130068 VO Utopian Bodies: Sexuality and Reproduction in Alternative Worlds (2016S)

'A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at' (Oscar Wilde). The practice of imagining alternative social orders has a long and complex history, with its roots in folk utopias of material plenitude and visions of paradise on earth. While the rational societies envisioned by early modern thinkers such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon were conceived as a way of criticising existing social conditions or setting out a new scientific agenda, utopia even in its socialist incarnation has never been reducible to a rationalist blueprint, but rather relies on the power of fantasy and dreaming to open up visions of the possible, while at the same time holding up a distorting mirror to historical reality.

Utopia’s fantastic distortions are most particularly visible in the area of sex, sexuality, gender relations, and family structures. The utopian society must reproduce itself, but it rarely takes historical reality as its model for this purpose. Utopian thinkers and writers experiment in a range of fascinating and often troubling ways with new models of gender, sexuality, and family from enforced polygamy to public sexual ritual, from parthenogenesis to fully technologised reproduction. Often overlooked in the literature on utopian fiction, these aspects of imagined societies are highly significant, in that they open critical perspectives on real sex-gender systems, past and present.

This course will examine the history of utopian imagination since Thomas More through the lens of gender theory, focussing particularly on the crises and questionable re-incarnations of utopia in the modernist period. Visions of other worlds will be scrutinised for their attempts (and failures) to re-imagine sex-gender systems; to re-structure or abolish the family; to rethink sex beyond taboo, or to introduce alternative taboos; and to set forth visions of emancipated or fully lived sexuality. The utopian tradition is thus re-read as a discourse on sex, one which makes a distinctive contribution to the critical effort to think through, and think against, established or normative models of gender and sexuality.