The Utopia of El País de las Mujeres from the Risk of Essence and Gynocentrism: A Political Strategy

Abstract

El País de las Mujeres, by Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli, builds a utopian representation of a society based on Gynocracy, provoking a kind of self-criticism of the humanist bases, since the latter considered the relationship between sex and the female gender as negative, present in Beauvoir (1967) when she affirmed the word woman linked to the state of education and customs and denied the female biological potential of reproductive processes as positive for the emancipation of women. In the work, there is a desire for men and women to recognize the values of traditional femininity, historically seen as biological (maternity and mothering, care and contact), to be transcended from the domestic space to the public space. The problem is how the “risk of essence” discussed by Fuss (2017) can contribute to the understanding that the public space previously dominated by men is dominated by women in a Utopia of Felicismo, with a gynocentrist base. The general objective is to reflect on utopia in the latent desire to (re)think and question the effects of patriarchy in Latin America. The research is bibliographic and critical-literary-feminist based on Fuss (2017); Bloch (2005); Freire (1997); Cavalcanti (2017); Vergès (2020), among others.