Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract:

Feminist science fiction is sub-genre of science fiction, which studies and examines the role of women in society and situate different questions about social issues, such as construction of gender roles and the importance of reproduction in defining gender. Feminist science fiction often uses utopias to illustrate these themes and to explore a society in which problems like the imbalance of gender differences and gender power do not exist . Joanna Russ' The Female Man with her utopian vision, solutions and radical narrative interventions (Russ: 127) played an important role in the development of the feminist utopian genre. In her utopian novel, by using utopian fiction, satire and metafiction, the author describes four different societies, each producing a different version of the same person and shows the reader how her protagonists interact and respond to the varying degrees of sexism. The Female Man was first published in 1969 (Gardiner: 87). In order to understand better the socio- historic context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I am going to discuss, in the first chapter, the exactly meaning and understanding of the word 'utopia', its related terms, such as dystopia, eutopia, outopia, as well as the history of utopia. It may be useful to examine the interaction of the feminist genre with other genres and transformation of the patriarchal concepts of man and woman. In the third chapter, my term paper shall look at the characters and the different way of lives of Russ's four protagonists and their attitude to the society, where they live in. The reader requires constant concentration, as to be able to follow up and understand both the sequence and chronology, which are continuously questioned in the visits to the different worlds: the present of the narrator Joanna, the dystopian past of Jeannine, the utopia of Janet and the dystopia of Jael. The influence of patriarchal society on the existence of Russ's protagonists, the ideas of the feminist writers and the reasons for emerging of the feminist utopias shall be the subject of my term paper.