The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

From the eighteenth century, Indigenous women have produced texts in English that reflect and re-inscribe Indigenous principles of law and social order, as well as challenge the force of settler colonial law. Native women writers have made visible the burdens and structures of violence that make Indigenous women and children particularly vulnerable to state disciplinary power (such as public execution, military warfare, massacres, state-sanctioned starvation, and the removal of indigenous children from their families) and extra-judicial violence (land theft, fraud, murder, rape). This essay reviews major works and criticism, organized in three overlapping categories: writing about the law and criminality; writing about prison and carcerality; and writing Indigenous law. These writers mastered new languages and genres to assert Native rights and make legible multiple forms of violence against Native communities. Across time and circumstance, Native women’s writing has had very little distance from the law, or from the law’s claim over their bodies, families, and futures.