Scan barcode
A review by pattricejones
The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future by
I was excited by the premise of this book, and I applaud all of the contributors for exercising their imaginations, but what I mostly felt while reading this anthology was... sad.
Why I was excited: We're in the midst, I think, of a profound crisis of imagination. We don't even know, I suspect, how to think the thoughts we would need to think in order to imagine a way out of the worldwide crises of climate change and escalating hate-based violence. And so we need to provoke ourselves to envision a world of truly different relationships, both among people and between people and the rest of the planet.
Why I felt sad: When asked to imagine a feminist utopia, the contributors to this volume mostly summoned up... the Democratic Party platform. Universal health care. Paid family leave. Reproductive freedom. All fine and important, but hardly the stimulating imaginary I was hoping for.
And then came the disappointments: Trans liberation mostly envisioned as rights/acceptance within the same old gender binary, as if it were impossible to imagine 5 genders or no genders or something else altogether to replace that particularly constrictive social construct. No attention whatsoever to how humans exploit the earth and other animals, as if utopia would be a world where we continue to trample all over everybody else but are nicer to each other.
I'm hesitating to publish this, because I don't want anybody involved with the project to feel sad as a result. But I really do think that our crisis of imagination is a real crisis and that, unfortunately, this book shows how constricted our dreams have become. It IS wonderful to imagine a world where people have to work hard to figure out what the word "rape" might have meant (that was actually one of the handful of truly creative contributions that I did enjoy). We just have to learn to imagine much more expansively.
Why I was excited: We're in the midst, I think, of a profound crisis of imagination. We don't even know, I suspect, how to think the thoughts we would need to think in order to imagine a way out of the worldwide crises of climate change and escalating hate-based violence. And so we need to provoke ourselves to envision a world of truly different relationships, both among people and between people and the rest of the planet.
Why I felt sad: When asked to imagine a feminist utopia, the contributors to this volume mostly summoned up... the Democratic Party platform. Universal health care. Paid family leave. Reproductive freedom. All fine and important, but hardly the stimulating imaginary I was hoping for.
And then came the disappointments: Trans liberation mostly envisioned as rights/acceptance within the same old gender binary, as if it were impossible to imagine 5 genders or no genders or something else altogether to replace that particularly constrictive social construct. No attention whatsoever to how humans exploit the earth and other animals, as if utopia would be a world where we continue to trample all over everybody else but are nicer to each other.
I'm hesitating to publish this, because I don't want anybody involved with the project to feel sad as a result. But I really do think that our crisis of imagination is a real crisis and that, unfortunately, this book shows how constricted our dreams have become. It IS wonderful to imagine a world where people have to work hard to figure out what the word "rape" might have meant (that was actually one of the handful of truly creative contributions that I did enjoy). We just have to learn to imagine much more expansively.