Gothic Childbearing, Monstrous Reproduction, and a Science Fiction Turn: Rosario Ferré’s “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s “Relato del piloto”

Abstract

The thirty years between the 1972 publication of Rosario Ferre’s short story “La muneca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s 2003 novella “Relato del piloto que dijo adios con la mano” span the cultural, political, and economic “shift” from a “regulatory state” to a neoliberal global order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction. Focusing on their transformed imaginary of “monstrous” reproduction, I explore in this paper how the texts’ Gothic and SF modalizations refract local conditions as well as critical elements of that shift, full of increasingly urgent and extreme consequences in Puerto Rico, and even farther afield.