The defiant commitment to life without reproducing
demands new genres of storytelling.
Futures Within, Futures Without makes space for fertile counternarratives that re-vision childlessness: experimenting with a hybrid genre of “speculative life writing” to bring together personal experience and the testimonies of others who are questioning dominant narratives of reproduction.
Areas for exploration include ecological and decolonial commitments; family histories and transgenerational trauma; embodiment, illness, disability and mental health; cultural, economic and political contexts; and alternative visions of family, community and kinship.
This work in progress explores how the future is conceived: engaging the “what if?” speculations of SF to revision the feelings of negativity, failure, longing and lack that have long-haunted those futures within that are determined to be futures without children in the familiar sense.
Futures Within, Futures Without makes space for fertile counternarratives that re-vision childlessness: experimenting with a hybrid genre of “speculative life writing” to bring together personal experience and the testimonies of others who are questioning dominant narratives of reproduction.
Areas for exploration include ecological and decolonial commitments; family histories and transgenerational trauma; embodiment, illness, disability and mental health; cultural, economic and political contexts; and alternative visions of family, community and kinship.
This work in progress explores how the future is conceived: engaging the “what if?” speculations of SF to revision the feelings of negativity, failure, longing and lack that have long-haunted those futures within that are determined to be futures without children in the familiar sense.
Extract from Holding Space zine, 2022
The first outcomes from Futures Within, Futures Without will be presented at God’s House Tower, Southampton, in summer 2024.
Please get in touch if you are interested in contributing to this ongoing research.
Please get in touch if you are interested in contributing to this ongoing research.