Gender role reversal

This is a list of works which explicitly reverse the gender roles for one or more significant aspects of society.

A key defining element of these works is the mirroring of some aspect of contemporary (usually) or historical (occasionally) patriarchal culture. The mirroring might be comprehensive, as in Egalia's Daughters, or of just a few major aspects of society. Often, but not usually, these are societies in which the role reversal is viewed as uncritically from that society's point of view, as patriarchy is viewed from a patriarchal perspective.

The mirroring aspect of gender role reversal creates a satirical or commentary effect. This is in contrast with simply worldbuilding by creating a society which views gender roles differently than most modern cultures presently do, as in trying to envision what a matriarchy might realistically look like. As satire or critical commentary, this mirroring may either offer critique of existing patriarchal societies and gender roles; or the mirroring may offer critique of an imaginary matriarchal or feminist society, implicitly naturalizing and reifying socially constructed gender roles by showing the absurdity of a gender transposition.

Works listed

• Catherine Asaro. The Last Hawk
• Katharine Burdekin, The End of This Day's Business
• Thomas Berger. Regiment of Women (Simon & Schuster, 1973). Anti-feminist blah-blah. You gotta feel sorry for guys like Berger, so obviously afraid of women. Where is Berger now? Anyway, this is a role reversal where the reader is intended to see the absurdity & pathos of a man dressing up & suffering sexual harassment etc. Somehow some very obvious points seem to have eluded Berger ... Oh well. This one is a little too long to be really amusing as an example of fear-of-feminism; the first chapter is fine & amusing, but then it keeps going on ... and on ... and on. Read it & weep, or spend your afternoon a lot more profitably with Gerd Brantenberg's Egalia's Daughters, which also covers role reversal from the perspective of a man, but who is a good writer, astute, observant, and funny to boot. -- lq, 6/11/00
• Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Ruins of Isis (1978) [a heterosexual couple of scholars from an interplanetary federation visit a matriarchal world ... ]
• Gerd Brantenberg's Egalia's Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes (originally: Egalias døtre) (translated from Norwegian into English by Louis Mackay)
• Jayge Carr. Leviathan's Deep (1979)
• Rokeya Sakhawat-Hossain. "Sultana's Dream" (1905) (a short story in which the Sultana visits Ladyland, where purdah has been reversed to the great benefit of the land)
• Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Matter of Seggri"
• Mack Reynolds. Amazon Planet (1975) (a man visits a planet, ostensibly run by women with a role reversal involving male harems (gynaeca))
• Sheri Tepper Six Moon Dance
• Richard Wilson. The Girls from Planet 5 (1955) [by 1998, women have taken over the government since the 80s, with Texas a masculine hold-out; when 6-foot tall, sexy alien girls come by with an unusual threat, it's men to the rescue. an ostensibly good-humored war-of-the-sexes story]

Television examples

• Red Dwarf episode "Parallel Universe", where the all-male crew encounter their female opposites. (Except for the Cat, who is aghast that his opposite is a Dog.)