Dr. Kathleen Blumreich

This semester our focus will be on feminist utopias and dystopias. Some of these works respond quite directly, if unintentionally, to Freud’s infamous question: ‘What does woman want?’ Other texts change the question itself, asserting what woman ‘does not want.’ As we shall see, however, notions of what constitutes a feminist utopia or dystopia vary across time and are often dependent upon an author’s personal (as opposed to universal) ideals and values. In fact, what one woman may call ‘liberation,’ another may deem ‘oppression.’