Feminist Utopia, Reproductive Technology, and Relationships of Difference in Contemporary American Feminism: A Reading of Octavia Butler's Feminist Utopias

Jennifer Nelson
2020
Feminist utopian science fiction became a popular staple for theorizing political solutions to gender oppression during the contemporary feminist period between the late 1960s and the 1990s. Some of that literature, but by no means all, represented the solution to oppression -often epitomized as the »patriarchy« -as an erasure of sexual difference through feminist appropriation of reproductive technology. Although it was only one among many feminist utopian visions, this answer to the
more » ... x system of oppression« has come to typify contemporary feminist theorizing about gender, difference, and reproductive technology. This particular utopian perspective has been criticized, however, for being limited in its theoretical consideration of differences among women and how those differences are produced and reproduced through a system of interdependent relationships and systems of oppression other than sex and gender. 1 In this article I examine the utopian fiction of Octavia Butler to argue that another part of a feminist conversation about reproductive technology and differences among women was put forth primarily by women of color who posed an alternative to the feminist utopian vision of a world without (sexual) difference. 2 This competing perspective initiated a fundamental shift in understandings about the significance of differences among women to women's liberation and feminism that profoundly shaped the contemporary feminist movement in recent decades. In order to distinguish this vision from what has often been termed as »mainstream« or white feminism, I will compare Butler's fiction to Sherri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country (1988), 3 which exemplifies the version of feminism that has often falsely stood for all of American contemporary feminism: this is a version of feminism that prioritizes theoretical consideration of female difference from men and its association with the origins of patriarchy, while ignoring other forms of discrimination that also penetrate relationships among women, particularly racism, classism, and heterosexism. 105 ÖZG 15.2004.1
doi:10.25365/oezg-2004-15-1-7 fatcat:u27auyntxvejncviqiwyydhsr4