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School of Modern Languages & Cultures: Department of German

Staff in the Department of German

Go to the MLAC staff pages.

Publication details for Dr Caitríona Ni Dhuill

Image: Sex in Imagined Spaces. Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch.2010 Ní Dhúill, Caitríona Sex in Imagined Spaces. Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch, Legenda, 200 pp.
  • Publication type: Books: authored
  • ISSN/ISBN: 9781906540418
  • View online: Online version

Author(s) from Durham

Abstract

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing 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 position of central importance 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.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/mlac/german/NiDhuill-Flyer.pdf