'Subversive Feminist Thrusts': Feminist Dystopian Writing and Religious Fundamentalism in Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale', Louise Marley's 'The Terrorists of Irustan', Marge Piercy's 'He, She and It', and Sheri S. Tepper's 'Raising the Stones'

Although science fiction does not normally deal with religion, feminist writers, especially in the utopian/dystopian sub-genre of science fiction, recognized the dangers of fundamentalism and its infusion into American politics in the 1980s and began to address those dangers through genre writing. In this project, I address how feminist authors critique religious fundamentalism, linked to the rise of the Religious Right in the United States, through Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Marley's The Terrorists of Irustan, Piercy's He, She and It, and Tepper's Raising the Stones. These texts interrogate fundamentalist manifestations of Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They form an arc, beginning with a totalitarian theocratic dystopia with a faint utopian impulse (Atwood), and progressing non-chronologically through a totalitarian theocratic dystopia with active resistance and a stronger utopian impulse (Marley), to ambiguously utopic religious communities surrounded by a dystopian world (Piercy), to a more fully-realized utopic religious community that actively defeats fundamentalist regimes that would destroy it (Tepper).;Using feminist intersectional analysis and Schüssler Fiorenza's heuristic of kyriarchy, I argue that feminist dystopian writing transgresses not only genre but also the "master narratives" of Western culture through its examination of and warnings against religious fundamentalism and theocratic governance. I scrutinize why and how a number of feminist science fiction authors engage in this debate, especially in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist dystopian and utopian writing. Feminist science fiction writers interrogate religious fundamentalism to expose its inherent misogyny and oppression, activities that are frequently played out on women's bodies. Furthermore, I argue that feminist utopian and dystopian writing which criticizes fundamentalist manifestations of Abrahamic religions challenges the legitimacy of the underpinnings of Western thought and culture in myriad ways.