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The paper examines the manner in which female anger and anxiety are channelled through two recent American reproductive dystopias, Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018) and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017). Starting from these two novels, I argue that anger and anxiety in feminist dystopias represent both the vehicle for political and social critique and the response to (potential) oppressive reproductive practices.

Even though the systematic use of solitary confinement in US prisons in the last decades “has grown into one of the nation’s most pressing domestic human rights issues,” it has nonetheless “remained one of the most invisible,” with its occupants living “buried, nameless and voiceless, in the dark heart of the American criminal justice system” (Casella and Ridgeway 5). The “mortification” and dehumanization of convicts dominates the accounts included in the two volumes under scrutiny here and will be explored more in depth throughout this paper. [...]I will also be looking at the manner in which the narratives aim to offer humanizing perspectives of this deeply contentious and divisive contemporary issue of segregated incarceration and add to the public and academic conversation and activism on legal reform in the US criminal justice system. Whereas the literature abounds in the effects of (prolonged) solitary confinement on the wellbeing of individuals and as a public health issue, and although there have been a plethora of studies urging reform in the field, especially given the wide-scale use of isolation in American correctional facilities, few firsthand accounts on the experience of solitary confinement in the US go beyond the dry statistics included in the aforementioned research. Baca resorts to the same imagery of dehumanization and death, calling his prison experience “the most frightening nightmare I ever experienced,” which “stripped me down to nothing, until I huddled in the dark corner of a cell, sometimes shivering with fear, other times filled with so much anger and self-loathing that it would have been better to die” (5). Besides these individual narratives coming from former people who served time in segregation, there are also websites, such as that of the ACLU or of the Marshall Project, which publish stories from solitary to raise awareness, encourage activism against the segregated housing of inmates and push for reform in the American criminal justice system.

Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in , it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women’s bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as ‘abortion tourism’ is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and ‘abortion mobility,’ (2020) and (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.

This article examines the manner in which the recent collection sets out to illuminate the dark urban corners of the so-called “Capital of the World.” I will look at how the neighborhood-based short stories in this collection reveal the urban underbelly of the American nation’s capital, its seedy underworld, the dark side of domestic life and murkiness of family ties, the racialized practices and institutionalized corruption plaguing the great American city. I argue that, through the collective voices of its residents, these stories offer precious insights into life as lived in the various corners of Washington, D.C., and bring to the fore a world populated not only by outcasts and the disenfranchised, but also by law enforcement officers, politicians, and high-profile representatives, similarly acting under the constraints of a dysfunctional city.

In May 2001, a traveling party of 26 Mexican citizens tried to cross the Arizonan desert in order to enter the United States illegally. Their attempt turned into a front-page news event after 14 died and 12 barely made it across the border due to Border Patrol intervention. Against the background of consistent tightening of anti-immigration laws in the United States, my essay aims to examine the manner in which Luis Alberto Urrea’s (2004) reenacts the group’s journey from Mexico through the “vast trickery of sand” to the United States in a rather poetic and mythical rendition of the travel north. Written to include multiple perspectives (of the immigrants and their coyotes, the immigration authorities, Border Patrol agents, high officials on both sides of the border), Urrea’s account, I argue, stands witness to and casts light on the often invisible plight of those attempting illegal passage to the United States across the desert. It thus humanizes the otherwise dry statistics of immigration control by focusing on the everyday realities of human-smuggling operations and their economic and social consequences in the borderland region. At the same time, my paper highlights the impact of the Wellton 26 case on the (re)negotiation of identity politics and death politics at the US-Mexican border.

This article explores the manner in which the narratives in the Prison Noir volume (2014) edited by Joyce Carol Oates bring into view the limits and abusive practices of the American criminal justice system within the confines of one of its most secretive sites, the prison. Taking an insider’s perspective - all stories are written by award-winning former or current prisoners - the volume creates room for the usually silent voices of those incarcerated in correctional facilities throughout the United States. The article engages the effects of “prisonization” and the subsequent mortification of inmates by focusing on images of death and dying in American prisons, whether understood as a ‘social death,’ the isolation from any meaningful intercourse with society, as a ‘civil death,’ the stripping away of citizenship rights and legal protections, or as the physical termination of life as a result of illness, murder, suicide or statesponsored execution.

This article analyzes the manner in which James Hynes’s novel (2001) can be read as a satire of what Bill Readings identified in his influential (1996) as the “posthistorical university.” I argue that, in the contemporary context in which higher education establishments are becoming more like corporations and the idea of culture is replaced by the “discourse of excellence,” Hynes’s novel offers an insightful discussion of universities’ negotiation of the Scylla of the pursuit of profit and the Charybdis of self-absorbed literary theorizing and its association with political correctness, the exploitation of junior and non-tenured faculty, and the quest for academic stardom. At the same time, I discuss the way in which the Gothic elements that permeate the novel fittingly double and deepen the critique of contemporary educational establishments and professors.

The paper examines the manner in which female anger and anxiety are channelled through two recent American reproductive dystopias, Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018) and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017). Starting from these two novels, I argue that anger and anxiety in feminist dystopias represent both the vehicle for political and social critique and the response to (potential) oppressive reproductive practices.

Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women’s bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as ‘abortion tourism’ is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and ‘abortion mobility,’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and Unpregnant (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.

This article examines the manner in which the recent collection D.C. Noir sets out to illuminate the dark urban corners of the so-called “Capital of the World.” I will look at how the neighborhood-based short stories in this collection reveal the urban underbelly of the American nation’s capital, its seedy underworld, the dark side of domestic life and murkiness of family ties, the racialized practices and institutionalized corruption plaguing the great American city. I argue that, through the collective voices of its residents, these stories offer precious insights into life as lived in the various corners of Washington, D.C., and bring to the fore a world populated not only by outcasts and the disenfranchised, but also by law enforcement officers, politicians, and high-profile representatives, similarly acting under the constraints of a dysfunctional city.