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Feminist Utopian Fiction
Feminist Utopian fiction is a theoretical response to patriarchy (Gearhart, Peel). In this sense, Utopian fiction is a critical response to an unsatisfactory present condition, with feminist Utopian fiction in particular addressing patriarchal problems in its critique, imagining some kind of place where these problems are solved, or conditions at least improved. Patriarchy is cultural, social and political systems that are characterized by dominant male power and dominant male focus (Peel). Dominant male power refers to "men's systematic power over women . . . control over women's bodies, their economic resources, their access to knowledge, their energies, their words" as well as indirect forms of power such as disparate access to money and power (Peel 54-55). Dominant male focus is the privileging of male norms, positing the male experience as the sole one or the one most worthy of notice- male singularity and centrality, respectively (Peel 57).
Feminist Utopian works critique dominant male power and focus and offer some kind of imagined, idealized society that is not characterized by male power and focus. How feminist Utopian writers solve problems of patriarchy- the shape of their imagined, Utopian places- reflects an underlying feminist theory. For example, one widely applicable conception of feminist Utopian fiction comes from Utopian writer and feminist theorist Sally Miller Gearhart. As Gearhart defines it, feminist Utopian fiction:
a. contrasts the present world with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time or space), b. offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions, c. sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills, and d. presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions.
(qtd. in Silbergleid 161)
Feminist Utopian writers (who are often also theorists: e.g., Gearhart, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin) who share assumptions seeing "men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills" have tended to solve problems of patriarchy in one of two ways: separation and countercolonization.
Works like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) and Gearhart's The Wanderground (1984) envision separation as the only viable solution to intransigent male barbarity. In those works, once women can get away from men and experience female singularity, societal ills across the...