Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces by Davina Cooper (review)

Everyday Utopias explores a topic that is vital but is too often overlooked by utopian scholars. It is best read in tandem with its 2013 predecessor, Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism, by Michael Gardiner (Bern: Peter Lang; see below). In a nutshell, Cooper, like Gardiner, argues that although utopian visions may be born in the brains of utopian thinkers, progress toward utopia is what counts, and it must be rooted in present patterns and possibilities. Lest my qualms with the book’s execution overwhelm its value for readers, let me emphasize my enthusiastic support of its basic purpose and its promotion of the growing field of practical utopianism, using a strikingly diverse array of cases to stake out Cooper’s position that utopias are for everyone and are rooted in the everyday experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary people.

Her cases alone should attract a diverse readership: governmental promotion of equality in Britain, public nudism, a lesbian feminist bathhouse in Toronto, a Local Exchange Trading Scheme in England, the famous English boarding school Summerhill, and Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London. Although her explanations for why each case is arguably utopian vary in persuasiveness, all six cases do logically fall within the purview of the utopian thinkers explored by Gardiner, especially Bakhtin, Bloch, Lefebvre, and Heller and Fehrer, all of whom target the utopian implications of everyday life and two of whom (Bakhtin and Bloch) Cooper cites.

Let us sample Cooper’s eclectic argumentation in her six cases. Focusing on the Equality Act of 2010, she explores ways in which the British government’s “touch of equality governance, as an everyday utopia” (45)—suggested by government documents that use such terms as “soft touch … embracing … [and] tackling” of problems (54)—“open[s] up more progressive and transformative ways of understanding the touching state—that is, the state that feels and that experiences, in turn, the feelings of others” (45). In this metaphorical reification of “an animate, sensitive, responsive state” (71), Cooper is suggesting a utopian/dystopian mixed bag, because “while casting equality allows us to envision a transformative kind of state touch, imagining such a touch poses troubling political questions, specifically, how touching-feeling should the state be?” (71).

The chapter “Public Nudism and the Pursuit of Equality” continues with the utopian theme of equality but applies it to a generally discouraged, heavily regulated, and typically banned activity. Here utopian features include the signaling of “the fantasy of a better way of living,” the educating of desire, and the inspiring of a more natural connection with the world (81). Because clothing often signifies socioeconomic class standing, nudity negates that link in an egalitarian direction. Of course, naked bodies are not all roses, as (for instance) “nudism’s early, highly problematic associations with eugenics and racism are well established” (83). From ancient times to the present, nudism as an acceptable option has been more available to men than to women, and it has long been marked by multiple ageist criteria. Nonetheless, “public urban nudism has the potential to contribute to wider forms of social dreaming and to visions of better cities” (97), the natural body suggests a more ecological perspective, and public nudism helps the issue of “equality of rights and entitlement come to the fore” (97).

The case of the Toronto feminist, lesbian, and transgender bathhouse again raises equality issues, regarding gender (including feminist care ethics), sexual orientation, and, serendipitously, race, as some guests have complained of experiencing racist slights at the bathhouse. Utopian intimations were embedded from the beginning, as “organizers sought to celebrate the range and diversity of sexualities; invest nonstraight female culture with a more overtly raunchy, ‘in your face’ eroticism; and signal women’s sexual agency to wider society” (103). Moreover, “as a queer feminist space, [the bathhouse] committed to modes of governance that were democratic, participative, and open” (104), and there “was a demonstrated commitment...