Neoliberal Gestation

This talk examines examples of speculative fiction from Poland and India, published after 1989 in Polish and English, respectively. The focal point of this presentation is a comparative reading of representations of what we term (with E. Dawson Varughese) ‘neoliberal gestation’ in the contexts of Poland and India – two semi-peripheral countries that began their neoliberal transformations in the final decade of the twentieth century. By proposing the term ‘neoliberal gestation’, this talk aims to contribute to existing scholarship on the interface of neoliberalism and biopolitics in speculative fiction (e.g., Vint 2021), and explore how scenarios from the ‘neoliberalised’ semi-periphery reframe the techno-biopolitical optimism of 1980s-1990s cyberfeminism within capitalist realities. The selected texts, both of which centre on themes of neoliberal capitalism, technology and pregnancy, and female embodiment, are: “Pierwocina” (2015; trans. First-yield), a Polish-language story by Poland’s leading science fiction author, Jacek Dukaj, and “The Persona Police”, an Indian English-language story from the interlinked short story collection Analog/Virtual and other simulations of your future (2020)* by Lavanya Lakshminarayan. This reading situates these stories within the post-transformation speculative fiction contexts of Poland and India, following the countries’ parallel shifts towards neoliberal free-market capitalism. In both texts, we can argue, these shifts are mediated through a nexus of technology, neoliberal capitalism and ‘gestation’, which figuratively marks the development of the new techno-capitalist reality through the symbolism of human reproduction. Dukaj represents the birth of neoliberal Poland as a prolonged and monstrous pregnancy, while Lakshminarayan problematises the notion of technologised reproduction in the age of hyper-productivity. As 2010s revisions of the initial optimism of Western cyberfeminism, refracted through the lived experience of neoliberalisation, both texts reveal the illiberal and schizophrenic face of neoliberal capitalism in the global semi-periphery. This talk draws on a project developed jointly with E. Dawson Varughese.

*Published in Europe as The Ten Percent Thief (2023) by Solaris