Botting Eileen Hunt
Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, United States.
Front Sociol. 2021 Mar 24;6:624909. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.624909. eCollection 2021.
I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal-or men-dominant-dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also projected the ways that patriarchal and authoritarian forms of populism could shape the cultural circumstances that can turn a local outbreak of a new and deadly contagious disease, like COVID-19, into a politically chaotic and economically devastating global plague. Modern feminist political science fiction born of Shelley's great pandemic novel (1826) is seemingly clairvoyant not because of any supernatural powers of the authors but rather because of their studied attention to the wisdom of plague literature, the lessons of epidemic history, and the political dynamics of patriarchy and populism.
我研究玛丽·雪莱、奥克塔维亚·巴特勒和玛格丽特·阿特伍德的政治科幻小说对于理解21世纪大流行病政治中父权制（或男性主导）动态的预测能力。和她在末日瘟疫文学中的文学追随者巴特勒和阿特伍德一样，雪莱预见21世纪将是致命大流行病的时代。她们的末日小说还预测了父权制和威权主义形式的民粹主义可能塑造文化环境的方式，这种文化环境会将像新冠疫情这样新出现的致命传染病的局部爆发转变为一场政治混乱、经济受损的全球瘟疫。源自雪莱伟大的大流行病小说（1826年）的现代女性主义政治科幻小说看似有先见之明，并非因为作者有任何超自然能力，而是因为她们认真关注了瘟疫文学的智慧、流行病历史的教训以及父权制和民粹主义的政治动态。
