New technologies of re/production and a world beyond the family: Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City

This article explores the contemporary debate surrounding reproductive politics by analysing Tlotlo Tsamaase’s debut novel, Womb City (2024), a work that exemplifies the critical intersection of feminist philosophy and feminist science fiction. Using Shulamith Firestone’s essay The Dialectic of Sex and Marge Piercy’s critical utopia Woman on the Edge of Time as starting points, this article intends to enter the debate about the necessity of redefining family structures beyond traditional genealogical or biological ties. Womb City is set in a futuristic Botswana, where AI-controlled and human-monitored artificial wombs seem to give women freedom from pregnancy and gender roles in these futuristic surveillance states, however, bodies are a government-issued resource. Our reading of Tsamaase’s novel centers on the portrayal of family as an instrument of oppression, exploring the author’s critiques as possible foundations for envisioning alternatives beyond the nuclear, white, heterocispatriarchal family (Lewis 2019, 2022; Gumbs, Martens, Williams 2016). Furthermore, Tsamaase’s portrayal of reproductive technologies is examined alongside Angela Balzano’s recent works, which do not reject biotechnologies themselves but critically interrogate the social norms that shape their use.