Lauren Rayne

17 February 2019

There Will Always Be the “Other”

After reading several Utopian texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Thomas More’s Utopia, and the one Dystopian novel, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, I began to question the politics involved within the narrative of these stories. I, personally, have limited exposure to the world of Dystopian/Utopian societies, but in just a short time I have found a common motif within this particular literature that I am going to explore further, and that is the commentary on identity politics; we as a postmodern society are exposed to this on a daily basis. Take Utopia for example, a novella written 500 years ago, in which Utopia identifies itself as world of radically different concepts that oppose modern day political hierarchy and thought. The same goes for Herland, and also Anthem; all arguably different, yet similar in their proto-communist narrative. Furthermore, to understand where I am going with this, I first had to define the term “identity politics” in order to keep with the same definition whilst doing research. Mary Bernstein examines various approaches to identity politics, but the one in which I will use is explicitly a neo-Marxist view seen at a macro level where class inequality is “the only real source of exploitation and oppression” (Bernstein, 49). Ultimately, I want to understand why two different versions of a postmodern world, the Utopias and the Dystopias, include the same political choice in the form of identity politics—how can the “unideal” and the “ideal” have similar political ideologies?

As much as I enjoyed Utopia, what I really want to examine are the extremes of identity politics in Herland and in Anthem. In the former we see a unified front of women (motherhood) with little political hierarchy, and in the latter, we see a collection of people known as “we” and “brotherhood” with an unidentified political hierarchy (very ambiguous).  Collectivism seems to be a key ingredient in both Utopian and Dystopian literature, which is when I came across the essay “Corruption and Identity Politics in Divided Societies,” where Camilla Orjeula highlights the intersection of corruption and evil within identity politics. One phrase stuck with me in this article, and that is the “violent pursuit of power.” This stuck with me, because Gilman, a progressive woman who commented on the social horrors of females in the twentieth-century, eventually created her own identity of women in Herland, though that identity excludes others, and not just men, but other women too. That’s the fault with identity politics, because there will always be the “other,” and it can be dissected to a great degree. The novel Anthem merges the identity of all into the collective pronoun that is “we,” thus similar to “motherhood.” Therefore, how is it that two “opposing” worlds are so similar when it comes to the identity of the masses? This question is answered within this article as well, Orjeula, shows the distinct paradox of identity politics that is there is the identity, the “self,” and then there is “identity as a social construct, a ‘production’, which is ‘never complete, always in process’ and in which the self is constructed in relation to an ‘other’, who is different” (755).

I do not think it is possible to examine this particular paradox within Utopian/Dystopian literature without including postmodern politics. In both Anthem and Herland we can assume the female authors were greatly affected by the societal conventions around them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ayn Rand most likely would not have been best friends, yet their commentary on political hierarchy and identity politics within the narrative of their stories embody the downfall of a unified front (Carina Chocano). So, do we want our own collective group based on our identities—or do we not? Media such as Fox News and CNN, promote identity politics, but only if you are on the side of which they deem the appropriate identity (this is a paradox working out in our own society today). There is also an article in the New Yorker that makes a good point, and that is, with Utopias we look to the future and with Dystopias we tend to look to the past (Jill Lepore). It seems, from the limited literature I have read on the subject, that is does not matter if it is the past or the future, the ideal or the unideal; what matters is that collectivism and group identities do not work in these very different and carefully constructed worlds.

There is a substantial amount of literature that I came across engaging in the same discourse regarding identity politics, and how identity politics in our current society can eventually lead to what these authors (Gilman and Rand) “warn” us against. In JP. Tate’s novel, The Identity Wars: Utopia is Dystopia, he depicts the problems within Utopian societies, because they only fit one standard of living—they are exclusive. This is in relation to Dystopian novels, where identity wars are consistent with far-right totalitarianism. Now, I am not attempting to make a broad generalization, though from what I have discovered in both my research and my readings of the two texts are: Utopias and Dystopias are essentially the same (as far as I can tell) when it comes to identity politics, and the spectrum of good versus evil depends upon the identity of the masses (i.e. “motherhood,” or “brotherhood”). 

Works Cited

Bernstein, Mary. “Identity Politics.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 47–     

74. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29737711.

Tate, JP. The Identity Wars: Utopia is Dystopia. 2005. Print.

Orjuela, Camill. “Corruption and Identity Politics in Divided Societies.” Third World Quarterly,   

vol. 35, no. 5, May 2014, pp. 753-769. EBSCOhost.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/a-golden-age-for-dystopian-fiction

https://www.good.is/features/issue-39-im-with-herland-charlotte-perkins-gilman