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Johns Hopkins University | AS.363.334

Feminism and Apocalypse

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Popular culture today is awash with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories. Feminist literature, though, has been thinking about the end of the world since 1826, when Mary Shelley’s The Last Man imagined a pandemic wiping out almost the entire global population. The first apocalyptic novel in English describes the end of the world as we know it: in the wake of disaster, The Last Man pauses to assemble alternative forms of collective life. Students in this course will read contemporary feminist fiction that responds to The Last Man by pressing the genre of apocalyptic literature into dialogue with feminist politics. We will explore key generic preoccupations that are also foci of feminist thought: reproduction and the family; separatism and utopia; gender and the environment; the human and the posthuman. Across our readings, our focus will be the duality of apocalyptic literature as both critique of the existing order and as thought experiment with what might replace it. What is the role of apocalypse in the feminist imagination? How have feminist authors made use of a genre also historically characterized by fantasies of racialized violence and class conflict, orientalist projection, and sexist stereotype? Why—and why not—might it be valuable to feminism to imagine the end of things?

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S. Franchi
10:30 - 11:45