What to expect when you're expecting an epidemic: Ling ma's severance and karen thomson walker's the dreamers

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has prompted renewed scholarly and popular interest in epidemic fiction, from biomedical thrillers to dystopian tales of disease-desolated worlds. While fiction may cultivate our expectations about the probable paths of the pandemic, it also invites us to participate in the creative process of imagining alternative futures. This essay examines how two recent novels, Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) and Karen Thomson Walker’s The Dreamers (2019), offer feminist refigurations of the genre Priscilla Wald has termed “the outbreak narrative.” Shifting emphasis from the epidemiological quest plot that has tended to dominate this genre, both novels focus on everyday cultures and ethics of care, illustrating how patriarchal systems produce and perpetuate conditions of vulnerability. In particular, pregnancy plots in both novels work to interrogate cultures of paternalism, raising key ethical questions about limitations and violations of the bodily autonomy. Illuminating, in spectacular and speculative fashion, how conditions of inequality and precarity are radically revealed and intensified by a public health crisis, novels like Severance and The Dreamers are essential tools for teaching about—and living through—the crisis of our pandemic present.