Description
Book SynopsisEveryday Utopias explores how everyday utopias—sites enacting commonplace activities in egalitarian, democratic, or emancipatory ways—contribute to a transformative politics through the concepts they put into practice and inspire.
Trade Review"Exploring a wide variety of projects with more or less radical agendas, from nudist colonies to alternative schools to official equality rights bureaus, Davina Cooper's brilliant work shows us nothing less than a new way to do theory.
Everyday Utopias is itself an everyday utopian theoretical space, showing the fruitfulness of eschewing tired polemics in favor of close analyses of the myriad social experiments going on around us."
—Mariana Valverde, author of
Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity“Dr. Cooper’s approach to considering equality law is therefore progressive, and appears to be part of a welcome trend of looking beyond the individual victim of discrimination and to society and its norms.... It allows us to redefine the limits of equality law, by forcing us to reconsider what truly drives differences in treatment.” -- Claire Overman * Oxford Human Rights Hub blog *
“[H]er third chapter is a fascinating discussion of states as sensory formations. She is attentive to both feeling as a state ethos and feeling in a thinned out state....Summing up: Recommended.” -- H. G. Reid * Choice *
“Davina Cooper takes the reader on an amazing journey – from an erotic bathhouse to a private school, Cooper aims to locate utopia in quotidian practice. … [T]he book has surely made important contributions to utopian studies. Cooper’s analysis is thoughtful and meticulous. This is a well-written book that will likely join the bookshelves of many utopian hopefuls.” -- Angela Jones * International Journal of Law in Context *
“The imaginative possibilities of Cooper’s approach, particularly when the connections sought are with ‘minor stream’ life, are emphatically brought home to the reader by the almost endlessly creative conceptualisation that characterises much of
Everyday Utopias.” -- Will Odogwu * Feminist Legal Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
1. Introduction 1
2. Toward a Utopian Conceptual Attitude 24
3. Casting Equality and the Touch of State Governance 45
4. Public Nudism and the Pursuit of Equality 73
5. Unsettling Feminist Care Ethics through a Women's and Trans Bathhouse 100
6. Normative Time and the Challenge of Community Labor in Local Exchange Trading Schemes 129
7. Property as Belonging at Summerhill School 155
8. Market Play at Speaker's Corner 186
9. Conclusion 217
Notes 229
References 251
Index 277
