“The boxed-up miseries and fears, orbiting two miles up”: Rationing and Rationalizing Emotions in Feminist Speculative Fiction

Abstract

In dystopian feminist novels like Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017), and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), themes of emotional repression, authoritarianism and female agency intertwine to critique patriarchal and capitalist power structures. My reading focuses on the ambivalence of power with regards to emotions: as feminine-coded elements, they must be evacuated from the public realm, but as definitory human traits, they constitute the core of power itself. The authors of these speculative novels depict emotions as subversive forces that challenge patriarchal power structures, blurring boundaries between reason and feeling, body and mind, and human and non-human entities. Such narratives that emphasize the corporeal and emotional dimensions of resistance allow for a powerful critique of societal norms and hierarchical binaries. Ultimately, the paper proposes that feminist dystopian literature is a privileged terrain for the revaluation of emotions like empathy and love for the sake of connection-making–which has come to be termed “care ethics” in feminist studies–which also gives its fair share to a less commonly-valued emotion: women’s anger, conceived as a transformative force.