Partial Visions

What would a good world for women look like? How would we get there from where we are and how would we have to change ourselves in the process? This book examines a critical moment in recent American and western European history when the utopian dimension of political movements was particularly generative and feminism was at their core. The imaginative literature that emerged out of American, French, and German feminisms of the 1970s engaged the dialectic between the actual and the possible in radically new and creative ways. Ranging from conventional utopian and science fictions to avant-garde and experimental texts, they countered the idea of utopia as a pre-set goal with the idea of the utopian as a process of «dreaming forwards.» This book explores the transformative potential of feminist visions of change, even as it sees their ideological blind spots. It does more than simply look back to the 1970s. Instead, it looks ahead, anticipating some of the shifts and changes of feminist thought in the following decades: its transnational scope, its critique of identity politics and the gendered politics of sexuality, and its embrace of affect as an analytical category. The author argues that the radical utopianism of second wave feminisms has not lost its urgency. The transformations they envisioned are still our challenge, as the vital work of social change remains undone.

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Comparative Literature at Emory University. Her scholarly and creative work explores women's writing and feminist thought, the relationships between history and memory, displacement, and cultural identity. She is completing a historical narrative stretching across four generations, Born After: A German Reckoning.

Contents: «Wild Wishes …»: Women and the History of Utopia – Utopia and/as Ideology: Feminist Utopias in Nineteenth-Century America – Rewriting the Future: The Utopian Impulse in 1970s’ Feminism – Worlds Apart: Utopian Visions and Separate Spheres’ Feminism – The End(s) of Struggle: The Dream of Utopia and the Call to Action – Writing Toward the Not-Yet: Utopia as Process – Conclusion to the First Edition (1991) – Conclusion to the Classics Edition: Feminism and Utopianism, Then and Now – A Roundtable Dialogue.