Davina Cooper: Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

Abstract

Utopian studies can be reawakened to its transformative possibilities by taking seriously the conceptual contributions latent in everyday efforts to live life differently. This is what Davina Cooper seeks to demonstrate in her theoretically innovative encounter with six sites in which people strive to actively live out or ‘actualise’ utopian visions in everyday contexts. The sites selected are an eclectic grouping. Britain’s government-led equality drive of the years 2009–2010 is explored in chapter 3. Nudism and nudist organisations come under the lens in chapter 4, while chapter 5 directs attention to a casual sex venue, the Toronto Women’s and Trans Bathhouse (TWTB). In chapter 6 the alternative currencies initiatives championed in Local Exchange Trading Schemes are examined. The final two chapters guide readers through an imaginative conceptual understanding of practices at Summerhill School (chapter 7) and Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner (chapter 8). In looking at these ‘everyday’ utopias, Cooper seeks to move the focus away from literary visions of all-encompassing, radical, dream-like transformations of entire societies. She chooses instead to turn toward sites where utopian aspirations are actually put into practice, albeit on smaller scales and in less comprehensive ways. ‘Everyday,’ in Cooper’s usage, further connotes that participants are, alongside their utopian project involvement, still occupied in the ongoing maintenance of lives or functions that are embedded in the larger scale social institutions of mainstream society. These practical utopias therefore constitute parttime, episodic, or otherwise temporally limited ‘minor stream’ practices. What attracts Cooper to these spaces is the conviction that they constitute fertile sites for