Gender Issues-Sexuality, Nonhuman Nature, And Community In American Feminist Utopian Fiction

The Female Man and The Wanderground: Stories of Hill Women were bothformulated and published in the1970s when the second-wave feminism reached itsclimax. They represent distinct feminist ideologies and politics at the time. AmazonGrace: Re-calling the Courage to Sin Big came into publication approximately30yearslater, but it demonstrates a radical feminist stance characteristic of second wave.All of these three texts make use of utopia as a primary literary genre to propose visionsof a more desirable society. The Female Man features futuristic Whileaway; TheWanderground presents the separatist, ecofeminist Wanderground; Amazon Graceenvisions a “Leap” to Lost and Found Continent, where “Foresisters of the ArchaicFuture” live. This Master’s thesis is interested in identifying and investigating threegender-related concepts—sexuality, nonhuman nature, and community—in these texts,which will shed light on gender representation in American feminist utopian fiction. Themain body of the thesis is divided into three parts, each part focusing on each keyconcept and how they are linked with gender in each text. The methods used in thethesis include empirical knowledge and theory, obtained from secondary and tertiarytexts. Major theories encompass queer theory, Bakhtin’s dialogism, ecofeministphilosophies, Foucault’s power theory, and French feminist theory. The conclusion thatresponds to the research question is as follows: in The Female Man, the concept ofgender is questioned, and the gender opposition is destabilized through de-genderizationof sexuality, nature, and dueling; in The Wanderground, gender is represented asessentialist through demonization of heterosexuality, feminization of nature, andnormalization of gender-based separatism; in Amazon Grace, sexuality is absent, andDaly’s essentialist view of gender is reflected by her highlight of essentialist femininity,and feminization of nature. Daly’s playful use of language demonstrates a certain degreeof subversiveness in that it exposes the crucial role of discourse in authorizing andreinforcing gender opposition, but she fails to break the curse of conceptual dichotomies.