Exploring racialization as technology for oppression in Stephanie Saulter’s Gemsigns (2013)

Abstract

In Stephanie Saulter’s 2013 debut novel Gemsigns, a pandemic known as ‘the Syndrome’ has wiped out most of humanity. To cope with the sudden loss of most of their work force, bioengineering companies have modified human genes to create genetically altered workers, the so-called gems. For more than a hundred years, gems have been the property of the company that created them, but as the gems have become more and more advanced in their cognitive skills, calls for their emancipation arose, until gem enslavement is eventually abolished. This article reads Gemsigns as a warning against how bioengineering can be employed to reaffirm racialized hierarchies with racialization working as a technology for oppression. The enslavement of gems does not merely replace older forms of economic exploitation of oppressed groups but is firmly rooted in real-world power structures, thereby addressing the exceptional vulnerability of marginalized people to be commodified by technological progress instead of profiting from it. I further suggest that Gemsigns uses its post-abolition setting to illustrate that the struggles for equality of formerly enslaved people do not simply end with the official abolishment of enslavement.