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A review by hdicicco
The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future by
4.0
3.5 stars rounded up, though I reserve the right to waffle on this up/down rounding.
Contributor Sam Huber quotes James Baldwin in their essay “I Don’t:” “The vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.”
This is, I think, my biggest gripe with many of the pieces in this anthology: they are simply too mired in the reality of our current world. I feel like a bit of a brat complaining about the lack of imagination in some of these pieces while knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to dream up anything more radical, but then I also didn’t write a piece reflecting on feminist utopia.
The pieces I loved most challenged me. Maya Dusdbery’s “Dispatch From A Post-Rape Future” fucked me up, pointing out how what we think of as meaningfully progressive ways of having sex are still a direct reflection of rape culture. Tessa Smith and Suey Park dared me to stop pathologizing my own emotional experiences and mental states. There were other superb contributions. Sadly, though, many utopian visions included nothing beyond “no one uses “slut” as a pejorative” or “there’s a childcare facility at work/school” as their big reveal. It’s not that these things aren’t important of course, but too few authors expanded on the “why” behind the necessity of adding or removing things from our worlds. I don’t need to hear that street harassment is bad. Tell me how, in a feminist utopia, the safety granted to people free of the preoccupation street harassment (etc) are building radically new systems that allow us not just to live but to thrive.
Some of these pieces made me sad to reflect on how crummy our realities can be; others made me sad that we can’t even imagine demanding - deserving - more. But the special few forced me to do just that.
Edit: here's a great review that focuses on another critique I noticed but didn't mention: this book is very much written by people in the first decade of their adult lives, and it shows! That doesn't make it bad per se, but it is something to think about for sure. https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-feminist-utopia-project-isnt-quite-utopian
Contributor Sam Huber quotes James Baldwin in their essay “I Don’t:” “The vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.”
This is, I think, my biggest gripe with many of the pieces in this anthology: they are simply too mired in the reality of our current world. I feel like a bit of a brat complaining about the lack of imagination in some of these pieces while knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to dream up anything more radical, but then I also didn’t write a piece reflecting on feminist utopia.
The pieces I loved most challenged me. Maya Dusdbery’s “Dispatch From A Post-Rape Future” fucked me up, pointing out how what we think of as meaningfully progressive ways of having sex are still a direct reflection of rape culture. Tessa Smith and Suey Park dared me to stop pathologizing my own emotional experiences and mental states. There were other superb contributions. Sadly, though, many utopian visions included nothing beyond “no one uses “slut” as a pejorative” or “there’s a childcare facility at work/school” as their big reveal. It’s not that these things aren’t important of course, but too few authors expanded on the “why” behind the necessity of adding or removing things from our worlds. I don’t need to hear that street harassment is bad. Tell me how, in a feminist utopia, the safety granted to people free of the preoccupation street harassment (etc) are building radically new systems that allow us not just to live but to thrive.
Some of these pieces made me sad to reflect on how crummy our realities can be; others made me sad that we can’t even imagine demanding - deserving - more. But the special few forced me to do just that.
Edit: here's a great review that focuses on another critique I noticed but didn't mention: this book is very much written by people in the first decade of their adult lives, and it shows! That doesn't make it bad per se, but it is something to think about for sure. https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-feminist-utopia-project-isnt-quite-utopian