The Nightmarish Odyssey of Women Stuck in the Dystopian Lottery: Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket

Year 2021, Volume: 31 Issue: 1, 43 - 74, 23.06.2021

İsmail Avcu

Abstract

Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket touches upon the issues of gender roles, femininity, motherhood as well as oppression, dystopian restrictions, the abandonment of free will and predetermined life. As a lottery is used in the narrative to determine women’s lives, the deconstruction of gender roles as well as a nightmarish system of oppression of women are thoroughly analysed in the novel. Since women’s writing and women’s issues have become quite relevant and topical today, Blue Ticket offers a deeper analysis and a horrible story about the aforementioned concepts. This paper aims to show how gender roles and the existence of women are reflected in Mackintosh’s feminist dystopian narrative Blue Ticket by making use of Luce Irigaray’s, Helene Cixous’s and Michel Foucault’s theories in which femininity, sex, gender roles, biological representation, and panopticon become prominent. Considering the fact that women’s writing and restrictions of gender roles go hand in hand in contemporary British fiction, this study brings out significant results about how Mackintosh evaluates those issues with a unique voice and what her female characters tell the readers about living a pre-determined life. In a world where women are given only two options, which are provided by pure chance in a lottery, of either having a baby or being used for the sexual pleasure of men, the conventional issues of femininity and gender roles are scrutinized with current patriarchal power relations and dystopian regimes.

Keywords

Gender roles, femininity, motherhood, womanhood, dystopia

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