Recovering hope in darkness: The role of gender in dystopian narratives

Abstract

My aim is to comment on dystopia based on an approach that has foregrounded, from its very beginning, issues of writing in their intersection with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. In the first part of the article, I carry out a reflection on the genre of dystopia, how it has changed, its constituent elements and their transformations, with a look in particular to its gender dimension, its formal and thematic features, as well as to its modes of articulating horizons of hope. In the second part, I discuss dystopian conventions and developments, drawing from Lyman Sargent’s (1994, 2022), my own work and together with Tom Moylan (2003, 2020), Ildney Cavalcanti’s (2000), Ruth Levitas’s (2007) contributions. I understand that dystopia remains fundamentally a term for a distinct literary genre, with its particular history, its formal characteristics, but also its evolving form. In the third part of the article, I analyze Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, as an example of critical dystopias produced today. Finally, I conclude that in dark times, dystopian literature becomes even more important to us, providing both the tools and the necessary incentive that we need to critically interpret and transform our present.