Gothic Childbearing, Monstrous Reproduction, and a Science Fiction Turn: Rosario Ferré’s “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s “Relato del piloto”

Dina Lisel Rivera

doi:10.5195/ct/2019.414

Abstract

The thirty years between the 1972 publication of Rosario Ferré’s short story “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s 2003 novella “Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la mano” span the cultural, political, and economic “shift” from a “regulatory state” to a neoliberal global order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction. Focusing on their transformed imaginary of “monstrous” reproduction, I explore in this paper how the texts’ Gothic and SF modalizations refract local conditions as well as critical elements of that shift, full of increasingly urgent and extreme consequences in Puerto Rico, and even farther afield.

Highlights

Order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction
Despite significant differences in context of production and ultimate thematic focus, I want to examine how local conditions as well as critical elements of a similar cultural and historical shift are enacted in two Puerto Rican tales told in related genre modes and centrally concerned with broadly understoodproductive questions
The first of these texts is Rosario Ferré’s 1972 short story, 1 “Reproductive futurism,” as Sheldon indicates, “[a]s developed by Lee Edelman... names the logic by which the social good appears co-terminus with human futurity, a futurity emblematized by the figure of the child and vouchsafed through reproduction