9.

FEMINIST UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: JOANNA RUSS, THE FEMALE MAN

(1975), MARGE PIERCY, WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME (1976)

JEANNE CORTIEL

1. Introduction
Feminist dystopia is not isolated from or even antagonistic to the dystopian tradition at
large: The history, development and characteristics of feminist dystopianism draw
from feminist theory and social critique but also from the ways in which the literary
utopia and dystopia have articulated cultural hopes and fears grounded in a critical as-
sessment of the present moment. The concept ‘feminism’ as used in dystopian/utopian
studies is usually implicitly understood to refer to a critique of social structures or cul-
tural patterns that have disadvantaged women. Yet feminism has never been a coherent
movement and has changed considerably since the first known critical engagements
with the so-called woman question. Feminist dystopia is thus best studied as a nodal
point that intersects with dystopian science fiction, feminist theory, and particularly
feminist utopian writing.
Feminist speculation about a better world goes back to the earliest examples of uto-
pian writing with texts such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies
(1404/05; cf. Johns 2010: 174). Feminist dystopia emerged in the 1970s from this tradi-
tion by importing key elements of the literary dystopia, such as the focus on and exten-
sion of repressive structures in the present and the satirical critique of these structures.
However, since both classical utopia and dystopia have traditionally been affirmative of
gender hierarchies, the feminist dystopia also includes a critique of the genre itself.
My exploration of feminist dystopia in this chapter focuses on its initiating mo-
ment in the 1970s. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the
Edge of Time have usually been read as examples of feminist utopian writing (with the
notable exception of Booker and Thomas 2009), even though they are, like most femi-
nist utopian writing in the 1970s utopian only in part, as Angelika Bammer argued in
Partial Visions. I argue here that these two novels can be seen as prototypical feminist
dystopian texts in the 1970s, constituting the beginnings of feminist dystopianism in
the midst of the utopian renaissance. As such, the two novels have a lot in common:
Both present the basic narrative world as dystopia for women; both include a partial
utopia and its dystopian nemesis; both show that this utopia is only one of many possi-
ble futures that depends on individual and collective action taken in the present mo-
ment; and, finally, both novels are grounded in a powerful sense of utopian hope,
while also expressing profound pessimism. The way in which these two novels incor-
porate and mix science fiction, dystopia, utopia, and realist fiction, deploying the inter-
relations and tensions between these genre traditions, undermines the rationalism and
156 Jeanne Cortiel

transparent storytelling practices of all of these traditions. In the wake of the complex
critique articulated in these novels, the 1980s and 1990s produced a number of femi-
nist dystopias that responded to cultural transformations by giving the dystopian ele-
ment a more prominent presence. However, the paradigm established by Joanna Russ
and Marge Piercy has continued to be productive in feminist fictions of the future.

2. Feminist Utopia/Dystopia – Emergence and Origins

Feminist dystopia emerged with full force in the 1970s but reaches back to a number
of interconnected literary and broader cultural and critical traditions especially in the
late 19th and early 20th century. The modern dystopia appeared in response to the so-
cial catastrophes produced in the 20th century, including economic depression, geno-
cide, nuclear war, and ecological collapse (cf. Moylan 2000: xi). The feminist dystopia
has discernible roots in the foundational texts of this tradition, such as Aldous Hux-
ley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
While these novels record the failure of their protagonists to overcome what makes
their societies dystopian – total social control over individual action and thought (cf.
Booker/Thomas 2009: 65; see chapters 2 and 3 in this volume) – feminist dystopia
extends this critique to draw attention to the ways in which contemporary societies
limit the potential of women specifically. Yet by shifting the focus to female protago-
nists, the feminist dystopia not only changed the possibilities for plot development, it
fundamentally transformed the generic conventions. Although the utopian tradition has
always included works that engaged with gender inequality, the major texts that have
defined the genre have left the system of gender largely intact (cf. Booker 1994: 338).
Feminist dystopianism provided a self-reflexive edge to feminist utopianism by serv-
ing as a critique not only of patriarchal social structures and cultural patterns but also
of feminist utopian thinking itself. Critiquing this correlation between gender and
genre, feminist fiction in general and feminist utopian/dystopian writing in particular
have from the beginning deliberately crossed genre boundaries and questioned the sta-
bility of genre conventions (cf. Baccolini 2007: 164).
A second source for the feminist dystopianism that emerged in the 1970s was ear-
lier feminist theories and feminist realist explorations of the repressive mechanisms in
everyday life, as for example in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow
Wall-Paper” (1892) or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). While these texts are not
generically dystopian, they do explore the effects of social and cultural pressures and
delimitations on the every-day lives of individuals in a cultural context in which indi-
vidual liberty is considered essential to personhood. When dystopia as a genre first
flowered in the early 20th century, feminist writers had thus already explored the
dystopian aspects of everyday life from the perspective of women in realist fiction.
While feminist realist fiction provided narrative patterns and tropes to engage dystopia
from the perspective of women, feminist social and political theory served as the
source for the key themes of feminist dystopian writing, including sexuality, reproduc-
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 157

tion, economic and social inequality, as well as the human relationship to the non-
human environment. Along with developments in feminist theory, the prominence of
these themes has shifted over time. In the 1970s, reproduction, sexual violence against
women, and women’s agency were central to the feminist dystopia; the 1980s added to
these concerns the threat of patriarchal totalitarianism, as for example in Margaret At-
wood’s classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale; and since the 1990s, there has been an
increasing concern with ecological disaster, and more specifically with climate change.
The feminist dystopia has thus been one of the most powerful literary expressions of
key concerns in what has been called second and third wave feminism.

3. Counterculture Energies: Feminist Utopia/Dystopia in the 1970s

The development of feminist dystopia since the 1970s is best traced by decade in rela-
tion to corresponding shifts in feminist theory and social criticism. Spurred by a num-
ber of contemporary movements for social change, the 1960s and 1970s brought a
temporary resurrection of utopian writing, but in a new, revisionist mode (cf. e.g.
Moylan 2000: xv; Bammer 1991). The so-called second wave of feminism with clas-
sics such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millet’s Sexual Poli-
tics (1970), and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) contributed to the
radical intellectual and utopian energy of the 1970s. Though these major critiques
drew from very different theoretical foundations, the relationship between women’s
sexuality and reproduction was one of their central concerns. Firestone’s celebration of
artificial reproduction, for example, became a source of inspiration and critique for
feminist utopian and dystopian writing.
The feminist dystopia proper begins in the 1970s with texts that deliberately merge
realist fiction, autobiography and dystopia. British writer Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of
a Survivor (1974), which can be seen as the first example of the feminist dystopia,
combines a dystopian narrative with, as the title indicates, memoir and a hopeful uto-
pian vision that points beyond catastrophe. A year later, Joanna Russ published The
Female Man, a novel she had finished in 1971; its sustained combination of autobiog-
raphy, science fiction, utopia and dystopia makes The Female Man a key example for
the development of feminist dystopian writing since the 1970s. Similarly, Sally Miller
Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1978) merges utopian visions of a promiscuous sexu-
ality free from violence with dystopian scenes linked to the world of the US in the
1970s (cf. Barr 1992: 44); here, as in many other feminist utopian/dystopian texts of
the 1970s, freedom from sexual violence is often achieved by eliminating men alto-
gether. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), then, explores the utopian
and dystopian potentials of contemporary American society and shows gender inequal-
ity as inextricably linked to economic inequality and racism; Piercy’s novel includes a
clearly delineated utopian vision that creates a mixed-sex society in which equality is
also based on artificial reproduction. Ursula Le Guin’s expansive Hainish cycle, which
constituted the beginnings of feminist science fiction with The Left Hand of Darkness
158 Jeanne Cortiel

(1969) and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974; see chapter 10 in this vol-
ume), also brings utopia in tension with dystopia, a potential Le Guin would more
fully develop two decades later in The Telling (2000). The feminist mixed-genre uto-
pia/dystopia of the 1970s thus prepared the way for more fully dystopian feminist fic-
tion in the darker imagination of the decade that followed.

4. Backlash: Feminist Utopia/Dystopia in the 1980s

The 1980s, the era of Reagan and conservative backlash, brought a diversification of
feminist concerns in the context of the disappointments associated with the faltering of
the civil rights movements. After the 1970s, when the utopian impulse had been domi-
nant, feminism turned to the depths of dystopian critique in the 1980s. Mary Daly’s
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) and Andrea Dworkin’s
Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) probed contemporary and historical ex-
pressions of systemic sexual violence against women, while bell hooks in Ain’t I a
Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981) took white feminism to task for its limi-
tations, and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and So-
cialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985) envisioned the Cyborg as a
fragmented, postmodern subject of feminism. These theoretical texts clearly show the
traces of feminist dystopian fiction: Haraway in particular explicitly acknowledges
feminist science fiction of the 1970s, including The Female Man, as a source of inspi-
ration for her vision of the Cyborg. In feminist dystopias of the 1980s, however, uto-
pian hope retains a powerful presence even in the bleakest dystopian visions. The epi-
logue of Margaret Atwood’s paradigmatic feminist dystopia of the 1980s, The Hand-
maid’s Tale (1985), ends the book from the perspective of the post-dystopian world.
Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women (1986) turns the separatist visions of 1970s
feminist utopian writing into a dystopian critique but nonetheless explores the agency
of women in key areas of 1970s feminism, reproduction and technology. Sheri Tep-
per’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) similarly probes a separatist vision in a
post-apocalyptic world in which women are in control of knowledge and men sink into
a state of war. Highlighting the presence of utopia in this predominantly dystopian pe-
riod in feminist fiction, Tom Moylan has emphasised the ways in which “the bleak
energy of cyberpunk and the unyielding utopian imagination of feminist sf” (Moylan
2000: xv) coalesce in the 1980s.

5. The Trouble with Otherness:

Feminist Utopia/Dystopia in the 1990s and Beyond
In the 1990s, dystopian feminism, retaining many of the major concerns of earlier
dystopian writing, more fully develops its apocalyptic mode, which Jerry Phillips sees
grounded in the “apocalyptic potential” of “the current racial formation of American
society” (Phillips 2002: 306). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminist theory thus
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 159

turned its attention to the diversity and instability of the feminist subject and to the
ways in which gender is produced along with race and class difference. Bell hooks’s
work, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Ju-
dith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) contributed to a major paradigm shift in feminism
that has come to be known as the third wave. In this context, Octavia Butler’s Parable
novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), arguably the
most significant contribution to feminist dystopianism in the 1990s, characteristically
combine the critique of systemic sexual violence with a critique of racism, economic
inequality and environmental destruction, seeing them as interrelated phenomena (see
chapter 15 in this volume). Like Butler’s Parable novels, Marge Piercy’s He, She and
It (1991) and Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) engage with dystopia from the
perspective of prophesy and apocalypse. However, apocalypse in all of these novels
also enables the vision of a new beginning. These texts are thus able to delineate a pre-
carious utopian alternative to the dystopian strand of history in which neoliberal eco-
nomics and ruthless exploitation of humans and the non-human environment are mov-
ing towards their apocalyptic self-destruction.
Feminist dystopian writing, then, has been characterised by a close relationship to
both feminist theory and the dystopian tradition that it absorbed, but also fundamen-
tally transformed. In its development from the late 1960s to the early twenty-first cen-
tury, feminist dystopia has also been grounded in feminist utopianism and served as its
counterpart and critique. Characteristic themes of feminist dystopian fiction, such as
reproduction, sexuality, intersecting inequalities, and human relations to the nonhuman
environment, have developed since the 1970s in conversation with feminist political
and philosophical theory. From its exuberant beginnings in the 1970s, feminist dysto-
pianism has contributed to the development of postmodern literature, feminist criti-
cism, and the dystopia at large. Among the writers of feminist dystopian fiction, five
names stand out for their lasting impact: Ursula K. Le Guin (*1929), Marge Piercy
(*1936), Joanna Russ (1937-2011), Margaret Atwood (*1939), and Octavia Butler
(1947-2006). The following two case studies focus on two paradigmatic texts from the
initiating moment of feminist dystopianism, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Both of these novels are grounded in the
conviction that history progresses dialectically, as change towards a better future is
initiated by the oppressed. While Russ’s novel creates an analogy between class and
gender, Marge Piercy incorporates the intersection with race.

6. Genre Trouble: Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)

Joanna Russ’s The Female Man is one of the most complex and interesting feminist
texts that have engaged with dystopia. Most commentators so far have emphasised its
utopian and postmodern affiliations (cf. Cortiel 1999; Malmgren 2002; Hicks 1999;
Hollinger 1999), but as with other examples of feminist utopian writing, The Female
Man places utopia in tension with a fully developed dystopia. Ultimately, Russ’s most
160 Jeanne Cortiel

well-known novel is difficult to categorise since the utopian vision not only depends
on dystopia, but also on the social realism that characterises the narrative present. Al-
though Russ’s novel is a complex, postmodern text, it is structured around a relatively
simple principle: different social contexts and material conditions produce individuals
with very different characteristics and identities. The novel’s protagonists, Janet,
Jeannine, Joanna, and Jael (in the order of their appearance), live in four different par-
allel universes, but they share the same genotype; the same genetic information pro-
duces four radically different women. The four different worlds also correspond to
four different generic contexts (cf. Cortiel 2008): Janet’s world is a utopia, Jeanine’s
world an alternate history, Joanna’s world is expressed in the social realism of autobi-
ography, and Jael’s world is a science fictional dystopia. The protagonists move be-
tween worlds and generic contexts, creating a complex, fragmented narrative steeped
in scepticism and acerbic humour, grounded in radical materialist feminism, darkly
dystopian but ultimately committed to a hopeful vision of a better future in this world.
Both utopia and dystopia in The Female Man are grounded in the social realism of
the autobiographical narrative strand, in which Joanna, one of the first-person narrators
in the novel, speaks as authorial voice. Joanna lives in the United States in 1969 and
records the ways in which women’s creative potential and social clout are systemati-
cally limited through social institutions, the media, and personal policing. Joanna’s
narrative is not a systematic delineation of the effects of patriarchal ideology in her
historical moment, but a series of vignettes that provide glimpses of everyday situa-
tions of verbal and physical violence against women, culminating in Part Nine, “The
Book of Joanna,” in which she is able to reflect upon these processes:
In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neu-
rotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intui-
tive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and
go to a party. Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother;
Woman, is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition;
Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love. (The Female Man 107)
The dystopian potential of the autobiographical present, Joanna’s world, is highlighted
by the alternate history narrative of Jeannine, whose world is made more restrictive by
a strained economy and uninterrupted male employment in a 1969 in which WWII
never happened. Even more so than Joanna, Jeannine is the creation of a world in
which her options are severely limited. Her equally unhappy boyfriend Cal does not
live up to the masculinity she demands of him in spite of her dissatisfaction with her
own limited life. Consistent with the repressive context in which she lives, Jeannine is
the weakest of the four protagonists and the only one who never speaks as a narrator.
Janet, the character from the utopian world Whileaway, represents the most bal-
anced expression of the four women’s genotype, though she is far from perfect: com-
pared to other women on her planet, Janet has limited intelligence and a propensity for
violence. Yet she is also compassionate, courageous, and self-confident and teaches
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 161

Joanna to identify the repressive mechanisms of her world, even though Joanna ulti-
mately recognises the Whileawayan as utopian projection:
[Janet] is in secret our savior from utter despair, who appears Heaven-high in our dreams
with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket . . . Radiant as the day, the
Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will ever know,
she is nonetheless Everywoman. (111)
In tune with the work of materialist feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, The Female
Man grounds its hope for a better life not so much in the termination or accidental ab-
sence of men, but in the development of technology to a point where communitarian
life can return to a tribal and agrarian structure. Artificial reproduction (the merging of
ova) on Whileaway makes the all-female and thus gender-less utopian society possi-
ble. From the perspective of Whileaway, the utopian world was created by a historical
accident similar to the one in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915): “Plague
came to Whileaway in pc 17 (Preceding Catastrophe) and ended in ac 03, with half the
population dead; it started so slowly that no one knew about it until it was too late. It
attacked males only” (12). Whileaway is at once post-apocalyptic and pastoral, while
at the same time in command of a very highly developed technology that enables sim-
ple living as the basis for an egalitarian and ecologically sustainable society.
Jael is Janet’s antagonist in more than one way, but ultimately also the condition
for her existence. In Jael’s world, the much-cited battle of the sexes has become a lit-
eral cold war; men and women live in separate quasi-national communities – Manland
and Womanland, both of which are narrated in a dystopian mode. Jael’s mission is to
accelerate and win the war. Reproduction is still a major point of interaction between
men and women, though the Womanlanders sell children to the Manlanders and repro-
duction is always non-sexual. Jael is also Jeannine’s opposite: highly focused and
thoroughly efficient, Jael is as emotionally and physically distorted as Jeannine.
Jeannine’s weakness is Jael’s power, Jeannine’s selflessness her intensely focused de-
termination, and Jeannine’s self-destructiveness her outwardly directed violence. Hav-
ing turned herself into a killing machine through plastic surgery and training, Jael thus
embodies the dark side of the revolution. Jael’s purpose in meeting the other Js is to
establish military bases on the other worlds, in order to be able to lead her war more
efficiently. At home, she has a male house slave, whose function is the mirror image of
male to female transsexuals who are used as wives and prostitutes in Manland. A
product of her dystopian world, she is barred from entering utopia.
Moreover, Jael contradicts Janet’s version of the history of utopia; while from the
perspective of the Whileawayans, random catastrophe wiped out all male humans,
from the dystopian perspective of Jael, the utopia is a product of her war, making
dystopia a stage in the dialectical movement towards utopia:
‘Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me give you something to carry away with you,
friend: that “plague” you talk of is a lie. I know. . . . It is I who gave you your “plague,”
my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your hearts content; I, I, I, I
am the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those
162 Jeanne Cortiel

like me, we gave you 1000 years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish
themselves on the bones of the men we have slain.’ (211)
Thus, the dystopian world and the utopia that follows are both interdependent and mu-
tually exclusive. Pat Wheeler reads the anger Jael acts out in her war in the larger con-
text of Russ’s fiction, in which anger serves as an oppositional strategy that is instru-
mental in countering the idea “that the female subject is acted upon, rather than active”
(Wheeler 2009: 100). Jael is active with a vengeance to a point where she becomes
unlikable. Her world thus constitutes a critique of non-dialectical utopian feminism,
contributing to the sustained critical engagement with the pastoralism of Herland in
The Female Man.
Dystopia thus provides a critical edge to the utopian vision in The Female Man,
both in terms of genre and historical development. The Female Man is part historical-
materialist and part radically feminist, undermining the assumptions of both positions.
Material conditions determine individual identity and revolution is the necessary con-
dition for fundamental change, yet utopia is also an imaginary all-female place that
enables hope in the present moment rather than serving as blueprint for the future. The
four Js travel across their separate possible universes and learn from each other, while
the novel as a whole crosses the generic traditions they respectively emerge from; uto-
pia, alternate history, postmodern autobiography, and dystopian science fiction. Story-
telling itself remains the key to transformation, and thus the novel ends with an apos-
trophe to itself as a book:
. . . do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch
and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you
are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from read-
ers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.
Rejoice, little book!
For on that day, we will be free. (The Female Man 213f.)

7. Brain-Control and Mind-Travel:

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
In spite of their differences, The Female Man and Woman on the Edge of Time share a
number of key characteristics. Like Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy has articulated a sus-
tained interest in oppositional possibilities throughout her work, as Tom Moylan has
pointed out (cf. 2000: 248), and like Russ, she combines science fiction with realist
fiction in her most well-known utopian/dystopian novel. In spite of its multiple generic
affiliations, Woman on the Edge of Time has also largely been read in the context of
utopia, and indeed its affiliations with the utopian tradition are profound. In his excel-
lent reading of Piercy’s novel, for example, M. Keith Booker traces the structural par-
allels between Woman on the Edge of Time and More’s genre-defining Utopia of 1516
(cf. 1994: 339). In the context of feminist dystopia, however, Woman on the Edge of
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 163

Time is also paradigmatic for how this genre has utilised the tension between utopian
and dystopian visions of the future in specific ways.
Compared to the fragmentary narration in The Female Man, a novel in which the
identity of the narrative voice often remains unclear, Woman on the Edge of Time is
much more straight-forward in its narrative and generic affiliations, and consistently
employs one third-person narrator who closely follows the perspective of the protago-
nist Consuelo/Connie Ramos. Although both novels develop their dystopian visions
from the perspective of a woman living in the narrative present by highlighting the
dystopian aspects of the immediate social and larger cultural context that delimits this
character’s range of action, Woman on the Edge of Time presents a much more sus-
tained and cohesive narrative of the protagonist’s life as a poor, Chicana woman in
urban America in the 1970s. She loses custody of her child and ends up in a mental
institution, where medical doctors sedate her and other patients and experiment on the
inmates’ brains with the apparent objective of establishing complete control over these
deviant individuals. Piercy’s novel thus emphasises the intersections of gender, race,
and class in the ways in which the social order is maintained.
The social realism with which Woman on the Edge of Time depicts the narrative
present draws on the dystopian mode (cf. Booker 1994: 339), highlighting the power-
mechanics of the contemporary legal and medical apparatus that binds the protagonist.
While The Female Man explores the dystopian potential of the present moment by in-
troducing an alternate history scenario, Woman on the Edge of Time unfolds this po-
tential by focusing on the world of those who are excluded from the ordered processes
of American society. Consuelo/Connie is both poor and considered psychologically
unstable. Like the characters in The Female Man, she moves through four distinctly
separate spaces in the novel and through time: in her present, she is largely confined to
her home and the mental institution, and in the future, she appears both in the utopian
world of Mattapoisett and in the dystopian world of a future gone in the wrong direc-
tion. Of these, only Mattapoisett gives Connie free range of motion. As in many femi-
nist dystopian visions since the 1970s, the main character is subjected to a male-de-
fined totalitarian regime, in which women have only two functions: to serve as victims
and as minions of those in power. For example, Connie’s niece Dolly works as a pros-
titute and takes drugs to maintain a semblance of stability. However, the poor and the
abject of this world are not just its victims, they also constitute its only potential for
fundamental change. As Jael in The Female Man, Consuelo ultimately needs to ex-
press her agency by becoming a killer herself, playing her part in the revolution that
makes the utopian world possible. Extending and specifying Moylan’s similar reading
of the novel, Booker argues that Woman on the Edge of Time draws dialogic energy
from the mixing of genres: realist fiction, utopia, dystopia, and ‘factual’ medical re-
cords at the end of the novel. According to Booker, by counterbalancing the realist
narrative with the fantastic elements of utopia and dystopia, Woman on the Edge of
Time potentially sidesteps the ways in which realism would serve to affirm the very
rationalism it is meant to critique (cf. 1994: 340).
164 Jeanne Cortiel

Woman on the Edge of Time articulates a brief but powerful dystopian vision of a
potential negative future in chapter 15, which presents a world that, as Booker has
pointed out, intensifies key problems of Connie’s present (cf. ibid.) and carries the re-
pressive potential of the basic narrative world to its ultimate extreme. Connie’s abili-
ties to communicate across time send her into the home – and prison – of a future
woman, who gives her name as Gildina 547-921-45-822-KBJ and is being kept as a
live-in prostitute by a mid-level power-broker. Biomedical control mechanisms that
only existed in an experimental stage in Connie’s world, enabling complete brain-con-
trol from birth to death, have been realised. Everything is regulated, including particu-
larly reproduction. Connie asks Gildina about the nature of her contract:
‘Suppose you have a baby?’
‘If it’s in the contract. I never had a contract that called for a kid. Mostly the moms have
them. You know, they’re cored to make babies all the time. Ugh, they’re so fat!’ (Woman
284)
In this world, the social hierarchies of the 1970s have been transformed into a rigidly
stratified structure; the revolution that was to create the utopia of Mattapoisett has oc-
curred, but remained unsuccessful. The military-medical complex has prevailed and
medical doctors, who exert technological control over the lives of individuals, belong
to the upper levels of society.
As in The Female Man, both the utopian and the dystopian worlds could be seen as
dream-like expressions of the main protagonist’s personal hopes and fears; yet the
time-travel or probability-travel in the two books could also be real in the logic of the
novels’ fictional worlds. The difference between utopian and dystopian possibilities
hinges upon Connie’s experience and on her action (or failure to act), and Connie’s
mental stability remains at doubt till the end. Some critics have pointed out that the
utopian world in Piercy’s novel could be read as delusional fantasy of the mentally
disturbed protagonist. But such a reading does not go far enough. It is important to see
that both possibilities remain intact in the novel without cancelling each other out. The
imaginative future world is not the product of random ravings of a crazy mind, but a
well developed literary utopia – or dystopia – that consciously deploys characteristic
features of the genre as a critique of the present moment. However, from the perspec-
tive of realist fiction, which is also strongly developed in Woman on the Edge of Time,
time travel is impossible and the main character is indeed an inmate in a mental insti-
tution, forced to take drugs and alone with her fantasy.
The utopian world of Mattapoisett has more space in the novel than the brief
dystopia, but – unlike in The Female Man – the utopia remains elusive. Connie travels
to the utopian future through mental abilities that stand in ironic contradiction with her
evaluation by legal and medical authorities in her world. In this future world, Connie
meets Luciente, a woman who is so free and independent in her behaviour and interac-
tions that Connie at first mistakes her for a young man. Luciente explains the nature of
Connie’s responsibility as key agent in a struggle that will determine the future:
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 165

It’s that race between technology, in the service of those who control, and insurgency –
those who want to change the society in our direction. In your time the physical sciences
had delivered the weapons technology. But the crux, we think, is in the biological scien-
ces. Control of genetics. Technology of brain control. Birth-to-death surveillance. Chemi-
cal control through psychoactive drugs and neurotransmitters. (216)
Mattapoisett is not a technophobic vision though. Much like Whileaway, it has sophis-
ticated, highly developed communication, production and biomedical technologies that
are rationally deployed for the individual and common good. Most importantly, these
technologies enable a system of artificial reproduction in which men and women can
serve as perfectly equal co-mothers. No-one gives birth and both men and women
nurse and care for the child equally in nuclear family units that contain three adults,
none of whom is biologically related to the child. As in The Female Man, the future
utopia requires the complete collapse of all social order through a violent revolution
led by the underclass, but unlike in Russ’s novel, only two possible outcomes are de-
veloped – the failure of the revolution resulting in dystopia, and its success which
brings the utopian world.
One aspect that these two paradigmatic novels have in common is key to the ways
in which both of these texts transform the genre of the dystopia: the tension between
utopia and dystopia is not only grounded in an analysis of contemporary mechanisms
of repression and strategies of resistance, but also in a reflection on the process of
imagination itself. Both novels contain a potential dual interpretation of the dystopian
future which is never resolved. From the perspective of the realist fiction contained in
the novels, both utopia and dystopia can be seen as part of the deluded imagination of
the realist character, who, like the protagonist in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,”
has turned mad as only sane response to the every-day violence she faces in her most
intimate world. Yet in the two novels, the social realism that focuses on the most inti-
mate and mundane aspects of the protagonist’s daily life also serves to undermine the
rationalism of the dystopian and utopian worlds with which it clashes and interacts.
Feminist dystopia in the 1970s, then, emerged from and in feminist utopian think-
ing and developed its specific characteristics through integrating the ruthless critique
of current social and cultural practices with the radical hope for a better world. More
importantly, however, it developed narrative techniques that used and undermined
genre boundaries between realist fiction and science fiction, as well as between utopia
and dystopia. Feminist dystopian writing of the 1980s and 1990s moved along with the
development of feminist theorising as well as with the development of science fiction
and utopia/dystopia in general towards bleaker and more dystopian visions. Since the
1970s, feminist science fiction and utopia/dystopia has had a lasting impact on the
genres of science fiction and utopia/dystopia at large. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man
was a product of and a participant in New Wave science fiction that brought a post-
modern sensibility and narrative style to science fiction and the other way around. The
feminist dystopia also contributed to the development of the critical dystopia (see
chapter 15 in this volume), the shaping of female characters in cyberpunk (see chapter
13), as well as the critical engagement with sexuality and reproduction in science fic-
166 Jeanne Cortiel

tion in general (see chapter 20); moreover, feminist utopian/dystopian fiction also
spawned the critical response to the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s
through dystopian visions of religious totalitarianism, as in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale (see chapter 14), and to ecological catastrophe, as in her MaddAd-
dam trilogy (2003-2013; see chapter 17)

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Atwood, Margaret. 1998 [1985]. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books.
Butler, Octavia. 2000 [1993]. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books.
–––. 2000 [1998]. Parable of the Talents. New York: Warner Books.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 2000. The Telling. New York: Harcourt.
Miller Gearhart, Sally. 2002 [1978]. Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. Talla-
hassee: Spinsters Ink Books.
Piercy, Marge. 1991. He, She and It. New York: Fawcett Books.
–––. 1993 [1976]. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Ballantine-Fawcett Crest.
Russ, Joanna. 1985 [1975]. The Female Man. London, UK: The Women’s Press.
Sargent, Pamela. 1986. The Shore of Women. New York: Random House.
Tepper, Sheri. 1993 [1988]. The Gate to Women’s Country. New York: Bantam Spectra.

Annotated Bibliography

Feminist Utopia/Dystopia
Baccolini, Raffaella. 2007. “Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostal-
gia, and Hope.” In: Tom Moylan & Raffaella Baccolini (eds.). Utopia Method Vi-
sion: the Use Value of Social Dreaming. Bern: Peter Lang.
Baccolini looks at the generic destabilizations in feminist utopian and dystopian
writing and how critical utopia/dystopia enables critical nostalgia. She argues that
women’s utopian writing through its concern with a critique of gender norms has
produced a critical engagement with and deconstruction of genre conventions and
boundaries.
Bammer, Angelika. 1991. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s.
New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
Partial Visions provides an excellent overview over the ways in which utopian
thinking became productive in feminism in the 1970s. Published in 1991, it is still
the definitive study on the topic, particularly because of its comparative outlook.
Placing American, German, and French texts next to each other, the study high-
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 167

lights similarities but also cultural specificities that generate a deeper sense of this
crucial period in feminist criticism.
Barr, Marleen S. 1992. Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City,
IA: University of Iowa Press.
Feminist Fabulation proposes a new look at postmodern fiction that would include
feminist science fiction at its core, criticising the systematic exclusion of women’s
writing from the postmodern canon. A major contribution to feminist literary criti-
cism in the 1990s, Barr’s book reads key texts of feminist science fiction, including
feminist dystopia, in the context of their contribution to an intervention in post-
modern literature.
Cortiel, Jeanne. 1999. Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction.
Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP.
Demand My Writing provides a survey and reading of Joanna Russ’s fictional
oeuvre, her eight novels and many of her short stories, examining its relationship
to the development of feminist theory, science fiction and postmodernism. It in-
cludes a bibliography of Russ’s fictional and critical work.
Johns, Alessa. 2010. “Feminism and Utopianism.” In: Gregory Claeys (ed.). The Cam-
bridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press. 174-99.
This chapter in the generally useful Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature
provides a solid overview over feminist utopian writing reaching back to the Mid-
dle Ages and including writing in the dystopian mode.
Mendlesohn, Farah (ed.). 2009. On Joanna Russ. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press.
An important collection of original essays that explores and celebrates the full
range of Russ’s oeuvre as “a feminist, a science fiction writer, and a feminist sci-
ence fiction writer” (3). As such, it opens up new vistas for Russ scholarship and
science fiction studies.
Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.
Boulder, CO: Westview.
Grounded in a number of paradigmatic readings, Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Un-
tainted Sky provides an overview of the critical responses to and theories of uto-
pian, dystopian and anti-utopian writing as well as a useful map of the field of ten-
sion between utopia and anti-utopia, within which dystopian writing has operated.
His readings focus on the critical dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s, by Kim
Stanley Robinson, Marge Piercy and Octavia Butler.
Wolmark, Jenny. 1994. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmod-
ernism. Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa P.
168 Jeanne Cortiel

Aliens and Others specifically looks at the ways in which feminist science fiction
has redefined genre conventions as well as gender identities, which Wolmark sees
as connected. The study includes compelling readings of classic feminist dystopian
science fiction, including Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World
(1974), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1978), Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women (1986),
Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), Marge Piercy’s He, She and
It (1991, published in England under the title Body of Glass).

Joanna Russ’s The Female Man

Cortiel, Jeanne. 2008. “Joanna Russ: The Female Man.” In: David Seed (ed.). A Com-
panion to Science Fiction. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Lon-
don: Wiley-Blackwell. 500-511.
This essay introduces The Female Man as a postmodern science fiction novel that
strategically interlaces four distinct genres – utopia, dystopian science fiction, al-
ternative history, and mainstream postmodern autobiographical writing.
Wheeler, Pat. 2009. “‘That Is Not Me. I Am Not That: Anger and the Will to Action
in Joanna Russ’s Fiction.” In: Farah Mendlesohn (ed.). On Joanna Russ. Middle-
town, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 99-113.
Wheeler analyses a number of Joanna Russ’s short stories and novels, including
The Female Man and The Two of Them, in terms of how they deploy “tangible
renderings of anger” in her fiction to argue that an aesthetic of anger enables a
critique of essentialist notions of femininity and female sexuality in Russ’s work as
a whole.

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time

Booker, M. Keith. 1994. “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: the Feminist Dystopias of
Marge Piercy.” Science-Fiction Studies 21: 337-50.
Booker provides a very useful reading of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time in
the context of utopian and dystopian writing and feminism; one of the few com-
mentators who explicitly addresses the relationship of utopia and dystopia in femi-
nist fiction before Baccolini.
Martinson, Anna M. 2012. “Ecofeminist Perspectives on Technology in the Science
Fiction of Marge Piercy.” Extrapolation 44.1: 50-68.
This essay compares Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1974) and He,
She and It (1991), suggesting that there is a shift in the ways in which these two
different novels imagine the relationship to ecology and technology. Martinson
reads the earlier novel as radical, while she identifies a postmodern epistemology
in the more recent book.
 Feminist Utopia/Dystopia 169

Further Secondary Literature

Barr, Marleen S. 1993. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Booker, M. Keith & Anne-Marie Thomas. 2009. “Dystopian Science Fiction.” In: M.
Keith Booker & Anne-Marie Thomas (eds.). The Science Fiction Handbook.
Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 65-74.
Hicks, Heather J. 1999. “Automating Feminism: the Case of Joanna Russ’s The Fe-
male Man.” In: Postmodern Culture 9.3. Web. 10 Apr 2014.
Hollinger, Veronica. 1999. “(Re)Reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the
Defamiliarization of Gender.” In: Science-Fiction Studies 26.1: 23.
Johns, Alessa. 2010. “Feminism and Utopianism.” In: Gregory Claeys (ed.) The Cam-
bridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge, UK: CUP. 174-99.
Malmgren, Carl Darryl. 2002. “Meta-SF: the Examples of Dick, LeGuin, and Russ.”
In: Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43.1: 22-36.
Phillips, Jerry. 2002. “The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia
Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” In: Novel: A Forum on Fiction Novel 35.2/3: 299-
311.