Feminist Dystopia and Reality in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

Abstract

This article examines two recent examples of feminist dystopias: Louise Erdrich'sFuture Home of the Living God (2017) and Leni Zumas's Red Clocks (2018). True to their genre, these novels act as warnings, denouncing the patriarchal control over women's bodies and the capitalistic over-exploitation of nature. Strategically positioned between dystopia and realism, they recover and revise generic and thematic conventions and propose relationality and solidarity of humans and the natural world as the best way to redress patriarchal and capitalist abuse. All in all, these feminist dystopias offer an opportunity for reflection on the intersections of current forms of literary feminism and transmodernity.