ABSTRACT

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background.

The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics.

This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

chapter |13 pages

Utopia and dystopia in the 21st century

Feminism, intersectionality, and the rejection of binarism

part I|43 pages

Between Anthropocenic dystopia and ecological utopia

part II|47 pages

The materiality of posthuman intersections and speculative discourse in fiction and art

chapter 4|17 pages

Critical hope

Relationalities in 21st-century speculative fiction and art

chapter 5|14 pages

The mesotopia

From speculative realism to speculative artistic events

chapter 6|14 pages

Neganthropic architecture(s)

Renee Gladman's speculative reorientation of science fiction

part III|45 pages

Between history and sexual politics

chapter 7|17 pages

Temporal politics

Entangling fictions, futures, and histories in contemporary and historical speculative fiction

chapter 8|14 pages

Utopia of intimacy

“The Fear of the Flesh,” hyper-sexualisation, libidinal exhaustion, and a new sexual politics beyond Oedipal (wo)man

chapter 9|12 pages

Do cyborgs dream of (becoming) people?

The alternative non-human self in Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me

part IV|56 pages

In-between feminist and post-feminist dys/utopias

chapter 10|13 pages

Twenty-first-century Gileads

Feminist dystopian fiction after Atwood—The Handmaid's Tale, The Natural Way of Things, The Water Cure, and The Testaments

chapter 11|13 pages

A rage of her own

The unpredictable powers of female flight in Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix

chapter 13|10 pages

Developing the F-word

Representing adolescent womanhood and race in young adult dystopian novels

part V|47 pages

Beyond the gender and structural binaries in dys/utopian cinema

chapter 14|10 pages

Alien bodies, alien selves

Under the Skin (2013) and beyond

chapter 15|11 pages

Dys/utopian narratives on the screen

Beyond the binaries in Children of Men and The Lobster

chapter 17|11 pages

“Where did all you zombies come from?”

Gendered pasts, presents, and futures in Robert Heinlein's “All You Zombies” and the film adaptation Predestination