By Dr Georgia Walton

In April 2024, members of The Future of Human Reproduction (FoHR) team travelled to Birmingham to present research at the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science.

For the first time, the British Society for Literature and Science; the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts; and the Commission on Science and Literature joined together to share research at the intersections between literature and science.

The FoHR team presented an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion at the conference based on the project’s various engagements with literary texts and literary critical methods and theory. The roundtable reflected on possible implications of technological change through discussion of literary representations of pregnancy, parenthood, conception, and genetics.

Focussing on a range of texts spanning from the iconic depictions of ectogenesis in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), to Octavia Butler’s epic of genetic manipulation and human survival in the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89), and Maggie Nelson’s memoir of queer family-making The Argonauts (2015), the roundtable offered interdisciplinary perspectives on the future of human reproduction.

Working from Donna Harraway’s assertion that ‘It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with’ (2016), this roundtable suggested that imaginative representations and creative responses have an important role in conceptualising and shaping reproductive futures.

Panellists from disciplines outside of English Literature borrowed literary criticism’s attentiveness to language and form and utilised literature’s propensity for speculation and world-building to envisage possible futures. At the same time, researchers usually working within literary criticism brought the insights of ethics, design, law, linguistics, and psychology to bear on their engagement with novels, memoir, and literary theory.

Prof Stephen Wilkinson and Dr Kirsty Dunn opened the roundtable with an examination of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, employing methods and ideas from contemporary bioethics and psychology. They discussed their own mode of approaching the text, hoping that their analysis of its literary form may lead to new territory for their own disciplines.

Dr Alexandra Krendel then discussed how literary references shape public responses to technological development in her analysis of user comments on the YouTube video ‘EctoLife’. She argued that, in many of the comments, iconic texts such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World function as a shorthand for futures of assisted reproduction that stymie engagement with the actualities of the technology as it is being developed.

Through analysis of a range of literary depictions of artificial womb technology and the application of literary critical methods to legal texts, Drs Laura O’Donovan and Nicola Williams discussed what we might best call the gestating entity within an artificial womb. They laid out a timeline of the different terms that have been used and discussed the pitfalls of introducing neologisms.

Building on Judith Roof’s study of a threatened yet persistent paternal metaphor, Dr Georgia Walton considered how reproductive technologies and maternal metaphors might challenge the symbolic order. This was framed through a discussion of Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts.

Professors Sara Fovargue and Sharon Ruston discussed Simon Mawer’s 1997 novel Mendel’s Dwarf. Focussing on the ways in which the novel imagines ‘monstrosity’, they considered how it encourages readers to reflect on their own biases. They also placed the text’s representation of practices of genetic selection in relation to the context of related legal and ethical debates towards the end of the 1990s.

Finally, Dr Andy Darby explained how Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, has informed his speculative design methodology. He showed examples from a speculative design project that imagined a future in which full ectogenesis is available and that was developed using Le Guin’s theory. He shared the hope that, instead of being organised around the champion of heroes, heroines and warriors, our reproductive future might instead be rooted in practices of gathering, sharing, and caring.

The audience question and answer session included discussion of how trans rights could be ensured in the development and availability of ectogenesis; the dystopian potentialities of corporate control of reproductive technologies; and the possibility for the eradication of certain genetic characteristics.

The International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science took place at the University of Birmingham from 10th-12th April, 2024.