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Summary Gender and Sustainability in Utopian/Dystopian Literatures in English
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Complete summary of the course Gender and Sustainability in Utopian/Dystopian Literatures in English by Véronique Bragard.
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Gender and sustainability in Utopian/dystopian literatures in EnglishDystopias:
- The Maze Runner
- Divergent
- The Hunger Games
- The Circle
- Black Mirror
Utopianism = social dreaming it is not the same as utopia
In 1993 in US senate women could wear pants instead of women’s wear
Dreams are the start of a utopian world. Imagination can change the world.
Einstein wrote an essay called ‘Why Socialism?’ in 1949.
After the war people were against socialism because of Stalinism. It led to a negative attitude against
socialism and Marxism. Nowadays, people wonder if it isn’t better than capitalism.
Utopia versus dystopia
A utopia is never achieved, because if you achieve a Utopia everything is nonsense. It can never be
achieved because otherwise it would become a dystopia. Utopia is trying to look for the future, but
not the near future. For some time, there was a negative attitude towards utopia and it was
considered dead. Now it is coming back and becoming more popular. People distrust Utopias, but
they understand that it is never going to be given and it is not a solution. They are in progress. Maybe
the future lies in small Utopias and projects. It will not happen on a macrolevel. Once globalization
was a utopia, but the question is what about the problems of a Europe without borders. A lot of
dystopias seem so close to us. Recently there were a lot of popular books, films and series that are
dystopian. It is in the future, but it might happen. It is very realistic, scary and interesting. For a
utopia to work, the sustainability needs to be taken into account.
Aboriginal art by a woman
It is a reference to water found in Australia. The woman comes from a
territory in Australia called Utopia. It is one of the poorest places in the
world. Aboriginals rebelled against the white people to get their land
back. They returned to their land but they lived on very dry land in very
poor conditions.
Approaches
- Gender
Gender reflects a larger theme of inequality. It Is central to a lot of the texts we are going to analyze.
Gender is the social expression of female or masculine aspects. It is a social construction. We
perform some gender roles depending on gender stereotypes. Trump dressed as a women: Trump
his power comes from his suit. It plays a role in the way we look at him. Women’s clothing looks
passive and doesn’t represent power. It shows that clothing is still gender related.
- Sustainability
Individual efforts made by the community to ensure that the beauty and benefits of today’s world –
economically, environmentally and socially – will be available for future generations to inherit. We
should start looking on the long term. Regeneration: how can we regenerate society, nature so that
things can be reborn? We also have to look at the social sphere and not only the environment.
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, - Gender and sustainability
o Ecofeminist theory: women connected to nature (reproduction)
o Gender & sustainability: not homogenous group, education, poverty and other
factors all these factors play a role. The man is going to have a different impact
than the woman.
o Meinzen-Dick, Kavark & Quisumbing 2014
Bloch’s Principle of Hope
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)
- it was published in Leuven
- it criticizes the old world and looks at the future
- Topos = place, U can refer to not or good it can be a non-place or a good place
- “All literature is inherently utopian because its whole point is….
Other terms:
Euchronia: from space to time (ex. L’an 2440) the same place in the future
Ustopia: ustopia is a word made up combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect
society and its opposite - because in my view, each contains a latent version of the other
(Margaret Atwood)
A literary genre
- A man/woman goes somewhere else, often an island or other continent. It is a journey to
some unknown place.
- The person gets a guided tour of the island and the society. They explain the practical things
and how the people live.
- The person returns home and tells about how good the other place was. They could learn
from the society the person visited and change their own society. There is a human-centered
message.
- Reality and fiction
- Didactic purpose – suggested possibilities
Two traditions
1. Maybe utopias are only in the past. It is a kind of paradise lost. Myths invoke forms of
utopias. People don’t work a lot and life is simple in these utopias. Death is easy and people
are united. Women are not really appreciated and responsible for bad things. It is a simple
world with no effort and no hardships. God is watching over you. An example is Arcady in
Greece where life was simple and easy.
2. Plato’s Republic is a struggle that is in the future and humans have to work together to
survive. It is about how to organize society with justice. There is human effort and invention.
Both traditions van work together and be present in a text, ex. Colonial texts.
4 periods:
- 16th and 17th century: religious radicalism and religions looking for egalitarian schemes
- Voyages of discovery recreate communities and organize them in a different way. Going
to the new world was reaching more innocent places. You could start from scratch and be
better.
- Scientific discovery and technological innovation utopian worlds are in the future, such as
for example life on Mars. It was the utopian direction.
2
, - 18th social equality and justice a lot of communities developed such as the hippies
Article 1: Sustainability is unhelpful: we need to think about
regeneration - Herbert Girardet
- Sustainability as solution to the world’s problems —> we should also think about
regenerating the ecosystems
- Definition of sustainable development (SD): it meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
- Can SD really occur under the rules of capitalism?
- We need to take specific measures to help regenerate soils, forests and watercourses.
- Development cannot be at the expense of the health of the world’s ecosystems and that
their protection and continuous regeneration must be a guiding principle for human action.
- We need to develop comprehensive rules for an environmentally enhancing, restorative
relationship between humanity and the ecosystems from which we draw resources for our
sustenance.
- The bulk from human impacts on the biosphere are from urban production and
consumption.
- Urban energy consumption and global climate change are intimately connected.
- We need to regenerate and make renewable energy as the main sources of the energy
supply.
Article 2: We are all Thomas More’s children
- They have imagined utopias on islands.
- More’s Utopia is the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage and
introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopian which is defined by a multifarious
phenomenon = island logic.
- In fact, it was no island, but a part of the continent. The most famous example of the island
utopia, the ideal type itself, is not by nature an island at all. —> by sweat of the native
people, they dug it from the continent.
- Every utopia contains a dystopia. Every dystopia contains a utopia.
- The utopian impulse is always stained.
- Utopianism is need and desire for recognition and for betterness. Something other than the
exhausting social lie.
- A start for any utopia must be to overturn the ideological bullshit of empire.
- It is to the political imaginary of betterness.
Article 3: The principle of hope – Ernest Bloch
- It is a question of learning hope which stands for success, makes people broad.
- People dream of the better life that might be possible.
- Not content just to accept the bad which exists.
- Let daydreams grow fuller so it can be encouraged.
Article 4: Utopianism and colonialism - Bill Ashcroft
- Utopian instinct as a fundamental human trait
- Utopia is by definition impossible, an unachievable ideal, a fanciful dream, unrealistic and
naive.
- Utopia has undergone a renaissance during the post-Cold War period of global empire.
o Concept= any theory of a better world, any hope for social change and amenity.
o Utopia is no longer a place but the spirit of hope itself, the essence of desire for a
better world.
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, o Link between Utopia and hope starts with Bloch: the anticipatory consciousness as
the fundamental internalisation of the utopian in human experience.
o Utopia = desire. Utopia representation a struggle between the manipulation and
education of desire that comes to define both its hope and its failure.
o Characteristic of utopia: all needs are satisfied by virtue of the limitations of desire,
‘wants’ being contained by their conversion into, and satisfaction of, manageable
needs. —> Paradox: conflict between the irrepressible desire for utopia itself and
Utopia’s apparent fulfilment of desire.
o Another paradox: the concept of boundaries. Boundaries are necessary in the
regulation of life, but they are also the source of repression and cultural and
economic control. ‘Surplus repression’ is the peril of any concrete utopia.
The perils of utopia
- The first fundamental problem with utopia lies in its practical realisation. It is a place and
spatial perfection requires boundaries, control, limits and direction.
The constant threat of law, which introduces the ever-present possibility of dystopia
- In More’s Utopia we see the fatal flauw of all utopias and why there are no postcolonial
utopias. => utopia is unable to manage the contest between the education and the
manipulation of desire -> consquence: all utopias are degenerate -to achieve utopia is to fail
to realize the possibilities of utopia
Relationship between imperialism and Utopia
- Two versions of utopia:
o Product or blue-print utopia
Politically constructed immanence of the agora
Collective agreement about ‘the Good’
o Process utopianism
Deterritorialization and decoding charecteristics of the world market
Agreeing on content is less important than identifying multiple Forbes of
production of the new that are active in a given socio-historical milieu.
- More’s utopia = product utopia
o Written at the beginning of the period of the world market, the cusp of Modernity,
the moment when the agora transforms into a world economy
o Why idea of an ideal society? Economics and imperialism (politics).
o The British Empire and the reterritorialization of the imperialism nation —> colonial
utopia as justification for imperialism —> regulated by the ordening power of a
higher civilization.
- Utopianism of two kinds:
o The utopia of a regulated commonwealth = legislated utopia
Utopia of form —> institutional power makes a utopia into the legislated
institutional form
o The utopia that comes from Bloch’s antcipatory consciousness, of the desire for a
better world = organic utopia
Utopia of function
- In More’s Utopia is the most important feature utopian communism = the principal
foundation of all Utopian ordinances, that is to say, in the community of their life and living,
without any occupying of money.
- Colonial process: the land was conquered, its name changed, the indigenous inhabitants
were civilized, what was wasteland was cultivated, the land was physically reconstructed.
=> force is necessary for the establishment of a civilized society
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