When (Lesbian) Women Will Rule Over Men: Visions of Future Gynecocracy in a Novel from Interwar Romania

• Published in: Caietele Echinox Vol. 46; no. 46; pp. 252 - 266
• Main Author: Martin Rodriguez, Mariano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Babeș-Bolyai University 01-01-2024; Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai; Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
• Subjects: Gender history; gynecocracy; History of ideas; ion talpă; lesbian fiction; masculinism; prin rotogoalele de fum; role reversal; Romanian Literature; utopian fiction; Role Reversal; Utopian Fiction; Ion Talpă; Lesbian Fiction; Masculinism; Gynecocracy; Prin rotogoalele de fum
• ISSN: 1582-960X
• DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.19

The growing assertiveness of the ‘New Woman’ inspired a number of speculative fictions on what the future would look like if women ruled over men. Future gynecocracy was also imagined in Romania in the interwar years. For example, Ion Talpă rewrote in his 1937 novel Prin rotogoalele de fum (Through Smoke Rings) the Hebrew story of humankind’s fall in order to narrate through myth how women will prevail over brutish men. The resulting order is based on all-female sociality, including sexual matters. Women treat degraded men as animals in the all-woman society of Talpă’s ambiguously dystopian narrative, which features lesbian sexuality as a matter of course. This work is innovative for its use of Modernist metafictional devices in order to suggest how subjectivity determines the alternate eutopian or dystopian possible endings of the novel, thus undermining its apparently masculinist message.