‘I feel, therefore I am; I think, therefore I can be free’: The Unique Confluence
of Utopia and Feminism in Sultana’s Dream
by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Anindita Mukherjee
is currently pursuing Masters in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. She got her BA in English Literature from Presidency
University, Kolkata.
Abstract
Sultana’s Dream
is a short story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain which the paper aims to situate
within a broader feminist critique in conjunction with utopian discourses,
primarily as a cursory reading of the text may foreground such concerns. The
paper argues that this collusion is problematic even as the primary text is a
Utopian Feminist text from the East. However, due to certain limitations, a
carefully scrutinized reading of certain Western Feminist theories lends a
unique position to the text in the Feminist Literary Canon, if indeed, a claim
for one may be made.
Keywords: Utopian discourse, Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain.
“Where
I am, I am not. I am far away from those who are around me. I live and move
upon a world-wide chasm of separation, unstable as the dew-drop upon the lotus
leaf” (Tagore 941-42). These words of Bimala in the 1916 novel Ghaire Baire (The Home and The World) by Rabindranath Tagore embosoms both the transparency
and the inscrutability of inhabiting a ‘perfect’ feminine space in a world that
encroaches not only upon the spatial boundaries which are informed by socially
reproducible gender differences but also make us confront a caesural pause, a
significant gap in the in-between-ness of identity formation. Sultana’s Dream, a short story by Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain precipitates this psyche of in-between-ness, a zone that is
concurrently marked by the desire of attaining topographical singularity as
well as the tenuousness that underlies the foundational framework of such
utopianism. This paper would seek to argue that inspite of having close affinities,
feminist criticism and utopian discourses are ‘not’ exactly in a state of wedlock
and an attempt to read this narrative in such exactitude would debunk and
dislocate its situatedness in the feminist universe. Even though the primary
text of this paper is a Utopian Feminist text from the East, due to certain
limitations, this paper has deployed a carefully scrutinized reading of the
Western Feminist theories with a geopolitically refracted theoretical lens
differently positioned with the awareness that Sultana’s Dream predates Western Feminist discourses of Utopianism
and see how this lends to the unique position of the text in the Feminist Canon.
Utopian
discourses are narrativised accounts of a transcendent sensibility, championing
the availability of new possibilities in a spatio-temporal setting of imagined
realities, where seemingly “eschatological implications” offer an apocalyptic
end to “human suffering, a happy ending to a long story” (Goodwin 1). It is
very awry of feminist criticism to rely upon the ‘grace of imagination’;
instead it would be effective to establish a genealogy of the ‘sins and errors
of the past’ so that constructive critiques can help ‘lead us out of the “Egypt
of female servitude” to the promised land of humanism” (Heilbrun and Stimpson
64 ). The relation of Utopian fictions with Feminist epistemology is
ambivalent, because on hand feminist ideology claims towards improving the woman/
human condition that is far removed from the idylls of utopianism, and on the
other hand claims that ‘feminism seems to have at least an inherent [emphasis mine] utopian inclination” (Goodwin 2) thereby
grounding its roots further away from reality.
The
term utopia was first coined by Sir Thomas More in the book called Utopia (1516). Utopia is a pun on two
Greek terms, ‘ou topos’ meaning ‘no place’ and ‘eu topos’ meaning a ‘good place’.
This homophonological proximity brings us close to the nature and politics of
the utopian site as is presented in the story Sultana’s Dream. Just as Michel Foucault uses the term ‘Mirror’ in ‘Of
Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ to depict a ‘placeless place’ as well
as a ‘sort of counteraction’, this utopian narrative merits critical
interpretation at two levels: firstly, as the mirror bequeaths an image, an
unreal visibility of oneself where one is invariably absent; the utopianism and
its relation to feminism reflected in the narrative can be traced back to this
same analogy, where utopia is no real place, but one of suspension from where
we can draw certain cues for feminist thought regarding what the image of an
‘ideal’ society can be (but is not). Secondly, such an absentia exerts a ‘sort
of counteraction’, from where one can realise the prospect of a feminist
subject- position vis-à-vis the illusoriness in the previous case, followed by
a resumption or a reconstitution to a place which is grounded in reality.
The
narrative of Sultana’s Dream is
throughout riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions that create a gulf,
a veritable chasm betwixt imaginative accounts of utopian speculation and
experiential accounts of realistic visualisation. To begin with, the identity
of Sister Sara seems dubious and complexities abound in the way the she is characterized.
She is taken to be the harbinger of a world that is “free from sin or harm”
(Hossain 4), but her relation to the protagonist of the story, Sultana is a
contested one. She acts as an interface between the conscious and the
unconscious world; a thread that bridges the contours of utopian imagination
and real quotidian existence. Nevertheless her typical characterisation uncovers
the fidgety relationship feminism shares with utopian politics. She acts as an
encasement that contains the entire narrative in action by playing the role of
a formulaic catalyst for the “liberation of the [female] spirit from the
pressure of external nature” (G.H von Schubert, qtd in Freud 2). Sultana is
critical of her role in the realist setting, thus she remarks, “how she came
in, I do not know. I took her for my friend, Sister Sara…” (Hossain 3),
implying that her very origination is a disputed one. Although Sultana refers
her as her ‘friend’ who brings in promise of relief and resolve, there is to a
certain degree a sort of tension that is manifested in the sudden shift of the
relative association when she found that her “companion was not Sister Sara,
but a stranger” (Hossain 3).
The
sudden shift of relationship cannot be relegated as a mere happenstance; since
this alludes to how feminist engagement with utopian politics vacillates over
several issues. The character of Sister Sara forms the basis of a methodolatry that
envisions utopianism as a escape from the constructedness of gender roles, but
indeed as Sultana remarks that it would be a ‘mistake’ to do so. When Sister
Sara wished “Good Morning” to Sultana, she knew that it “was not morning, but
starry night” (Hossain 3), reminding us that she is conscious of her present
state of being; the imagery of the night is employed deliberately to state the
actual conditions of women in real life where they are entrapped within the
dark labyrinth of oppression and discrimination in contradistinction to the
supposed ‘morning’ in the utopian land. If Sister Sara is taken to be the means
through which Sultana discovers herself in the Ladyland, she is highly
sceptical of its constitution and this is evident in the way she ‘inwardly’
smiles. The choice of word is noteworthy, because the word ‘inwardly’ means ‘within
the mind’ (OED Online); therefore at
the beginning of the story Rokeya through the character of Sultana makes a
conscious distinction between the utopian land and the realist setting.
The
positioning of the utopian landscape within a dream carries imbricated layers
of meaning; firstly the unbridgeable distance with reality is made conspicuous
and secondly, as a dream is conceived as a secret wish fulfilment, this utopia
within a dream stands as a caution for curbing all elysian wishes that pertain
to invert the existing model of social organisation to bring gender equality in
the society. The tendency of inverting the patriarchal model into a matriarchal
one is a process of inducing subsets of similar hierarchy which
are always in part tied to the repressive
regimes they [women/men] wish to challenge…[I]t is extraordinarily hard to
think about what we see and don’t see when [seemingly] progressive ways of
thinking are continually being stolen and redeployed for the purposes of the
preserving power systems. Oppression and repression, deception and silences,
stunt our viewings of the present, with no before after. (Eisenstein 39)
Rokeya intentionally places her readers in
this dichotomy of preserving one ‘power system’ by discarding the other,
thereby offering a glimpse of the avenues in the utopian land only to subvert
such magical transmutation by exposing its pitfalls and limitations. She breaks
with the utopian tradition in the space of the text itself, engages in the creative
attempt of rewriting herstory by
challenging and disempowering the existent ways of thinking about women. Subversion
of a dominant trope (utopia) in the story may stand in for substituting (his)story
which offers spaces for women only in a place that is non-existent.
As
Rokeya toys with the notion of utopia, Helene Cixous’s appropriation of the
concept of ‘Paradise’ is crucial in understanding the relevance of Utopia for
measuring the shortcomings of the contemporary world. Just as a Paradise cannot
be regained, a Utopia cannot be materialised in reality, but has to be reinvented
and “reconstructed via ‘a different sub-jective economy”’ (Shiach, qtd in
Schonpflug 63), i.e., a subjective understanding of unlearning hierarchies
should be carried out by keeping in mind the innumerable effects of
marginalisation in the society. The desire for a ‘subjective economy’ must be
consolidated and synthesised so that the generalising tendency of treating the
utopian ‘estrangement’ (Monika Shafi, qtd in Schonpflug 66) as desirable and
symptomatic of a literary and social tradition that privileges the position of
the women can be avoided. Even when the Ladyland is presumed to be free “from
sin or harm” (Hossain 4), immune to the binaries, gender specifications, and
hiearchisation; Sultana remarks that in the Ladyland, “Some of the passers- by
made jokes at me” only because she was “very mannish”. The word ‘mannish’
itself foregrounds that even in a Utopian space, the essential qualities of men
are used as a metrics for determining what a woman is or how a woman ‘should’
behave. Sultana distanciation from the Ladyland by saying that “I could not
understand their language” (Hossain 3) is a way of establishing her subjective
economy. Her inability or unwillingness in understanding their language
(language being the primary means of communication) is a subjective way of
dissociating or disengaging herself from the utopian milieu.
The
degree of dissociation works not only at a personal microcosmic level, but at a
larger macrocosmic realm as well, especially in the way Sultana’s Dream is presented as a scathing indictment of the
nationalist discourse where the ‘woman question’ presumably solved by situating
the location of the nationalist enterprise in the private sphere. Home became
not a “complementary but the original site on which the hegemonic project of
nationalism was launched” (Ray 120). Women were perceived to be to locus where
the otherwise differentiated lines of tradition and modernity could intersect
one another for the creation of a ‘new’ nationalist culture. Mukti Lakhi argues
in a similar vein that the male ‘nationalist mind’ together with his colonised
‘self-identity’ brazen further by a fundamental crisis of masculinity reduced women
as mere reactants in the cultural process of the society. Perhaps this is why
Sultana remarks, “We have no hand or voice in the management of our social
affairs. In India man is lord and master…” (Hossain 5). She becomes nothing
more than a relative absence, structurally present in the nationalist discourse
as a ‘new woman’ but ontologically absent from the dialectical cultural
processes of the society. The nationalist discourse has deliberately situated
the quest of the woman for alternative existence within the realms of the
household or ‘home’.
Sultana
also notes, “He has taken to himself all powers and privileges and shut up
women in the zenana” (Hossain 5). When Sister Sara tells Sultana that “Your
Calcutta could become a nicer garden than this if only your countrymen wanted
to make it so” (Hossain 4), she responds that ‘they’ (men) think it ‘useless’ to
pay attention to ‘horticulture’. Horticulture though means growing plants, but
the figurative connotations may invariably imply how patriarchal politics
engage in systematic literalisation of the female body. Conventionally, women
have been linked with the conception of ‘Nature’ because of the association
with fertility and ‘natural’ reproductive capabilities, and perhaps it is on
these grounds that the association with the literal usage of the term
horticulture can be ascertained. Not giving ‘attention to horticulture’ may
also allude to the nationalist representations of Muslim women as ‘backward’
and ‘victimised’ whose “relation to the category of ‘modern, ideal, Indian
woman”’ (Sarkar 49) was intrinsically associated with the image of a Hindu,
upper caste, middle class bhadramahila,
who were celebrated as signposts of “‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ among Bengali
bhadrasampraday” (Sarkar 49). Rokeya seems critical of the long standing
occlusion of Muslim women from the historical tracts of Bengal and thus in
Sultana remarks that “they (men) have many other things to do” (Hossain 4).
Interestingly,
in the Ladyland, men have been confined in the zenana in and the consolidated assertion represented in the two
phrases of Sister Sara ‘exactly, so’ highlights the manner in which women are
restricted in the innermost quarters of their home facing similar crisis and
disillusionment in real life. Envisioning alternative spaces through exclusion
reveals the fundamental crisis of utopianism in restructuring the grids of
social cohabitation and therefore an irreparable and irreconcilable zone of
imbalance is created which is not only severed from the utopian but also from
the realist way of social restricting. The exclusionary nature of the Utopian
discourse as is reflected in the narrative participates in the production of
yet another discourse of othering, thereby rendering ‘others’ as unwanted and
“historically inconsequential”(qtd in Schonpflug 70).This is relevant to our
discussion in the light of argument that develops between Sister Sara and
Sultana regarding the “proper place” of men and Sultana realises her “mistake”
by saying “you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before” (Hossain
4). She states that “We shut men indoors”, but gives no reason whatsoever for
it; rather draws an analogy by saying that as women were shut indoors in the zenana, men are ‘exactly’ tied to the
same fate. What is all the more disturbing is that even when Sultana is present
physically in the Ladyland, she is rendered as a complete other, who is unable
to construe the immense possibilities of freedom and happiness in their
‘customs’.
This
distanciation or defamiliarization exposes not only the banality of existence
in the utopian land but the inability of utopian politics to render what
‘proper’ places can mean to be. Considering the man as one “who do or at least
is capable of doing no end of mischief” (Hossain 5), or one who does not have “patience
enough to pass thread to a needle hole” (6) is a part of the discourse that
essentialises the qualities of two sexes on the basis of their dubious
‘natural’ constitution. Quite interestingly, the rationale underpinning the
exclusion of women from the public sphere cannot be attributed to their
‘nature’, as the systematic oppression of women is a “political issue rather than an inevitable fact of
women’s biology” (Moore 128). But, Sister Sara remarks, “You have neglected the
duty you owe to yourselves and you have lost your natural rights by shutting
your eyes to your own interests” (Hossain 5); debunking the uneven dynamics that
participates in articulating gender roles in the society. It is awry of utopian
politics to consider women responsible for their subservient position, rather a
genealogy of the history of prejudice and discrimination is to be drawn and
amassed so that the false delectability of fetching an ‘answer’ to the
secondary position of women can be done away with. But, in Sultana’s Dream, the purpose of presenting this inverted image in a
utopian land is not an attempt to legitimise the subservient position or
otherisation of men in the Ladyland or to argue that matriarchy can bring
equality in the social capital but to show the exact plane on which this utopia
acts as a subversion of itself. By positing the utopian and the realist world,
but by incorporating the same exclusion, the utopia shows the problems and
pitfalls of both.
Succumbing
to the patriarchal model of restructuring society is faulty, because it is
incapable of terminating seclusion, but is potent enough on increasing their
dependence on men for officialising the dictum of ignoring the ‘natural rights’
as the supposed cause of female subordination. The architectonics of the
kitchen in the Ladyland works on a similar version of exclusion. That the
kitchen exists in the utopian landscape is no cause of worry as might be the
case with Alice Austin and Ruth Adams, feminist architects who “wanted to
‘throw out’ the kitchen to spare women from having to cook” (Shands 59), but
its utilitarian value is underpinned by its very indispensability in the
household. In Sulana’s Dream, the
kitchen is presented as a space that is “situated in a beautiful vegetable
garden… [where] every tomato plant was itself an ornament…it was clean and
bright… [with] no sign of coal or fire” (Hossain 7). Such illustrative account
of the “feminine milieus”, as Nancy Henley identifies, is problematized in the
way Sister Sara vehemently says, “Of course the men have been asked to clear
off when I was going there” (Hossain 7).
Critics
may unvaryingly argue that the kitchen, being the “domestic core of the private
sphere- resembles the bodily spaces of the woman” (Shands 59) and thus the
forceful proscription of men is a way of reclaiming or re-valorising the
spatial metaphors of femininity. The problem lays not so much in excluding men
from the spatial politics of the kitchen, but how the kitchen, which is taken
to be the natural place of women or an instrument contrived to domesticate
women and their sexuality is seen as a “proper place” for feminist utopian
imagination. The utopian landscape which holds promises of emancipation and
empowerment reduces us in the closets of the same binarisation and gender
articulation from which we were assured deliverance. The idea that men do not
or rather should not have access to the kitchen, as is evident from the story
is a way of reiterating the patriarchal recommendations of constructing a
private sphere that is considered to be well suited for the women. The lack of
women performing significant public roles in the story and working only for
‘two hours’ a day can be perceived as an innocuous manifestation of joie de
vivre of a utopian land.
Nevertheless,
we never get to know of the public roles of other women inhabiting the utopian
land except Sister Sara. Sister Sara can be taken as a representative of all
the women in the utopian land, but their decreased mobility cannot be kept
aside. Although they advance varied reasons pertaining to the work ethics of
men who “smoke two or three choroots…talk much about their work…wastes six hours
every day in sheer smoking” (Hossain 7), their immobility cannot be justified
on the basis of scientific fictionality that reduces their pressure of work,
primarily because such fictionality itself becomes the fulcrum of judging the multiple
possibilities of freedom and equality in the utopian world. In order to
strengthen feminist criticism that relies on building alternative feminine
spaces, a simple reversal of the gender roles or a utopian assignation
pertaining to who should inhabit the public or the private space is not only
detrimental but undesirable in bringing gender equality.
Furthermore,
terms such as ‘public’ and/ ‘private’ are themselves constructions and as
Michel Foucault argues “power exists everywhere” (93) irrespective of the
position in the division of power concerning who occupies the public/ private
sphere. Power and resistance may also reside in areas which are otherwise seen
as “muted” (Shands 64) or segregated places. These places may have their own
metaphors of describing what power and resistance may imply within their
subjective economy that are empowering in themselves. Thus, in Sultana’s Dream when men are asked to
retreat into the secluded core of the household called the zenanas, the women remarked that they did it “for the sake of purdah”
(Hossain 10), thereby reclaiming purdah
as a means of resistance. The phrase ‘purdah’ can also stand as a metonymical
extension of meaning feminine values like modesty and humility. The exact reason
nevertheless remains ambiguous. But if it happens to be an attempt to
appropriate or contextualise purdah as a way of reclaiming the rightful control
of their bodies in the Ladyland, then the ramifications are very clear.
Reclaiming the purdah can also be a way of unwittingly re-inscribing the precepts
of patriarchal logistics of crippling both the body and the mind of the woman.
Rokeya at times although made a difference between abarodh, i.e., forceful seclusion and purdah which was considered as “acceptable so far as modesty of
women was concerned” (Ray 62).
However,
in ‘Istrijatir Abanati’ she seems very critical about the nature of seclusion
and states:
Do women of all societies live confined in
purdah? Or did I say that they are fully civilised only because they have
relinquished the purdah? My focus was on the enslavement of the mind. (Hossain
33)
Although power and resistance carries several
metaphors, there are certain limitations, especially when the use of power goes
unregulated and unchecked. A useful way of understanding this unregulatory
mechanism of power in Sultana’s Dream
is how women ‘overpowered’ the men by dint of their mental faculties.
Overpowering either by arms or brain is an act of transgression. Therefore violence
committed must not be made justifiable in any way. That the men in the Ladyland
have been ‘overpowered’ is clearly visible when Sister Sara says that “It is
not likely that they would surrender…of their own accord…They must have been
overpowered” (Hossain 8). By stating what utopia may emerge, the likely
tendencies that can develop when the process of achieving complete freedom goes
to the extent of imposing oppressive strategies of control, utopia loses its
value as an alternative space of freedom and ecstasy. Homogeneity in actions
and thought processes becomes the master narrative and eventually seclusion becomes
the cause of social evil. The surficial understanding of the evolution of
Ladyland into a utopian space and how the “military officers sprang to their
feet…to meet the enemy” (9) but lost can be attributed to the fact that the “enemy…
was too strong for them.” One may argue that it was the seclusion between the
men and the women that forms the root cause of such a defeat.
The
universities in which the women were admitted by the intervention of the Queen
were kept closed for the men folk, thus the fruits of scientific innovation and
experiments remained unknown to them. Had they not been excluded, similar
scientific techniques could be used to serve their purposes of defeating their enemy.
But, this does not answer whether women could have come out of their zenanas or not. Apparently it might seem
that the seclusion of the men was necessary for the increased mobility of the
women outside the zenana.
Nevertheless the apparent justification might be an obvious impediment in
realising the ambiguities, gaps, silences of the text pertaining to how the
text carries but breaks with the dominant assumptions of utopianism. The
incongruity that is presented is a unique one; monopoly in availing the
scientific inventions make the women victorious in fighting with the enemy but
excluded men from enjoying the fruits of it. But had the men not lost the
battle, the women could not have come out of the zenanas to use the scientific discoveries available at their
disposal for fighting against them. So, exclusion forms the central structure
of utopian imagination, where creation of utopia for one would be advocated at
the cost of subordinating others from it.
Moreover,
the reason of renaming the ‘zenana’, sequestered female quarters, as ‘Mardana’
remains ambiguous in matriarchal society, although as ‘Mardana’ was synonymous
with the public sphere, the desire of the women to dwell in the public sphere
can be taken as a probable reason of renaming. The contradictories and
discontinuities represented in Sultana’s
Dream reveal the
possibility for imagining utopia’s relevance
to – and promise for – feminism: utopia is only viable if it is left
permanently open, contested, in contradiction with itself, if it is never put
into practice as a static, codified entity, but remains a shifting landscape of
possibility. Utopia’s potential lies in its transformative nature, but this
transformative quality must be brought to bear on the very meaning of the term
for it to be significant in the future. (Sanders 4)
The transformative and the contested nature
of the utopia needs to be realised but to consider the Utopian model in Sultana’s Dream as a guiding principle
is a potential threat for the society. The manner in which women seem to have
undergone through a process of internalisation of the ideals of womanhood
designed by men, in a similar manner, as Sister Sara remarks that years after
men have been confined in the zenana,
they “have ceased to grumble at their seclusion” (Hossain 11), veritably
implying how hegemonic strategies of power function in the society and the
subordination of one cannot be attributed to their unawareness about their
‘natural rights’.
The
manner in which Rokeya reworks the genre of utopian narrative within a dream
sequence permeates and directs the course of the narrative in a way that the avenues
of social dreaming and its seeming limitlessness form the basis of criticism
for the existing social order. Feminist authors who consider utopia as “more
creative than critical”, with innumerable facets how imagination could
transform “aesthetic reality” (Annas, qtd in Teslenko, Section 6) fail to
understand that they are falling in the trap of the universalising and
generalising tendencies of achieving freedom in an alternative socio-symbolic
order which has no existence whatsoever ; that ‘aesthetic reality’ is a
falsified knowledge, a promise of attaining salvation ‘there and then’, rather
than ‘here and now’. This is explicable in the way the story comes to an end,
where a plausibly open-ended utopian narrative articulating feminine
reconstructions of subjectivity, desire, alterity and difference meets a
closure, and the protagonist, Sultana remarks that “I somehow slipped down and
the fall startled me out of my dream” (Hossain 14), recalling how the entire
episode had been a part of the dream sequence.
Having
said this, even when she finds herself back in the reality lounging in her easy
chair, she seems preoccupied with the same dilemma, with which she was
grappling with in the beginning of the story, i.e., the ‘condition of Indian
womanhood’. This provides us with ample evidence how inspite of having apparent
knowledge about the resolve of bringing gender equality by establishing a
utopian world in her dreams. She seems highly sceptical about it, not only
because a dream is highly removed from the circumstantial truths of everyday
life but also because the distilled prospects of a utopian land is inadequate
in deliberating well with the practical possibilities that concern women
emancipation. The narrative loses its ability of furtherance as a utopia, primarily
because the apparent resolve that is worked out in the form of establishing a
matriarchal society fails, and such irresolution is symptomatic of the
dissolution the protagonist faces with the seeming resolve of the age old
problem. The dissolution achieves a greater degree when the narrative ends not
with a full stop but with an exclamation mark, reminding us that the resolve
enacted in the utopia is a false one. Sultana stresses the stagnancy of her
position that is bereft of any significant shift in perspective and position
and this is evident from the usage of the words “my own bedroom” which could
very well be ‘my bedroom’ as is the case in the first line of the story.
Critics
who have considered Sultana’s Dream
as a Utopia or a Feminist Science Fiction tend to miss a point that both these
genres are presented by Rokeya within a dream that Sultana saw and the
relevance of it cannot be forsaken altogether. Sultana’s Dream not only becomes the title of the story but the
central premise of it pervades in the form, content and the style of the
narrative. The dreams become a container of all the fantastic elements in the
story as well as a necessary border/ break that marks the critical distance
between reality and fantasy. Moreover, the dream succinctly carries both the
worlds of Sultana as well as Sister Sara, thus, both real conditions of
existence in a zenana and the
confined state of men in the mardana
are contained as well as pitted against one another. The dream becomes an
important motif of estrangement, the embodiment of a critical distance that by
incorporating both reality and fantasy within it forms a critique of both. In
an attempt to render utopia as a model for structuring the desire of a
marginalised group, it falls easy prey to essentialisation where the desires of
a specific group is taken to stand in for all, where “some women become all
women” (Kitch 5).
The
intention of this paper is not to argue that utopian texts do not inform
feminist responses of conceiving reality ‘ideally’, but to consider an utopia
as an ‘ideal’ would definitely mean a serious distortion of the critical
distance that should maintained between the idealistic parameters that make a
utopia and realistic parameters that can be “framed through an emphasis not on
imagining perfect societies but as discursive practices of resisting the
present” (McBean 55). This critical distance probably may become the feminist
chronotope that radicalises difference nevertheless by acknowledging that a break
with the utopian model is necessary. If a truly feminine space is to be
articulated in this “epoch of simultaneity” and “juxtaposition” (Foucault 1),
essentialisation and hiearchisation; a significant de-sanctification has to
occur, where Utopia should be conceived as a tool, potential enough to inform
and guide the impulses of feminist demeanour but nevertheless glaciated enough
to present us with a void, an impasse in our understanding of the world as it
is, a world that is essentially phallocentric and is tainted with erosion of
individuality and projection of stereotypes.
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