Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T19:21:09.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - Engendering Utopia

The Force of Gender and the Limits of Feminism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2024

Sherryl Vint
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
Get access

Summary

The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Engendering Utopia
  • Edited by Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009180078.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Engendering Utopia
  • Edited by Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009180078.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Engendering Utopia
  • Edited by Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009180078.004
Available formats
×