This essay situates Making Space within a broader
ideological pattern. It argues that the domestic uncanny the supernatural
child, the haunted home, the disintegrating marriage has become a privileged
form through which platform‑mediated fiction processes social contradiction.
But rather than illuminating those contradictions, such works frequently
privatise them, rendering structural crises as personal anxieties and political
dilemmas as matters of mood. The result is a literature that is technically
competent, emotionally legible, and algorithmically optimised yet socially
miniaturised, historically weightless, and politically evasive.
In Making Space, the uncanny child serves as more than a
narrative device; it reflects a broader literary pattern in which the household
becomes the main setting for crises. Kuang’s story explores Jess’s longing for
motherhood, driven by her personal history and societal pressures that expect
newly married women to have children, through the enigmatic boy who appears in
the woods. The supernatural element doesn't expose the conflicts around
reproductive labour but heightens Jess’s internal emotional struggles.
This captures the domestic uncanny as it has evolved
recently. Instead of using the supernatural to distance the reader from the
real world, it explores the protagonist's inner psychological state. The
uncanny serves as a metaphor for feelings like anxiety, dread, or desire,
emphasising the self rather than questioning the external world.
Historically, the uncanny has served a different function.
In the Gothic tradition, the haunted house or monstrous child often revealed
the era's repressed social contradictions: class conflict, colonial violence,
patriarchal domination. In the domestic uncanny of the platform era, however,
the supernatural tends to obscure rather than illuminate. It becomes a device
for privatising crisis, rendering structural pressures as personal emotional
burdens.
The Social
Conditions of Reproduction — and Their Absence
Deciding to have children is
currently influenced more by external factors than personal psychology. These
include worsening material conditions such as stagnant wages and job
insecurity, the decline of public childcare services, rising housing expenses,
and the commercialisation of reproductive services like fertility clinics and
surrogacy. Additionally, societal pressures on women to embody a “fulfilled”
domestic role while bearing the financial burden of austerity also play a
significant role.
These conditions form the fundamental basis for reproductive
choices. They are not mere background elements; they are crucial. Yet, in
Making Space, they are almost absent. Jess’s crisis is shown as caused by
desire, fear, and personal longing. The social context is presented only as a
minor influence, illustrated by the repeated question “when will you have
children?” rather than as a set of structural obstacles.
This absence is more than just a lack of imagination. It
reflects a wider ideological narrowing in modern genre fiction, especially in
works created for and distributed via platform infrastructures. The domestic
uncanny depicts crises without addressing their roots. The supernatural child
replaces social realities, making the home the sole focus of meaning.
Platforms like Amazon and
TikTok heavily influence literary form through their economic incentives. They
favour quick consumption, emotionally clear content, immediate confessional
stories, narratives suited to short videos, and fiction that emphasises personal
psychology over social intricacy. Consequently, the resulting literature tends
to be psychologically intense, socially simple, politically non-committal,
formally concise, and algorithmically optimised.
Amazon's short fiction anthologies, like The Time
Traveller’s Passport, are crafted for quick reading, emphasising 'content' over
literary depth. Virality, easy discovery, and platform compatibility drive
their form. In this landscape, stories that highlight personal emotional
struggles tend to be favoured over those engaging with broader social issues.
Kuang’s story exemplifies this trend, not an anomaly. Its focus on inner life
reflects the environment in which it was created and distributed.
The Return of Plekhanov’s “Extreme Individualism”
The Marxist critic Georgi Plekhanov, writing over a century
ago, diagnosed a tendency in bourgeois art toward “extreme individualism,” in
which artists become “condemned to sterile preoccupation with personal
emotional experiences… marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination.” His
critique targeted the Symbolists and Decadents of his era, but its resonance
with contemporary platform fiction is striking.
The domestic uncanny of the present moment reproduces this
individualism under new technological and economic conditions. The artist is
not isolated in a fin‑de‑siècle salon but embedded within a digital marketplace
that rewards personal confession, emotional spectacle, and algorithmic
compatibility. The result is a literature saturated with feeling yet evacuated
of social content—a literature of mood rather than critique.
Kuang’s Making Space exemplifies this tendency. It is
atmospheric, emotionally legible, and technically competent. But it is also
inward‑turning, socially miniaturised, and ideologically conservative in its
imaginative horizon. It stages a crisis of reproduction without acknowledging
the structural conditions that make reproduction itself a site of crisis.
The online speculation that Kuang’s productivity is evidence
of AI assistance is a distraction and a gendered one. It reflects a suspicion
directed disproportionately at women writers whose output exceeds marketplace
expectations. But more importantly, it misidentifies the real issue. The
question is not whether the work was produced with AI. The question is what
social vision the work advances.
On that count, Making Space is revealing. It is a
story that gestures toward the largest questions sacrifice, futurity,
reproduction while retreating into the confines of the household. It converts
structural crisis into private dread, social contradiction into supernatural
metaphor, and political economy into personal anxiety. The AI discourse
obscures this ideological function. It treats the work as a technical artefact
rather than a social one.
The domestic uncanny is not necessarily conservative. It can
potentially shed light on the contradictions within domestic labor,
reproductive crises, and the social structure of intimacy. However, in the
platform era, it has often shifted towards privatization, inward focus, and
ideological narrowing. A thorough critique of modern genre fiction should
examine not only the works themselves but also their production conditions: the
platform's economic logic, algorithmic influences on form, the breakdown of public
social imagination, the commercialization of literature as content, and the
retreat from social issues into domestic themes.
Making Space is a modest, well‑crafted example of
this retreat. It is not a failure of talent, but a symptom of a broader
cultural formation in which the household becomes the only imaginable stage for
crisis, and the supernatural becomes a device for avoiding the world rather
than confronting it.
