The Role of Speculative Fiction in Feminist Thought

Speculative fiction is where the rules get rewritten.

It has always asked: what if? 

But in feminist hands, that question sharpens into a weapon. What if gender wasn’t destiny? What if motherhood wasn’t a mandate? What if the world broke, and women decided not to rebuild it the same way?

It's gravity bending. Gender dissolving. Power flipping. It's where, for a brief, burning moment, the world becomes what it could be—or what we’ve always feared it already is.

Feminism thrives in this genre not because it offers escape, but because it unlocks the trap. The trap of realism. In a culture obsessed with proof and practicality, speculative fiction gives women—especially those on the margins—the radical permission to imagine beyond survival. Because when you live in a body the world doesn’t center, the most rebellious act is to imagine a future where you are central.

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Utopias Are Never Neutral

From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) to Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), feminist writers have long used utopia not to paint paradise, but to dissect the present. These are not places where everything is perfect. They are laboratories of possibility. Gilman didn’t just invent an all-female society for fun—she created a pressure cooker to question male authority, sexual norms, and reproductive control.

But beware the utopia that only serves a few. If your speculative world erases race, class, disability, queerness, or colonial histories, it’s not utopia. It’s a gentrified thought experiment. Intersectional feminist futures must account for multiple truths, multiple violences, multiple ways of being. Otherwise, we’re not writing the future—we’re rebranding the past.

Of course, not all feminist visions are hopeful. Sometimes the point is to terrify. Think The Handmaid’s Tale, or Parable of the Sower. Think of all the worlds where women’s bodies are currency, where language is weaponized, where survival is sold as a prize for obedience. These dystopias don’t create new horrors but they can amplify existing ones. They turn quiet misogyny into law. They take gaslighting and turn it into governance. They are cautionary tales soaked in realism. Feminist speculative fiction reveals what’s already happening and turned it up to 100 and painted red.

On the other hand, speculative fiction gives us tools that realism won’t touch. Magic becomes metaphor for rage, trauma, and reclamation. Monsters stop being metaphors for “other” and start becoming protagonists. Time travel is used both as a tool and a way to reclaim history, to haunt colonialism, to revisit ancestral wounds with open eyes. And there is nothing more feminist than a woman who controls time, rewrites fate, or burns down a kingdom built on her silence.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, the house is both memory and myth; a shifting, haunted architecture where queer abuse is reframed through horror tropes and experimental form. It’s a type of an interrogation. In Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily, fairy tales are fractured into sharp, lyrical essays that blur motherhood, exile, and womanhood into speculative fragments. These aren’t reimaginings. They’re reclaimings. Or Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts: a hallucinatory descent into female desire, voyeurism, and violence. There’s no magic in the traditional sense but there is a distorted, hyper-surreal psychology that turns ordinary spaces into unstable terrain. And in Mona Awad’s Bunny, the line between academia and nightmare dissolves. A lonely, alienated writer is lured into a cult of saccharine, murderous MFA girls who speak in unison and conjure creatures from their trauma. It’s absurd. It’s horrifying. It’s feminist to the bone. These authors aren’t offering futures of peace or blueprints for empowerment. They’re crafting psychological maelstroms, fables stitched from blood and glitter, rage and ritual. In their worlds, womanhood is not a role. It’s a portal. And going through it means not coming back the same.

So, in short, speculative fiction demands we ask: What if things were different?

Feminist speculative fiction asks: Why weren’t they already? And what will we do about it?

Writing within this genre means giving up comfort. It means disrupting nostalgia. It means creating futures that aren’t just white, wealthy, and Wi-Fi connected.

It means storytelling as resistance and think maybe the most radical thing a woman can do in literature is exist—fully, messily, without narrative permission.

So build your worlds. Populate them with witches, cyborgs, single mothers with knives. Let them bleed and fail and rise. Let them queer time. Let them demand better. Let them burn it down.