Feminist science fiction continues to be a vehicle for women writers to examine gender roles

and experiment with the ways they could be changed. For lesbian and bisexual women,
feminist science fiction offers a place for us to experience worlds where women are central,
and where being a lesbian is often the norm instead of the exception.

Although women have written about imagined utopias since the nineteenth century, feminist
science fiction did not come into its own until the late 1960s. Partially inspired by the feminist
and gay rights movements of the 1960s, authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, and
Suzy McKee Charnas created worlds in which women ruled, gave birth to children without
the help of men, or switched genders throughout their lives.

Many of these feminist utopias looked very similar. They were ecologically stable,
communal, egalitarian, non-capitalist, non-sexist, non-racist, non-hierarchical—in other
words, a 1960s-era commune populated only by women. As academic Sonya Andermahr
noted in her 1993 essay “The Worlds of Lesbian/Feminist Science Fiction,” these utopias
often excluded men not because the authors necessarily hated men, but because of a desire to
envision a world in which power was not located in one (male) sex.

More recent feminist science fiction novels, such as Nicola Griffith’s "Ammonite," have
moved beyond 1970s feminism’s romance of the earth mother. In other words, sex and
violence and pain and pleasure all return in full force, which can be a relief after reading some
of the colder, more political feminist science fiction. It was certainly important to imagine
alternate worlds in which gender was redefined and power was not patriarchal, but I am
thankful we have moved into a third generation of feminism where lesbian desire can be
expressed without cloaking it in maternal love.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy is a feminist science fiction novel in
which the protagonist must act to win the utopian future over an alternative, dystopian, one.
Utopia, in its most common and general positive meaning, refers to the human efforts to
create a better, or perhaps perfect society. Ideas which could be/are considered able to
radically change our world are often called utopian ideas.
This work presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave
feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana
Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal
as the political, and of criticizing the patriarchical social order.In her examination of two
novels of the 70s - Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You and Joanna Russ's
The Female Man - Teslenko provides a comprehensive account of the generic strategy of
feminist utopian fiction. Feminist utopias, according to Teslenko, describe a better time/place
for women while working with the linguistic and generic tools of patriarchy. These fictions
attempt to transgress social codes, to refigure patriarchal tropes, and to explode genre-setting
rules through the use of fragmentation, ambiguity, multiplicity and openness.This book
demonstrates feminists' attempts through fiction to envision a new political order. Teslenko
takes a thorough look at a reworked 'good place that is no place' that elaborates a site of
gendered opposition.
Beginning with a general discussion of patriarchy as the starting point of feminist utopian
literature, Qian Ma's study focuses on a cross cultural comparison of feminist utopian
discourse in six eighteenth-century Chinese and English fictional narratives - Charlotte
Lennox' Female Quixote, Sarah Scott's A Description of Millennium Hall, Samuel
Richardson's Clarissa, Chen Duansheng's Destiny after Rebirth, Cao Xueqin's A Dream of the
Red Mansion, and Li Ruzhen's Destiny of Flowers in the Mirror. This study also examines the
contrast between the feminist idealistic world and the patriarchal realistic world within
fictional narratives, and the contrast between fictional ideality and social realities in China
and England during the eighteenth century. Although restrictions of patriarchal society
fostered a tendency for early feminist writers to express social criticism obliquely in the form
of utopias, the writers discussed in this study were true forerunners of contemporary
feminism, and their works anticipated today's feminist concerns.
Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that argues that there is no single
cause for a woman's subordination because sociological gender is itself constructed through
language. Because the meaning behind this gender is not universal, there is no single
approach towards dealing with the issue.

Although postmodernism resists characterization, it is possible to identify certain themes or

orientations that postmodern legal feminists share. Mary Joe Frug suggested that one
"principle" of postmodernism is that human experience is located "inescapably within
language." Power is exercised not only through direct coercion, but also through the way in
which language shapes and restricts our reality. This makes language a potentially fruitful site
of political struggle.

Frug's second postmodern principle is that gender is not something natural, nor is it something
completely determinate and definable. Like all human systems of meaning, it is constantly
evolving and capable of infinite variations under individual circumstances. Gender is,
therefore, socially constructed and completely inescapable (what would it mean to be outside
the system of meaning?), but always susceptible to a new interpretation. Gender, like other
systems of meaning, is less like a cage, and more like a tool: it constrains but never
completely determines what one can do with it.*

A more simplistic way of understanding the concept of postmodern feminism, or the

subjectivity of gender, leaving aside language for a moment, is to look at the toys given to
children. Few parents would give a boy a female doll at a young age, and most people without
much thought would give a young girl a dolly, a symbol of motherhood. At a young age,
children are given gender stereotypes and roles, we give fake make-up kits to young girls, and
action figures to young boys.

If gender was a fixed innate concept, and not a conditioned one, one could easily give a boy a
doll and know he would throw it away, but since gender is not fixed, we do not give the boy
the doll, for we fear the backlash or the bullying that child would receive, because every other
boy has a football. Thus, the concept is that there exists conditioning our children to be like
everyone else, intentionally or not. No two year old girl, playing with a doll imagines herself
giving birth, she wears her mother's high shoes to emulate her, not to look attractive or
feminine. Postmodern feminism gender identities are conditioned, developed, there is no
innate masculinity or femininity.