that Irene was primarily of the Nordic race. She was found to be in excellent health and likely to bear children, noting her ‘wide pelvis’. Irene Schönbein having successfully passed the requirements for becoming a German wife/mother got married and her husband would go on to be very interested in twin births and other medical curiosities, a man we know as the ‘Angel of Death’, Dr Josef Mengele.
A variant expression of this form of reproductive futurism in a totalitarian state is depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Precarious Heredity
In Atwood’s Gilead, the vast majority of the humans are sterile. We are told: ‘Some of the failure to reproduce can undoubtedly be traced to the widespread availability of birth control of various kinds, including abortion, in the immediate pre-Gilead period’. Atwood then points to multiple ecological factors:
“Stillbirths, miscarriages, and genetic deformities were widespread and on the increase, and this trend has been linked to the various nuclear-plant accidents, shutdowns, and incidents of sabotage that characterized the period, as well as to leakages from chemical and biological-warfare stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites.”
The concern over heredity, Atwood suggests, will affect women, with greater state control over them and the process of reproduction.
Gilead solves the problem of mass sterility by identifying ‘handmaids’. Handmaids are allotted to politically powerful families. On their days of fertility, the handmaid is raped by the ‘Commander’, the head of the household, in the presence of their legal wives so that eventually the handmaid becomes pregnant. Once the child is born, he or she is integrated into the family, and the handmaid sent away to another family. The handmaids, like Irene Mengele, are ‘pre-approved’ for reproduction, since reproduction is not an individual choice but one determined by the state. Totalitarianism, then, is not only about political and economic control: it demands control over sexuality and reproduction.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go envisions an era when clones are created in large numbers as a matter of state policy. The clones are brought up in specialised schools until they reach a certain age when they start ‘donating’ their vital organs for humans to survive, thus suggesting a different form of reproductive futurism where humanity will create a new class of beings to serve the human race.
Total Stewardship
Eugenics and reproductive futurism are measures akin to a form of stewardship, ensuring that a future will exist for the human race through the management of genetic materials. In other words, stewardship of human futures is a coercive economy built around reproduction. Butler, Atwood and Ishiguro imagine this stewardship’s coercive economy in different ways. Reproductive futurism as a means of stewardship over human futures on earth could be about the merger of humans and alien lifeforms; of men, women and surrogate mothers; or humans and clones.
In Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, it takes the form of aliens who cohabit with humans to enable the humans to survive on a devastated earth. The alien Oankali re-organise human genetic material so that ‘you’ll [humans] have a chance to live on your Earth – not just to die on it’. Human futures demand alien lifeforms to merge with humans.
In Atwood, the family’s continuity can be preserved only through the sexual slavery of the handmaids, who have no role after giving birth. The clones exist only to serve the human race in Ishiguro. The three authors point to a common theme: the stewardship of the human race, directed at the future, replicates the violence natural to the human race as it seeks to alter the race’s longevity and health.
These are cautionary tales, serving to show us that when the spectre of reproduction is raised, it enables a social imaginary in which greater control will be demanded over the most intimate aspects of life. When rabble-rousing is done over interfaith marriages and inter-caste liaisons in a land that naturalises (dis)honour killings, it is a first step towards totalitarian reproductive futurism. Who one can marry and/or have children with will be a subject for state policy.
Octavia Butler, appositely, should have the last word on the subject: ‘you controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction’.