PERSPECTIVES

Feminisms Futures
The Limits and Ambitions
of Rokeyas Dream
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

What do feminists want? What

visions of an ideal society have
we conceptualised or dreamt of?
What are the possibilities and
limits of iterations of a feminist
futurity? Even as we ask,
however, we are brought up short
by a more fundamental question:
is such a teleological conception
of any theory or social movement
however we define feminism
valid? Can we expect feminism to
function with a single blueprint of
an ideal political order or society
to come?

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (rajeswari.sunderrajan@

googlemail.com) teaches at New York University.
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1 Begum Rokeya

egum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,

the author of Sultanas Dream,
is one of our feminist mothers,
and a writer for our times as much as she
was for her own. Her short life was filled
with remarkable achievements as writer,
journalist, educationist and pioneering
reformer of Bengali Muslim society in
the early 20th century.
Begum Rokeya was born in 1880 and
died in 1932. Born into a wealthy upperclass zamindari family in Rangpur District in present-day Bangladesh, to an
orthodox mother and a strict traditional
father who did not encourage womens
education, Rokeya and her sister nevertheless managed to learn Bangla and
English with the help and encouragement of their brothers. She was married
off at 16 to a widower many years older
than her, Syed Sakhawat Hossain.
Sakhawat Hossain was a highly educated man, and a civil servant. The critic
Roushan Jahan describes him as a man
of liberal attitude (1988: 39). He urged
his wife to go out into society, provided
her with books, encouraged her writing
and supported the cause of womens
education. Their married life was a short
one howeverSakhawat died in 1909
after a long and painful illness. He left
Rokeya a sizeable fortune with which
to start a girls school, which she did,
first in Bhagalpur and then in Calcutta,
encountering along the way a great deal
of opposition and criticism from her
community, and even from the parents
of her students.
Starting with only eight students the
Sakhawat Memorial Girls School in
Calcutta grew to be a thriving institution.
It continues to serve the cause of the
education of girls to this day, more than

vol l no 41

a hundred years later, a fitting memorial

as Jahan writes, to her wonderful husband as well as Rokeya herself (1988: 41).
In 1916 she founded a Muslim Womens
Association, going among poor Muslim
women and offering them financial
assistance, literacy classes and shelter.
She had begun writing for various
publications as early as 1903, and continued to write essays, stories, tracts
and fiction to the end of her life. In her
writing as in her other public work,
Rokeya addressed the problem of womens, especially Muslim womens, narrow
domestic lives in seclusion, campaigning
for their greater participation in public
life chiefly through education. She
addressed women readers directly in
her writings, using reason and persuasion to convince them of the harm of
confinement, endowing them with the
agency of their own emancipation. In
1973, the Bangla Academy collected her
scattered writings and published them
as Rokeya Racnavali, a sign of her iconic
status as intellectual, reformer, educationist and philanthropist in present-day
Bangladesh.
I have to confess that I know only a
portion of Rokeyas prolific writings in
Bangla through the few available translations. In this essay however I will be
focusing on Sultanas Dream, a text
written originally and uniquely, in English, and now firmly established in the
feminist literary canon. It is a short fable, only a little over 10 pages long,
which Rokeya wrote in 1905. Roushan
Jahan relies on Rokeyas own account of
how she came to write the story during
an idle interlude when she was alone at
home. Her writing was partly to demonstrate her proficiency in English to her
non-Bengali husband, Jahan surmises;
he was her immediate and appreciative
audience (1988: 1). Although this was
to be her sole attempt to write in English,
she had already begun to publish strongly
worded articles in various Bengali
journals protesting womens lack of
opportunities, and would also go on to
write several pieces of fantastical fiction:
so there is a thematic continuity in her
work. The story was first published
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in the Indian Ladies Magazine, a

Madras-based English periodical, and
later republished in 1908 in book form
by a Calcutta publisher. As the title indicates, it narrates a fantasy dreamt by a
young woman, Sultana. In her dream
Sultana visits an unusual land that she
calls Ladyland governed and run solely
by women, while the men are confined
to the zenana. In this country Sultana
encounters perfect order, natural beauty
and harmony everywhere, all achieved
through technological advances and the
scientific knowledge that the women
have acquired. A feminist tract in the
generic form of a science fiction utopia
raises for us a number of reflections about
what I have called feminisms futures.
2 What Do Feminists Want?
Through the examination of Rokeyas
dream that I undertake here, I wish to
engage the question of feminisms ends
anew. The ends of feminism, in terms of
the futures that feminism has envisaged, and the end of feminism, as an
aspect of its futurity, are connected.
When and how will the longest revolution, as Juliet Mitchell (1984) called it,
end? What would it have achieved at
its conclusion?
Feminism is paradoxically situated
today. One American feminist famously
diagnosed feminisms defeat in a political climate in which a dominant moral
right asserts the triumph of family and
family values over womens careers and
legal rights (Faludi 1991). More recently
however, a popular American journalist
announced the sensational end of men
and rise of women, attributing both
phenomena to the current crisis of capitalism and to changes in reproductive
technologies (Rosin 2010). In Britain the
end of feminism has been explained in
terms of a post-feminismits goals have
ostensibly already been reached and it
has nowhere further to go (McRobbie
2004). From a different perspective
however feminism is pronounced a success (although many gender inequalities remain). Feminism is taking powerful new forms, which make it unrecognisable to some (Walby 2011: 1).
All this in the advanced industrial
West. In other parts of the world,
40

however, it seems as if feminism has

never been heard of, so unchecked and
rampant is misogynistic violence against
women. In the Indian subcontinent two
incidents of unspeakably brutal violence
committed against women in the recent
past (although neither is unique) have
awakened the conscience of our societies in an unprecedented way. The world
followed the fates of the victims for
weeks, with pity and terror. The survival
of one woman and the death of the other
have been deeply cathartic; and they
have been attended by lessons, both
moral and political, that we are still trying to absorb.1 In light of the widespread
realisation that has come in their wake,
that women have been and continue to be
subjected to violence by men on the
grounds of their gender, the demand of
feministsand no longer feminists
alonethat such violence cease has
come to seem a matter of the simplest
humanitarianism, even of a basic humanity. All that women ask, it seems, is that
they not be hurt. It is the modesty, not to
say abjection, of this demand that should
lead us to ask what do we, as feminists,
want for women?
What do feminists want? What visions
of an ideal society have we conceptualised or dreamt of? What are the possibilities and limits of iterations of a feminist futurity? Even as we ask, however,
we are brought up short by a more fundamental question: is such a teleological
conception of any theory or social movementhowever we define feminism
valid? Can we expect feminism to function
with a single blueprint of an ideal political order or society to come? Feminism
has been identified in terms of historical
phasesfirst wave, second wave, third
wave; it has also been interpreted differently by different constituencies, each
marked by a distinctive set of imperatives. Therefore feminisms future and
feminist futures, it might be argued, are
contingent on changing historical conditions and on the divergent agendas of a
non-unitary constituency conceptualised
under the rubric of women. In seeking
the feminist equivalent of Marxist classless
society as telos and revolutionary praxis
as method, would feminism then be
barking up the wrong tree?

We could say that feminism is primarily a form of critique rather than a programme. It has, variously, sought to
demystify difference, to isolate the
sources of womens subordination, to
identify patriarchy as a universal
regime of male domination, to analyse
its roots, and to deconstruct the sexgender system. Critique finds its limits in
an implicit reformism, the rectification
of the wrongs it uncovers.
Here is what I mean. Feminist analysis
of the condition of women has for the
most part been articulated in terms of
the following negative existential aspects:
discrimination; oppression; exploitation;
subordination; dispossession; powerlessness; violence (this is not a comprehensive list). Such a critique assumes the
implicit demand that the terms should
be altered if not reversed: thus equality
(in response to discrimination); emancipation (from forms of oppression); justice (freedom from exploitation); domination (as reversal of subordination);
ownership of property (as against dispossession); power (versus powerlessness); and counter-violence as the response to violence. And yet several of
these terms have hardly been pressed
into service in the context of feminism:
not domination; not power;2 not even
ownership of property; and certainly
not counter-violence.
Feminisms demands have for the
most part been coded instead in terms of
reform, to be achieved by legislative fiat
or mind-changing education or both.
Full-fledged opposition to the status quo
is rarely articulated and feminist futures
are not predicated on an overthrow of
existing economic, social or political
arrangements. It should be clear that my
critique here is not issued as a call for a
revolutionary feminism, which would be
merely glib. For we know only too well
why gendered antagonism on the model
of class antagonism is difficult if not
impossible to sustain: women are implicated with men in heterosexual relations
and in kinship structures (my father
was a man, as a character in Elizabeth
Gaskells novel Cranford observes [1851]),
and hence complicit with existing social
arrangements. The sex wars have always
been reductive as an explanation of

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what feminism stands for. And feminists, all too aware that power, domination, ownership of property and violence
are precisely the masculinist values that
underpin gender oppression and hierarchy, and confronted by the impossible
predicament of deploying these as the
means to overthrow patriarchy, have
had to rethink the goals as well as the
means of the feminism they espouse.
So, to sum up: feminism is non-teleological in its philosophy and praxis,
which is to say that its analysis is linked
to causes not outcomes; its function
is critical, rather than visionary; it is
ameliorative rather than oppositional in
its politics; and it questions established
value-systems rather than proposes alternative ones. But what might seem like
the limits of feminism and a constraint
on its politics is not necessarily so. To
bring about even one of the changes
mentioned above, however modest in
scope, would cause enough social
upheaval to be considered radical, if not
utopian in ambition.
All the same, an exploration of the
extent and kind of explicit feminist imagining, in theory and fiction, of positive
alternatives, an affirmative politics, and
constructive visions could provide
access to the realm of desire, while also
exposing its contradictions.
I identify two of the most radical
forms that such imagining has taken.
One is the vision of a separation of the
sexes resulting in a world without men,
a society exclusively of women, a Ladyland or Herland. And the other is the
destabilisation of gender, conceptualised
in terms both of an absence of gender
difference as well as of its opposite, the
proliferation of genders. The first form
of imagining identifies men as the source
of the problem and seeks to exclude
them; the second diagnoses gender as
the structural cause of the problem and
seeks to trouble the conceptual schema
of male and female. I shall return to
the implications of these ideas for
feminism, but for now I want to draw
attention to their utopian dimensions
utopian because they do not as yet exist
in pure form anywhere, although like
all utopias they have a prefigurative
dimension.
Economic & Political Weekly

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OCTOBER 10, 2015

Rokeya Shekawat Hossains Sultanas

Dream is, as I said earlier, a utopian
fiction, or as the title says more simply, a
dream. Utopia is an ideal place
(eu-topia) or a no-place (ou-topia)
(Bagchi 2005: xviii); that is, it simultaneously offers an ideal and acknowledges that it is beyond reach. But insofar as
it is a place or world that has been imagined, it brings it within the scope of human imagination. What can be thought
can be realised; or to put it in less hubristic terms, what has never been thought
cannot ever be realised. The utopic
imagination represents hope, freedom,
a politics of the possible, or an immature
politics with its attendant minoritarian
and anarchic dimensions.3 What interests
me about utopia however is what a
symptomatic reading might reveal: what
reality is the utopian vision reactive to?
What are the conditions of its possibility? What limits does it operate within,
and why? What aspects of reality is it
guilty of repressing? A certain reality
is always the condition of utopia, acting
as both its constraint and its inspiration.
To recapitulate: Even if feminism has
not articulated its ends in any systematic
way in the form of a Feminist Manifestoand for good reason, as we sawit
is nevertheless not lacking in speculative explorations of questions of gender.
These have been articulated in the
generic terms of a utopia. Where this
utopia bears the specific lineaments of
science fictioneither the scientific fantasy of a world where science and technology deliver womankind (and mankind) from their condition of enslavement, or alternatively where women
acquire and use scientific knowledge to
transform the worldwe have a futurity
whose emancipatory possibilities are
uniquely feminist.
3 Sultanas Dream
I imagine that most readers are familiar
with Sultanas Dream, but here is the
obligatory synopsis nevertheless. It is not
a story driven by anything like a plot.
The author offers only a lively guided
tour through a new world, where a
charmed visitor, Sultana, is introduced
by a native, Sister Sara, to the wonders
of Ladyland as she calls the dream
vol l no 41

world. Sultana is intrigued to find that

there are no men to be seen on the
streets of the fantasy Ladyland. The men
have all been shut up indoors. In response to Sultanas protest that surely it is
womens place to be secluded since they
are naturally weak, Sara offers the
irrefutable logic that since men are dangerous like wild animals or lunatics, it is
they who must be locked upwhereas
in our world Men who do or at least are
capable of doing no end of mischief, are
let loose and the innocent women are
shut up in the zenana! Sara blames
women for their own incarceration:
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 1988: 9).
Sister Sara moves easily between the
old world and the new to draw comparisons, for the changes in her own country
had happened only 30 years before with
the succession of their queen. The
young queen introduced compulsory
education for all the women and banned
marriage for them before the age of 21.
As a result there were women scientists
in her realm who were able to conduct
marvellous researches; and they invent
machines to draw water from the atmosphere and store the heat of the sun.
When the enemy attacked the country,
the men went out to fight and got killed,
while the women were able to beat back
the enemy with the help of their heat
machines. The queen took over the reins
of government and had the men retreat
into seclusion, where they have remained ever since. Under her enlightened
rule, the land thrives. We make nature
yield as much as she can, Sara explains,
so that there is electricity and aerial
transport, clean streets and lush gardens
in the land; and pleasurable labour,
plenty of leisure, no crime and no disease. Sultana meets the Queen who
repeats Saras encomiums on scientific
education: We dive deep into the ocean
of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems that Nature has kept in store
for us (Hossain 1988: 17). After she has
visited all the places of learning in Ladylandthe universities, the laboratories
and the observatoriesSultana wakes up
from her dream and the story ends there.
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Sultanas Dream is rightly admired

for its charming conceit of a reversal of
gendered roles which places women in
government and visible in public space
(streets, gardens), and men in powerless
roles and invisible in domestic spaces
(kitchens, the mardana). The consequences are entirely beneficial; and there
is poetic justice in the fate that men
suffer as it is their own self-destructive
aggression that brings them to defeat.
Women, given the opportunity, use their
political and military power wisely and
with restraint, and they put their scientific knowledge to the best possible use,
for development and environmental
purposes. Rokeyas expressed admiration for Gullivers Travels suggests that
Swifts satirical fantasy may have given
her the idea of constructing an imaginary, alternative world and exploiting its
potential for the play of ideas. Sultanas
Dream is bound to remind us of Alice in
Wonderland too (although I have not
been able to find out if Rokeya had actually read Lewis Carrolls classic story).
The parallels between the two works lie
in the similar dream/fantasy plot of a
young girl driven by curiosity to explore
strange worlds; the openness and wonder with which in each case she receives
an initiation into novel experiences and
a continuous education in ideas; and the
internal logic with which these worlds
cohere. Other writers too have developed the premise of separate worlds in
their novels, notably Charlotte Perkins
Gilman in Herland (1915), published only
a few years later.
Resemblance to Hind Swaraj
But Sultanas Dream bears as well an
unexpected resemblance to yet another
literary oddity from the Indian subcontinent almost contemporary with it:
Gandhis Hind Swaraj (1909). The dialogic form of both texts, between a leading guide and an interlocutor, is strikingly similar. When Gandhi in the persona of the Editor corrects the reader,
who gives the credit for Britains conquest of India to its superior civilisation,
by pointing out: The English have not
taken India; we have given it to them.
They are not in India because of their
strength, but because we keep them
42

(Gandhi 1997: 39), he places both blame

and agency on the conquered, in
exactly the same way as Rokeya, in
the persona of Sister Sara, chides the
women of Bengal for losing their
freedom to men. But just as striking
are the opposed positions the authors
take on the question of science and
technology. Where Gandhi famously
rejects everything about western modernity including Enlightenment rationalism
and the advances of science, Rokeya
seeks the clear light of reason and the
benefits of technology in establishing a
good society.
Rokeya wrote that when her husband
finished reading her story, he immediately commented A terrible revenge!
(cited in Jahan 1998: 2). It is of course
mens disappearance into the zenana
that will strike readers as the masterstroke of the narrative. But although
much has been made of the revenge
motif, Sultanas Dream cannot be read
as primarily an attack on the male sex.
Rokeya could not have been blind to the
ideological implications of an idealised
female ruler maintaining segregation
and retaining the sexual division of
labour while merely inverting it. The
text is noticeably reticent about the politics of the reverse enslavement of men. It
displays a similar reticencesurely a
sign of discomfortabout womens
recourse to military might and bloodshed in defence of their land (even if the
weapons be advanced scientific inventions). Gandhi on the other hand mocks
the fiery nationalistic reader who would
keep English rule, without the Englishman. You want the tigers nature, but not
the tiger. As for himself, he makes it
clear that this is not the Swaraj that I
want (Jahan 1998: 28). Rokeya however
is pushed to acknowledge that a female
regime would be possible only if men
were overthrown and kept under control; and that for this to happen, force
would be required. The necessity of
force as an aspect of the stateeven if
Ladyland does away with police and
magistratesis obviously contrary to the
philosophy of Hind Swaraj. The difficult
conditions of possibility of a Ladyland
cannot be wished away, but Sultanas
Dream does not celebrate them in a

triumphalist spirit. The contradictions

underlying feminisms futures are made
transparent in Sultanas Dream.
Rokeya seems to accept without question that there are essential female
values such as pacifism, the cultivation
of nature, harmonious social coexistence,
and avoidance of conflict which will
inform a female-dominated society. More
questionable still, especially to readers
today (although her defenders point out
that she wrote before the two world
wars and the atom bomb), is her unquestioned faith in the beneficial value of
technological advances and scientific
discoveries. Humankinds conquest of
nature is embraced as unadulterated
good. Sultanas wonderment at the
absence of mosquitoes and at the
well-run kitchens in Ladyland is typical
of the navely awed responses of many
in the underdeveloped world to the
condition of Western societies with their
shining marvels of gadgetry and functioning order.
Even weapons of war are used with
restraint for good ends in Ladyland
(they were not even invented primarily
for killing), and they function mainly as
deterrent. Barnita Bagchi stresses that
the driving force behind the success of
the utopian feminist country of Ladyland is womens education, and science,
technology and virtue work together in
perfect harmony. Ladyland, she concludes, embodies the triumph of the
virtuous, enquiring, scientific, enlightened and welfare-oriented spirit in
women. (Bagchi 2005: xii, xiii) It is also
worth noting that the education of girls
at the time (as even now) tended to
stress the useful domestic skills and
soft subjects rather than the hard
sciences; so Rokeya is also making the
point that women must acquire the same
knowledge as men, and are perfectly
capable of acquiring mastery of the
sciences. Knowledge is not only power in
Ladyland, but also enlightenment. The
faith displayed here in all innocence,
both in the capacity of technology to
achieve a good society and in womens
differentethical, purposiveuse of
scientific knowledgehave understandably been subjected to questioning. I
want now to contextualise this aspect

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of Rokeyas storyits techno-scientific

utopianismwithin a broader feminist
theoretical frame.
4 Conceptualising Alternatives
It is usual to identify three distinctive
feminist modes of conceptualising alternative social relations or political structures, namely, the political-liberal, the
ethical-radical, and the sexual-technoscientific. I am sure there is no need to
rehearse each of these in any detail since
this is a widely used classification of
feminist thought and praxis.
The first, political-liberal feminism, is
usually traced back to the French Revolution which provided the language of
equality to women, however inadvertently (Scott 1996). The demand for
political equality for women, starting
with the right to vote and moving quickly on to other kinds of parityequal pay
at the workplace, equal opportunity for
education and entry into careers, childcare and maternity benefits, wages for
housework and the kind. The feminist
campaign against violence is also
couched in the language of rights, more
recently in human rights language,
where even culturally and socially sanctioned violence is deemed to constitute
an offence against womens human
rights and comes into conflict with
them. Although this kind of juridical
equality has by and large been conceded
to women worldwide by national constitutions and through universal United
Nations mandates and conventions, it
constitutes its own limits. Quite apart
from the distance we can track between
formal equality and actually obtaining
conditions of inequality in many contextsand the difficulty of enforcing
equal rights for women or other disadvantaged constituencieseven as an
achieved goal it has to acknowledge a
ceiling. More recently, influential critiques of liberal feminism have originated from feminist and other intellectuals adopting and advocating culturally
other perspectives.4
The differing emphases of womens
demands are sometimes envisaged as
constituting evolutionary stages or
phases of the feminist movement. Thus,
Juliet Mitchell (1984) sees the historical
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trajectory of second-wave Western feminism in the following terms:

The first stage of our movement was directed to putting right the wrongs of women, the
second to an emphasis on the values, the importance of the qualities of womanhood and
femininitypeace, caring, nurturance.

The second phase that I have identified

by the label radicalethical, is a move
away from liberal equality and the struggle for rights/justice, now perceived not
just as insufficient but as actually complicit with masculinist values. The major
move towards embracing an alterity
coded as feminine involves simultaneously envisaging social relations and
political structures in a radically different mode; essential female attributes of
care, nurture, cooperation, pacifism
and the like displace conflict, competition, instrumental reason now deemed
essentially male in origin and as ideology. Rokeyas feminism is both liberal
political in urging social reform, education and political participation for
women, as well as ethicalradical in
advocating a separate and different
female world.
More radical still is a relatively recent
development in feminismthe questioning of the sex-gender system itself. It
draws upon the post-structuralist deconstruction of binary structures with
which the name of Jacques Derrida is
associated and upon Michel Foucaults
studies in the History of Sexuality. Drawing on their work, French feminist theorists like Monique Wittig and Luce Irigaray have sought to unground sexual
identities. If the opposition manwoman
has been built on the ostensible biological difference between the sexes and has
in turn supported the sexual division of
labour, then this structure itself would
have to be demystified in order to dismantle the system. Why two sexes? Why
not a proliferation of sexual identities on
a much broader spectrum? If sexual difference is the ground of womens oppressionconsigned to child-bearing and
maternal functions, and perceived as
the object of sexual violencethen the
removal of sexual difference alone can
liberate them. The refusal of biology as
destinyprogrammatically argued in
Simone de Beauvoirs Second Sex (1951)
vol l no 41

has of course long constituted one of

feminisms stands. Donna Haraway
expressed the utopian dream of the hope
for a monstrous world without gender
(1985: 181). Judith Butlers argument
about the performativity of gender is
intended to render it flexible and open to
transformation. In the view of feminists,
Butler explains, gender is something
that should be overthrown, eliminated,
or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely
because it is always a sign of subordination for women (1999: xiii). Genderlessness through the abolition of gender is a
feminist future, arguably analogous to
Marxisms goal of achieving a classless
society by eradicating class.
While much of the impetus for this
theoretical thinking has come from the
lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT)
movement in recent years, and, in turn,
informed it, the dissolution of gender
identities and of the sexual difference
itself has been an aspect of the utopian
imagination for much longer.5 In Sultanas
Dream, the very ease with which the
reversal of gender roles is brought about
is an indication of its performative
condition. To her surprise Sultana is
viewed in Ladyland as mannish in her
appearance. Sister Sara enlightens her
it is because she is so shy that she resembles the new men in her country.
Sultanas shyness is of course the result
of her being a purdanashin woman in
her own society, one unaccustomed to
being out on the streets without her
veilin contrast to the fearlessness and
confidence with which women in Ladyland move around. Here it is the men
who are shy and reclusive.
I have connected the sexual radicalism
to techno-scientific developments, but it
must be noted that the connection does
not explicitly figure in either French
feminist thought or Judith Butlers work.
Nor has it been prominent in the contemporary LGBT movement. Rokeya herself is vague about the sexual order of
Ladyland; the queen has a little daughter, although we learn that childcare is
left to the men in their domestic roles.
Presumably men play their traditional
role in sexual reproduction, but there
is no explicit mention of marriage or
the usual forms of heterosexual union. It
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is of course their superiority in scientific

and technological knowhow that gives
women the upper hand in Ladyland and
inverts the power structure, but Rokeya
does not stretch her imagination so far
as to envisage the biological order itself
being disturbed by scientific advances in
the field. This had to await discoveries
and innovations that came later in the
20th century.
5 Techno-Scientific Utopias?
The earliest of the feminist works which
seized on the potential for womens liberation through scientific advances in
biotechnology and cybernetics was
Shulamith Firestones The Dialectic of
Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,
published in 1970. Firestone called for a
feminist revolution whose goal would
be not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself:
genital differences between human
beings would no longer matter culturally
(p 11). Her vision was futuristic, but it
grew from a Marxist consciousness of
history. Drawing on Engels, she maintained that only the proper identification of the origins of antagonism could
provide the means to end it. The source
of womens oppression lies in biology,
specifically the sexual uniqueness that
makes women the sole reproducers of
the species. Child-bearing and childrearing are physically constraining and
painful for women, not merely socially
demanding roles.
But if Firestone concedes female biological oppression, she also argues her
way out of it with the confidence that
modern scientific progress will make it
possible to conquer Nature, providing
deliverance from the primitive and
oppressed animal life that mankind

lives. Her scenario of the future extends the possibilities of a present in

which humanity has begun to transcend Nature (p 10). She is filled with
optimism about the potential of the
20th century scientific revolution to
bring about the emancipation of women
and workers:
A feminist revolution could be the decisive factor in establishing a new ecological
balance: attention drawn to the popula
tion explosion, a shifting of emphasis from

44

r eproduction to contraception and demands

for the full development of artificial reproduction would provide an alternative to the
oppressions of the biological family; cybernation, by changing mans relationship to
work and wages, by transforming activity
from work to play (activity done for its
own sake), would allow for a total redefinition of the economy, including the family unit in its economic capacity. The double
curse, that man should till the soil by the
sweat of his brow, and that woman should
bear in pain and travail, would be lifted
through technology to make humane living,
for the first time, a possibility (p 184).

Juliet Mitchell (1971) paraphrases

these ideas in terms of Firestones radical feminism:
Radical feminism, the revolution for the
release of the oppressed majority of the

world, would liberate test-tube babies, babyfarms, big-brother control, from their confinement within the horrors of brave new
world and 1984, and guarantee that their
humane application would finally free mankind from the trap of painful biology. Thus
culture would at last overcome nature and
the ultimate revolution would be achieved.

I have quoted at some length from The

Dialectic of Sex and Mitchells gloss on
the book in order to show the extent of
faith that a certain strand of feminist

thought has invested in biotechnological

means of liberating women from their
biologically-produced oppression.
In the late 1980s Donna Haraways
Cyborg Manifesto would revisit the
by then largely forgotten and aban
doned agenda of Firestones work. The
cyborg is our ontology, Haraway anno
unced, using the present tense in an
anticipatory way (1991: 150). We are
c yborgs, she affirmed, creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who
populate worlds ambiguously natural
and crafted (p 149). She takes recourse
to feminist science fiction to read in
these texts the quite different political
possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man
and Woman (p 180). The feminist position in these postmodern times would
be to face radical scientific transformations of the biological, and by extension
the social world, squarely. By taking
responsibility for the social relations of
science and technology and refusing
an anti-science metaphysics, a demono
logy of technology (p 181), women
would be enabled to transcend gender.
What aligns Haraways work with

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PERSPECTIVES

Firestones, despite considerable differences between them, is their shared

faith in overcoming the gendered condition through the opportunities afforded
by the biotechnological revolution.
However, what is not clear from Firestones position (or for that matter Haraways) is what role women in general or
the feminist movement in particular
would play in bringing about this development. Twentieth century advances in
contraception, the birth control pill in
particular, have undeniably produced a
transformation in heterosexual relations
and in the female condition itself for
which the term liberation can be used
(even if ironically). As more forms of
reproduction through artificial insemination, artificial wombs, the freezing of
embryos, test-tube babies, cloning and
the like proliferate, the relationship of
the sexes is bound to change definitively.
But it is not women, women scientists, or
feminist demands that are driving these
changes, or not primarily. And we would
be right to ask how much of an unmixed
good the advances themselves represent. There is no doubt that these, like
labour-saving machinery and the condition of women in the workplace, have to
be articulated with capitalist developments in production and technology.
Not that either Firestone or Haraway
was blind to modern science and technologys connections with capitalism, in
both production and consumption. As
self-identified and recognisable socialist
feminists they worked with (although
not within) Marxist categories. But neither of them gets into the details of how
a feminist praxis that would overturn
capitalist domination and take over its
instruments will be staged. Indeed Haraway does not propose a revolutionary
praxis at all; her postmodern position
implies faith in the more diffuse expression of subversion and ambivalence. It is
Rokeya who envisages womens capture
of the state as well as the takeover of the
scientific establishment by women scientists as the implicit preconditions of
science and technology being put to progressive uses. True, in Sultanas Dream
these ends are not directly in the service
of womens biological and physical emancipation, being broadly environmental
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

OCTOBER 10, 2015

and developmental. However between

them the woman writer from early 20th
century colonial India and the feminist
theorists from late-capitalist United
States cover complementary aspects of a
feminist utopia.
I am conscious that my essay has left
several pressing questions unanswered
and unattempted. There is the politics of
utopia itself, a much-debated issue that I
have not touched upon.6 There is also
the controversial content of this utopia,
the imaginary of a brave new world (it is
not for nothing that the majority of
visions of a scientifically advanced society are dystopic). Arguably too, the goal
of social emancipation achieved through
the radical destabilisation of gender systems requires much greater thought.7
But this is precisely the point. Technoscientific utopias that envisage social
well-being as nothing less than the amelioration of the human condition itself,
challenge us to interrogate their premises
and their reasoning. Rokeyas dream
repays consideration today as much as it
did over one hundred years agoeven
though it may not be responsive to our
immediate fire-fighting urgenciesif
only because it pushes us to consider
what it is we want.
Notes
1

5
6

The first was the shooting of a schoolgirl Malala

Yousafzai by the Taliban in the Swat District in
Afghanistan in October 2012, and the second
the gang rape and killing of a young woman,
Jyoti Singh Pandey, on a bus in New Delhi,
India in December 2012.
Instead we have the term empowerment to refer
to a kind of muscle-building, self-improvement
exercise for women.
The last phrase is Leela Gandhis Affective Communities (2006). See especially Chapter 7,
pp 177ff.
From perceiving the limits of equality politics
such critiques have proceeded to question the
hegemony of claims made in the name of its
universality. Ethnographies like Saba Mahmoods Politics of Piety, for instance, have invoked strong cultural relativist arguments (problematically, to my mind) to recognise and legitimise pious Egyptian Muslim (Salafa) womens submissive religiosity in order to challenge
liberal feminism, and have succeeded in considerably destabilising its complacency.
For an interesting discussion, see Noah Berlatsky
(2013).
Frederic Jamesons The Politics of Utopia, is
among the most well-known recent reflections
on the subject.
Cf Angelo Brieussel: to focus on the utopian
ideal of a genderless society might well be
counterproductive to the expansion of freedom
for gendered beings. Attempts at the obliteration of difference throughout history have

vol l no 41

proven to be some of the most violent impositions on the collective human body and psyche,
and which have been distinctly gendered. In
other words, a genderless society might not
even be imaginable, let alone achievable or
desirable, at this stage in Western Lifeworlds.

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