Q&A: Reimagining Motherhood in Contemporary Feminist Speculative Fiction. Mothers Out of This World.
Why focus on contemporary feminist speculative fiction?
Contemporary feminist speculative fiction occupies a distinctive space where imagination intersects with critical inquiry. Unlike traditional science fiction, which often emphasizes exploration or technological advancement, this genre examines the very conditions of life and society. It provides a platform to interrogate reproduction, gender, and power, asking how societies create and sustain life, and who has authority over these processes.
This genre is particularly valuable because it makes visible what is often overlooked. Reproduction is central to existence, yet its social, ethical, and political dimensions are rarely fully explored in literature. Feminist speculative fiction allows authors—and readers—to examine gestation, childbirth, and parenting in nuanced ways, revealing the broader cultural and structural forces that shape parenthood.
Why study motherhood specifically?
Mothers are the origin of life, yet their experiences have often been marginalized or reduced to stereotypes. Pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving have traditionally been portrayed as confining roles, narrowly defined by patriarchal assumptions. By placing motherhood at the center of speculative narratives, authors challenge these constraints. They explore reproductive experiences as socially, ethically, and culturally mediated, opening space for alternative forms of care, family, and agency.
Is motherhood commonly represented in feminist science fiction?
Surprisingly, it has often been absent. Many feminist sci-fic texts focus on protagonists who are childless or whose children are already grown, sidestepping the lived realities of parenting. This gap reflects several factors: the influence of second-wave feminism, which sometimes framed motherhood as restrictive; fear of misogynistic backlash; and a literary tendency to treat reproduction as private rather than socially and politically significant.
How do authors engage with reproduction and parental agency?
Feminist speculative fiction often transcends biology. Some narratives imagine motherhood as technological or scientific, reflecting humanity’s longstanding fascination with controlling life. Historical precedents—from eighteenth-century artificial womb experiments to parthenogenesis in aphids—prefigure these literary explorations. Authors probe ethical, social, and cultural dimensions of reproductive control, questioning who may create life and under what circumstances.
These stories also explore alternative forms of parenthood: collective caregiving, asexual reproduction, or technologically mediated gestation. By doing so, they challenge conventional assumptions about family, gender roles, and reproductive ethics, prompting readers to reconsider both historical and contemporary understandings of motherhood.
Why is speculative fiction uniquely suited to this exploration?
Speculative fiction enables writers to imagine worlds in which social norms, ethical dilemmas, and technologies are exaggerated or altered. Motherhood in these narratives is not merely private or biological—it becomes public, social, and political. Readers are invited to consider how power, technology, and societal organization shape reproductive experiences, highlighting both constraints and possibilities that may extend to our own reality.
What does this tell us about contemporary culture?
By centering motherhood, feminist speculative fiction demonstrates that reproductive experiences are culturally constructed and ethically complex. It exposes the constraints of patriarchal systems while imagining alternatives in which parenthood is diverse, autonomous, and socially valued. These narratives prompt reflection on broader questions: How do we define family? How do societies recognize and value care? How might technology, policy, and cultural attitudes reshape parenting in the future?Feminist speculative fiction thus does more than tell stories. It critiques assumptions, expands imaginative possibilities, and positions motherhood as a site of ethical, cultural, and political significance. In doing so, it encourages readers to reconsider what motherthood means, both in literature and in the wider world.
The full list of authors and the topics explored in the volume can be found in the here in the Table of Contents
Foto by Vik Molina from Unsplash
For those interested in exploring these themes in depth, our book is available here.
Review by Andrea O’Reilly, Founder of Motherhood Studies:
“This dazzling collection on reproduction and gender in contemporary feminist speculative fiction is indeed, as its subtitle signifies, ‘Out of this World.’ As the editors astutely and rightly observe in the collection’s introduction, despite the centrality of reproduction to feminist discourse, its portrayal within science fiction has often been conspicuous by its absence. With its incisive and decisive explorations of mothers and mothering across diverse histories, themes, genres, and perspectives, the collection compellingly reveals how speculative fiction, as mirror and lens, enables, nay, empowers readers to envision an alternative future wherein the full spectrum of maternity is celebrated and respected.”
(Andrea O’Reilly, Founder of Motherhood Studies and Author of In (M)other Words: Writings on Mothering and Motherhood 2009-2024 and Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice)
Image by Noé Sardet from Unsplash