ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to provide the reader with a representative picture of modern utopian imagination in its negotiations with questions of sex and gender. The figures in utopian fiction are constructs of the societies they inhabit, or, put another way, the values of the utopian order are materialized through the bodies of its inhabitants. The book is concerned with the ways in which these bodies, even in the most radically alternative arrangements, continue to be gendered bodies that have to reproduce themselves in order for their society to perpetuate its existence. It focuses on questions of gender and sexuality in utopian writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the sense that the question of sex became increasingly central to literary discourse around 1900.
