This exploration of feminist utopia as a set of strategies for re-inventing a patriarchal genre is based on the new-rhetorical theories of genre that view language as situated social action and genres as "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (Miller 159). Being active social processes, "dynamic rather than static" (Devitt 580), genres respond to and regenerate their context of situation. Evolving due to changes of larger discursive systems, they continue to exist only if the strategies they embody “work”. The study identifies a need for a utopian genre that can provide the feminist community with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change, to validate the personal as political, and to express feminists’ self-defence in their retaliating symbolic violence against patriarchy.

My readings of Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man are based upon Burke’s rhetoric of identification, Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, and feminist theories of gender and subjectivity. My key terms are gender, sexuality, subjectivity, power, language, and meaning.

Feminist utopias criticise patriarchal social order and offer a new conceptual space:​ they envision a different time/place which allows for ideological change. This act of imagining is always problematic once it is written down;​ first, utopia must avoid fixing the act of social dreaming by creating blueprints of utopian worlds because doing so removes the transformative potential of the imagined future which can generate change in the present. Second, a feminist utopia must describe a better place for women while working with the very tools of patriarchy in the form of language. Consequently, it attempts to disrupt the genre-setting ‘rules’ of mainstream utopia through the use of ambiguity, multiplicity, and openness.

The feminist utopia is not a ‘natural’ or ideologically innocent transgression of patriarchal genres, but a set of strategies both contingent on the rhetorical situation and implicated in the politics of feminist discourse community. The feminist utopia describes ‘the good place which is no place’;​ but as a genre, it is grounded in place and time:​ it reflects the feminist attempts to change their inferior positioning in the socio-historic context of the 1970s