The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia

Intersectional, Feminist, and Non-Binary Approaches in 21st-Century Speculative Literature and Culture

Katarzyna Ostalska, Tomasz Fisiak, Katarzyna Ostalska, Tomasz Fisiak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367537043
• eBook ISBN: 9781000509960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background.

The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics.

This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women's and gender studies.

Part IBetween Anthropocenic dystopia and ecological utopia

1In need of new narratives Feminist ustopian fiction challenging the Anthropocene

Alessandra Boller

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082958-3

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with;

it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with;

it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts,

what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.

It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

—Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Introduction: it matters what ideas think ideas

The latest heyday of dystopian fiction coincides with the establishment of the Anthropocene, a term suggested by Crutzen and Stoermer in the year 2000 to describe the current geological epoch as the first one shaped by humankind’s transformative, i.e. devastating, impact on the earth and the atmosphere. As the age of imperialism, industrialisation, and expansion is commonly regarded as its onset, the Anthropocene, as a concept and mindset, appears to be inseparably linked to the modern subject and the (Western) paradigm of modernity (see McKagen; Malm and Hornborg) with its grand narratives: “[d]iscourses of science, religion, politics and philosophy which are supposed to explain the world in its totality, and to produce histories of the world as narratives of progress” (Wolfreys et al. 47, emphasis added). Thus, the notion of progress and hence traditional, i.e. linear, temporality play an integral role in conceptions of the Anthropocene and its connected narratives.

Although the term Anthropocene has become an important tool to name pressing ecological issues and to stress the need to fight the undeniable human-induced effects on global ecology, it has been challenged alongside its related narratives and concepts by, for instance, critical posthumanism or New Materialism (see Mohr 44–46). Such criticism must be taken seriously because as tools to think with, concepts and narratives can either support or challenge the comfort zones of anthropocentrism and universalism, and hence prevent or contribute to cognitive shifts. Just as the Anthropocene is not simply a descriptive term, the grand narratives it is connected to are not merely stories, but also patterns of thought and—to some extent—of thoughtlessness since they limit thinking and knowing to preconceived frameworks and schemata. Epistemically speaking, they render difficult thinking through the scientific fact that human beings are not only dependent on their surroundings but are part of ecology, a web of relations—an insight that is also increasingly discussed by recent turns that have pushed the boundaries of the humanities’ inquiries. Such ecological questions are inseparable from ontological and socio-political ones, as, for example, Félix Guattari, Gregory Bateson, or Anna L. Tsing argue (Gottlieb 160). Hence, these “mixed-up times,” as Donna Haraway calls the current moment in Staying with the Trouble (1),¹ demand alternative epistemologies and concepts.

This article turns to New (Feminist) Materialism, which, through focusing on life and matter, endeavours to liberate epistemologies from patriarchal Western-centred hierarchical systems, linear narratives of progress, and an anthropocentric definition of agency. Besides, this contribution entangles concepts such as Haraway’s Chthulucene or Barad’s agential realism with fictions that provide thought-provoking and empowering alternatives to limiting frameworks and grand narratives. Drawing on Le Guin, I regard concepts and narratives as carrier bags which carry ideas and values that lead to tangible realities. I therefore argue that we need to understand reality as material-semiotic, to use Haraway’s term for networks of not only bodies but also discourses (13). As Karen Barad stresses, discursive practices are material (re)configurations (148–149). Therefore, it matters what ideas we think ideas with, what stories tell stories, as Haraway emphasises. Or, to use Margaret Atwood’s idea, “[u]nderstanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity” (“Aliens”). My discussion of Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) will reveal that (feminist) ustopian fictions, in particular, can become tools to think-with alternatives to Anthropocene fictions such as (post-)apocalyptic last-man narratives or established stories about human origins. These novels’ ustopian possibilities spring from their focus on relations, collaborations, and storied matter that transcend linear ideas of progress and notions of a singular past, present, and future to transgress binaries and open up viewpoints beyond despair or hope without accounting for simple solutions.

Anthropos and Anthropocene: ideas to think ideas with?

In the year 2011, The Economist proclaimed that “[h]umans have changed the way the world works. Now they have to change the way they think about it, too.” As Haraway stresses, the Anthropocene is a “time-space-global thing” which “obtained purchase in popular and scientific [and I would add political] discourse” in the context of “efforts to find ways of talking about, theorizing, modelling, and managing a Big Thing called Globalization” (44–45). Ideas about newly defined relations in Anthropocene discourse and fiction, e.g. concerning interrelations of human and more-than-human² realities, have been issued by a number of scholars from different disciplines (see, for instance, Caracciolo et al. 223). Lohmer-Horn and Bergthaller conceptualise the Anthropocene as a turning point and intellectual break that requires us to recast ideas of nature, culture, history, and “the human.” According to them, Anthropocene “designates an ecological threshold” “[m]ore than just a crisis which may come to an end at some point in the future” (1–2).

However, Lohmer-Horn’s and Bergthaller’s claim that the concept “puts previous knowledge into a new constellation, and thus opens up a new epistemic field” (19) connects to a belief in the altering power of Anthropocene discourse that is debatable. Although Dürbeck et al. support the idea that it defines human-nature relationships anew, they also acknowledge an apparent paradox: the Anthropocene centres on human agency as the defining geological force even though it “lacks any characteristics of a coordinated collective action” (118) and, moreover, it is “always part of larger cultural and material flows, exchanges, and interactions” (119). Named after Anthropos, the Anthropocene has become a shorthand for human-induced destruction that suggests only one species as “quasi-geological agent capable of shaping the climate future of our planet” (Caracciolo et al. 223) and thus disregards the diverse more-than-human agencies that New Materialism acknowledges. Besides, it connotes that humankind acts as one collective geological force—a highly debatable view with regard to the so-called North-South divide, for instance. Moreover, despite contested etymologies and the ambiguity of the term, Anthropos means man, but never woman, especially in biblical contexts (Haraway 183 n. 45). Thus anthropocentrism denies women and non-binary people agency within (patriarchal) structures informed by grand narratives that operate with false universalism and, in extension, with conceptions of justice and rights (see Mohr) that have tangible effects³ on the lives of those who do not fall into the normative andro- and Eurocentric conception of Anthropos. With its connection to grand narratives, the concept of the Anthropocene thus preserves knowledge-making practices that produced “the Anthropos as the human species, Modern Man” and have maintained bounded individualism as well as human exceptionalism “since the imperializing eighteenth century” (Haraway 30). This worldview accounts for the misrecognition of human beings’ position in ecology—regarding humanity as a special species affecting a network instead of being one of its many constituents—and thus is at the root of the devastation of the material reality the concept sought to contain.

Although Anthropocene should be credited with initiating debates and with facilitating a more critical attitude towards human behaviour and capitalist exploitation, it maintains the thought structures and normalising grand narratives that render different perspectives hardly thinkable. Contemporary ideas of green growth in economic and political discourse serve as an example: due to their continued reliance on notions of linearity and progress as well as theories of individualism that see “preexisting units in competition relations” (Haraway 49), they cannot put an end to reliance on fossil fuels and (more-than-)human exploitation. Anthropocene is therefore not well-suited for engendering the acknowledgement of more-than-human agencies or for thinking (about) spatiotemporal and naturalcultural entanglements. Similar reservations speak against Capitalocene, a term suggested as a conceptual alternative to Anthropocene to stress that not “the human” but global capitalism, and thus those countries that industrialised early (see Gottlieb 160), has rendered ecosystems unstable. Despite its validity, the concept neither sufficiently takes into account relationality nor the fact that strategic relations, among them capital, power, and civilisations, “emerge through cascading transformations and bifurcations of human activity in the web of life” (Moore). Capitalocene therefore preserves a partial disregard of the entanglement of all forms of lives and matters, including human beings, and maintains the idea of human actions and effects as closed practice that can be undone; “the human” as a self-contained entity is a too heavy weight in this carrier bag.

As a label that only accounts for a very limited idea of “the human” and its alleged opposites, “the animal” and “nature,” Anthropocene (and to some extent, Capitalocene) thus “runs the danger of being used simply as a fashionable marker of topicality and political relevance” (Lohmer-Horn and Bergthaller 19)—its use within political, cultural, and economic discourses serves to keep unthinkable trouble small and easy to deal with. Its connected narratives, both grand and literary, are subject to the same criticism because Anthropocene discourse can only produce binary reactions: apocalyptic despair that results in a “game-over attitude” (Haraway 3), or a “break-it-and-fix-it mentality . . . informed by the assumption that human agents . . . create ecological problems but can readily solve all of them at will with the right technology”⁴ (Phillips and Sullivan 446), both resulting in inactivity.

Many literary Anthropocene narratives exemplify this dualism: the story of the hero, the human individual fighting against hostile surroundings that is at the root of stories about the human species, according to Le Guin (150–152), frequently resurfaces in the shape of dystopian stories and post-apocalyptic last-man narratives oscillating between hope and despair. In such narratives, the threatening end of “the human” equals the end of modernity and its subject: the all too frequently Western, white, male, and able human. Thus, the end of the paradigm of modernity and “the human” merge in what is commonly depicted as the ultimate catastrophe. Such narratives are increasingly criticised for reiterating established exclusionary and binary thought structures and for functioning within “familiar arrangements of knowledge,” as Simon argues (194). Since the stories we tell shape the world (see McKagen; Mohr 43–44; Barad 133), only subversive, non-linear, and non-anthropocentric, i.e. non-androcentric, patterns of reading/writing/thinking can provide spaces for thinking with more-than-human agencies.

Intra-relations and new carrier bags: Chthulucene and new materialism

Anthropocene’s functioning within familiar patterns of knowledge and knowledge production appears comforting in spite of its conceptualisation of Anthropos’ devastating impact. However, the belief in assumedly universal and unchangeable “reality” is crumbling because of, for instance, the increasingly visible effects of climate change, insect decline, and now SARS-CoV-2. This sense of a new reality calls for inclusive practices of engagement and a non-anthropocentric understanding of agency. Questioning the universal notion of “the human” as exceptional, New Materialism stands in stark contrast to anthropocentric approaches. It provides concepts that connote entanglement, symbiosis, and dynamic states (Haraway 44–47) and elicits “possible ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into dichotomous patterns of thinking” (Iovino and Oppermann 2).

Barad’s notion of agential realism is a prime example of such an approach, as it regards discursive practices as material reconfigurations that differentially enact the determination of, for instance, boundaries. Barad thus contests the human-centred concept of agency and its view of matter as passive and fixed, in need of human representation that imbues it with meaning. Instead, “[m]atter and meaning are not separate elements” for Barad (3), who suggests a “performative understanding of discursive practices [to challenge] the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things” (133). This idea is intricately linked to the position of human beings within ecology: while representation positions humankind outside the world to reflect on it, a “performative account insists on understanding thinking, observing, and theorizing as practices with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being” (133). Barad’s intra-actions centre on dynamic relationships between agential matters and thus emphasise that agency is not an attribute reserved for “the human” but a process and a “matter of intra-acting. . . . Agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity” (178).

Entangled concepts such as Barad’s intra-actions that entail co-productions, Haraway’s Chthulucene, Moore’s big-enough stories, or Latour’s Gaïa- or geostories⁵ can contribute to cognitive shifts. Instead of curtailing discussions by resorting either to a belief in techno-fixes as simple solutions or to despair, they contribute to cultivating the multispecies response-ability proposed by Haraway: “Response-ability is about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives and who dies and how in the string figures of naturalcultural history” (29). Nevertheless, giving up the position of the hero in favour of multispecies becoming-with does not let human ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: a utopian/dystopian spectrum: from friendship to fear, from consent to coercion
• Utopia and dystopia in the 21st century: feminism, intersectionality, and the rejection of binarism
• Part I Between Anthropocenic dystopia and ecological utopia
• Part II The materiality of posthuman intersections and speculative discourse in fiction and art
• Part III Between history and sexual politics: alternate herstories and historical alternatives
• Part IV In-between feminist and post-feminist dys/utopias
• Part V Beyond the gender and structural binaries in dys/utopian cinema
• Index