Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions
Author: Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107245230

This study examines feminist speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and finds within it a new vision for the future. Rejecting notions of postmodern utopia as exclusionary, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor advances one defined in terms of hospitality, casting what she calls 'imaginative sympathy' as the foundation of utopian desire. Tracing these themes through the works of Atwood, Butler, Lessing and Winterson, as well as those of well-known Muslim feminists such as El Saadawi, Parsipur and Mernissi, Wagner-Lawlor balances literary analysis with innovative extensions of feminist philosophy to show how inclusionary utopian thinking can inform and promote political agency. Examining these contemporary fictions reveals the rewards of attending to a community that acknowledges difference, diversity and the imaginative potential of every human being.

Feminist Utopias in a Postmodern Era

Feminist Utopias in a Postmodern Era
Author: Alkeline van Lenning
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1997
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

There is a respectable feminist tradition in utopian thought. Dreams and fantasies about gender-equal, women-friendly or female-dominated worlds have been formulated abundantly. However, utopian thinking has also met with severe criticism. By definition, utopias were said to be too idealistic, and of little use in the process of societal change. More recently, it has been stressed that the concept of utopia has been superseded by postmodern awareness, in which general explanations of gender inequality (and, along with them, general utopian views) are disqualified to the benefit of more local and more specific theories. In this book, the reader will find not one general, broadly defined utopia, but instead, a wide array of more or less specific, feminist utopias. Utopias are viewed as preliminary and imaginary goals from which present situations can be revalued and from which strategies for change can be developed. As such, utopias have not lost their significance.

Feminist Fabulation

Feminist Fabulation
Author: Marleen S. Barr
Publisher:
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1992
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether.

Lost in Space

Lost in Space
Author: Marleen S. Barr
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1469639769

Archaeologists and anthropologists discover other civilizations; science fiction writers invent them. In this collection of her major essays, Marleen Barr argues that feminist science fiction writers contribute to postmodern literary canons with radical alternatives to mainstream patriarchal society. Because feminist science fiction challenges male-centered social imperatives, it has been marginalized and dismissed from the canon--thus, lost in space. Moving beyond feminist science fiction itself, Barr goes on to examine other literary genres from the perspective of 'feminist fabulation'--a term she has coined to encompass science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature, and mainstream literature that critiques patriarchal fictions. Discussing the works of such writers as Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Marge Piercy, Barr illuminates feminist science fiction's connections to other literary traditions and contemporary canons. Her critical analysis yields a new and expanded understanding of feminist creativity.

Heterotopia

Heterotopia
Author: Tobin Siebers
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1994
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780472105571

Considers the uses and dangers of utopian thinking in the postmodern world

Utopian and Science Fiction by Women

Utopian and Science Fiction by Women
Author: Jane Donawerth
Publisher:
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1994
Genre: Feminism and literature
ISBN:

Contains 11 original essays on works on utopian and science fiction by women that reveal a literary tradition from 17th-century Europe to the present day. This collection speaks to different themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the men-less islands of the French writer Scudery to the 18th- and 19th-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of L. Guin, Wittig, Piercy and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.

Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond

Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond
Author: Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2021-04-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000376354

Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.

Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
Author: Susan Watkins
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-02-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137486503

This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that depicts the end of the world as we know it, and women writers are no exception to this trend. However, the book argues that their fiction is distinctive. Contemporary women’s work in this genre avoids conservatism, a nostalgic mourning for the past, and the focus on restoring what has been lost, aspects key to much male authored apocalyptic fiction. Instead, contemporary women writers show readers the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision, and offer qualified hope for a new beginning for society, culture and literature after an imagined apocalyptic event. Exploring science, nature and matter, the posthuman body, the maternal imaginary, time, narrative and history, literature and the word, and the post-secular, the book covers a wide variety of writers and addresses issues of nationality, race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality.

Higher Ground

Higher Ground
Author: Sally Kitch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2000-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780226438566

Many feminists love a utopia—the idea of restarting humanity from scratch or transforming human nature in order to achieve a prescribed future based on feminist visions. Some scholars argue that feminist utopian fiction can be used as a template for creating such a future. However, Sally L. Kitch argues that associating feminist thought with utopianism is a mistake. Drawing on the history of utopian thought, as well as on her own research on utopian communities, Kitch defines utopian thinking, explores the pitfalls of pursuing social change based on utopian ideas, and argues for a "higher ground" —a contrasting approach she calls realism. Replacing utopianism with realism helps to eliminate self-defeating notions in feminist theory, such as false generalization, idealization, and unnecessary dichotomies. Realistic thought, however, allows feminist theory to respond to changing circumstances, acknowledge sameness as well as difference, value the past and the present, and respect ideological give-and-take. An important critique of feminist thought, Kitch concludes with a clear, exciting vision for a feminist future without utopia.