The (Dystopian) Promise of Happiness: Hope, Happiness and Optimism in Contemporary Feminist Dystopias

This article explores how recent utopian studies have conceptualized hope as a shapeless “horizon” characterized by its collective, positive and revolutionary core, and compares it to recent discussions on hope in the fields of feminist theory and affect studies that problematize affirmative conceptualizations of hope, happiness and optimism in calling for a more complex vision on the topic. Such reflections will be applied to the increasingly realistic contemporary feminist dystopias of recent years, which demonstrate a decisive change concerning where and how dystopian worlds are set and represented. Finally, an analysis of the novel The Book of X (2019) by Sarah Rose Etter, with its stunning lack of any utopian horizon traditionally intended, will try to break open Baccolini and Moylan’s definition of “critical dystopia”, detaching the presence of a critical angle from the presence of a properly intended utopian opening.