ABSTRACT
In Hamlet, Shakespeare insists “that the future stop here” (Edelman 31)—terminating almost all the characters' lives, bringing them to “a premature end” (“abort, v.”). In this chapter, I propose that Ophelia is in the early stages of pregnancy in the play and that her death is the culmination of an abortion attempt. This reading of Hamlet puts Ophelia, who queer theorists have largely ignored, in conversation with the antisocial thesis, a theory that uses abortion figuratively to urge queer people to reject reproductive futurism. I argue that Ophelia's deliberate rejection of the expectation that people will reproduce and live on in their progeny illuminates her pregnancy as queer, as well as her loneliness, despair, and final act of agency in the play.
