Violencia obstétrica y activismo maternal anishinaabe en Future Home of the Living God: el futurismo indígena de Louise Erdrich

Abstract

This article analyses Chippewa author Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) from a gender and health humanities perspective. In this Ecocritical Dystopia, or Indigenous Futurism, there are two medical institutions which, from a Western gaze, pathologise the female body and subject it to obstetric violence, that is, a series of grossly violent and intrusive practices around maternity care (pregnancy, birth and postpartum). Throughout this article, I will examine the Western medical model that the novel puts forward and thus demonstrate how colonial spatialities and reproductive futurisms actively participate in obstetric violence, a perspicuous form of biocolonialism. With this article, I aim to emphasise the different ways through which the medical structures and practices disseminated by settler colonialism, in contraposition to traditional Native American female spaces and Anishinaabe maternal activism, embody oppressive spaces which desacralise and instrumentalise the female anatomy and maternity.