A Challenge to Reproductive Futurism: Queer Families and Nonhuman Companionships in Ueda Sayuri's The Ocean Chronicles

Abstract

Introduction and Methodology Science fiction novels typically create elaborate, multilayered worlds that often, and sometimes literally, turn our own world upside down. In her series The Ocean Chronicles (Ōshan kuronikuru shirīzu), Ueda Sayuri (b. 1964) depicts a post-apocalyptic world that discourages human reproduction and anticipates the extinction of the human race. I argue that she does so to challenge the notion of “reproductive futurism,” to borrow a term coined by Lee Edelman (2004, 2) to describe the belief that having children will ensure the future that underlies many policies in Japan and other nations. In No Future: Queer Theories and the Death Drive, Edelman (2004) discusses how reproductive futurism is deeply embedded in the ideological and political discourse of heteronormativity. Using psychoanalysis, he argues that “queerness” is at the opposite end of the spectrum—“the place of the social order’s death drive”—which resists reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004, 2-3). The concept of futurism is also limited by the fact that we do not know what the future will bring. It is, inherently, human speculation or imagination of the present. However, the belief that humans must reproduce to ensure a future is expected and prevalent as a norm. While Edelman is concerned with LGBT activism, I apply his explanation of queerness and how it is a critique of heteronormativity to the