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... Show moreGender 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. Show less
This study delves into the understudied relationship between utopianism and film with specific attention to the relationship between utopianism and European migrant film in the context of Turkish... Show moreThis study delves into the understudied relationship between utopianism and film with specific attention to the relationship between utopianism and European migrant film in the context of Turkish migrants’ hopes and fears. It proposes a new concept, the intertopian mode, by engaging with the relevant concepts in utopianism and migrant cinema. The intertopian mode is the space between the extremities of the utopianist spectrum, utopia, and dystopia at their most ultimate forms. This study provides close and socio-politically situated readings of the selected films that serve as case studies to test the presence of intertopian mode. It situates each case study/film in the specific contexts and applies the research questions to demonstrate the patterns. Hence, this study explores how utopian motives, as in the form of intertopian mode, appear in migrant film and it engages with utopianism as a method for representing change, socio-cultural issues, desires, hopes, fears, and values. It lays the foundation for future investigation of utopianism in film. Show less
