Feminism and Futurity: Revisiting Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

Abstract

This article considers the question of feminist futurity through Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While dominant readings of this novel have focused on its relationship to the feminist Utopian genre and feminist theory from the 1970s, this essay aims to critically reframe the novel through contemporary feminist theorising on time and futurity. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory that suggests that the future might most productively be figured through more nuanced and renewed engagements with the past, I argue that readings of Piercy's novel that frame it only through its contemporary moment obscure the novel's critique of singular, linear models of time. The novel represents the future through the themes of loss, mourning and haunting, which I argue resist a model of time that moves linearly from past to future and instead bring the past and future into complex relation with each other. In this regard, Piercy's novel is read as representing a form of feminist futurity that engages with progress in time as necessarily uneven, discontinuous and fractured, speaking to contemporary demands for a feminist futurity that might require more nuanced accounts of the past.

Nakedly Normative: A Feminist (Re‐)Imagination of Planetary Politics

“…The temporality embedded in such work calls for a re-envisioning of social, political and economic models in order to foreground equity as the driving principle of a feminist future. Interestingly, much of this work weaves around the notion of progress and assumes that feminist visions are always future facing (McBean, 2014). This approach to temporalities presumes a tidy understanding of feminist history and how it can feed into a progressive future.…”

“…Feminist fiction has a long tradition of destabilising a linear understanding of temporality. Novels such as Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time encourage the reader to imagine a different reality that encompasses losses, lessons and visions (McBean, 2014). As in Arrival , recognition of the circular nature of time focuses on ‘the moment’ as encompassing futurity or the process of becoming (Grosz, 2005; McLeavy et al, 2021).…”

“…This approach to temporalities presumes a tidy understanding of feminist history and how it can feed into a progressive future. However, what happens when, as in the case of Arrival , the temporal dimension is more complex, or as McBean (2014, p. 39) pointedly asks, what happens when ‘time is no longer conceptualised as a singular, cohesive movement forward?’. In Chiang's work, past, present and future intertwine and so shape different possibilities around us.…”

Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” and “Barbie Doll”: How is the will of others imposed on the female bodily self in a patriarchal society?

“…Relating the past to the future, it is more concerned with a linear relationship. (McBean) [11] For Karen F. Stein, Marge Piercy's utopian novels highlight the gender inequalities in most societies-social, economic, political, reproductive, and so on. It is in this cynical atmosphere that Marge Piercy writes contemporary utopian fiction as a feminist in an atmosphere where there is a greater tendency "today" to divide men and women into two distinct groups rather than one and the same.…”

The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’: Psychosis and a (non)sense of time

“…Sam McBean casts Woman on the Edge of Time as staging a problematic of feminist futurity where ‘[t]he feminist present might be best imagined as persistently interrupted by the demands of the future – haunted by the promise of something different and something more’ ( 2014 : 53). McBean captures the dialogic relationship between Connie’s present, which re-structured as past, serves to construct the future: ‘ Woman on the Edge of Time not only functions as a critique of the present through the utopian genre, but also brings loss, mourning, haunting and futurity into close contact with each other – so that Connie’s past losses are formative and productive of the future’ ( 2014 : 40). The restitution of Connie’s agency performs in microcosm the empowering human – and distinctively but not exclusively female – flourishing that Mattaposett potentiates ( Trainor, 2005 ).…”