Feminist Utopia Research Articles

Kenstituent power: an exploration of feminist constitutional change in Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie explores the influence of childhood dream worlds and toys over adult life, and the singular importance of a toy which represents an empowered woman. But this story plays out against the backdrop of deep societal challenges. That the subject matter of the film is light does not detract from its cultural significance; it enhances its reach and thereby its influence. Constitutional change, property, dissent, inequality and revolution are not the B-plot of the film, they suffuse every scene and motivate its major characters. In this article we explore the significance of Barbie Land as a supposed embodiment of a feminist utopia and the extent to which Gerwig is confronting viewers with difficult questions about authority and just governance in the Real World.

Polyphonic Narrative, Feminist Utopia, and London Imagination: Artistic Experimentations in Girl, Woman, Other

Polyphonic Narrative, Feminist Utopia, and London Imagination: Artistic Experimentations in Girl, Woman, Other

A utopia do harém: representações do harém nas cartas persas de Montesquieu e em Nasci num Harém de Fatima Mernissi

The harem has long been depicted as representative of the Orient in Western imagination. For some, a place of despotic rule and (female) oppression; to others, a feminist utopia of female freedom and protection. This paper analyzes two fundamental works that focus on the harem, Montesquieu’s 18th century Persian Letters, and Fatima Mernissi’s 20th century Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. It will do a comparative and exploratory reading of the harems presented in these two works, while focusing specifically on issues of agency and power—all departing from the concept of despotic power, female and authorial agency, and the gaze.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Evolution of Community Thought: From The Yellow Wallpaper to Herland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American novelist and feminist, well-known for her works The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland, which have drawn considerable attention from scholars at home and abroad and aroused wide discussion since their publication. In most cases, the former was regarded as a classic of gender politics and the latter, a feminist utopia. Through the detailed analysis of the two works, it can be found that Gilman has interwoven the spirit of community into the two works, considering it as the right path to gaining women’s equality and freedom. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman just implicitly puts forward women alliance as a potential way to liberate women; while in Herland, Gilman describes the harmony between people (women) and the surroundings, between people (women) and people (men), which demonstrates that Gilman is more resolute and more confident in community and cooperation. In the meanwhile, from the two works, it can be found that Gilman’s thought on community is changing and more and more progressive and that the forming of community is a more effective way to contribute to personal growth and development.

Feminist Utopias in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an intense period of international feminist organising and campaigning. Organisations such as the International Alliance of Women (1904), the Socialist Women’s International (1907), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1915) exemplified the transnational geography of the movement. This was also a time in which women’s writing moved in new ways, imagining speculative utopian worlds to accompany their radical gender politics. This article examines two literary feminist utopias from the early twentieth century: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). While US writer Hopkins’s Of One Blood offers an early Afrofuturist or Black internationalist utopia that reflects women’s struggles, Hossain presents a simultaneously feminist and anti-colonial imagining of the world. Both these works, in an internationalist tradition, criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders, demonstrating the vital role played by literary utopian works in feminism of the early twentieth century.

‘blotted into the unreadable darkness’: Feminist Solidarity as Feminist Utopia in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002)

This article investigates the representation of feminist solidarity as feminist utopia through the relationship between Sugar and Agnes, the female protagonists of Michel Faber's neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). The article argues that the two women's relationship serves as a metaphor for the feminist debate on difference, negotiated in neo-Victorian fiction, and dramatises the process whereby support is consciously and actively offered in order to defy oppression and alleviate suffering, despite their different positionalities. A key aspect of this process is the (literal and metaphorical) journey which Sugar undertakes to the sites of Agnes's lived experience, which provides her with an insight into the kind of oppression Agnes experiences and enables her to offer the latter woman the assistance she needs. Feminist solidarity, the article asserts, is ultimately conceptualised as a feminist utopia, as Agnes's desired mode of aid entails that she chase her own utopia once Sugar liberates her. In this way, the text asserts the necessity of thinking about feminist solidarity as feasible within the context of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century feminist controversies on that issue.

Rokeya’s Dream Vision: An Indian Lady Philosophy and Conversion to Feminism

This essay examines Begum Rokeya’s pivotal work Sultana’s Dream (1905) in the context of medieval dream vision by foregrounding its matches with the dream vision genre. With Sultana’s Dream, Rokeya takes women in the Indian community to a realm of freedom away from purdah and the zenana via mainly treating the concerns of gender and education. Rokeya endeavours to raise female consciousness in her story written in a dream format featuring Sister Sara as the guide to forging a self-sufficient female identity equal to men. I read Sister Sara as a wise woman, an exemplar of Boethius’ Lady Philosophy, appearing in medieval dream visions to bring people to the truth, the conversion to Christianity in the medieval setting as in The Dream of the Rood. The essay concludes that, apart from her community, Rokeya’s call in Sultana’s Dream stretches out from medieval to contemporary society within the milieuof a dream vision to a feminist utopia respectively.

Pluralistic methods in codesign: a co-speculation play method for feminist Utopias in urban Türkiye*

ABSTRACT This article introduces a co-speculation method developed in urban Türkiye, economically, socially and politically fluctuating geography. This method leverages decolonial and feminist design studies to emphasise pluralism and the integration of underrepresented knowledge systems, thus benefiting from their valuable epistemological and methodological contributions. We show the details from the development of the feminist co-speculation method through co-design sessions, showcasing how it adapts to and is reshaped by the social realities in urban Türkiye.

Feminist Discourse and Its Translation: Macro- Strategies in Fihrist’s Feminist Utopias Series

Starting from the late 18th century, the feminist movement has evolved throughout the world, and literature has a crucial role in its development. Not only the feminist literary works or their translations but also research based on these works help women raise their voices in order to stand against inequalities arising from their gender. With a broad perspective, in this study, feminist translation is not just regarded as a struggle against domination, but it is rethought through feminist strategies and practices applied by the translators and the other agents involved in the translation process. In 2021, the publisher, Fihrist published a series under the title of “Feminist Utopias”. In this series, there are five late 19th-century utopias, which highlight the temporal gap between the source texts and their translation. Within this regard, this study aims to analyze feminist translation macro- strategies in these utopias within Luise von Flotow’s framework. The results of the analysis have shown that Fihrist’s launch of this series aims to introduce Western feminist utopias which present new dimensions by envisioning alternative societies that challenge traditional gender roles and power dynamics to the Turkish reader. The publisher's intention has been strengthened through the strategies employed by the translators, particularly the utilization of footnotes, addressing sexist concepts, and highlighting original feminist discourse.

Ecotopia: Ecological Concerns and Alternate Womanspace in Select Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin

The term ecotopia draws attention to the etymological link between utopia and ecologism, which emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sustainable relationship with the natural world in the context of an ideal egalitarian society. Literary utopias aim to evoke a longing for a society that differs from the present, playing a crucial role in breaking free from conventional thinking and envisioning alternatives to oppressive social institutions. The concept of green utopias is unthinkable without radical social reforms and changes in culture and lifestyle. Feminist ecotopia proposes a gendered deconstruction and reconstruction of a green utopian society. In her ecotopian novels Always Coming Home and Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin explores the relationship between ecologism and utopia. The structure of these novels frequently exhibits an ecotopian sensibility, while their content emphasizes the process of creating a better society. Le Guin’s transgressive concept of utopia and ecology seeks to challenge and subvert the ideological frameworks that support materialist and dominant patriarchal conceptions. It provides feminist writers with a distinct space to imagine transgressive and oppositional ecotopian alternatives, where mothering-related myths and femininized characteristics are valued. This paper delves into how Le Guin’s utopian novels interrogate and deconstruct powerful patriarchal structures, creating a cultural space for women to imagine transgressive and oppositional ecotopian alternatives. Keywords: Ecotopia, Utopia, Ecology, Feminist Utopia, Terraforming, Yin-Yang, Daoism

Suzuki Izumi’s Escape from the World of Women

Suzuki Izumi’s (1949–1986) short story “Onna to onna no yo no naka” (A World of Women and Women) was published in 1976, at the time when the genre of separatist feminist utopia was flourishing in the West. Worlds of women in the context of Western literature have been viewed as part and parcel of the feminist movement and debates of the 1970s and 1980s and some attempts have been made to look at Suzuki’s story through the same lens. However, this essay claims that “A World of Women and Women” should be examined as an expression of discomfort experienced by women in society rather than as a possible blueprint for a better social order or utopian feminist vision. I contend that Suzuki’s work reflects the contemporary cultural atmosphere of disappointment both with the state and with protest movements, with what the philosopher Yoshimoto Takaaki called “communal illusion.” The story is a critique of a discursive space near and dear to Suzuki’s heart – the world of shōjo narratives (narratives aimed at girls and young women), constructed as an insular space that precludes real engagement with the reality of having to live in a world in which men do exist.

Of the Zenana: Ismat Chughtai and the Feminist Utopia

A zenana is generally read as a metaphor of male dominance over women. Marking a radical departure from this normalised perception of Zenana. Ismat Chughtai in her Lihaaf presents an alternative view. She destabilizes the association of a zenana with male governance and attempts to give it an altered dimension. While the popular readings of a zenana offer an understanding of it as a space to alienate women from the rest of the world, Chughtai in her Lihaaf uses the space as a microcosmic representation of her own world. This paper is an attempt to show Chughtai subverts a gendered space and establish a feminist Utopia around it. It muses on how patriarchy’s own intrinsic disparities produce it as a site of agential possibilities for women and create rooms for a feminist Utopia.

A Feminist Reading of Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the representative feminist writers in the United States. Her novel Herland constructs a utopian society for women and breaks binary opposition between men and women. This thesis analyzes from two different perspectives -- space and environment, and ideology in a woman-dominated country to reveal the ability of females’ deconstruction of dualism and reconstruction of equality rebuild between people and nature, and between men and women with subjectivity and agency of women. On the other hand, by comparing patriarchal ideology in reality and feministic thoughts in Herland, this thesis also aims to reveal the advancement in this feminist utopia, thus indicating the practical significance of the novel as a social criticism by creating a female dominated utopia to explore the ways to solve the various social problems in patriarchal United States.

POETIKA DISTOPIJSKIH HRONOTOPA U ROMANU „STALNO SE VRAĆAJUĆI KUĆI“ URSULE K. LEGVIN

Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home is typically considered a peculiar step forward within the science fiction genre, as the author creates her literary vision of feminist utopianism. As opposed to these generally accepted critical standpoints, this paper will analyze potential dystopian chronotopes as presented in Kesh poetry. The focal point of the paper will be what we will refer to as the poetics of chronotopes: starting from the outer, geographical surroundings, analyzing the structure of a domicile, and, ultimately, examining inner, psychological spaces – both individual and communal – the paper will draw from Bachelard’s oneiric concepts as presented in The Poetics of Space, as well as from Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. We will aim to prove that the novel’s dystopian (chrono)top(os) is correlated to psychological landscapes of both literary subject as well as their com- munity, where a post-apocalyptic, seemingly utopian community of the Kesh fails to defend itself against destructive forces of their ancestor’s civilization. Furthermore, by endeavoring to escape the sins of their fathers, the Kesh are “always coming home” as the next generation imprisoned in a vicious, entropic cycle.

Review: Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Review: <i>Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times</i>, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia

This book is an application of the idea of critical dystopia to three understudied novels and the beginning of an argument about utopian desire itself. Emrah Atasoy, a prolific author who reviewed Turkish speculative fiction in a well-received 2021 Utopian Studies article, is modeling a search for hope in dystopian texts. In this book, derived from his dissertation, he examines three British novels written in three different eras of the twentieth century: Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), and P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992). In each novel, Atasoy argues, the protagonists move from an ignorance that served the interest of the dystopian forces to a resistant knowledge that should be read as offering hope, both as resistance and as knowledge.The book is organized in a straightforward way, with an introduction, conclusion, and then three analytical chapters, one for each of the novels. The introduction is expansive, offering both brief surveys of the nature of utopia and dystopia and a recounting of a number of themes taken up by dystopian texts: education, politics, gender roles, family life, and more. Layered onto this is a discussion of theorizing around knowledge and power and the transition from ignorance to understanding. The chapters focused on the individual novels are all similarly expansive. Atasoy offers biographical information about the authors along with considerations of the primary social and political events to which the authors might be responding. The analyses of the novels focus primarily on the motivations of the protagonists, but interspersed in the plot summaries are narrative cul-de-sacs explaining particular textual details (for example, the discussion of Theo’s choice of the Greek statue of Diadoumenos as allocation to leave a note for the Warden [James, 37]). These little detours are often interesting but can be distracting from the primary analytic focus.The analyses themselves also cover a lot of territory. The middle section of the chapter on The Children of Men (118–34) includes discussions of power, eugenics, religion, sexuality, punishment, assisted suicide, and immigration. Each of these is used to elucidate modes of social and political control wielded by the Warden, but the sheer number of issues included in the fast-moving analysis left me wanting more. Atasoy’s analysis of Quietus nicely captures the ways in which James has created a world where the elderly are both encouraged and manipulated to end their lives for the good of the whole. This discussion fits especially well with the larger focus of his analysis on modes of social engineering. Fewer themes and more close readings like this one would have deepened the reading experience. But for anyone beginning a project on one of these novels, this book is a good place to start.This book begins and ends with the interesting contention that times of catastrophe diminish the literary production of utopia, and potentially the capacity for hope itself. While the point of this book is not to defend this claim empirically, it is one worth considering for any scholar of utopia, or any person interested in the potential of future change for the better. The book may underplay the fact of twentieth-century literary utopias (there is a brief discussion of the feminist utopias written in the 1970s and 1980s), but it is surely correct that there is an imbalance in the production of utopia in favor of dystopia. Utopias are more challenging to construct and potentially (especially in this day and time) less formulaic than dystopia, which is an increasingly popular (and marketable) genre.Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a recent interview that “[utopias] shape people’s conception of what’s possible that could be good in the future.”1 Atasoy’s book offers the possibility that a close reading of dystopian texts might well help us uncover other ways of finding out what future good is possible. By extolling the value of finding the hopeful in the dystopian text, he is asking utopian scholars to facilitate discovering the ways in which “the utopian enclave does exist in the dystopian world” (151).

Reshaping the Balance: How Gilman Critiques and Constructs a Feminist Utopia in Herland

Reshaping the Balance: How Gilman Critiques and Constructs a Feminist Utopia in Herland

This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s ed. by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin

Reviewed by: This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010sed. by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin Courtney Kisat This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin. Women and the American West. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 303. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6926-2.) Scholars of gender, rural, and western American history will find much to celebrate in This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. The first installment of the Women and the American West series, which is edited by Renée M. Laegreid and published by the University of Oklahoma Press, the volume presents thirteen essays that profile Oklahoma women over time and space. Central to these essays are the notions of belonging and agency: to whom do the rights of a citizen belong, how have they been claimed and refuted, and how does this reshape our understanding of the American West? This scholarship is merely the latest effort at correcting the historiography of the American West, a movement that began in 1982 when the Coalition [End Page 600]for Western Women's History formed to highlight the lack of historical attention on western women's lived experiences and to refute the mainstream, overmasculinized version of the American West. Since then, historians looking to see the past through a more gendered lens have produced valuable scholarship shaped by more inventive ways of imagining the spaces in which women have worked, lived, and died. This Land Is Herlandcontributes much to this vibrant field of western women's history. The anthology's editors, Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, both of whom are noted historians of gender and the American West, have woven a historical tapestry that artfully represents the activism of Oklahoma women from a variety of socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds between the 1870s and the 2010s. The anthology is organized into three parts and represents the work of a dozen professional historians, adding much to a field that is finally receiving well-deserved attention in mainstream history. Part 1 examines themes of activism, radicalism, and maternalism through the lives of five remarkable women who worked within the bounds of gender norms to help shape their fledgling communities in the postbellum era through statehood in 1907. Part 2 delves into the long civil rights movement in Oklahoma, offering profiles of four courageous women from the 1920s through the 1960s, women who remained determined to improve society even as opposition mounted and consequences loomed large. Part 3 concludes the anthology with four essays covering women who fought for their vision of equality from the 1970s through the 2010s. As the culture wars of the times increased in intensity, the authors explain, so too did each woman's determination to win the day, even in the face of devastating consequences to their liberty and property. By way of critique, the subjectivity of some authors raises questions about potentially overcorrecting the historical record, while other points are weakened by unsubstantiated claims. For example, one author explains that an illustration is "possibly" that of her subject, but as "there are no confirmed" photographs of her, the reader is asked to instead imagine the woman in the photo as representative of the women who occupied that space and time (p. 136). If a specific figure becomes impossible to document through traditional research, where does the historian's due diligence lie, and where does it factor into an imagining of the spaces occupied by people such as those under study in this volume? These questions will continue to provoke scholars who produce scholarship on women's experiences across time and place. The women profiled in This Land Is Herlandremained fluid in tactics, rhetoric, and activism by necessity, because they operated in a world dominated by men. Each utilized the tools of maternalism, social capital, and political persuasion to advance their particular view of a society in Oklahoma. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote Herlandin 1915, describing a society as a feminist utopia completely free from male presence. As the historians in...

Decolonizing the Feminist Utopia: Interfaith Sisterhood and Anticolonial Feminist Resistance in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag

ABSTRACT This article investigates the ways in which the Western theoretical construct of the feminist utopia has been rearticulated within the field of colonial and postcolonial studies. Particularly, it contends that Rokeya Hossain’s literary works innovatively use the framework of the feminist utopia to reimagine a decolonized nation premised on the ideals of gender equity and religious harmony. Using the scholarship of Barnita Bagchi, Sreejata Paul, Sandeep Banerjee, and Ralph Pordzik, among others, as a springboard, this article situates two of Hossain’s literary works—Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Padmarag (1924)—firmly at the intersections of feminist utopianism and postcolonial studies. By analyzing textual evidence and incorporating historical research on the Indigo Rebellion and the nationalist struggle for independence, the article also establishes ways in which Hossain reconfigures the discourse of nationalism by positioning the subjectivities of colonized women front and center.

Not Just Slash: Transformation of Aesthetic Relations and Feminist Utopian Narratives in Chinese Gender-Switching Videos

In 2020, Yiwen Wang published an article about gender-switching videos, a Chinese gender subculture in the digital media environment. Different from Wang, who identified gender-switching videos as an example of the slash (especially boys’ love) subgenre, through a more comprehensive investigation of this subgenre this study found that gender-switching videos—which can be divided into two categories of complete and selective—involve homoerotic (including both boys’ love and girls’ love), heteroerotic and queer narratives. This article starts by demonstrating the multi-gender/sexual orientation narrative in gender-switching videos, and further analyses their social and cultural functions as a gender subculture in reconstructing gendered relationships in traditional Chinese aesthetics and narratives. The theory of feminist utopian narratives is further introduced to better understand how Chinese women intervene in the grand historical narrative as an important force to influence the development of history and story plots via fiction content creation in the digital media environment.