The Paperwork of Poverty: Administrative Violence, Bodily Precarity, and Self-Narration in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead

Abstract

This article argues that Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead revises the contemporary American social novel by representing poverty not simply as deprivation but as a condition administered through bureaucratic, medical, and documentary forms. I call this logic the “paperwork of poverty”: the institutional procedures through which vulnerable life becomes administratively legible, manageable, and exploitable. Through close readings of foster care, pain management, and Demon’s first-person narration, I show how Kingsolver shifts the representation of poverty from lack to procedure. Foster care turns the child into a placement; medicine converts pain into a score, prescription, and market; and self-narration produces a counter-record that contests administrative finality without escaping the demand for legibility. Demon Copperhead thus reorients the social novel for an age in which visibility itself has become a technology of governance, asking how literary form can expose and resist the systems that document, manage, and extract value from vulnerable life itself.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2026 · DOI ↗