“Wheels turning in opposite directions”: the Utopian Dynamics of Individual and Collective Temporality in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country

• Published in: Fafnir Vol. 9; no. 2; pp. 98 - 117
• Main Author: Sarah Lohmann
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 01-12-2022
• Subjects: community; feminism; individuality; sheri s. tepper; sustainability; temporality; the dispossessed; the gate to women’s country; ursula k. le guin; utopia
• ISSN: 2342-2009

Einstein may deem objective temporality an illusion, but temporal relations of self and other still strongly shape our lived experience. I explore how individual and communal temporality function in two apparently “ideal” societies, Anarres in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Women’s Country in Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988). While both quasi- utopias are founded on long-term egalitarian communality, I argue that anarcho-communist Anarres successfully combines progress- orientation with holistic cyclicity to pursue sustainable inclusivity against the odds while Women’s Country fails to do the same through separatist feminism and performative group identity: it succumbs to the tragic temporal trajectory at its core. However, I ultimately suggest that the novels still serve as complementary testimonials to the utopian potential of sustainably integrative temporality if we consider the utopianism negatively encoded in Gate’s performativity.