Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines two recent examples of feminist dystopias: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018). True to their genre, these novels act as warnings, denouncing the patriarchal control over women’s bodies and the capitalistic over-exploitation of nature. Strategically positioned between dystopia and realism, they recover and revise generic and thematic conventions and propose relationality and solidarity of humans and the natural world as the best way to redress patriarchal and capitalist abuse. All in all, these feminist dystopias offer an opportunity for reflection on the intersections of current forms of literary feminism and transmodernity.
Highlights
This article examines two recent examples of feminist dystopias: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018)
As for Red Clocks, the situation is disturbingly close to our own, and evokes the famous saying that “one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia,”[52] or, more pertinently, that some men’s utopias are often women’s dystopias. This strategic blurring of genre borders and between dystopia and realism in recent dystopian novels by women, which deal with gender “in a way that’s fundamentally true,”[53] is an incisive critique of the present state of affairs which in turn reminds us that what may be dystopian in a particular context, for a particular group of people—gender, class, race, nationality are some of the relevant factors here—may be, real life, in another
Conclusion it will take time and more in-depth analyses of contemporary feminist dystopias to establish whether they mark a clear departure from past forms of the genre, my study of Future Home of the Living God and Red Clocks points to a renewed ethical commitment through a revision of generic and thematic conventions
Summary
This article examines two recent examples of feminist dystopias: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks (2018). Two telling examples of this regression are the passing of more restrictive reproduction laws in the United States and the continuing violence against women everywhere.[30] All in all, and despite the irony, as noted by Sheryl Vint, that this boom of feminist dystopia about reproduction comes at a time of global overpopulation,[31] there seems to be an obsession with women’s bodies and reproduction which these novels reflect.
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