Sex in Imagined Spaces - 9781906540418

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social practices. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopia as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to 're-arranging' gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a central position in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.

LEGENDA is anoint imprint of the Modem Humanities Research Association and Malley Publishing. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities.