Cruelty, Reproductive Injustice, and Communities of Fate in Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

In Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018) and Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket (2020), the featured state either designates women as un/worthy of motherhood or forces motherhood upon women, which seeds resentment and division. Division among women diminishes the possibility of resistance through community building. In the wake of such state-sanctioned cruelty targeting women’s freedom and bodily autonomy, anger and anxiety can be harnessed to form communities of fate, or communities formed through duress. As critical dystopias, Red Clocks and Blue Ticket show the power of centering resistance, activism, and justice, thus demonstrating the productive capacities of community formation.