ABSTRACT
Using Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” which describes citizens who are capable of being legally killed by the state, this chapter explores how some feminist dystopias depict highly oppressive societies in which women lose their political rights (for example, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). A consideration of Agamben’s notion of the sacrificial homo sacer figure shows how, in these dystopias, women have become sacrificial figures: both subject to the law and excluded by it. On the other hand, other examples of feminist, dystopian science fiction critique forms of male domination by inverting the paradigm of patriarchy: portraying all-female or female-dominated societies in which men are subject to the same kinds of abuse women suffer, for example, Marge Peircy’s He, She and It, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. However, while these works attempt to problematise gender binaries, they often succeed in reinforcing them through their reliance on essentialist forms of feminist discourse. The ‘female’ societies are often founded on notions of homogenous womanhood and myths of an essential caregiving and maternal female identity which is meant to serve as a subversive form of resistance to dominant masculine power structures. However, by embracing gender normative notions of womanhood, these texts embrace a feminist politics that reinforces patriarchal, sexist assumptions and ignores individual female specificity in favour of an exclusory concept of femaleness.
