Hope, destruction, and rebirth: acts of recovery in gender separatist feminist utopian literature

Abstract

Gender separatist utopian literature portrays communities that are populated with only women while men live elsewhere or at times as slaves. This separatism brings about issues of sociopolitical and emotional conflict between women and men. This subgenre carries great potential for the interrogation of the supposed biologically inherent differences between women and men, and also among women in the same gender groups. I concentrated on the narrative cycle of hope, destruction, and rebirth present in many literary examples from this subgenre. The cycle starts out with the complete destruction of the current state of affairs in their respective worlds in order to achieve a state of tabula rasa. In this research project, I examined a wide variety of gender separatist feminist utopian texts, spanning from the work of Christine de Pizan from the 1400s -absent in most of the overviews of this genre dominated by men- up until the work of Leigh Richards in 2004 (a pseudonym for Laurie R. King). Keeping the scope of my corpus as wide as I could helped me gain a literary overview of the subgenre, with a clear focus on the last decades of the 20th century. My dissertation engages with questions regarding whether the connection between this narrative cycle and utopian disillusionment can lead to a perceived failure of the utopian ideal, whether feminist utopianism can be located in feminist dystopian narratives of destruction, how this cycle can interact with the common traditions of utopian literature, feminist utopian literature, and feminist theory, and how women's subjectivity in these works of literature relates to the problem of history, how the 'female subject' sees her role in relation to her sociopolitical context, and how the mechanism of hope, destruction and optimism interact in this subgenre.