Historie alternatywne i steampunk a emancypacja i prawa kobiet. Rozważania wstępne

Abstract

The article deals with the presence of reflections on emancipation and women’s rights in alternative and steampunk stories. The author points out that in both of the above‑mentioned genres of fantasy literature, these issues are not an overarching theme, despite the fact that criticism and subversive rewriting of past eras from the point of view of the present is inherent in these genres. The analysis shows that anachronically conceived emancipation of women takes place mainly in novels set in historical eras far removed from the present (deep antiquity and, far less frequently, the Middle Ages). Novels closer to contemporaneity, set in the 18th and 19th centuries, generally do not subject emancipation and women’s rights to alternative reflection. This is all the more astonishing if one bears in mind the fact that the 19th century was time of the birth of the feminist and suffragette movements. This reluctance to rework the nineteenth century from the point of view of women’s emancipation is due to the still active cultural memory of the period. The author’s thesis is that the unwillingness to rework the issues of emancipation and women’s rights in an alternative way is related to the still active cultural paradigm, founded, among others, on the Judeo‑Christian tradition. Another reason is the domination of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in alternative and steampunk, which is a literary, phantasmatic reaction to the dynamic processes of women’s emancipation taking place in the actual world.