How should we live? A study of social critical theory, feminist utopianism, anarchism and eco-political thought : A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lincoln University

Abstract

Resistant discourses such as feminism, anarchism and environmentalism can be read as assertions that social life could be arranged and experienced in ways other than how heteropatriarchal capitalism structures society and culture. These criticisms are both utopian and ontological. Inherent in these critical discourses is both the concern that things are not as they ‘should’ or could be, and the proposition that dominant discourses do not hold a monopoly on reality. This play between reality and improvement, between the possible and the immanent, is a hallmark of utopianism, and is well-trod ground in utopian theory. Holding academic work, activism and fiction to be collaborators in a perhaps unintentional utopian project, I analyse a number of examples from fictional writing, resistant discourses and social critical theory. In the postmodern era however, resistance and even the suggestion of alternatives to heteropatriarchal capitalism seems particularly difficult and likely to be subsumed by dominant discourses. Yet although resistant discourses remain entangled with dominant ones, unable to transcend the cultural conditions which produce them, they all nonetheless contain ideals and alternatives for world-making. In this thesis I argue that utopianism is not irrelevant, but immanent, while also seeking to problematise and disprove that claim by examining some of the concepts and assumptions usually attached to the concept ‘utopian’. In reading these discourses as utopian, and by drawing on a body of work in utopian studies which has become increasingly nuanced over time, I offer a conceptualisation of utopianism and resistance in terms of fragments and unintentionality. I argue that postmodern utopianism might be described as a utopianism which is expressed through the particular. I frame these practices of utopianism as fragments of an assemblage or collective utopian and resistant project which negates the totality of dominant discourses and hierarchy in western culture, even while this reading reflects, rather than transcends, the postmodern preoccupation with particularity.