Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

Notes on Nowhere is about a contemporary shift in the way discourses of social transformation articulate the relationship between the utopian and critical impulses, a shift that can be broadly defined as the rejection of the utopian impulse in favor of internal critique. I examine this shift in the context of a transformation in how discourses represent the relationship between subject and social space: for example, how figures of individual subjectivity are used to fund images of the social space; how a subject’s experience of oppression and position relative to dominant power structures is understood to affect its ability to resist oppression and imagine alternatives.