Utopia(n) Matters
Feminist Utopias and the Transformation of the Social Imaginary of Gender

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (October 2026 – September 2029)

Can feminist utopias change how we perceive and think about gender? Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Octavia Butler have recently been revisited for their portrayal of post-patriarchal societies. However, it remains unclear whether and how utopias actually shape gender relations

This project will investigate how feminist utopias were received in the political debates of the early twentieth century and how they may have influenced the social imaginary of gender –  by which I mean, following Ricœur (1986), Castoriadis (2009) and Taylor (2004), collectively produced and socially shared ideas of sex and gender.

Drawing on archival research, I will examine three case studies: Magnus Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediaries (1906), which I will read as a utopian project seeking to dissolve the equation of sex, gender and desire in the heterosexual matrix; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland (1915), which envisages a society without reproductive difference; and Alice Constance Austin’s architectural designs for the socialist settlement Llano del Rio (1916), which aim to overcome the gendered division of labour.

By reconstructing the intellectual and political networks in which these utopias emerged and were received, I will ask: How do utopian ideas transform what a society can imagine gender to be?

In doing so, the project extends the concept of the social imaginary from the perspective of feminist theory.