Utopian Genderscapes

"This innovative feminist rhetorical history advances valuable lessons for contemporary discussions in the discipline about teleological rhetorics, rhetorics of exceptionalism, and rhetorics of choice"--

Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women’s labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women’s trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.

The utopias envisioned by Edward Bellamy and other novelists late in the nineteenth century were generally blueprints of government. As satellites of men, women were expected to share in the general improvement of society. The resurgence of the feminist movement since the late 1960s has produced a very different kind of utopian literature. Frances Bartkowski explores a body of work that is striking and vital because it reflects the hopes, fears, and desires of women who have glimpsed the possibilities of a bright new world freed from stifling patriarchal structures. Feminist Utopias is a comparative study of the utopian fiction of nine women writers in the United States, France, and Canada. Except for Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the prototype for feminist literary utopias, all of the works were published between 1969 and 1986. Bartkowski discusses Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Christine Rochefort's Archaos, ou le jardin étincelant, E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women, Louky Bersianik's The Eugelionne, and two dystopian novels, Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale.

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.

Although writers' images of the utopian society contain many diverse and often contrasting elements, Ferns (English, Mt. St. Vincent U., Nova Scotia) argues that the actual story that accounts for how the central character discovers utopia has remained more or less consistent since the Renaissance. Ferns investigates the ideological implications of this story, and emphasizes the problems it creates for writers trying to free themselves from its limitations, particularly feminist writers who sometimes perceive the utopian narrative as a distinctly male myth. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Utopian exchanges : negotiating difference in utopia / Lee Cullen Khanna -- A fragile utopia of sensibility : David Simple / Joseph F. Bartolomeo -- Gothic utopia : heretical sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian / Brenda Tooley -- Rewriting Rousseau : Isabelle de Charrière's domestic dystopia / Caroline Weber -- Utopia in the seraglio : feminist hermeneutics and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes / Mary McAlpin -- Transparency and the enlightenment body : utopian space in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and De Sade's The 120 days of sodom / Ana M. Acosta -- Emperess of the world : gender and the voyage utopia / Nicole Pohl -- A man might find every think in your country : improvement, patriarchy and gender in Robert Paltock's The life and adventures of Peter Wilkins / Elizabeth Hagglund and Jonathan Laidlow -- Generating regenerated generations : race, kinship and sexuality in Henry Neville's Isle of pines / Seth Denbo -- Thinking globally, acting locally : enlightenment utopianism for 21st century feminists? / Alessa Johns.

This “incredible addition to the feminist canon” brings together the most inspiring, creative, and courageous voices concerning modern women’s issues (Jessica Valenti, editor of Yes Means Yes). In this groundbreaking collection, more than fifty cutting-edge feminist writers—including Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, and Mia McKenzie—invite us to imagine a world of freedom and equality in which: An abortion provider reinvents birth control . . . The economy values domestic work . . . A teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music . . . The Constitution is re-written with women’s rights at the fore . . . The standard for good sex is raised with a woman’s pleasure in mind . . . The Feminist Utopia Project challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given, “offering playful, earnest, challenging, and hopeful versions of our collective future in the form of creative nonfiction, fiction, visual art, poetry, and more” (Library Journal).