Rehabilitating utopia: Feminist science fiction and finding the ideal

Abstract

Twentieth century political philosophy takes for granted that the pursuit of utopia is dangerous for three reasons: pursuing utopia justifies the use of violence to accomplish its ends; it requires one to deny the individual in favor of the community; and it utilizes a mindset of mere problem‐solving when asking the question of how humans should live together fruitfully. But these criticisms (articulated by Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott, respectively) do not apply to certain writers of feminist science fiction whose utopias embrace pluralism, ambiguity, and the messiness of politics. This paper examines the work of two such utopians, Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy, in order to reinvigorate political philosophy with the visions of community imagined in these largely ignored utopias.

Keywords:

• Octavia Butler
• Marge Piercy
• Utopia
• Political Philosophy
• Pluralism
• Social Change

Notes

Claire P. Curtis is an assistant professor of political science at the College of Charleston. She is a political philosopher whose work deals largely with questions concerning the tension between skepticism and perfectionism.

I focus on the work of Berlin, Rawls and Oakeshott, although this criticism can also be found in postmodernism’s criticism of foundations.

Cf. Plato, Republic , bk. VII; More, Utopia, pp. 107‐117; and Bellamy, Looking Backward , ch. XVII.

Ursula LeGuin’s work also fits this paradigm. See my “Ambiguous Choices: Skepticism as a grounding for Utopia” (Curtis, 2005).

Berlin, “Pursuit of the Ideal,” pp. 5‐6.

Furthermore Gilman herself, in the sequel to Herland called With Her in Ourland, expresses racist views concerning the mental development of certain ethnic groups.

Gilman’s Herland is not the first feminist utopia written. Sally Kitch outlines the history of the feminist utopia in chapter two of Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American. Feminist Thought and Theory.

“Ambiguous Utopia” is the phrase often added to the tile of Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.

Butler, in an NPR interview on September 1, 2001 (during an extended piece on the U.N. World Conference on Racism) acknowledges this aspect of her novel as a way of working through whether empathy like this would result in a more communal or more problematic world. Her conclusion, that such empathy would allow people to easily be manipulated is taken up in both novels.

Butler’s Xenogenesis series does explore this interplay quite specifically.

Donna Haraway’s influential “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” is clearly working theoretically within this model of technology’s possibilities.

Compare this with the recent move in Sweden to encourage fathers to spend more time with their young children by making 30 days of parental leave (of which 360 days are available) available only to the father. So that if a family wants to cover a full year the father must take at least 30 of those days (those days are not transferable to the mother).

Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopia and the Late Twentieth Century: A View from North America” in Utopia: Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire P. Curtis

Claire P. Curtis is an assistant professor of political science at the College of Charleston. She is a political philosopher whose work deals largely with questions concerning the tension between skepticism and perfectionism.