Towards a Feminist Utopia

Or, Don’t Invite Misogynists to Parties

I sat down at my computer after a slow, sweaty run at the end of June, finally finding a writing rhythm after the long slog of COVID disruptions to childcare and the frenetic pace of parenting two small children. I saw my friend Molly’s Facebook post first, an allusion to bad news. Opening the New York Times page, I read with disbelief, even though I knew it was coming, that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, rejecting the idea that women and people with uteruses had a Constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion.

            I turned away from the screen and just sobbed, thinking first of the girls and women that would die or suffer irrevocable health consequences as a result of the decision. The U.S. has some of the worst maternal health outcomes in the developed world, and the vague red state trigger laws waiting to take effect will worsen those outcomes. I thought next about how this would impact people’s right to enjoy sex and pleasure, knowing that the act itself could lead to forced pregnancies or even death. My last thought, before I dried my tears, was about the work ahead: the almost incomprehensible amount of labor (mostly done, if I had to guess, by women) it will take to reinstate these rights and live in a country that sees women as equal citizens.

            For a couple of weeks after the decision, I woke up and would remember, the grief hitting me all over again. I felt a sense of collective support, friends and family reached out (mostly women). I hated the feeling, the dread, the rage, and tried to control it through more running, drinking less, getting enough sleep. I resented how the thoughts took me away from enjoying time with the kids, and I wondered how I would pull it together to be a resource for my students returning to campus in the fall.

            I thought too about being a middle-class white woman with dual citizenship, and that because my daughter will have a U.K. passport, she’ll most likely have access to abortion care her entire life. I recognize this privilege, and felt guilty that really only now do I feel like a second-class citizen (even though I knew women have always been, the U.S. being a patriarchal society still), a feeling that I know my friends of color, my queer friends, my immigrant friends, my friends in countries formerly colonized, really, anyone outside of this very elite, white, U.S. sphere would feel.

            I teach the writers that come from these communities, most specifically Caribbean and U.S. Latinx writers. I also teach feminist and queer theory, and so I turned to them for a roadmap of how to survive in the struggle. I know these theories, but now I feel them. How do you keep going in the face of so much oppression? How can you find happiness in societies that might never fully recognize your humanity?

            So right now I’m reading two things: Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and an essay by Octavia Butler “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” Both are about what it means to imagine the future. After the Roe decision, I grieved for the future I had imagined would be better for girls and women, better for my daughter. After Roe, it seems less possible. But both texts are reminding me that there is something radical about imagining a better future, even imagining a utopia. Muñoz writes that considering utopias has fallen out of favor among philosophers and gay rights activists who adopt pragmatic approaches to political change. He wants to reclaim imagining utopias as a radical act. Butler writes that “…the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”

            These acts of hope can be radical, so I say now is the time to imagine our feminist utopias, now is the time to build up hope. With a clear vision we can enact change. We can find joy in intimate connections, small relations that build to a collective consciousness of what we want our societies to be. Start with a party, don’t invite any misogynists, and let’s go from there.