The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia
“Ever since last week,” Cedar explains on the first page of Louise Erdrich’s 2017 book, Future Home of the Living God, “things have changed. Apparently—I mean, nobody knows—our world is running backward. Or forward. Or maybe sideways, in a way as yet ungrasped.”
This passage has returned to me again and again in recent weeks. It’s never felt more obvious that something is very wrong with the shape and trajectory of the world, that time itself is out of joint. Perhaps you felt a similar sense of disorientation recently, watching one brave, intelligent, persuasive woman after another publicly rake through a traumatic moment in her life. Perhaps you felt, like I did, that something you’d previously felt safe taking for granted—that a man credibly accused of sexual assault might not be elevated to a position of profound power over women—was no longer something to trust.
Maybe you watched the president openly mock the testimony of a woman who says she was assaulted. Perhaps you thought about sexual assault—your own, or the ones you know have happened to your friends, your family members. Maybe you’d assumed until now that the world could only be improved; that each generation would get stronger, kinder, and wiser; that women would eventually teach men not to hurt them. You saw progress eking out its path: women listened to, men sent to prison. But then things began to change. And you observed, as Cedar does, that the world feels like it’s running backward. Or sideways. Or in some direction that makes no sense at all.
This feels like a particularly strange moment in history, but it’s one that writers seem to have anticipated: The past two years have seen that connected the turbulence and the racism and the alternative facts of the 45th presidency with anxieties the world has had before. Over the last couple of years, though, fiction’s dystopias have changed. They’re largely written by, and concerned with, women. They imagine worlds ravaged by climate change, worlds in which humanity’s progress unravels. Most significantly, they consider reproduction, and what happens when societies try to legislate it.
