ABSTRACT
Utopian writing has become a privileged formal and theoretical domain for feminist women, in ways that explore and frequently erode the distinctions between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, ‘creative’ and ‘critical’, ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Such writing shares an experimental and analytic drive; a desire to subvert those categories and boundaries which guarantee disciplinary, discursive and sexual hygiene, by licensing exchange between the arts and sciences, the ‘irrational’ and the ‘rational’, the fantastic/abnormal and the natural/normal. Different agents have different stakes, and certainly this is true within the field of contemporary feminisms, but it is instructive to step back from the specific goals and products of such encounters momentarily, to mark the proliferation of contemporary utopian writings by women, and their corollary: the emergent construction of a history of utopian writing by women, and a metadiscourse about utopian writing by women.
