Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

2. Turning Inward: Strategies of Containment and Subjective/Collective Boundaries in Traditional Utopian Literature

2 Turning Inward: Strategies of Containment and Subjective/Collective Boundaries in Traditional Utopian Literature Depending upon the point of view from which the ideal collective is conceived, the political effect of the narrative practices that support the traditional form of Utopian literature can vary dramatically. In the first part of this chapter, I examine how Utopian logic operates in traditional works of Utopian literature that express a more or less socialist agenda; in the second part, I explore a novel in which this traditional Utopian literary form has been adapted to reflect and support a contemporary feminist vision. My study of the Utopian literary tradition in this chapter is not intended to be exhaustive; my goal is to pick out certain generalizable tendencies that distinguish the traditional Utopian narrative from other genres. My focus is on the fact that, although crucial elements of the form remain the same (the emphasis on harmony, the strict division between authentic and inauthentic , the absorption of the individual into the collective and the suppression of agency), the different social contexts in which these formal elements operate produce a different set of political effects. More specifically, I analyze how these political effects reveal that traditional Utopian logic becomes problematic when it is deployed from a position of disempowerment. Since the relationship between individual and social body lies at the heart of my analysis of both Utopian logic and the logic of contemporary feminism, I concentrate on how the political function of the Utopian narrative is expressed in the relation betweenfiguresof subjectivity and images of the social body. My comparison of a contemporary feminist Utopia to traditional 47 Turning Inward socialist-oriented Utopias is sympathetic to Donna Haraway's observation that "to be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product" (1990:201). In traditional socialist Utopia,abstracting the individual body as a figure for the collective, although it entails several undesirable political effects, does not represent an outright contradiction . In feminist Utopias,however, using women's bodies as afigurefor the ideal women's collective confronts the problem that women's bodies are a primary site of gender oppression and have been represented by dominant discourse as the site of particularity and difference— not abstract universality. It is thus impossible, aswell as politically undesirable , to make the female body stand as afigurefor an ideal social collective in the traditional way that this homology has operated. In this chapter, I critique not only elements of Utopian logic within the socialist tradition, but also the choice made by radical feminists to adapt this logic in developing their strategies of resistance and the resulting tendency toward a more essentialist cultural feminism. Traditional Utopian narrative relies on a figure of subjectivity founded on exclusion and the projection of negative qualities onto an outside body, thus supporting dominating practices with the same logic through which it establishes its harmony and self-containment. I argue here that certain strains of radical feminism, in order to sustain this Utopian dichotomy between authentic and inauthentic, elected to adopt the position of "other" in this individual/other dichotomy and thus predicated feminist Utopia upon a logic that supports women's disempowerment. In critiquing how the use of traditional Utopian logic impaired feminist goals, I do not wish to dismiss the boldness of early radical feminism's analysis or the extent to which this analysis provided the foundation for our current understanding of gender relations and the nature of women's oppression. By critiquing some of their strategies in hindsight, I am not so much dismissing them as naive as I am attempting to come to an understanding of how they shed light on some of the double binds that face feminism today. The Sealed Pact: Utopia and the Hermeneutic of Unity In Thomas Mores Utopia, Utopian social space is founded on afigure of organic unity, on a conception of the individual body as har48 Turning Inward monious and self-contained—free from contamination and protected by an absolute boundary between itself and its external environment . Mores Utopians begin by dividing the pleasures of the individual body into two classes: the first consists of the gross satisfactions that "fill the senses with immediate delight," and the second consists of "nothing more than the calm and harmonious state of the body" (59). In actual fact, however, these two classes...