Content area
Full Text
This essay provides a feminist perspective on dystopian anti-leisure. Dystopias are futuristic anti-utopias where leisure is distorted and individuals are manipulated to further the agenda of the politically powerful (Rabkin, 1983). The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how women in dystopian societies are subjected to anti-leisure as evidenced by the devaluation of their personal leisure spaces. A feminist definition of leisure is used to guide a poststructuralist feminist analysis of four dystopian novels: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano and George Orwell's 1984. Synopsis and discussion are then employed to demonstrate how two binary oppositions of female disempowerment are evidenced in the novels and to consider how these same forces operate in reality to jeopardize women's personal leisure spaces.
KEYWORDS: Anti-leisure, dystopian fiction, women's personal leisure spaces
Introduction
When considering ultimate terms and their implications, rhetorician Richard Weaver (1985) states, "if one has to select the one term which in our day carries the greatest blessing, and-to apply a useful test-whose antonym carries the greatest rebuke, one will not go far wrong in naming 'progress'" (p. 212). Yet this same term, when applied to anti-leisure in dystopian fiction as experienced by women, carries a great curse. For it is in the name of progress that the personal leisure spaces of women become compromised.
In fiction, a dystopia is a futuristic anti-utopia or "bad place," generally dealing with a societal vision that dramatically addresses universal fears of a monstrous situation (Rabkin, 1983). The horrors of dystopian societies are often depicted in part by the overt distortion of leisure. As defined by Burnett and Rollin (2000), anti-leisure in dystopian fiction is "closely akin to our acceptable leisure, but perverted to suit dystopian ends. . .dystopias use leisure as a means of retaining power of the elite by regulating identity, suppressing individual thought, manipulating self-sufficiency and moderation, providing distraction and requiring non-voluntary and often vicious forms of leisure" (pp. 2-3). Underlying these four themes is human inferiorization. The current analysis reveals how this inferiorization targets women.
The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how women in dystopian societies experience anti-leisure as evidenced by the devaluation of their personal leisure spaces. First, a brief historical consideration of...