Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) begins with Connie's psychiatric hospitalization for ‘violent behaviour’. A working class, Latino woman in 1970s US, Connie was ‘violent’ indeed. She violently protected her niece against a pimp – hitting him with a bottle in an attempt to prevent her niece undergoing a forced abortion. Living in a threatening neighbourhood, she might have used violence in other situations, or become used to it. But decontextualized ‘violence’ appears inadmissible, pathological, morally reprehensible. In this story, mental health professionals decontextualize Connie's actions, making them illegitimate, the sign of an individual flaw, and this had terrible outcomes. Tragically, Connie finds herself locked up and dispossessed from the custody of her child. But in the hospital, a ray of hope shines in the form of Luciente's visits. Luciente introduces Connie into a bright future, a fulfilling, utopian social organization that Connie can eventually explore by herself, meeting its members, discovering how their community overcame the plagues of capitalism, individualism and sexism. Whether these visits are imaginary or real is another question.

In the society Connie discovers, words implement change. A significant one is ‘per’. Per, the first three letters of ‘person’, is used instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’, both as an outcome and catalyst of the shifting gender relations that drove this future world out of masculine domination: people are referred to as persons, not as sexes. As such, some parts of this story critique how institutions categorize behaviours in a way that minimizes their social context, especially for those who, like Connie, do not have the means to resist. Further, Woman on the Edge of Time raises reflections on the power carried by categorizations. What does it mean to be ‘violent’? What does it mean to be called ‘he’, ‘she’ – ‘per’? Categories are hinges between realities and their perception. As such, because people live through how they name things, labelling mechanisms have both conservative and transformative potential: they draw a space of possibilities.