The ethics and infrastructure of care in contemporary speculative fiction

Abstract

This dissertation explores the imaginaries of care offered by contemporary speculative fiction, a genre that captures societal anxieties about the future while allowing for the exploration of the possible. It explores the interplay between the public desire for better forms of care and the contemporary crisis of care, the inadequacies of current care provision across societies, groups, and contexts, exacerbated by the contemporary disruptions and uncertainties of technological advances, sociopolitical contingencies, and climate change. Care studies have pointed out that care has long been implicated in the gendered and racialized division of labor. The contemporary provision of care globally and regionally is also shaped by the disinvestment in public infrastructural support because of the decline of the welfare state and the privatization of care due to the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s. Contemporary authors thus use speculative fiction to challenge the neoliberal status quo and experiment with alternatives to existing care provision. While expressing a shared desire for better care, speculative fiction reveals the dominant values and relations in contemporary care provision. Mainstream speculative fiction offers surprisingly contradictory approaches to crisis of care. This dissertation argues that the often conservative nature of the solutions is symptomatic of a neoliberal configuration of care provision that emphasizes individual agency but has undermined the infrastructure of care, which consists of competing ideologies of care, social relations, and the material conditions that support and are sustained by the provision and circulation of care. I argue that although speculative fiction can make the care crisis visible, they repeatedly present care as an affective state, a moral value, and an individual duty to be performed within the family structure. In contrast, the space outside the family is often precarious, lacking the material conditions and social structure for stable care provision. This pattern points to the need for an imagination of care infrastructure that can register and explore the kind of connectedness of the human and material worlds that is more than the triad of family, market, and state. The first three chapters focus on caring robot narratives, such as Jessamine Chan's novel The School for Good Mothers (2022) and Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun (2021); hopepunk texts, represented by the comics series Saga (2012-present) by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and the bestselling Wayfarer series of novels (2014-2021) by Becky Chambers; so-called cli-fi texts such as Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). These chapters explore different themes in the discussion of care issues: the ideal mother as a paradigm of caregiver, the imagination of a collective of care, and the evolution of models of care and its infrastructure in the context of climate change. The fourth chapter discusses the possible alternatives in the imaginary of care in Chinese speculative texts, The Wandering Earth film series (2019-2023), for insights outside Anglo-European cultures.