This research project explores how Latin/x American speculative literature reflects and critiques reproductive and eugenic bioethical injustices, focusing specifically on Canadian-Mexican writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels, Mexican Gothic and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau.  Speculative fiction is an encompassing genre that freely explores possibility and impossibility alike. These novels serve as critical literary portrayals of eugenics and reproductive control, offering insight into the cultural and ethical dimensions of bodily autonomy. By analyzing these texts, I aim to show how literature, especially Latin/x American speculative fiction, uniquely enables deeper ethical reflection and political awareness around the intersections of gender, race, class, and reproductive justice. Moreover, I will historically and politically contextualize my close readings of Moreno-Garcia’s novels through North American histories of eugenics and reproductive control.

I became interested in this topic after learning about historical cases of forced sterilization of Latina women in both the U.S. and Mexico thanks to my incredible professor Dr. Karina A Vado! I want to understand how literature can show these injustices and challenge the legacies of eugenics and reproductive control.

So far, through this process, what has resonated with me is how descriptive and creative Silvia Moreno-Garcia is when it comes to talking about the body as a way of resistance and how literary depictions of scientific experimentation can expose racial, gender, and social hierarchies in the real world.

By examining the literary critiques of eugenics and reproductive control in these novels, this project illustrates how the same structures of inequality persist in modern healthcare and reproductive policies.