Abstract
Situating Paul Magrs's Could it be Magic? (1997) in the context of historical and contemporary representations of male pregnancy, this essay argues that the novel employs the figure of the pregnant man as an avatar of queer futurity and, given the impossibility of same-sex reproduction, the embodiment of queer utopia. Reading the text as a response to the AIDS crisis and Thatcherism, it is proposed that the pregnant gay man refuses the dominant order's association of homosexuality with death while also offering a counterpoint to Lee Edelman's assertion that queer oppositionality can only be enacted through resistance to reproductive futurism. Through its focus on impoverished members of a deprived community in the north-east of England, Could it be Magic? resists the occlusion of class in queer scholarship and activism, and envisions a socialist as well as a queer utopia.
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