Dystopia, Feminism and Phallogocentrism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is a very dark dystopian fable which introduces the reader to a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the planet Earth is on the edge of destruction, and human beings have been almost completely eradicated and substituted for a new, genetically-engineered, race. In this article, I am going to analyse the fundamental role phallogocentrism plays in the destruction of humanity and in the creation of a new world order populated by primitive but more ecological creatures.

Literary dynamics inThe.PowerBookby Jeanette Winterson andOryx and Crakeby Margaret Atwood

“…For example, The.PowerBook has generated cybertext (Barnett, 2003; Butchard, 2015), queer (Pelle, 2012), utopian (Wagner-Lawlor, 2009) and theological (McAvan, 2020) critical analyses, or blends of these, among other readings. Scholarly discussion of Oryx and Crake includes dystopian (Ciobanu, 2014; Hicks, 2016; Mohr, 2015), Anthropocene, (Caracciolo et al, 2019; Chen, 2018), feminist (Evans, 2010; Martín, 2019) and other thematic interpretations. In a stylistic rather than thematic analysis, Caracciolo and colleagues (2019) used qualitative coding and computer-aided statistics to describe a subset of metaphors in Oryx and Crake .…”