Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s

Teslenko, Tatiana

doi:10.4324/9780203484340

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…This is relevant to the idea of the “chronotope” which “expresses space/time relations that reflect certain social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of human individuals in this particular space and time” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 233). Appropriating Bakhtin’s concept to the utopian genre, “the utopian chronotope” is defined as “a means for uncovering social contradictions that employs a certain way of expressing time’s fullness” by locating “the harmonious condition of the individual and society in the utopian space and time” (Teslenko, 2003, pp. 26–27).…”

Section: Atwood’s Ustopia: Cartography and Heterotopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradise in Hell: Mapping Out Ustopian Cartographies in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Mustafa

2021

Sage Open

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The paper examines Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from the fertile lens of cartographical studies of space. Initially, it explores the relationship between cartography and Atwood’s literary oeuvre. Then, it draws upon Foucault’s theory of heterotopia to consider its relevance to Atwood’s Ustopia. It seeks to fill in the gap in the critical studies written on Atwood’s ustopian trilogy. The paper explores how Atwood has diegetically constructed ustopian cartographies in which dystopian spaces are permeated with heterotopic locations of utopian resistance. It attempts to elucidate that the diachronic analysis must be complemented by a synchronic analysis of space. It develops the hypothesis that the ustopian cartographies of the spaces occupied by the characters in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy have resolved the tension between utopia and dystopia. By theorizing the cartographies of her ustopia, Atwood establishes herself as a literary cartographer.

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Section: Atwood’s Ustopia: Cartography and Heterotopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradise in Hell: Mapping Out Ustopian Cartographies in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Mustafa

2021

Sage Open

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“…To borrow the terms of Gustav Landauer (2010), the feminist utopia, a vision of a new liberated world, is tied to the feminist topia, the particular interests and concerns of women in specific times and places. The feminist utopias of the 1970s were an attempt to provide a speculative elaboration of the central demands of the women's liberation project, offering a means by which to explore the implications of the feminist movement (Teslenko, 2003). Quite explicitly, Russ positioned her utopia The Female Man as paying homage 'at the shrines of Friedan, Millett, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest' ([1975] 2010: 206).…”

Section: Temporal Play and The Feminist Utopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Retrotopian feminism: the feminist 1970s, the literary utopia and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

Davidson

2021

Feminist Theory

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In recent years, there has been increasing discontent with feminism’s understanding of its own history and, more specifically, the place of the feminist 1970s. Feminist scholars – most prominently, Elizabeth Freeman, Victoria Hesford, Kate Eichhorn and Kathi Weeks – have sought to move beyond the feelings of progress and nostalgia that the feminist 1970s often inspires. There is a need to mediate between the urge to leave the past behind and the desire to return to it, with feminists adopting positions that ricochet between progress and nostalgia. In this article, I argue that the feminist literary utopia offers a particularly productive means by which to represent this ambivalent, paradoxical temporal understanding. The classic feminist utopias of the 1970s have become the object of critical contention in more recent speculative texts, which destabilise both progress and nostalgia in their evocation of second-wave separatism. To elaborate this claim, I turn to Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, which critically assesses the feminist 1970s via an account of a separatist feminist enclave in a near-future Britain. The community of women is a homage to the feminist 1970s, displaying both the potentialities of the movements of this time as well as their sometimes violent limitations. The dreams of the 1970s emerge in the text as an unsettling presence in the world, a force that can neither be left behind nor fully embraced.

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“…trend, 2 as Teslenko's (2003) Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s argues that feminist utopian novels provided the conceptual space to test out some of the feminist ideas that were being put forth in theoretical terms, and Gerds' (2004) work frames Woman on the Edge of Time as exemplar of the feminist utopian trend of the 1960s and 1970s.…”

Section: Woman On the Edge Of Time' S Feminist Utopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As part of an explosion of feminist utopian novels in the 1970s, Woman on the Edge of Time is often read as being 'about' a certain moment in feminist thought and critique-namely, as a fictional exploration of the concerns of second-wave feminism (Booker, 1994;Haran, 2000;Teslenko, 2003). This article moves away from a reading of Piercy's text as a fictional exploration of the concerns of secondwave feminism to consider instead how it might be placed in dialogue with contemporary feminist and queer theorising on the relationship between futurity and the past.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

McBean

2014

Feminist Review

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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.

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Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Paradise in Hell: Mapping Out Ustopian Cartographies in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Paradise in Hell: Mapping Out Ustopian Cartographies in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Retrotopian feminism: the feminist 1970s, the literary utopia and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

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

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