CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1995 Florence joined a Local Exchange Trading Scheme (LETS)in England's West Midlands. She joined to meet people like herself,left-wing alternative kinds of people, and to be able to tradewithout using pounds. Through her LETS, she got to know peopleand made friends. She produced homemade bread and jams,offered some decorating and gardening, and bought other people'sproduce and services, including a ride to the airport, dog care, andhouse sitting. Samantha joined a North London lets a couple ofyears later, attracted too by the idea of exchanging skills withoutofficial money. She gave people lifts, offered word-processing, andgained a cleaner. Eventually she left because few people took upher services, and the main thing she wanted, house repairs, wasunavailable on a scheme dominated by, in her words, alternativetherapies, arts, and crafts.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another experimental socialspace was in full swing. In 1998 a group of Canadians, dissatisfiedwith the lack of casual sex spaces for women, started a bathhouse.Inspired by the agentic sexual openness of men's bathhouses, whileseeking to develop something that was community-based, feminist,and progressive, Pussy Palace was born. It aimed to createa space where women and subsequently transgendered peoplecould develop erotic confidence and a more raunchy sexual culture.Bathhouse volunteers offered a practical education in analsex, finding your g-spot, lap dancing, and breast play. Carla volunteeredto lap-dance at a bathhouse event, the first time she'd everdone such a thing. She described the venue as warren-like, dark, confusing,and exciting. It seemed like a place of incredible opportunity, aplace to meet people and to be sexually visible in new and unanticipatedways.

Far older than LETS or the Toronto bathhouse is Speakers' Cornerin London's Hyde Park. There, for over a century, people have come toorate, to gather in throngs to discuss current affairs, and to listen. Anunusual space, in the sense that you can join unknown others in conversationabout politics and religion, stand on a stepladder and lecture intothe air, heckle, tease, and make fun of speakers or audience, Speakers'Corner continues to be a place that is especially attractive to those excludedfrom mainstream discursive fora. Charles is a regular, attendingmost Sundays to listen to speakers and enjoy their boisterous dialoguewith the crowds. But he also goes to meet Corner friends, other regularshe has come to know. They will ask how he is doing and about his week.With them he can express life's daily frustrations and get a sympatheticresponse.

Sites such as these are everyday utopias—networks and spaces thatperform regular daily life, in the global North, in a radically differentfashion. Everyday utopias don't focus on campaigning or advocacy.They don't place their energy on pressuring mainstream institutionsto change, on winning votes, or on taking over dominant social structures.Rather they work by creating the change they wish to encounter,building and forging new ways of experiencing social and political life.Because their focus is on building alternatives to dominant practices,everyday utopias have faced both disregard and disdain from those onthe left who judge this strategy to be misplaced. However, at a time ofconsiderable pessimism and uncertainty among radicals about the characterand accomplishment of wholesale change, what it entails, and howit can be brought about, interest has risen in the transformative potentialof initiatives that pursue in a more open, partial, and contingent waythe building of another world.

This book focuses on six everyday utopian sites. Alongside lets,Speakers' Corner, and the Toronto bathhouse, they are public nudism,equality governance, and Summerhill School. These are sites involved inthe daily practice of trading, public speaking, having sex, appearing inpublic, governing, learning, and living in community with others. Theyare also sites that vary hugely—in their form, scale, duration, and relationshipto mainstream life. Given the very obvious and considerabledifferences between public nudism and state equality governance, forinstance, it may be hard to see what these sites have in common, particularlywhat they have significantly in common. The premise of thisbook is that what these very different sites share is captured by the paradoxicalarticulation of the utopian and the everyday. Over the next fewpages, I want to map the main contours of this articulation and thencut through to the heart of this book, which concerns the potential ofeveryday utopias to contribute to a transformative politics specificallythrough the concepts they actualize and imaginatively invoke.

Since its early identification as an impossible kind of good space,the utopian has led to a range of literary representations, as well as toother kinds of materialization in music, art, urban design, and communityliving. Interest in the utopian has also generated a growing fieldof academic scholarship. While much of this work focuses on utopian"objects"—including novels, buildings, and planned communities(e.g., Kraftl 2007; Kumar 1987; Sargisson 2012; Sargisson and Sargent2004)—increasing attention has been paid to the utopian as an orientationor form of attunement, a way of engaging with spaces, objects, andpractices that is oriented to the hope, desire, and belief in the possibilityof other, better worlds (e.g., Levitas 2013). This orientation can take aconservative or reactionary form; however, within utopian studies it haslargely been tuned to the possibility of more egalitarian, democratic, andemancipatory ways of living.

For Ruth Levitas, one of the leading scholars in utopian studies, socialdreaming, longing, and desire for change are key dimensions of the utopian,along with the hope—or, perhaps more accurately, the belief—thatmore egalitarian, freer ways of living are possible....