Worlds Unseen: Reimagining Health Through Afro-Futurist and Speculative Feminist Fiction

Bioethics is often tasked with, or asked to participate in, designing a more just future. In this pursuit we are over reliant on our scientific roots, and fail to seriously entertain the possibility that the humanities are more aligned with the goal of radical change. Science inches forward; replicating, repeating, “proving” outcomes already known, especially to the patients who live them. This is at best inefficient and at worst deeply unjust. Rather than inch, we must leap. Rather than disprove, we must imagine. Engaging with speculative fiction holds promise for the articulation of identities, resources, structural relationships and power orientations that cannot be conceptualized as logical endpoints of the known world.

In this paper presentation, the author will argue that medicine, as a scientific field of inquiry and practice, has proven itself inadequate to the task of dismantling health inequality or championing health justice. Science hinges on incremental change—new knowledge builds from data driven refutation of old knowledge. It draws power from the unexamined assertion of value neutrality. Righting the entrenched structural, societal and moral wrongs of oppression requires a more radical approach. Envisioning health justice demands that we open the discourse within medicine and bioethics to embrace more diverse, embodied, humanist epistemologies.

The power of the imaginary becomes revolutionary when speculative narratives center on people currently experiencing the impact of marginalization. The author will explore themes within black (Afro-Futurist) and feminist works of fiction that may aid bioethicists as we envision a healthier future.