Globital Utopias: Imaginaries of Gender, Memory and New Technologies

Abstract

This chapter develops the idea of the ‘feminist mnemonic imagination’ as a critical tool to dis-embed the knowledge practices of the mnemologist in the Globital Age. The chapter examines human imaginaries of gender and memory at significant historical points in which revolutionary mnemonic technologies were invented. Anna Reading shows the entangled ways in which memory, gender and new technologies are imagined within the domain of literary utopias from late medieval or early Renaissance fiction, including Christine de Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Thomas More’s Utopia through to 20th century exemplars such as Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night and The End of This Day’s Business, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Marge Piercy’s A Woman on the Edge of Time.