ABSTRACT
Moving to the North American continent of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the conclusion looks at how the writing of promiscuity intersects with ecological concerns. It traces promiscuity through writers such as Updike and Roth, in which sexual activity features as a proxy for a dangerously accelerated, consumerist narcissism. Writing with variously subtle and corrosive irony, these writers present promiscuity as the end-game of capitalist patriarchy. Gay writers, too, have seen promiscuity in relation to capitalism but also as permitting acts of liberation and as enabling the exploration of new forms of the social. Moving into the twenty-first century, to feminist, speculative fictions, promiscuity is again a symptom of over-consumption and neoliberal exploitation. But biogenetic modification is also factored in as a way of imagining other futures. In Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy, biogenetic modification is both a further sign of exploitation and a possible solution. Promiscuity is once again in focus, as the sex lives of Atwood’s reconfigured creatures bring into question once more the relation between the human and the animal, the individual and the collective, sex and rights.
