Exploring Women’s Agency in Bengali Feminist Utopian Fiction: An Analysis of Begum Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream

Abstract

Since the evolution of the genre, Science Fiction has served as a fertile ground for the exploration of socio-cultural understandings of gender. The paper aims to provide an overview of the treatment of gender in feminist science fiction in general and explore, through the textual analysis of Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) in particular, the concept of women’s agency. To serve this purpose, the feminine authorial tendency of using the genre as a parameter for discerning gender discrepancies by providing a utopian setup, will be scrutinised. The analysis will, therefore, interrogate the patriarchal utopian genre of science fiction and underline how feminist interventions have given voice to women’s agency. The paper will also try to examine how exploration of the thematic concerns of the chosen text highlights the basic feminist literary tendencies of the female-authored science fiction of the 1970s in the West. Exposing the patriarchal tendency of subjugating the position of women in society by portraying them as the ‘other’ or the ‘inferior’ functions at the core of this analysis. The need to evolve a theory of women’s agency lied in the urgent need to give a proper voice to women’s own needs and concerns in a patriarchal society. Building on the consciousness raising model of the feminist movement of the 1960s-70s, utopian Science Fiction as a literary genre can be visualised as a tool for women empowerment.