Medicine and Ethics in Black Women's Speculative Fiction

Medicine and Ethics in Black Women's Speculative Fiction explores the complex nexus of black women's health, the fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women, and the contemporary problems with the inconsistent application of medical ethics that should concern us all. Through the transgressive works of prominent writers Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson, the ethical issues surrounding genomics, militarized rape, children born of war, female circumcision, organ donation, mental illness, and disability highlight how personal experiences of illness and disease frequently reflect larger societal sickness. These authors reveal the role that religion plays for black women in countering problematic medical ethics and the systemic structures that support them and present alternative ethical paradigms that challenge the construction of black women and girls as pathological. In so doing, black feminist speculation enters the larger tradition of community-building and advocacy in black women's fiction writing, scholarship, and activism.

Esther L. Jones is Assistant Professor and E. Franklin Frazier Chair of African American Literature, Theory and Culture in the English Department at Clark University, USA. Her work has appeared in such publications as African American Review, Obsidian, and MELUS.