Nuclear Reproduction: Race, Gender, and Reproductive Control in US Cold War Speculative Fictions.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation argues that race, gender, and reproduction together played a major role in shaping the Cold War American imagination. Using an intersectional approach, “Nuclear Reproduction” finds that normative notions of reproduction grounded in whiteness and masculinity organized much of American domestic life but so too did the threatening specter of nonwhite female reproduction. From the 1940s to the 1980s, US culture was permeated with racialized and gendered reproductive images, such as the cookie-cutter nuclear family, the unassimilable Asian immigrant, and the bad black mother. These figures appeared frequently in speculative fictions, or texts that map out potential futures. From civil defense manuals and nuclear war scenarios to overpopulation polemics and science fiction novels, speculative fictions helped to construct the ideal of the nuclear family, police the racial borders of the national body, and offer strategies to survive in a post-nuclear world. Within these fictions, the interplay between racism and sexism was crucial, albeit paradoxically, to Cold War understandings of American freedom, domestic harmony, and cultural democracy.Each chapter in this dissertation explores a different decade of the Cold War in relation to a larger reproductive issue. Chapter one, about the years immediately following World War II, looks at the emergence of the nuclear family as a strategy of domestic containment in civilian nuclear defense and post-nuclear-war fiction. Chapter two, covering the late 1960s to the early 1970s, focuses on the anti-Asian racism and xenophobia that suffused fears of a global population explosion as expressed in overpopulation fiction. Chapter three, on the Reagan Era, uncovers the interspecies dependencies that sustain post-nuclear life in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and that disrupt conservative reproductive ideologies of the 1980s.