Jorge León Casero – University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

Series: Gender Issues and Challenges
BISAC: SOC010000; SOC037000; SOC028000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52305/YQNE6277

“An outstanding collection of reflexions about SF, utopias and stories concerning gender and the possibility of going beyond the limits of the modern project. It’s a remarkable book!” – Paula Cristina Pereira, Universidade do Port//University of Porto and founder of Philosophy & Public Space Research Group

“A fascinating, necessary, highly topical book that masterfully traces the close connections between utopia and gender from an innovative perspective.”– Leticia Flores Farfán, PhD, Coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in Gender Studies, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México//National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

“A wonderful journey from modern utopias written by women in order to dream up new ways of understanding gender to post-apocalyptic utopias that strike at the heteropatriarchal and racialized modern system of creating these new worlds.” – Felipe Schwember, Universidad del Desarrollo//Development University (UDD), Chile

Since its inception in the 15th century, the modern humanist project developed in the West has always been linked to the utopian writings and imaginaries that have determined the characteristics of the supposed ideal society to be created. The fundamental issue is that all these projects have always emphasized the social hierarchy (class), heteropatriarchy (gender), territorial organization (colonialism and race) and the technical domain of nature (environment), regardless of whether private property of the means of production was defended or criticized. The current prevailing discourse, on the other hand, maintains a completely anti-utopian attitude from two fronts that are divergent in their starting points but convergent in their ultimate consequences. The first, with a greater presence in the environmental and technological field, is characterized by a dogmatic and uncompromising application of the principle of responsibility defined by Hans Jonas. The second, with greater application in socio-economic areas, renews the already old postulate of the “end of history” through an accelerationist-apocalyptic interpretation that identifies the current techno-capitalism with the hopeless collapse of human civilization. This book is based on the consideration that both fronts derive from a unilateral and reductionist notion of utopia, limited to the political-administrative character of public institutions, conceived under the public-private binarism of class defined during the 19th century: liberalism-capitalism vs socialism-communism. Given this position, the contributions collected in this book broaden the sociopolitical consideration of the utopian from an intersectional point of view (gender, race, class, species), identifying (the socio-symbolic organization of) sexuality as the key element from which to propose new utopian projects beyond the (human) binary of gender. With this background in mind, the seven chapters that make up this book have been divided into two non-antagonistic and non-exclusive sections. In the first, Gender Utopias in and against the Modern Project, three historical reflections are found that analyze and rescue some of the first utopian projects with a gender character conceived from a gnosological horizon and with the concepts of modern political theory in an attempt to expand, and make them work against, their heteropatriarchal-colonialist character, or at least evidence, denounce and criticize their insufficiency.

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