Imagine a World of Forced Pregnancies: my new post on Girls of Color in Dystopia

I've never been attracted to books set in a world in which women have been stripped of their reproductive rights and function mainly as breeders.

After all, I live in a very real society in which women's rights over their bodies are constantly being eroded. The right to family seems to not apply to those who are poor, of color and/or incarcerated. So why escape to a world in which all of these injustices have been magnified?

The cover of Dan Well's Partials depicts the back of a dark-haired girl of ambivalent skin color looking out over a wasteland. Nothing in the summary indicates that there are people of color in the book. To the jaded reader, Partials might very well be yet another book in which people of color have not survived the apocalypse. I wouldn't have picked up Partials for this blog series on race and gender in dystopia had my twelve-year-old daughter not read and recommended it, letting me know that the main character is a girl of color. And she's not the only girl of color who's survived dystopia.

For full post, go to: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/partial...