The Feminist Utopia in Prema Shah and Rokeya S. Hossain: Linking the Real to the Ideal

Prema Shah’s “A Husband” and Rokeya S. Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” present two complementary versions of women’s world: the real in Shah and the imagined in Hossain aspire to make the other complete. The worldview that each author projects in their texts reasserts the latent spirit of the other one. The embedded interconnectedness between the authors under discussion reveals their unique association and bond of women’s creative unity towards paving a road for the upliftment of women in general. The paper seeks to find out the historical forces leading to the formation of a certain type of bond between these two authors from different historical and socio-cultural realities. Shah locates a typical Nepali woman in the protagonist in the patriarchal order while Hossain pictures the contemporary Bengali Islamic society and reverses the role of men and women. Hossain’s ideal world and Shah’s real world form two complementary versions of each other: despite opposite in nature, each world completes the other. Sultana moves to the world of dream to seek a new order because Nirmala’s world exercises every form of tortures upon the women’s self. Shah exposes the social reality dictating upon the women’s self while Hossain’s protagonist escapes into the world of dream where women control the social reality effectively and successfully. Overall, Shah and Hossain complement each other’s world by presenting two alternative versions of the same reality, creating the feminist utopia.

Baseball, not Biology

This chapter confronts the central claim of many in sport studies that sports may best be characterized by hegemonic masculinity. This school of thought is reflected in the work of such scholars as Nancy Lesko and Varda Burstyn. To challenge this notion, this chapter reads widely from early feminist utopia to contemporary young adult science fiction, exploring the representation of gender as it relates to sport. Science fiction does not limit sport to the realm of the masculine. Athletic bodies, rather, present a distinct limitation to the construction of sport as an inherently violent, destructive (coded masculine) space. In this way, this chapter saves a place for biological embodiment and posits the equation of sport and hegemonic masculinity as an oversimplified essentialism.

A Feminist's Call for Anarchy

While Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed has been categorized as a science fction and utopiannovel, I argue that it should also be considered a feminist utopia. With infuences from feminismand Marxism, Le Guin uses both theories to create a comparison between two political systems—anarchy and democracy—to ultimately reveal that anarchy is more conducive for feminism. Theanarchic system of government provides women with more agency than capitalism, becausewomen are free from class and gender oppression. Theorists such as Lewis Call and Daniel Jaeckledefne the anarchy that is established in The Dispossessed. The distinct female characters in TheDispossessed demonstrate the clear diferences between the two political systems. Additionally,I argue that The Dispossessed is a feminist text with the ultimate purpose of demonstrating howwomen can reach equality and ultimate agency in an anarchic state due to Le Guin's example

On Rethinking Japanese Feminisms

The conclusion begins by considering the historical and political context of the 2013 conference at Emory University that inspired the edited volume. It questions the meaning of “Womenomics” proposed by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō after his return to power in 2012, and asks what it means to rethink feminism as well as the category of “Japanese” at this historical juncture. Weaving together ideas from the keynote addresses of Ueno Chizuko, Barbara Molony, and Vera Mackie, the chapter considers the issues of canonization of feminist voices versus contention among feminists, the national versus the transnational dimensions, as well as the optimistic versus pessimistic arc in narrating the history of feminism in modern Japan. It concludes by considering the challenges in the present moment, when the growing gap between the rich and poor makes it more difficult to imagine a single vision of feminist utopia shared by all.