Vulnerable Subjects: Ling Ma's Severance and Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers

This essay brings into dialogue two pre-Covid speculative fictions—Ling Ma's Severance (2019), and Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers (2018)—and identifies empowering resilient-resistant responses to viral contagion centred on a "reproductive futurism." Yet their narratives of survival reinscribe cultural differences and patriarchal structures: revised social imaginaries reveal ambivalent outcomes.