Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

This work presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as the political, and of criticizing the patriarchical social order. In her examination of two novels of the 70s - Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You and Joanna Russ's The Female Man - Teslenko provides a comprehensive account of the generic strategy of feminist utopian fiction. Feminist utopias, according to Teslenko, describe a better time/place for women while working with the linguistic and generic tools of patriarchy. These fictions attempt to transgress social codes, to refigure patriarchal tropes, and to explode genre-setting rules through the use of fragmentation, ambiguity, multiplicity and openness. This book demonstrates feminists' attempts through fiction to envision a new political order. Teslenko takes a thorough look at a reworked 'good place that is no place' that elaborates a site of gendered opposition.