GSU Lecture

This lecture brings into dialogue two pieces of fiction, a novel and a short story written over one hundred years apart: Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Camille Stories (2016) by Donna Haraway. It argues that both texts place care at the centre of social life, imagining societies structured around interrelation and interdependence rather than competition or coercion. While Herland envisions a female-centred utopia grounded in practices of care and social cohesion, The Camille Stories extends care beyond the human, foregrounding ecological entanglement and multispecies kinship in the after-math of environmental collapse. Each author, in her own way, proposes narratives that challenge entrenched dualities in Western modern thought: a) the dichotomy between rational thought and emotions, b) the tension between individual and collective, and c) the division between reproductive and productive labour. At the same time, both envision social constellations in which relations of care become the primary mode of engagement and the structuring principle of society.