This enables an in-depth consideration of how gendered inequality functions, whilst maintaining the ability to represent utopian possibility. Atwood’s generic model, the ustopia, combines utopian and dystopian paradigms.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and The Heart Goes Last use genre to explore the risks and opportunities associated with gender’s intersection with technology and culture in 21st century Western society. These fictions articulate the mechanics of power regarding the regulation and functioning of bodies under late capital and global instability.

James’s novel The Children of Men, its adaptation to the film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake offers a means of exposing the way in which power penetrates and manages life, especially under the extreme eventualities of global infertility or radical global bio-engineering. I argue that narrative fictions imagine, expose and critique biopolitical controls over life through the workings of sovereignty and the mechanisms of power that I read through the critical and theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. This thesis addresses the imaginary encoding of biopolitics as it operates within the contemporary English-language novel. Fredric Jameson has famously noted that individual narratives have the power to provide imaginary resolutions to the shared, lived contradictions of the material and social world.

Oryx y crake margaret atwood