A text that I’m interested in analyzing is Ling Ma’s Severance. While Severance has been discussed as both an Asian American and a dystopian novel and has particularly been put into conversation with affect theory and critical race theory, I would like to hone in on the centrality of reproductive labor and consider how social reproduction theory and Marxist-feminist theories of the gendered division of labor might illuminate the novel’s treatment of capitalism and the body. One of the things I have not yet “figured out” is the significance of the novel’s ending, particularly how Candace’s pregnancy should be read. On one hand, her pregnancy seems to represent the possibility of reproduction and futurity after the collapse of capitalism. On the other hand, social reproduction theory complicates this reading, as reproductive labor is necessary to the reproduction of capitalist society.
I also want to think about what Candace’s pregnancy does to the novel’s construction of neoliberal individualism and subjectivity. Throughout Severance, Candace is highly mobile and relatively independent, moving through global systems of production and consumption while maintaining a sense of herself as an individual worker and consumer. Pregnancy potentially disrupts that model of the autonomous neoliberal subject because it makes the body explicitly relational; Candace’s body is sustaining another body, and her future becomes connected to someone else’s. At the same time, I am interested in whether the novel actually imagines this relationality as a collective alternative to neoliberal individualism, or whether reproduction simply becomes another responsibility that Candace must manage as an individual. This question might allow me to connect the novel’s treatment of reproductive labor to its broader concerns with globalization, commodity production, and the collapse of social systems.
I will need to position Severance within contemporary literature broadly, particularly twenty-first-century novels that respond to crises of neoliberalism, globalization, and late capitalism, while also positioning it within the tradition of Asian American literature. Because Severance was published in 2018 and centers a Chinese American protagonist while also addressing global systems of labor and consumption, I am interested in the tension between reading it as an Asian American novel and reading it as a more “universal” novel about capitalism and catastrophe. The novel’s prescience regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the vulnerability of global supply chains has contributed to this broader reading, but I want to consider what might be gained or lost when its Asian American specificity is subsumed into a universal narrative about crisis and capitalism.
A couple of specific secondary sources I think will be helpful are academic articles I have already read and engaged with about Severance, including “Zombie Work Force: Capitalism, Sacrifice, and the Virtual Afterlife of Labor” by Jose Alvarez Lara and Abigail Muller and “Imagining the End, Experiencing the Beginning: Capitalist Critique in Ling Ma’s Severance” by Olivia Wertz. I also plan on engaging with Marxist-feminist scholarship on social reproduction. I am not sure exactly which theories I will use, but I am considering Martha Gimenez, particularly her essay “Population and Capitalism” from the collection Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist-Feminist Essays. At this stage, my questions are: What does the role of reproductive labor in Severance reveal about the relationship between capitalism and women’s or gendered subjects’ bodies? How does Candace’s pregnancy disrupt, challenge, or potentially reinforce neoliberal notions of individualism and subjectivity? And, does the novel imagine reproduction as a possibility for a future beyond capitalism, or does it suggest that capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself is inseparable from the reproductive labor of human bodies?