The Climate of Control: Piercy’s Intersectional Critique of Patriarchy, Race, and Ecological Crisis in Woman on the Edge of Time

Ce séminaire est le sixième d'une série de séminaires intitulée « Climate Fiction(s) » qui a pour but d'explorer différents types de fictions climatiques, à la fois dans la littérature et dans les arts visuels, d'un point de vue anglophone. Pour ce sixième séminaire, nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter Elisabetta Di Minico, qui parlera de Woman on the Edge of Time de Marge Piercy.

[en anglais]

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is a foundational title of feminist science fiction with a strong ecological perspective, in which environmental degradation and social domination emerge as structural interconnected systems of power, situating the novel within a tradition of speculative works that examines the intersections of social and ecological oppression, including Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), and Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh (2017), among others. Piecy’s narrative constructs a continuum of control that links patriarchy, racism, poverty, medical and political oppression, and contamination, showing how the regulation of marginalized bodies, especially those of women and queer people, operates alongside the exploitation of nature.

Through the figure of Connie Ramos, the novel exposes the biopolitical subjugation of individuals deemed socially disposable in a reality that already bears dystopian marks of ecological and social crisis. Connie’s repeated experiences of discrimination and abuses and her confinement in the psychiatric hospital exemplify how institutional authority disciplines vulnerable subjects in the 70s. Piercy’s critique theatrically intensifies in the alternative dystopian future inhabited by Gildina, a doll-woman whose identity is destroyed and reconstructed to satisfy male fantasies. She lives in a vertically stratified New York dominated by multinational corporations, where the atmosphere is lethally polluted, nature has disappeared, food is synthetic, indigent people are used as organ suppliers, and sexual slavery through temporary contracts replaces marriage. While the poor barely survive on a toxic ground level, medically enhanced elites live blissfully in higher spaces. Both bodies and ecosystems are degraded, commodified, and exploited by the same regime of profit and control, denouncing the political framework of ecological emergency. Environmental collapse is inseparable from corporate authority, extreme class division, and violence against women. 

Against this dystopian trajectory, the ecotopian community of Mattapoisett offers a radically different socio-ecological future paradigm grounded in sustainability, reproductive autonomy, decentralization, and the dismantling of gender and racial hierarchies. Its careful integration of technology with renewable practices and social equality envisions a society in which justice and ecology coexist, showing that the survival of both humanity and the planet depends on dismantling structures of domination. Woman on the Edge of Time is a powerful and provocative novel that foregrounds intersectional justice playing with dystopian nightmares and utopian dreams and reminding us that the environmental resistance is inseparable from the fight against patriarchy, racism, and structural inequality. 

Biography

Over the past decade, Elisabetta Di Minico has developed a thought-provoking research profile spanning the Humanities and Social Sciences, focusing on dystopia, otherness, power, and social and political violence. Her work examines how literature, film, TV series, and comics reflect and interrogate urgent contemporary issues such as authoritarianism, systemic injustice, gender and racial violence, ecological collapse, and the fragility of democracy. Between 2022 and 2025, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (UNA4CAREER, Horizon 2020) at the Complutense University of Madrid, where her project, The Enmity of Otherness, analyzed how dystopian narratives reveal the mechanisms of political enmity and the use of the “other” to justify exclusion and repression. Since earning her PhD in Contemporary History (University of Barcelona, 2015), she has authored over 20 publications in English, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan, including the monograph Il futuro in bilico (Meltemi, 2018), used as a textbook in several Italian universities. She has presented her research at more than 60 international events across over 15 countries, including Harvard University, University of Sydney, Seoul National University, and Scuola Normale Superiore. Public engagement is central to her work. Since 2022, she has curated electricdreams, a science fiction film festival (IULM, Milan), and organized dystopian film cycles, literary festivals, book launches, and public debates. She has appeared as a guest at numerous festivals, collaborated on documentaries, radio and TV programs, podcasts, and livestreams, and served on juries for literary awards.

Respondent: Lisa Haristoy

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Ce séminaire s’inscrit dans le projet « Climate Fiction(s) » du programme FORESEE. Lauréat de l’appel à manifestation d’intérêt lancé dans le cadre du Plan 2030, le programme FORESEE explore les expériences vécues des conséquences du changement climatique par les individus, les organisations, les territoires et l’action publique. 

Le projet structurant « Climate Fiction(s) », co-porté par Marie Thévenon et James Dalrymple, fait partie de l’axe 1 du programme FORESEE qui s’intéresse aux individus face au changement climatique : émotions, discours, récits prospectifs. Ce projet propose d’explorer différents types de fiction climatique, tant dans la littérature que dans les arts visuels, d'un point de vue anglophone, en mettant l’emphase sur la représentation des individus face au changement climatique dans ces récits prospectifs.