Bea Joubert

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
overpopulation; rhetoric; dystopic fiction; ecocriticism; ecofeminism; climate crisis; climate discourse; demographic decline; sterilization; contraception; reproductive control; reproductive policy; fertility crisis

CURRENT RESEARCH:
My doctoral thesis examines the intersections between state control of women’s bodies and climate change discourse. My research shows that dystopic fiction offers a powerful critique of eugenicist discourse, especially in the context of present, growing fears of “demographic winter”—a popular New Right conspiracy fueling regressive policy and rhetoric surrounding reproduction, exacerbated by societal fears of climate crisis and its threat to human futurity. I argue sf narratives that negotiate a crisis of fertility position women and their wombs as the placeholders for generational security. My project is bookended by Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which fomented “gendered, classed, and racialized anxieties” (Sreenivas 2021) about a global human population boom in the 1970s and 1980s, and Elon Musk’s recent alarmist remarks about demographic decline warning that falling fertility rates in Europe and North America will lead to the collapse of humanity (Slobodian 2024). My project historicizes the shift in rhetoric from overpopulation to demographic decline through grounded analyses of key dystopic texts that reimagine resistance to historical and contemporary politics of reproductive control.

AWARDS:
– ‘Publishing Scotland Award’ for Best Dissertation (2018)
– Gordon J. Wood Memorial Scholarship, Carleton University (2021-22)