I managed to convince the editors of sci fi journal Extrapolation to entrust me to review Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch. Subject-wise, you couldn’t get much more up my street; this one was figuratively knocking on my front door. Good news for me, I got sent a review copy of the book, which was handy as it’s £120 otherwise so very not accessible.
Another thing that’s behind a paywall is my book review, which means that like some of my other academic publications I can’t actually read it online myself. Luckily though I have a copy, what I wrote, and I am able to share it here.
Intersections of Destruction, Domination, and Promise
This is the accepted version of the following article: ‘Intersections of Destruction, Domination, and Promise’, which has been published in final form at https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/extr/64/3. This article may be used in accordance with the Liverpool University Press Self-Archiving Policy.
Intersections of Destruction, Domination, and Promise. Douglas A. Vakoch, editor. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction. Routledge, 2021. 167 pp. ISBN 978-0-36-771623-3. $170 hc.
Reviewed by Sheryl M. Medlicott
For those of us who have long suspected that utopian sf and ecofeminism have much to offer each other, this book is an exciting prospect. It proudly brings together contributors from five continents in eleven essays edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, with a foreword by Vandana Singh and an introduction by Patrick D. Murphy. Unlike its sister publication within the Routledge Studies in World Literature and the Environment series, Ecofeminist Science Fiction (2021), which surveys various media, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond deals solely with literary fictions.
Singh’s foreword, “Ecofeminism and Speculative Fiction: A Writer’s Reflection,” is a masterpiece that would justify buying the book in itself if the cost were not so high as to preclude access to general readers. Routledge and similar academic publishers clearly target libraries at these absurdist prices, so you may have to defer to your library if you are lucky enough to have institutional access to one; otherwise, your only hope might be to secure a review copy (ahem).
Many of these essays strive to define ecofeminism, usually by quoting whichever prior ecofeminist scholar’s definition they choose to follow. Singh’s foreword goes to the source to demonstrate how fights for the rights of women and the environment are interlinked while explaining how they encounter colonialism as a key antagonist. She recalls an expedition to the Himalayas in 1980 to study the Chipko movement, named for the women who “put their arms around the trees and successfully prevented them from being cut (hence ‘chipko,’ which means ‘to stick to’ in Hindi)” (xiii). Furthermore, she says that, for the villagers, “the forests gave [them] everything they needed: wood, fuel, fodder, fruits, water” whereas the “Forest Department, a legacy ofBritish rule and an enabler of industrial logging, had a slogan: ‘What do the forests bear? Resin, Wood and Commerce!’” (xix, xx). This contribution most visibly meets the editors’ objective to provide “the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions [by] examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women” (iii).
Murphy’s introduction is an anti-climax to Singh’s foreword. He declares that utopia has “two conflicting definitions” (1). Utopian studies scholars might be thinking that he means blueprints and the education of desire, with a mind to Miguel Abensour, but Murphy has his own ideas: “one, a place that cannot be actualized in reality, but perhaps might be strived for in this imperfect world of fallen human beings; two, a place, or way of life, that could be developed if founded on the right principles” (1). This sentiment illustrates how Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond as a whole has little foundation in utopian and/or sf studies. The essays are sorted into two parts—“Climate Change and Future Earth Dystopias” and “Utopias on Earth and Beyond”—and there is no substantive discussion of the genre distinction made between them. Instead, Murphy ascribes the label “cli-fi,” homogenizing “utopia” and “dystopia” with the term rather than treating them as distinct sf subgenres.
While covering a range of canonical and lesser-known texts, the essays pivot around Ursula K. Le Guin, to whom the book is dedicated and whom Vakoch credits for opening “the possibility for me to start reimagining gender and nature” (xxx). Le Guin is the primary subject of two of the strongest essays and gets an honorable mention in four others.
In “Re-reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s SF,” Amy Chan Kit-Sze teaches the principles of Daoist philosophy. She expertly demonstrates how these principles map onto Le Guin’s sf and where they align with Western eco-philosophy from the likes of Deleuze and Guattari and Donna Haraway. Chan Kit-Sze weaves together complex threads with ease and clarity. She concludes with thoughts that will have to “wait for another paper” (136). I say give her a book to fill with them.
Karl Zuelke’s “Keeping Grows; Giving Flows” on Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985) is the only entry to play with the conventional essay form, opening as it does with a personal anecdote about the crabapple tree adjacent to his home that “nearly died of grief” (138). This is a fitting tribute to Always Coming Home, which makes many structural innovations in order to portray an ecofeminist utopia.
Some of the essays unfortunately provide fewer insights and simply point out where ecofeminist ideas arise (e.g., where women/others such as non-white characters and animals are attuned with nature and ecology as men ride roughshod over it). These include readings by Hatice Övgü Tüzün of Octavia
E. Butler’s Parable series (1993, 1998), by Julia Kuznetski of Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann books (1999, 2005), and by Irene Sanz Alonso of Joan Slonczeski’s A Door into Ocean (1986). Both Tüzün and Kuznetski miss opportunities to bring out the colonialist aspects of the anti-ecology ideologies
under critique, which, in her foreword, Singh contends are part of the same masculinist paradigm. A wealth of Black utopian scholarship focuses on Butler’s series that Tüzün neglects to consult (e.g., see Jayna Brown, adrienne maree brown, and Alex Zamalin), and Kuznetski explicitly separates her work from analyses of Mara and Dann as a “postcolonial parable” (emphasis original, 56).
Michelle Deininger and Gemma Scammell’s “‘Extinction Is Forever’: Ecofeminism and Apocalypse in Louis Lawrence’s Young Adult Short Fiction” and Nicole Anae’s “Ecofeminist Utopian Speculations” on four Australian women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both evaluate largely out-of-print texts. The scope of these contributions is too broad; they are only able to introduce the texts and “show and tell” their relevance for ecofeminist study. Deininger and Scammell note Lawrence’s “engagements with deep ecology” (89). Given the tendency for deep ecologists to perceive humans as polluting interlopers upon a pristine, pure nature, I wonder if this stance would have her diverge from ecofeminist thought that seeks to dissolve a human/nature boundary. Anae asserts that her chosen writers “challenge traditions of colonial SF” (98). But they are still settlercolonists themselves, albeit female, so is theirs a different kind of colonial sf? These essays need more space to explore such issues in depth.
Izabel F. O. Brandão and Ildney Cavalcanti’s “Margaret Atwood’s Ecodystopic SF: Approaching Ethics, Gender, and Ecology” is the better of the two essays on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy. (The other one is from Debra Wain: “An Ecofeminist Treatment of Nourishment and Feeding.”) The action is all in the notes, which explain their working definitions of the terms “ethics,” “transcorporeality,” “post-humanism,” and Brandão’s own coinage, “ecodystopia,” in relation to Atwood’s novels (44–45). As such, Brandão and Cavalcanti have composed a primer in material ecofeminism for sf scholars. In a similar manner, Iris Ralph’s “Ecofeminist Climate Fiction: Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl” might be considered an introduction to (eco)masculinities in ecofeminist discourse, particularly as theorized by Greta Gaard.
In “‘The Revolt of the Mother’: Romanticizing Nature and Rejecting Science in Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground and Other Feminist Utopias,” Christy Tidwell addresses science in ecofeminist utopias and challenges the gender essentialism inherent in several texts, particularly The Wanderground (1978). Contributors have evidently been directed to cross-reference each other’s work, and only Tidwell manages this initiative convincingly by popping in a footnote when she’s touching on something covered elsewhere in the volume. This kind of cross-referencing is a good idea that’s clunky in practice (e.g., on occasion, contributors seem to refer to what must have been a previous version of Kuznetski’s essay).
The publication of Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond validates the interrelations of feminist ecocriticism and sf. While the collection lends insight into ecofeminism for sf scholars, however, it does not have a reciprocal function, and feminist ecocritics are unlikely to learn a great deal about sf and utopian studies.