Power and responsibility: Ethics and evil in feminist speculative fiction

This dissertation is an attempt to reconceive ideas of atonement, broadly understood, by means of a feminist conversation drawing on ethics, theology, literature and psychology. This conversation specifically questions how concepts of responsibility and evil inform each other and influence ethics not only theoretically, but also in practice.;To introduce the questions of evil and responsibility together, Kathleen Sands' theological work on the history of evil as understood in classic western theism and also by contemporary religious feminisms is summarized alongside the work of ethicist Sharon Welch. Sands seeks to reintroduce the "tragic" into our theological sensibilities, while Welch's "feminist ethic of risk" provides both a critique of the western "ethic of control" with its utopian imagination as well as a guide toward reading literature as a source of ethical thinking for redefining responsibility.;In the same way that Welch examines resistance literature, Ursula K. LeGuin's Four Ways to Forgiveness and Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing are read as sources of ethical thinking that offer alternative concepts of responsible action coincident with approaches to the question of evil that vary from the rationalistic and dualistic patterns Sands identifies. Their strategies, synthesized in the final chapter, include: an insistence on the "utopia" of the here and now; a deep appreciation of the connection of the personal and the social, the individual and the community; the role of history in revolutionary movements; the nature of healing, the need for survival, and the reality of failure; and the balanced understanding of limitation and possibility in ethical maturity. Using the work of feminist ethicist Ruth Ginsberg and poet/essayist Audre Lorde, the concluding chapter argues for survival and "erotic" well-being as central to an adequate ethical system, while the concept of evil is reexamined via C. G. Jung's "Shadow" and Paul Tillich's "daimonic."...