My new understanding of what a dystopia consists of is a society or economic structure that is continually oppressive to all or the vast majority of its constituents, whether it be through social, political, or financial means.
Even though that is the definition I have come to learn and intuitively understand, there are aspects that I drew from the article readings throughout the semester that may suffice in the explanation of the definition. When we were assigned to read Iris Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression,” I realized, then, there are many more aspects that contribute to what makes a dystopia so dysfunctional than I had originally assumed. Through mostly political regimes such as “Marginalization” and “Cultural Imperialism” I was able to understand that usually, the people that make up a dystopian society are helpless in their environment. In addition to Iris Young, was Sigmund Freud’s disposition that a dystopia is unavoidable and unsurprisingly natural. Through other blog posts, we discussed if a utopia is possible, and I was one of those that believed that since everybody’s definition of a utopia was different, it could not exist, and Freud’s article, even with harsher language, somewhat supported my theory.
