Summary: | My reading of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories understands Carter’s text as a feminist political project emblematic of feminist utopian thought. I use the term “feminist utopia” in a similar sense to the feminist utopia formulated by Lucy Sargisson in Contemporary Feminist Utopianism and Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression. As such, I focus on Carter’s feminist utopian vision aligned with the feminist utopia that Sargisson posits, a “feminist utopian expression” manifested on the level of the narrative and is based on form rather than content. By employing Adrienne Rich’s concept of writing as re-visioning, I discuss how Carter’s feminist utopian re-visioning enters into the intertextuality of old forms such as the fairy tale genre and the pornographic masculine text to assail male-dominated histories and ideologies. Through these two narrative strategies, I suggest that Carter’s feminist utopia gestures towards an opening of new conceptual spaces for exploration and exploitation in projects of emancipation for women.
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