For Janet:
From my syllabus-- (probably more than you want to know!)
What is a Utopia? A Utopia is a place or state of political and
social perfection. Utopian fiction portrays a visionary system of
political and social perfection by providing a normative and evaluative
description of the perfectly good society. Features of Utopias often
include (1) a stable and (2) cooperative society wherein (3) the benefits
(goods, resources) and the burdens (e.g., distasteful but necessary
services, taxes) are equally shared and (4) everyone engages in meaningful
work and leisure.
What is a Dystopia? According to M. Keith Booker, 'dystopian
literature' (1) directly opposes "utopian thought, warning against the
potential negative consequences of arrant utopianism" and (2) criticizes
"existing social conditions or political systems, either through the
critical examination of the utopian premises upon which those conditions
and systems are based or through the imaginative extension of those
conditions and systems into different contexts that more clearly reveal
their flaws and contradictions."
Both Utopias and Dystopias are calls to social and political
action: Utopias, by describing the world in which we want to live, and
Dystopias, by warning us of the implications of current social and
political trends and by prodding us to act on these warnings.
What is a Feminist Utopia? Sally Miller Gearhart sets out four
characteristics of Feminist Utopian literature: it "a. contrasts the
present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by
time or space); b. offers a comprehensive critique of present
values/conditions; c. sees men or male institutions as a major cause of
present social ills; and d. presents women not only as at least the equals
of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions." In
any case, conditions of full equality between the sexes must hold in a
Feminist Utopian society.
Perhaps we can tentatively characterize a Feminist Dystopia, then,
as a work that warns of the potential sexist and otherwise harmful
consequences of Traditional or Feminist Utopian thought, and critiques a
particular set of Traditional or Feminist social, political, and moral
theories by depicting a future in which these theoretical assumptions
ground the systemic oppression of one sex by the other.
Judith
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Dr. Judith Ann Little Philosophy Department SUNY-Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676-2294 littleja@potsdam.edu
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