Utopian and Dystopian Sci-Fi of the Second Wave
The founding slogan of second-wave feminism, “the personal is political,” fuses the prospect of revolutionary transformation to the details of intimate life. At its peak in the 1970s, second-wave feminism unites radical politics and the challenge of reimagining how everyday life may be lived. As both utopia and dystopia, the genre of science fiction plays a vital role in second-wave feminism’s visions of new world orders and new modalities of power, gender, embodiment, sensation, love, and obligation. This class will explore the literary, formal, and theoretical centrality of science fiction to second-wave feminist thought. We will begin with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which plots the collision of feminine normativity and the novel’s realist representational form. We’ll then read a series of second-wave utopian/ dystopian texts that far exceed the bounds of realism: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Monique Wittig, Le Corps lesbien/ The Lesbian Body; Joanna Russ, The Female Man; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Octavia Butler, Dawn; Marge Piercy, He, She and It; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring.
We will read shorter accompanying second-wave and contemporary theory to further our exploration of embodiment, technology, feminist utopia, and/ or feminist critical methodology, including: Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”; Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; Malini Johar Schueller, “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body”; Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”; Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body; Elizabeth Grosz, Coming Undone.