A perfect world, who doesn't want that? But what is perfect is debatable. What is great for one person is disastrous for another. PhD student Zeynep Anli took a closer look at dreams for the future by looking at gender-separated utopias.
'Utopian literature that is gender-separatist outlines a world where women and men live separately from each other,' explains Zeynep Anli. 'This separation tends to bring conflict, which can question the socio-economic, political or biological differences between men and women.'
Gender
Perhaps the example of gender separatist utopian literature that deserves more credit and also the first utopian literary work written by a woman is Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies, which she wrote in 1405. 'In the work, De Pizan presents several women who had a positive impact on society. She also questions whether women should be taught in the same way as men and why some men do not want women to be taught at all.'
'In The Book of the City of Ladies, a clear distinction is made between women and men,' Anli continued, 'In the heyday of this subgenre, in the 1960s and 1970s, authors went a step further and the principle of gender was completely abandoned. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness questions whether gender matters at all, thus managing to question not only the idea of gender separatism but also gender relations in our own world.'
The exclusion of utopia
'What we see not only in gender-separatist utopias, but also in general utopian literature, is that there are always individuals or groups to be excluded,' Anli explains. 'What is a utopia for women is a dystopia for men. And this applies to basically all the utopias I have analysed. What may be a utopia for the author may come across as a dystopia to many readers.'
'That exclusion is often accompanied by hope for a better world. The exclusion described in the story is necessary to eliminate the cause of bad things like war, disease and misfortune. Destroying all the negative creates a clean slate on which the improved world can be built. It is this hope that can be found in both utopia and dystopia, as dystopia also seeks to destroy the cause of all that is bad.'
