Automated Care in a Domestic Space: Reproductive Futurism in Hao Jingfang’s ‘The Question of Love’

This article is a feminist reading of Hao Jingfang’s science fiction story ‘The Question of Love’ (2017) which invites a dialogue between enduring feminist agendas and neoliberal conditions in contemporary China. The story offers near-future techno-imaginaries of a Chinese urban elite’s household, and it problematises the privatisation of labour’s social reproduction via techno-automation, especially the power relation of the non-caring subject-position over the caring subject-position. The article starts with a theoretical discussion of childcare, love, and automation of housework as they pertain to social reproduction theory. The origin and development of this feminist genealogy is introduced, followed by a historical contextualisation of how social reproduction is perceived and organised in People’s Republic of China, differentiating between the socialist era and the post-socialist era, and between the rural residents and urban dwellers. The last section offers a textual analysis of Hao’s story about love and care, interrogating the techno-othering of caregiving and the prescription of a productivist imperative through feeling rules. The reading reveals the story’s critical unmaking of the patriarchal-corporate alliance and their underlying productivist imperative.