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Abstract

Creation myths have long been used to explain how the first humans and lands were produced in ways that, from a contemporary standpoint, often defamiliarize and destabilize understandings of how we relate to land, each other, and animal, especially in what is given life, how, and by whom. Now, against a rhetoric of panic prevailing worldwide with increasing climate disasters, politicized violence, and globally plummeting birthrates, Indigenous scholar Bernard Perley suggests “ethnocosmogenesis,” or the process of recreating worlds through retelling origin stories, as a more reparative approach to experiencing the devastating realities we currently face. In this thesis, I analyze two novels that both conclude with women seemingly getting pregnant: My Year of Meats (1998) by Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki (b. 1956), and Earthlings (Chikyū seijin, 2018) by Murata Sayaka (b. 1979). However, rather than read their bodily experiences of pregnancy solely as a form of empowerment and liberation, I instead focus on the ambiguity that is generated by ending with pregnancy and, if read as creation myths, how readers might imagine forms of life and futures being conceived that are other than human. First, I use the myth of Izanami, Izanagi, and their deformed firstborn, Hiruko, to understand how reproduction remains similarly gendered and ritualized for Akiko and Natsuki, but also to question what other animacies can be housed and produced in female bodies when these heteronormative structures are rejected. Using Mel Chen’s (2012) theory of animacies, I ask, whereas the woman’s body is often thought of as a source of life, what happens when only the inanimate or the already dead can survive in it? The second chapter is informed by the Musqueam origin story of the double-headed serpent and its fertile waste, alongside Donna Haraway’s (2016) work on compost. If the reproductive potential of Akiko, Jane, and Natsuki as women and wives has been “wasted,” then what might come of this compost? In these texts, I find common resonances in how the protagonists experience expanding notions of motherhood, consumption, and intimacy across national bounds.