Abstract
This chapter examines Adam Boostrom’s Athena’s Choice, a speculative fiction of a future world without men, comparing it to separatist feminist science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s while simultaneously evaluating it through an intersectional feminist lens. I argue that a highly technologically developed socio-democratic society without violence and poverty that has fulfilled reproductive freedom and normalized same-sex relationships has the appeal of a cyborgian feminist utopia. The plot, however, relies heavily on biological determinism and essentialist assumptions about masculinity, femininity, and heteronormativity. Racial stereotypes abound and queer characters are denigraded rather than celebrated. In conclusion, although the novel seems to suggest that the world will be better off without men, it proves to be a product of a straight white male imagination.
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Notes
- 1.
Adam Boostrom’s profile on the back cover of Athena’s Choice.
- 2.
Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp defends lesbian feminism, explaining that it is fundamentally based on the idea that “a connection exists between an erotic and/or emotional commitment to women and political resistance to patriarchal culture” (33).
- 3.
- 4.
Merging ova to generate an offspring is not out of the question for mammals. Mice have been created from same-sex parents in the laboratory. Bi-maternal mice have borne their own healthy pups (Rehm 2018).
- 5.
Choice could have been written in response to the #MeToo movement, which has drawn the attention of the media to the social movements against sexual harassment and violence.
- 6.
Despite the legalization of abortion in 1973, access to legal abortion in the US has become increasingly restricted by anti-abortion state laws. Between 2011 and 2019, over 480 state abortion restrictions were enacted.
- 7.
The term “reproductive justice” originated in 1994 when women of colour started leading a movement that combines reproductive rights and social justice and advocating for the reproductive health, self-determination, and rights of marginalized people whose needs are not covered by the reproductive rights movement led by white middle-class women. See “Reproductive Justice.” Sister Song. Available at: https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice. (2020).
- 8.
In reality, the atom bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far from being instantly extinguished. Those who survived possibly suffered more from burns and radiation poisoning than the ones who died instantly or in the fire that followed the explosion.
- 9.
There is no factual grounding behind the idea that most men find pleasure in violence. Statistically, men are responsible for the majority of violent crimes, and women are victimized more frequently than men, except in the case of homicide, which records more male victims. Federal statistics show that ninety-nine out of a hundred rapists are men. In 2018, 87 percent of the homicide perpetrators in the United States (US) were men (this does not include cases of which the perpetrator’s gender is unknown). One in four women in the US experience intimate partner violence. One in four women survive rape or attempts of rape during college.
- 10.
Between 1982 and 2020, 113 mass shootings in the US were committed by men, while women committed three. See “Number of Mass Shootings.” Statista. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/476445/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-gender/. (2020). As well, while most suicide bombers are men, females have increased over the last few decades from almost none during the 1980s to about 15 percent of all suicide attackers in recent years (Davis 2013).
- 11.
Although Grace herself orchestrated the mass-killing of men, those actions are somehow justified because of her altruistic intentions.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the Mother-Daughter Book Club and the Empty Nest Book Club for the lively discussions on Athena’s Choice, which gave me the idea for this work. My appreciation also goes to Sherryl Vint for her insightful comments on the earlier version of this chapter.
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Takeshita, C. (2022). Cyborg Separatism: Feminist Utopia in Athena’s Choice. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_9
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