Beyond Patriarchal Discourse: Imagining Alternative Citizenship In Three American Feminist Utopias

Conceptions of citizenship, which rest on an abstract and universal notion of theindividual, fail to recognize the difference inherent to man and woman. Such conceptionsexclude women because of its gender-neutrality. Feminist utopias are able to reconstructcitizenship by interrogating the ideological assumption of liberal citizenship. With resoluteimagination, feminist utopia writers critique the accepted citizenship conventions at thepresent moment in a representation of the world as it could be.Through a comparative study of the early feminist utopia Herland at the turn of lastcentury, and the Female Man and Woman on the Edge of Time of the1970s, the paper revealsthat citizenship is a discursive concept that evolves with development of the genre both inform and content. Herland in alignment with the feminist movement focuses on a politicalagenda, demanding an inclusive or reversed gender role for women in both the public andprivate spheres that are relevant to the living experience of every women, whereas the othertwo works not only imagine an alternative world with “gender-neutralized” female images butalso empower a female voice that is able to articulate a concept of citizenship that is notsubject to patriarchal discourse. Through “thought-experiments”, feminist thinkers such asCharlotte Perkins Gilman, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy strive to revise women’s stories byenvisioning alternative plots for their lives in their “speculative fiction”. In their respectivenovel, issues of reproduction and motherhood, sexual relationship, relations betweenindividual citizens, citizen education and human relationship with the non-human environmentare addressed. It is noticeable that these feminist utopia do not only solution to include womenin the citizenship discourse by according them access to public sphere, but also provide uswith alternative discourse of the concept of citizenship.