By Angelika Bammer
Utopianism - the idea that truth not just needs to, yet can, be replaced - is among the most important impulses of feminist politics. Angelika Bammer strains the articulation of this impulse in literary texts produced in the context of the yank, French and German women's pursuits of the Nineteen Seventies. "Partial Visions" offers a conceptual framework in which to procedure the heritage of Western feminism in this formative interval. while, the book's comparative procedure emphasizes the necessity to distinguish the particularities of other feminisms. Bammer argues that during phrases of an intensive utopianism, Western feminism not just endured the place the Left foundered, yet went a decisive step extra by means of reconceptualizing what either "political" and "utopian" may perhaps suggest. via concurrently shut and contextualized studying of texts released within the US, France and the 2 Germanies among 1969 and 1979, her publication examines the transformative strength in addition to the ideological blindspots of this utopianism. it really is this double area that "Partial Visions" emphasizes. Feminist utopianism, it argues, is not only visionary, yet can be myopic - time and culture-bound. This e-book will be of curiosity to scholars and lecturers of women's experiences, feminist idea, comparative literature, cultural reports, social and cultural background.
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Additional resources for Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s
Example text
Mizora draws this very conclusion. Having accepted the premise “that home is [woman’s] appropriate and appointed sphere of action,”13 Vera Zarovitch is not surprised to find a perfect replica of Victorian domesticity in the utopian future of Mizora. Woman’s nature, she notes, “finds its sweetest pleasure, its happiest content, within its own home circle; and in Mizora I found no exception to the rule” (Lane 1975: 40). In the context of nineteenth-century literature this conclusion and the 34 PARTIAL VISIONS assumptions on which it was based were not unusual.
Class differences, on the other hand, are so deeply entrenched as to appear virtually natural and unchangeable. In the final analysis, therefore, the freedom of Paleverian women like Elodia to do what they want to do is extremely problematic. For if one reads this utopia against the grain, one finds that the very concept of freedom it espouses in relation to gender is called into question by the issue of class. In this respect, Unveiling a Parallel lays out the terms of one of the most critical and ongoing debates within feminism:the debate about the relationship between women’s liberation and class struggle.
Herland, a pastoral society hidden in an almost impenetrable wilderness, once again imagines a world of all women. In the two thousand years since the last men were slain by the young women they were trying to conquer, the descendants of these original Amazons have created a world of free and fearless female people. As a nation of mothers and daughters all parthenogenetically descended from a single female ancestor, Herland is literally one big family. : 19). But home and family, in this utopia, have been radically redefined as the distinction between private and public sphere has been replaced by a sense of community in which life and work are inseparable.
