在《時空邊緣的女人》中，作者藉著揭露一位墨裔美籍女性穿梭時空的故事，來探討弱勢族群在美國資本主義社會中被邊緣化的困境，並批判美國社會中以中產階級白人男性觀點為主流價值標準而形成對「異己」團體及文化的壓迫、歧視與剝削。作者運用科幻小說技巧中的異想（fantasy），連結現在與未來，對比１９７０年代的美國現實社會和西元２１０７年的烏托邦世界，揉合女性主義及後現代主義精神，以檢驗並批判當代美國社會之窳陋，並試圖勾勒一個多元價值並存、兩性尊重平等、自然與科技平衡的願景。

此篇論文共分四章。第一章略述小說文本的概要及其寫作背景，並討論分析此一文本所應用之理論和概念：後現代主義、女性主義、烏托邦文學和科幻小說，及此四者所交織出對於典律(canon)之質疑和批判的策略。第二章討論作者如何運用後現代批判形式之論述策略來表達其女性主義之關懷，形成邊陲與中心的對話。第三章的焦點集中於探討女主角穿梭時空下對比現實世界、未來烏托邦和反烏托邦世界所牽引出──語言、歷史、科學╱科技、生態、性╱別以及主體──一系列課題之批判思考。最後一章則回顧前述的理論如何與文本的內容及形式相結合，以挑戰現實世界及讀者心中牢固偏執的主流意識形態。

Struggling with the social norms of gender and to be a 'visible' woman writer, Marge Piercy challenges and interrogates the canonical, patriarchal hegemony that dominates the culture. Her work, Woman on the Edge of Time, invites multiple alternatives by imagining beyond what is taken for granted. This thesis aims to explore how the heroine's time-travel undergoes a dialogic process between the past, present and future, which effects a feminist politics to examine the social norms and to anticipate a change toward an egalitarian world.

This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter offers an overview of both the text and context of this novel. Since I define this novel as a generic mixture of feminist utopian writing and postmodern science fiction, I first introduce theories of postmodernism, feminism, science fiction, and utopian writing, and their intersections. The exploration of theories here paves the way for the textual analysis in later discussion. In the second chapter, I discuss how the writer manipulates postmodern strategies to express her feminist concerns of destabilizing the canon and enabling a dialogic interaction between the margin and the center. The third chapter focuses on key debates within feminist discourse, which are revealed and symbolized through the heroine's telepathic experiences communicating between the dystopian present and the utopian future. The feminist thinking toward language, history, science/technology, ecology, gender/sexuality, and subjectivity is elaborated in this chapter. Finally, the concluding chapter reviews theories and issues concerning both postmodernist and feminist thinking highlighted through the heroine's time-travel/mind-travel, which is a dialogic process bringing up different voices and perspectives--a voyage of rethinking and reshaping.

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