Abstract

The power of dystopian and speculative fiction to illuminate the conditions of late capitalism is well recognized. However, the unique force of fiction at the intersections of realism and the speculative has generally been less visible. Short story collections like Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and Kate Folk’s Out There mix genres to explore feminist themes,
while Helen Oyeyemi’s What is Not Yours is Not Yours experiments with genre to address other kinds of socio-political concerns. Wanting to build on these developments, I offer a short story collection, entitled Eating Lessons, that shifts between realism and fabulism to explore how the worsening material precarity and debility produced by late capitalism also open possibilities for strange (and unreal) new formations of care, power, and embodiment. More specifically, the stories focus on close interpersonal relationships, often between women, and show how existing
dynamics of power, care, and closeness are unsettled by the unreal. Using surrealist and fabulist devices to examine the lives of women and girls, my short stories thus demonstrate how systems of power and oppression are made to feel real, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how
unstable this apparent reality actually is.