Worlds Apart: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias (Book Review‪)‬

Taxonomies of Transgression. Dunja M. Mohr. Worlds Apart: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. Jefferson, NC: McFar-Jand & Company, 2005. 312 pp. $39.95 pbk. * In Worlds Apart: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias, Dunja M. Mohr sets out to account for feminist science fiction's complex interplay of Utopian and dystopian thought. Focusing on influential works by Suzette Haden Elgin, Suzy McKee Charnas and Margaret Atwood, she delineates a "new subgenre" of feminist "transgressive Utopian dystopia" (5). These writers, and many others in the 40-year history of science fiction's sustained intersection with feminist politics, produce this hybrid form because they "incorporate within the dystopian narrative a Utopian undercurrent" using "utopian strategies" which "criticize, undermine, and transgress the established binary logic of dystopia" (3). The book's title refers to the multiple dualisms-invested with gendered value which have been critiqued and transgressed by feminist theorists like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, but it also signifies the duality of Utopia and dystopia. Dystopias, even transgressive Utopian ones, are grounded in a dual logic that compares the world as it is to the world as it could be, Mohr insists; the ones in the genre she defines undermine that dualism even as they rely upon it, which is what makes them paradoxical and interesting. The ambiguities of utopia and dystopia have been traced by many critics and fiction writers, a debt Mohr acknowledges--in addition to her many scholarly citations, influential Utopian texts like Le Guin's The Dispossessed appear frequently in footnotes and parentheses (116, 121). The new contribution Mohr seeks to make rests in her emphasis on transgression and her sustained close readings of her chosen texts in conversation with classic feminist theory.