Body Utopianism: Prosthetic Being

Between Enhancement and

Estrangement Franziska Bork Petersen
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN UTOPIANISM

Body Utopianism
Prosthetic Being Between
Enhancement and Estrangement

Franziska Bork Petersen

 Palgrave Studies in Utopianism

Series Editor
Gregory Claeys, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of
London, London, UK
Utopianism is an interdisciplinary concept which covers philosophy,
sociology, literature, history of ideas, art and architecture, religion, futur-
ology and other fields. While literary utopianism is usually dated from
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), communitarian movements and ideolo-
gies proposing utopian ends have existed in most societies through
history. They imagine varied ideal beginnings of the species, like golden
ages or paradises, potential futures akin to the millennium, and also ways
of attaining similar states within real time. Utopianism, in the sense of
striving for a much improved world, is also present in many trends in
contemporary popular movements, and in phenomena as diverse as films,
video games, environmental and medical projections. Increasingly utopia
shares the limelight with dystopia, its negative inversion, and with projec-
tions of the degeneration of humanity and nature alike. This series will
aim to publish the best new scholarship across these varied fields. It will
focus on original studies of interest to a broad readership, including, but
not limited to, historical and theoretical narratives as well as accounts of
contemporary utopian thought, interpretation and action.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15242
 Franziska Bork Petersen

Body Utopianism
Prosthetic Being Between Enhancement
and Estrangement
Franziska Bork Petersen
Roskilde University
Roskilde, Denmark

Palgrave Studies in Utopianism

ISBN 978-3-030-97485-5 ISBN 978-3-030-97486-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97486-2

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For Josefine and Pontus
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

Part I Impossible, Imagined and Imaginary Bodies

2 On Being a Body in Thomas More’s Utopia 35
3 Impossible Body Escapes 63
4 Technological Bodies Becoming Images 101

Part I Conclusion

Part II Human Enhancement

5 Bodies of Lack 147
6 Utopias of Bodily Capacity 171
7 Beautifying Body Modification 185

Part II Conclusion: Capitalism’s Utopian Co-optation of

Embodied Normalcy

Part III Utopian Estrangement

8 Bodily Estrangements of Space 233

vii
viii CONTENTS

9 Estrangements of Corporeality 247

10 Estrangements of Reproduction 267

Part III Conclusion

11 Conclusion 289

Index 307
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Body and Utopia

In January 2019 the Guardian reported on a recent tendency in cosmetic
surgery: the “phenomenon of people requesting procedures to resemble
their digital image [which] has been referred to – sometimes flippantly,
sometimes as a harbinger of end times – as ‘snapchat dysmorphia’”.1
While patients used to bring in pictures of celebrities with their ideal
nose or jaw, cosmetic doctors noticed that they “were now pointing to
photos of themselves”.2 These images are typically edited with Snapchat
or the retouching app Facetune and feature large eyes and pixel-perfect
skin. The article quotes doctors referring to these images as “unrealistic,
unattainable” and “without a single marking of a normal human face”.3
Myriad human desires to instantiate what is physically impossible
appear to be longstanding. People have altered their bodies throughout
history by fortifying them with armour, moulding them with clothing or
decorating them with makeup and other modifications. “[T]here seems
to be a widespread human desire to transcend the body’s limitations”,

1 Elle Hunt, “Faking it: How Selfie Dysmorphia is Driving People to Seek Surgery,”
Guardian, January 23, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/23/
faking-it-how-selfie-dysmorphia-is-driving-people-to-seek-surgery.
2 Hunt, “Faking it,”.
3 Hunt, “Faking it,”.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
F. Bork Petersen, Body Utopianism, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97486-2_1
2 F. BORK PETERSEN

ascertains fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson with regard to how societies

throughout history have “deformed, reformed or otherwise modified the
body”.4 But instantiating radical changes of its appearance is far from
the only area in which the body is a relevant topic of enquiry in relation
to utopia. Mid-twentieth century philosophical anthropologist Helmuth
Pleßner conceived of the existential human reliance on culture, more
generally, as our being ‘naturally artificial’.5 With regard to the body utopi-
anisms I investigate in this book, I argue that this makes bodily being
invariably a ‘being prosthetic’. As human existence socially tethers people
to each other and their surrounding infrastructure, especially citizens of
the Global North are physically tethered to an increasing amount of tech-
niques and technologies to go about their working and social lives—to ‘be
a body’ in a culturally meaningful way. But while this tether to clothing,
stuff and technical devises is not new as such, it has arguably acquired
a different quality in recent years. Techniques that transform the human
body, that optimise it by enhancing its beauty and capacity, have seen a
surge that puts all bodies in a state of constant potential improvement.
If Pleßner distinguished between ‘having ’ and ‘being ’ a body, it is his
notion of having a body, of forming and manipulating it as one would
other materials, that is at the core of many of the utopian desires I will
explore.6 My study draws on Utopian Studies scholar Ruth Levitas’ widely
used definition of utopia as the expression of a “desire for a better way
of being and living” and addresses such desires as current and historical
issues of body culture.7 The paradox that identifies the point of departure
for my investigation is: How do bodies, blatantly ‘there’ and real, relate
to utopia as something of the mind that is traditionally understood as an
imagined projection into the future?
In scholarship and colloquial use, utopia/nism evokes the notion of
a better collective life. What some authors see as a general—or at least
widespread—human tendency to dream of a better existence is commonly
associated with dreaming of a “radically different society than the one in

4 Elisabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity [1985] (London and
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 3.
5 Helmuth Pleßner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1965).
6 On having and being a body, see Pleßner, Stufen des Organischen, 230ff.
7 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (1990) (Witney: Peter Lang, 2011), 8. Levitas
adds the notion of the expression of desire on page 9.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

which dreamers live”.8 But with the body’s ‘enhanced’ appearance and
capacity becoming key factors in defining social value and interaction for
the individual, this does not need to be the case.9 German philosophy
scholar Gunter Gebauer’s remark in this regard may seem as troubling, as
it is perhaps logical. He supposedly refers to a privileged body when he
argues: “The body is the focal point of our efforts to change something
about the present. (…) The extent to which we improve it corresponds
to the gain we get as social persons”.10 In the Global North, the body
has long been absorbed into a capitalist logic in which it produces not
only monetary, but also social value.11 Bodies are key in social interac-
tion; even—or maybe especially—as a lot of this interaction is happening
online. While classic utopias dismissed the depiction of individual bodies
in favour of fictional communities, according to Gebauer, the body has
today itself become a powerful utopia.12

8 Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies
5, no. 1 (1994): 3, emphasis added.
9 Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (1993) (London: Sage Publications, 2003),
188f. In this respect, Jones refers to skins, in particular, as “surfaces upon which meaning
can be projected”. Meredith Jones, “Expressive Surfaces: The Case of the Designer
Vagina,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7–8 (2017): 32.
10 Gunter Gebauer, “Körper-Utopien. Neue Mythen des Alltags” Merkur (special
edition Zukunft denken. Nach den Utopien) 9/10 (2001): 887. Unless indicated,
translations from the German, Swedish and Danish original are my own.
11 Mike Featherstone, “Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture,” Body & Society,
16, no. 1 (2010); Shilling, The Body and Social Theory; Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight:
Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1993); Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images
from Plato to O.J., (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Ana
Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds., Aesthetic Labour Rethinking Beauty
Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
12 Gebauer sees a “fundamental difference between the classic utopias of former times,
and the contemporary utopian fictions in the role played by the body and images”
Gebauer, “Körper-Utopien,” 886. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff refer to a contem-
porary “current of individualism that has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or
political, or any idea of individuals as subject to pressures, constraints or influence from
outside themselves” Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, “Introduction,” in New Femi-
ninities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Identity, eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7.
4 F. BORK PETERSEN

Levitas, similarly, refers to a shift in utopianism, in which the body

plays a central role. It has become “what is to be transformed (…) by
ornament, diet, exercise and surgical intervention”.13 Levitas writes:

If Utopian thought of all kinds is expressive of a desire for a better way

of being, its projection onto the body, rather than the body politic, may
be seen as an important retreat from hope, at least social hope, to desire.
Furthermore, it is a retreat from understanding desire, as Deleuze and
Guattari, Reich, and Marcuse did, in terms of a libidinal energy suffusing
the realm of the social, and thus fuelling capitalism and fascism as well as
their potential Utopian alternatives. For these writers, desire may emanate
from the body in an essentialist, vitalist way, but it does not stay there.”14

In this book, I look at bodily expressions of utopian desire in both of the

understandings Levitas alludes to: solipsistic desires for the body’s beau-
tification in, for instance, cosmetic surgery or bodybuilding, on the one
hand. And on the other hand, utopian practices in which (individual)
bodies express broader societal desires for a ‘better way of living and
being’. In both cases they meet various instantiations of impossibility to
embody their utopian desires. As such, the utopianisms I scrutinise are
rooted in utopia’s etymological conflation of the Greek eutopia (good
place) and outopia (no place). In their quest to optimise the body, many of
the techniques, actions and desires I refer to here and investigate in detail
conform to and are deeply entangled with the status quo of contemporary
capitalism. As a point of critique (and scepticism within the academic field
of Utopian Studies) this is entirely valid. And yet, if something we often
experience as so inescapable as our bodies can be changed into some-
thing inconceivable, this opens imaginations for how the world could be
different; it educates utopian desire for change.
As mentioned, I draw on the phrase from Levitas’ introduction to
The Concept of Utopia that specifies utopian desire as the desire for a
better way of being and living. However, my considerations highlight a
small but—I think—significant change of emphasis that Levitas makes
200 pages later when she writes: “The essence of utopia seems to be

13 Ruth Levitas, “For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capi-
talist Society,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3, no. 2–3
(2000): 34, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230008403311.
14 Levitas, “For Utopia,” 34.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

desire – the desire for a different, better way of being”.15 The added
mention of ‘different’ emphasises a component that a number of Utopian
Studies scholars elaborate on when they highlight the estrangement (from
the status quo) that utopia evokes.16 It hints at an implication of critique
that Levitas and others see as a key factor in utopia. The other change
in Levitas’ later definition of the term is the omission of ‘living’ in what
is bettered (or: different) in utopia. This leaves an emphasis on ‘being’
as what is desired as different and better; an emphasis that I understand
as evoking a more basic, physical aspect of human existence.17 Without
regarding it as entirely separable from the perhaps more social notion of
‘living’, this ‘being’ is principally concerned in the material I turn to in
what follows and I will now outline it a little further.
In order to explore a ‘different, better’ being, or the desire for it,
this needs to be delineated from a current status quo of bodily being
and the conditions that determine it. For the examples I investigate in
the following chapters, which are primarily taken from the contempo-
rary Global North, I identify this current status quo of bodily being
as informed by and happening under the conditions of contemporary
capitalism. The status quo of bodily being entails the body’s (rela-
tively unchangeable and unpredictable) material conditions, which I will
comment on, shortly. But it is also determined by the preconditions it
meets in a thoroughly capitalistic system of values and their production—
values that often clash with bodies’ stubborn physical immutability and
uncontrollability. In the following chapters, I address instances of this,
which include ideals regarding the body’s ‘fitness to work’ and function,
an idealised ability to ‘become image’ on social media and associated
notions of bodies’ specific value in an economy of gendered beauty.
Throughout the text, I elaborate on how current iterations of ‘prosthetic
being’ are informed by and grapple with the values that surround them.

15 Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 209. In later publications, Levitas generally uses ‘better
way of being’. See Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
16 Such as Lucy Sargisson, Tom Moylan or Fredric Jameson. I address the estranging
implication of utopianism specifically in part 3 of this book.
17 Similarly, Gregory Claeys’ understanding of utopia as an “ideal or vastly improved
state of existence” does not seem to preclude explicitly bodily utopias. Gregory Claeys,
Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011), 11,
my emphasis.
6 F. BORK PETERSEN

I investigate examples of prosthetic being specifically in terms of the

physical actions it entails. Beyond this focus on actions, I pay utopia
what David M. Bell calls ‘subversive fidelity’ and explore body utopi-
anisms with regard to their implied utopian ‘no’ and a ‘good’ in the
respective parts of the book.18 Finally, I investigate body utopianisms
concerning what scholars often identify as utopia’s key implication: that
of estranging/critiquing the status quo. Like Bell, I am interested in how
the concepts in question relate to and constitute each other. But, most
importantly, I investigate how the utopian ‘good’, the utopian ‘no’ and
utopian estrangement are affected when applied to the human body. This,
crucially, concerns the fact that in proposing to look at bodies in terms
of utopianism in this book, I am arguably suggesting to look at them as
‘places’: the ‘topos’ that is etymologically implied in utopia.

The Body as Topos/Place

In understanding the body as topos, I want to investigate it as a situ-
ated, performed compound (of movement, speech, dress, etc.) that is
never finished in itself, but evolving through changing affective relations
with its environment.19 While on the surface, this focus on actions might
not go with the idea of a ‘body as topos/place’, theoreticians such as
Doreen Massey would claim exactly that: space is (also) made up of what
it accommodates—of ‘what is happening in it’.20 “A ‘place’”, according
to Massey

18 David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia. Place, Power, Affect (London and New York:
Routledge, 2017), 5.
19 Pointing to the entanglement of space and the bodies using it, Bingaman, Sanders
and Zorach argue: “One of the flaws in utopias both past and present has been their
neglect to consider not just places/spaces but also the bodies, indeed the inhabitants
and users that constitute those spaces”. The authors draw on Michel de Certeau when
they construe space as a ‘practised place’: a “product of the social, sexual, and gendered
activities that take place within it”—spaces are mutable, according to their use. Amy
Bingaman, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach, Embodied Utopias. Gender, Social Change
and the Modern Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 12, my emphasis.
20 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Miwon
Kwon similarly proposes that “our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed, phys-
ical location to somewhere or something constituted through social, economic, cultural
and political processes”. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and
Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 10.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

is formed out of the particular set of social relations which act at a partic-
ular location. And the singularity of any individual place is formed in
part out of the specificity of the interactions which occur at that loca-
tion (nowhere else does this precise mixture occur) and in part out of the
fact that the meeting of those social relations at that location (…) will in
turn produce new social effects.21

These interplays with their surroundings are the bodily actions that I focus
on in this book. Jonathan Crary writes: “Rather than being autonomous
or self-sufficient, an individual cannot be understood except in relation to
what is outside them, to an otherness that faces them”.22 In considering
bodies through their actions and interactions, I investigate ‘different,
better’ prosthetic being in terms of its constituting bodily doing.
As hinted at above, a ‘body as topos’ is not only specifically situ-
ated, but also materially specific. What a (specific) body can do, how
it can be affected and affect others thus also significantly depends on
the material reality of the specific human body: in terms of both phys-
ical and discursive determinations. Discursive elements of bodily being
are techniques of moving, dress and adornment or manners of speaking
and gesturing, for instance.23 All these are in more or less reiterative
or antagonistic relation and contribute to a culture’s understanding and
construction of gender, age, class etc. Further, to point to the live body’s

21 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 169.

22 Jonathan Crary, 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York:
Verso, 2013), 21. Judith Butler turns the focus on embodied being when she elaborates
on this relation as a dependency: “By theorizing the body as a certain kind of dependency
on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and networks
of support and sustenance by which the human itself proves not to be divided from the
animal or from the technical world, we foreground the ways in which we are vulnerable to
decimated or disappearing infrastructures, economic supports, and predictable and well-
compensated labor. Not only are we then vulnerable to one another – an invariable
feature of social relations – but, in addition, this very vulnerability indicates a broader
condition of dependency and interdependency that challenges the dominant ontological
understanding of the embodied subject”. Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and
Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia
Sabsay (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.
23 For accounts of these social practices as learned, see, respectively: Marcel Mauss,
“Techniques of the Body,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Stanford Kwinter
(New York: Zone, 1992), 455–477; Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion,
Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); Erving Goffman, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
8 F. BORK PETERSEN

ultimate unpredictability, my account insists on material bodies that are

specific in their size, age, colour, ability; bodies that will get hungry and
tired, might get ill or stumble. While all of these aspects can be manipu-
lated with techniques that—again—are specific in their cultural form and
meaning, a material body does exist that is not obviously and infinitely
controllable.24 Even if such material aspects of bodily being are not gras-
pable in an independent, a priori way, eliminating them entirely only
seems possible in the literal construction of bodies ‘from scratch’: in art
and science’s attempts and imaginations.25 In this vein, abovementioned
Pleßner made the case that human being is determined not only by char-
acteristics such as bipedalism, our ability to communicate through speech
or our customary wearing of clothes. Being human is also defined by
our bodies’ occasional unpredictability. Pleßner studied this in terms of
the “loss of control (Beherrschung) of the body (Leib)” in laughing and
crying.26 The point I want to make is that human existence is tied to a
material reality that both enables and disables certain ways of affecting
other bodies and being affected. Some scholars understand this concep-
tion of being—as inextricably tied to and informed by specific physical
factors—as ‘embodiment’.27 I refer to it throughout the book as forming

24 Karen Barad deals with the relationship between discursive practices and material
phenomena (in humans as well as nonhumans). Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Half
Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2007). Other important positions in the discussion are
expressed in Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York
and London: Routledge, 1993); and in corporeal feminism, including Elizabeth Grosz,
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1994).
25 Such creations are, of course, still specific in their appearance, but this appearance
is then malleable by the body’s creator. For examples, see Bianca Westermann, Anthro-
pomorphe Maschinen: Grenzgänge zwischen Biologie und Technik seit dem 18. Jahrhundert
(München: Fink, 2012).
26 Helmuth Pleßner, Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen
menschlichen Verhaltens (Arnhem: van Loghum Slaterus’ Uitgeversmaatschappij N. V.
1941), 33.
27 Thus, when I in what follows refer to the ‘embodiment of a certain ideal’, that
indicates less a supposed disappearance of the body as medium behind the expressed ideal
and rather the physical grappling with certain expectations and situatedness. Similarly, in
Theatre Studies ‘embodiment’ no longer refers to the notion of an actor as the trans-
parent medium that ‘accurately’ transports the meaning of the dramatic script, as was the
case in the nineteenth century. Embodiment is, rather, understood as an actor’s physical
specificity: her individual phenomenological body without which no dramatic figure can
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

part of the ‘status quo of being a body’ that cannot be circumvented

in obvious ways. While these specifics apply to live bodies, I will make
the case in part 1 that ‘prosthetic bodily being’ in other media is deter-
mined by other medial possibilities and restrictions. My understanding
of a utopian ‘body as place’, then, refers to prosthetic being in a variety
of media. While the vast majority of the utopian embodiments I scruti-
nise are performed live, with this liveness constituting the body’s medial
preconditions, prosthetic being also happens in other media, with the
specificities of, for instance, the page or online interaction determining
‘what a body can do’.
My use of the term ‘prosthetic being’ to conceive of bodies as places in
terms of their interactive doings and their material reality emphasises two
aspects: on the one hand, reflecting on utopia in relation to human corpo-
reality invariably imposes specific possibilities and limitations. Whether
embodied action is conceived as, or turns out to be impossible, desirable,
utopian, anti-utopian, depends on the social and material specificities that
being a particular body entails. On the other hand, and as in Massey’s
relational definition of space, bodies are always under construction—
“always in the process of being made”.28 For theatre and performance
scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, “[t]he human body knows no state of being:
it exists only in a state of becoming. It recreates itself with every blink of
the eye, every breath and movement embody a new body. For that reason
the body is ultimately elusive”.29 This becoming can mean a variety of
things in relation to utopianism: in a Bergsonian understanding, it entails
indeterminacy, and posits perpetual novelty. But such a becoming ‘the
body as topos’ can also assume an entirely different meaning which is
relevant to this investigation. In certain practices I enquire into (espe-
cially ‘enhancement’ techniques such as cosmetic surgery) bodies appear
as ‘topoi’ in the sense of malleable places.

exist on stage. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance. A New
Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 17.
28 Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles et al.: Sage, 2005), 9.
29 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 92.
10 F. BORK PETERSEN

The Body as Eu-Topia

Thinking the body in relation to the ‘eu’ of utopia—the good—does not
seem far-fetched: some notion of a good/better body appears to be an
omnipresent human desire.30 In the following, I scrutinise instances of a
‘good’ in embodied utopian actions on two levels. On the one hand,
understandings of what constitutes a body’s ‘better way of living and
being’ tend to be inherent in the specific actions and in their striving for
idealised difference from the status quo. Understanding these concep-
tions of what constitutes a ‘good’ body (as blueprints or in a different
way) is part of my analytical effort. But utopia is entangled with ideology
and this manifests in both anti-utopian preservation of the status quo and
dystopia as the results of utopian actions.31 In order to reflect on whether
a given utopian embodiment results in a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ outcome, I thus
operate with the notion of a utopian ‘good’ on an additional level.
On this second analytical level, I attempt to trace the ‘good’ of bodily
actions in terms of their increasing the capacity of ‘what a body can
do’. This point is elaborated in Bell’s (Deleuzian) distinction between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ which is based on the affects it produces on the
body.32 In this understanding of affects, in which Deleuze draws on
Baruch Spinoza, affects are modifications or variations produced in a body
(including the mind) by an interaction with another body which increases
or diminishes the body’s power to act. They are preindividual intensities
corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body
to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s
capacity to act. While utopian actions conjure an increase in the ability to
act, Bell refers to the dys of dystopia as comprising operations of power
that limit what a body can do.33 If, according to Deleuze “[w]hat a
body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be

30 Michel Foucault, “Utopian Body (1966),” in Sensorium—Embodied Experience, Tech-

nology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006).
31 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination
[1986] (Oxford et al.: Peter Lang, 2014), 18; Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6.
32 Bell, Rethinking Utopia, 38.
33 Bell, Rethinking Utopia, 38.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

affected”,34 then operations of power that bodies experience as ‘sadness’

or in which they are prevented from being affected, altogether, can be
called ‘bad/wrong/harsh’: the dys of dystopia. ‘Sadness’ refers here not
to an emotion, but to a body’s fear, anxiety, emptiness or physical pain
that restricts what it can do.35 As a consequence, while bodily actions
might live up to their internally identified notion of ‘goodness’ and meet
the expressed desire, far from all of the instances of prosthetic being I
investigate in what follows manifest as utopia in the sense of an increase
of ‘what a body can do’. While this approach is informed by Deleuze’s
reading of Spinoza and the question what a body can do in terms of how
it can be affected and affect other bodies, I ask it somewhat more loosely:
What scope of action do specific instances of prosthetic being create or
prohibit?

The Body as Ou-Topia

It might be less intuitive to relate real life material bodies to utopia’s
‘ou’—the ‘no’, that makes utopia simultaneously a non-place; somewhere
that does not exist. Sargisson writes: “Utopias are intentionally distanced
from their presence”.36 The notion that utopia encapsulates an impossible
ideal, while the body by its very existence is possible might explain why
the two terms have not yet been explicitly related in a larger study.37
The potential I see in the live body understood in terms of its
embodied actions as a utopian medium is that it, despite its engagement
with impossibility, invariably brings utopia to the present. Utopian bodies
play with or challenge what is possible, but there is no doubt about their
being tethered in, sustained and limited by the real world around them.

34 Ian Buchanan, “The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, Or, What Can
a Body Do?” Body & Society 3, no. 3 (1997): 80, https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X9
7003003004.
35 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1988), 26ff.
36 Lucy Sargisson, Fool’s Gold (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18.
37 However, Foucault writes about bodies as ‘inconceivable-obvious’ utopias in
Foucault, “Utopian Body”. Jean-Luc Nancy, similarly, locates ‘body’ as familiar and strange
at the same time: “Body is the doubtful, shattered certainty. There is nothing which
was more familiar to our old world, nothing which was more strange to it”. In Peter
M. Boehnisch and Ric Allsopp, “Editorial: Bodyscapes,” Performance Research 8, no. 2
(2003): 1.
12 F. BORK PETERSEN

“Performativity and utopia both call into question what is epistemolog-

ically there and signal a highly ephemeral ontological field that can be
characterized as a doing in futurity”.38 In what follows, I reflect on the
impossibility implied in utopia with regard to the different aspects that
constitute the body as the topos of prosthetic being. These span instances
of both social and physical impossibility—with death as one obvious and
ultimate result of ‘embodying something impossible’. Both social and
physical death are frequently risked in bodily expressions of desire for a
better way of being.39 Yet, when the (alive) body with its material limits is
the medium, this also means that there are limits to how radically different
from the status quo a utopian practice can be.40

Clarification of Terms: Utopia,

Dystopia, Anti-Utopia---and ‘the’ Body
I use utopianism to refer to practices that imagine, produce or advocate
the production of utopia; they articulate utopian desire. The adverb that
applies to this is utopian, and in the particular case of this investigation,
what is explored are utopianisms that take the form of utopian bodily
actions. This means that utopian actions are doings that engage simul-
taneously with differently defined notions of the ‘good’ and the ‘no’ to
evoke or imagine change/transformation from the relevant status quo.
From this combination often follows an estrangement from or a critique
of the status quo.

38 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York and London: New York University Press, 2009), 26. In this vein, Daniel Sack writes
about performance art: “Since performance is always happening now, these concepts speak
of a present moment’s outlook toward the future not as a relation with a divorced entity,
wherein the future might represent a remote island of time, but an extension of what
is immediately before us. These futures belong to the present”. Daniel Sack, After Live:
Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2015), 6.
39 I explore this ‘impossible utopian body’ in the first part of the book (Chapters 2–4)
and provide a general elaboration on this issue in a separate introduction to part 1.
40 This might open some of my examples to critique from the point of view of a
position that holds any reconciliation with the present as not utopian. On this position,
see, for instance, Bell, who sums this up in stating: “Utopia is not a holiday destination”.
Bell, Rethinking Utopia, 137.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

Yet, depending on what definition of the ‘good’ we apply see above:

implied in the logic of the activity or considered in terms of increasing
‘what a body can do’, far from all of the utopianisms or utopian
embodiments I investigate manifest as utopias. Analysing the imbrica-
tion of utopias with utopianisms that result in something much closer
to dystopia, anti-utopia or estrangement is a key objective of this book.41
In drawing attention to more dystopian outcomes of utopian actions, I
am far from entertaining the notion that utopianism, if attempted in real
life, turns dystopian. But, as Gregory Claeys remarks, utopia and dystopia
frequently run parallel.42 In addition to dystopia, another risk for utopi-
anism has been discussed as becoming particularly prevalent in recent
decades: that of a utopian impulse being co-opted by capitalist ideology.
Tom Moylan and others have convincingly argued that utopia is always
entangled with (arguably anti-utopian) reiterations of ideology.43 While
utopian desires are at play and retain eu-topian elements in all the bodily
practices I investigate—the analyses, overall, also point to strong nega-
tive implications. Often, these body utopianisms oscillate on a scale and
certainly do not solidify into a blueprint of a utopian ‘better’. On this
basis, dystopian and anti-utopian elements weigh as heavily as eu-topian
ones. With this inclusion of manifold instantiations of utopian desire, I
acknowledge utopianism’s historically colonial, misogynist and generally
somatophobic impetus.44 But turning dystopian or anti-utopian is by no
means inevitable for actions that express a desire for a different, better
way of being—while challenging what is and isn’t possible. And while
much contemporary utopianism avoids this, the risk still appears to be
very present. Dystopia and anti-utopian reiterations of the status quo are

41 In other words, what prevents me from assessing several of my examples of bodies ‘as
utopias’ is that they do not appear to fulfil the criteria necessary for a nuanced use of the
term if I take seriously that: “Utopianism without the ‘no’ is complicity with the status
quo; utopianism without the ‘good’ is critique, or anti-anti-utopianism”. Bell, Rethinking
Utopia, 136.
42 Claeys, Dystopia, 6. See also In Sargisson, Fool’s Gold, 7.
43 Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 18. See also Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
(London and New York: Verso, 2005), 124; Darko Suvin, “Theses on Dystopia 2001,”
in Dark Horizons. Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, eds. Raffaella Baccolini
and Tom Moylan (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
44 Bell draws on Karl Hardy when he points out that “utopianism—in many guises—
must be recognized as ‘being predicated upon and, therefore, implicated in the ongoing
naturalization of settler colonization’ (2012: 127)”. Bell, Rethinking Utopia, 113.
14 F. BORK PETERSEN

not ‘utopia’s others’, but inextricable parts of utopianism. The argument

this book makes is that focusing on bodies brings these entanglements to
the fore.45 Importantly, the point I am implying is not that utopia should
therefore be neither thought nor attempted, but that it is challenged by
risks—risks that appear to be particularly prominent in the Global North’s
contemporary body culture.
Finally, a note on ‘the body’: women have been historically associ-
ated with bodily being.46 Due to this association, it has also been women
who enacted myriad attempts at utopian bodily betterment and change.
Although my focus on female examples risks reiterating the hugely prob-
lematic binary and attributions of value implicit in this tradition, the
material is particularly rich and women’s embodied actions thus consti-
tute the vast majority of my examples throughout the book, although
male bodies figure in the contemporary examples in, especially, Chapters 7
and 10.

Thoughts on Method
An important aspect of my method is identifying a number of primarily
contemporary bodily acts as utopian. In selecting this source material,
I have largely focused on the everyday and the popular—bodies from

45 Furthermore, it could of course be argued that the mentioned shift in ‘what is to

be transformed’ in utopias to the physical body is already part of such re-iteration of the
status quo. Levitas, “For Utopia,” 33.
46 On the historical association of women with (their) bodies, see: Moira Gatens, Imag-
inary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996);
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary
Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Caroline Walker Bynum,
“Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22,
no. 1 (1995); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Elisabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995). See also Bray and Colebrook’s important
critique of, amongst other aspects, what they see as corporeal feminism’s unchallenged
reiteration of Freudianism and “uncritical celebration of the body as an inherently libera-
tory site”. Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook, “The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism
and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment,” Signs 24, no. 1 (1998): 56. And, for a more
contemporary perspective on the role of the body in feminist theory, Ana Sofia Elias,
Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds., Aesthetic Labour Rethinking Beauty Politics in
Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Sara Ahmed, “Imaginary Prohibi-
tions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’,”
European Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no. 1 (2008).
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

the Global North, that can be encountered live or as images in everyday

settings, primarily on the street or online. This also means that there is a
visual bias, because of that culture’s visual inclination. As such, it is this
contemporary visual culture I primarily investigate throughout, with an
exception of Chapters 2 and 3 which serve as historical and thematic
background chapters. Further, and as explained above, my academic
background in Performance Studies determines the outlook of my inves-
tigation as a focus on what these bodies are doing; how they interact with
and are affected by the bodies around them.
As a first criterium for selecting my examples, I draw on their common
factor to express a desire for a different, better way of living and being—a
changing of the status quo.47 In the case of this study, expressions of
utopian desire appear as bodily acts, as I have laid out. The chapters
then span analyses of these enacted desires for variously defined change.
Levitas herself has acknowledged that the breadth in this definition makes
it difficult to operate with. In the different parts, I argue for my exam-
ples’ inherent utopianism on the basis of their challenging notions of
impossibility (the utopian ‘no’, part 1), their embodied desire for some-
thing ‘better’ (the utopian ‘eu’, part 2) and their proficiency in evoking
‘affective estrangement’ from the status quo (utopian estrangement, part
3). While I make the case that these characteristics render the actions
in question utopian, whether or not a specific action’s result qualifies as
utopia—or can rather be seen as anti-utopian or dystopian—depends on
the actions’ implied increase or decrease of ‘what a body can do’ and on
how they relate to the relevant ideology: Do they change, or are they
ultimately reiterative of it?

Previous Work on the Body in Utopian Studies

Despite a certain neglect of the subject matter, bodies have of course
previously figured prominently in utopias and Utopian Studies has not
completely ignored this. The sixteenth- to nineteenth-century literary
genre of what Darby Leves calls ‘somatopia’: “a pornographic text which

47 See Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 8, 9 and 209.

16 F. BORK PETERSEN

presents women’s bodies (as) a utopian sexual landscape”, is a particu-

larly obvious example.48 Further, the fact that plentiful food and sex are
not uncommon motives in literary utopias—and dystopias—illustrates the
body’s central role in utopianism.49
Existing research on the body and utopianism differs from this study
in that it has largely considered bodies as rendered in utopian fiction.
Contrarily, my study focuses on utopian bodily actions in real life and
does not engage specifically with literary utopianism. However, to refer
to the existing body of research and point to similarities in themes, I will
begin this section with a brief introduction to Utopian Studies scholarship
on bodies in utopian fiction.
Since More wrote his Utopia, innumerable authors have imagined
innumerable kinds of bodies to populate their utopias. Robert Troschitz
gives an overview in “Perfect Worlds Need Perfect Bodies: Utopia and
the Politics of the Body” that addresses the body in (canonical) utopian
fiction.50 In his article, Troschitz suggests striking similarities—to each
other and to the bodies imagined by More—regarding the health and
‘shapeliness’ of the utopian bodies in texts as diverse as Tommaso
Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis
(1627), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’s
News from Nowhere (1890), Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), Kim
Stanly Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990) and even Marge Piercy’s Woman
on the Edge of Time (1976) or Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017).51
While Troschitz acknowledges the diversity of these literary utopian texts,
he suggests that “there are two fundamental ideas that are shared by most
of them: the perfect society ought to be a society without squalor and one
in which the human body has considerably improved”.52
It needs pointing out, however, that the ‘improvements’ to being
a body that several of the mentioned utopian fictions imply or spell
out in detail are challenged in utopian sub-genres. The 1970s wave of

48 Darby Lewes, “Utopian Sexual Landscapes: An Annotated Checklist of British

Somatopias,” Utopian Studies 7, no. 2 (1996): 167.
49 Lyman Tower Sargent and Lucy Sargisson, “Sex in Utopia: Eutopian and Dystopian
Sexual Relations,” Utopian Studies 25, no. 2 (2014).
50 Robert Troschitz, “Perfect Worlds Need Perfect Bodies: Utopia and the Politics of
the Body,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 25, no. 1/18 (2019).
51 Troschitz, “Perfect Worlds Need Perfect Bodies,” 44.
52 Troschitz, “Perfect Worlds Need Perfect Bodies,” 51.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

feminist utopian writing can be mentioned, in particular, as refusing

More’s conception of ideal bodies and as challenging their heteronor-
mative gendering.53 Adam Stock’s reading of dystopian fiction of the
early twentieth century likewise points to the critical implications of the
imagined bodies and characters that he considers in the context of their
contemporary (body) politics.54
As an important area of intersection between utopianism and the
human body, Patrick Parrinder explores science fictions, speculations
and utopian thinking from the point of view of scientific developments
through history in Utopian Literature and Science.55 Ralph Pordzik,
more specifically, describes the desire “for the overstepping of given limi-
tations” as a trope that animates (posthuman) dystopian fiction.56 He
sees this desire expressed in the treatment of evolutionary biology, infor-
mation technology and bioscience in novels from H. G. Wells’s The Time
Machine (1895) to William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2004).
While inquiries into utopian literature such as Troschitz’s, Stock’s,
Parrinder’s, Pordzik’s, Tom Moylan’s or Angelika Bammer’s are
concerned with several of the topics I will be dealing with in the following
chapters, I want to emphasise that this study is not about bodies in
utopian fiction. After my introductory treatment of More’s Utopia—read
as a foundational document for the genre, rather than primarily a piece of
literature—I will be turning to (real life) bodily practices, rather than the
renderings of such bodies and practices on the written page. If my study

53 See Angelika Bammer, Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s [1991]
(Oxford et al.: Peter Lang, 2015); Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction
and the Utopian Imagination [1986] (Oxford et al.: Peter Lang, 2014). Troschitz,
however, points out: “Though some utopias, like Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
criticize established beauty standards in terms of skin colour and body shape, utopian
writings in general, and this includes Woman on the Edge of Time, have largely sustained
and propagated the notion that the ideal body is the body that is healthy, strong and
physically fit and that this, and no other, is the kind of body worth striving for”. Troschitz,
“Perfect Worlds Need Perfect Bodies,” 46.
54 Adam Stock, Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World
Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
55 Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to
Brave New World and Beyond (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
56 Ralph Pordzik, “The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other
of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction,” Utopian Studies 6, no. 1 (2012):
144.
18 F. BORK PETERSEN

neglects utopian literature, this also reflects my intention to investigate

body utopias or utopian practices as not only fictional instantiations of
utopian ideas and desires: on a micro-level, embodied utopian practices
are operational in our everyday lives.
Beyond literary utopianism, Ernst Bloch repeatedly stresses bodily
being in The Principle of Hope, and I will engage with this emphasis espe-
cially in the second part of this book. Bloch’s focus is, to some extent,
politically motivated. Distancing himself from the Freudian emphasis on
libido—and its suppression—Bloch highlights bodily needs and desires
that he deems relevant for the working class, rather than the bour-
geoisie. I argue that the repeated rendering of an affective body in
the examples in this seminal work for Utopian Studies—as sleeping,57
hungry,58 ill,59 consuming drugs60 or bodily functions and affects, more
generally61 —characterises Bloch’s utopianism throughout.
In “Utopian Body”, Foucault elaborates on his claim that “it is against
this body (as if to erase it) that all these utopias have come into being”.62
The aspect of impossible incorporeality that also concerns me in the
following chapters emerges as central when Foucault states:

Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body
without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous,
speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible,
protected – always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia,
the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of
an incorporeal body.63

57 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul
Knight (Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 1986), 78ff.
58 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 288.
59 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 454.
60 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 92.
61 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 103ff; 287; 290. Although Bloch uses ‘affects’ somewhat
differently than I do here. For him, they are rooted in bodily sensation (as in my under-
standing), but (unlike the pre-subjective understanding of affects I use) with a clear ‘I’
behind them.
62 Foucault, “Utopian Body,” 229.
63 Foucault, “Utopian Body,” 229.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

Troschnitz, similarly, suggests that “it is the limitations and weaknesses

of the human body that have driven the utopian endeavour”.64 Lyman
Tower Sargent places the emphasis on physical, as well social aspects of
being when he elaborates on his seminal definition of utopia as ‘social
dreaming’:

If we are hungry, we dream of a full stomach. If we are sexually frustrated,

we dream of sexual fulfilment. If we are frustrated by something in our
society, we dream of a society in which it is corrected. Often we dream
even though we, personally, are well fed and sexually fulfilled. We still
dream at least in part because, content, we are capable of recognizing that
others are not and feel that others should also be fulfilled. At its root,
then, utopianism is the result of the human propensity to dream while
both asleep and awake.65

Although Sargent specifically addresses “groups of people” arranging

their lives and envisioning a “radically different society”, this is entwined
with a physical aspect.66 Sargent sees what he calls ‘body utopias’
as historically foundational for utopianism: “Well-known examples are
Hesiod’s golden age, Eden, some versions of the millennium, and various
Greek and Roman myths. For want of a better label I call them Utopias
of sensual gratification or body Utopias. They are social dreaming at its
simplest. Every culture has some such stories and I believe that they are
the beginning of utopianism”.67 But being sensually gratified is of course
not the only way in which bodies figure prominently in utopias. Polit-
ical Scientist Philip Abbott writes of the utopian body as a “complex site
that includes gender, birth, ageing, death, reproduction, sexuality, health
and illness. Young bodies, old bodies, pregnant bodies, copulating bodies,
male and female bodies, healthy bodies and diseased bodies, dead bodies
are just some of the variations”.68 According to Public Health scholar
Marc Chrysanthou: “the best available picture of utopia is a map of the

64 Troschitz, “Perfect Worlds Need Perfect Bodies,” 45.

65 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism,” 3.
66 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism,” 3. Some of Sargent’s work addresses this
entwinement specifically, see for instance Sargent and Sargisson, “Sex in Utopia.”.
67 Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism,” 11.
68 Philip Abbott, “Should Utopians Have Perfect Bodies?” Futures 42 (2010): 875,
emphasis added.
20 F. BORK PETERSEN

healthy human body”.69 Given the extent to which “the body is a site that
includes major social practices”,70 and the fact that bodies are indeed the
basis of every ideology71 —it is puzzling that more specific research has
not been devoted to live bodies in Utopian Studies.
One possible explanation for this is the cognitive bias that characterises
Utopian Studies as a discipline (or: its primary constituting disciplines).
Literature, literary and political theory have strong traditions in utopi-
anism and Utopian Studies and Darko Suvin refers to utopia as “verbal
construction”.72 While the body is tied to the present, utopia is—not
least in Utopian Studies—associated primarily with something that can
be thought (and artistically represented in other ways), but not neces-
sarily be immediately acted out. Regarding what she understands as a
key element of utopianism: estrangement, Lucy Sargisson illustrates this
cognitive bias in Utopian Studies when she argues that while utopias “are
not completely cognitively remote”, they “always exist outside of our
experience”.73 However, this appears to be changing and Levitas notes:
“Utopia is not simply a thought experiment in the conventional sense,
for it necessarily operates at the level of affect as well as intellect…The
process of making and communicating imagined alternative futures must
be both affective and cognitive”.74

Contributions to Research
This book aims to begin addressing what I argue is a fundamental gap
in Utopian Studies scholarship: that is if we accept ‘the expression of the
desire for a different, better way of being and living’ as a widely used

69 Marc Chrysanthou, “Transparency and Selfhood: Utopia and the Informed Body,”
Social Science & Medicine 54 (2002): 469.
70 Abbott, “Should Utopians Have Perfect Bodies?” 876.
71 Gebauer, “Körper-Utopien.”.
72 In Sargisson, Fool’s Gold, 19.
73 In Sargisson, Fool’s Gold, 19. At the same time, live experiments in communal
housing or urbanism, etc. are of course a fundamental strand of Utopian Studies,
if without scrutinising ‘bodily being’, specifically. See, for instance, Lucy Sargisson,
Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression (London and New York: Routledge,
2000); Sargisson, Fool’s Gold; Peter Kraftl, “Utopia, Performativity, and the Unhomely,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007).
74 Levitas, Utopia as Method, 218.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

basic definition of utopia, then bodies play a key role in such expressing
and desiring.75 In taking a first step towards filling this gap, I explore
instances of how the tension between ou-topia and eu-topia is articulated
in bodily actions. Another area of Utopian Studies scholarship to which I
hope to make a contribution is utopianism’s entanglement with dystopia
and anti-utopia. In this vein, I explore prosthetic bodily being as a likely
site for utopianism’s co-optation by dominant ideology. Yet, I also want
to show that not all utopian actions that are carried out with a focus
on individual bodies are escapist, as is sometimes suggested in Utopian
Studies scholarship.76 Furthermore, my study elucidates how understand-
ings of utopia in terms of both function and process have problematic
implications.
While Utopian Studies is a distinctly multi-disciplinary field, this book’s
focus on the body draws on disciplines that are as of yet relatively unex-
plored in Utopian Studies, such as Performance Studies, Fashion Studies
or Body Studies. As bodies appear to become increasingly important sites
for the expression of utopianism (even if these utopian actions often
turn out dystopian or anti-utopian), this is an area of great potential for
Utopian Studies.
In addition, the book draws its relevance from tackling social science
issues such as human enhancement, cosmetic surgery, body modification
or the body online in a humanities framework that highlights critical
analysis. This scrutiny of bodies and their actions specifically with regard
to utopianism invariably produces insights that concern bodies in visual
culture, bodies and media and bodies as aesthetic objects. My investiga-
tions point to similarities in practices that define contemporary prosthetic
being on the basis of their utopianism, while they may be distinct on
almost every other level. By emphasising the imbrication of utopia,
dystopia and anti-utopia, the study hints at the utopian impetus at work in
practices that other scholarship often considers as unambiguously neolib-
eralist—with its stress on entrepreneurial subjectivity. More broadly then,
Body Utopianism addresses the role of bodies in society. It reflects issues
concerning the body’s relation to identity and performativity and the
dissolution of borders between the natural and the artificial.

75 Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 8, 9 and 209.

76 See Sargisson, Fool’s Gold, 33; Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London and
New York: Verso, 2005), 124; Levitas, “For Utopia.”.
Another random document with
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pues la primera vitoria
de mí la tengo alcanzada;
que aunque la pena contina
mi juicio desconcierte,
es de suerte
que estimo por medicina
lo que me causa la muerte.
En tan rabioso combate
bien se verá á lo que vengo,
pues por vencimiento tengo
ser vencido y sin rescate;
porque, pastora, quedé
en lugar donde bonanza
no se alcanza,
que en los brazos de la fe
se desmaya la esperanza.
El que más se guarda y
mira,
más en vano se defiende,
pues vuestra terneza prende
y ejecuta vuesta ira,
y pasa tan adelante,
que entiendo en el daño fiero
de que muero,
que sois hecha de diamante
ó pensáis que sois de acero.
Trayo comigo guardado
licor para mi herida,
un sufrimiento á medida
de vuestro rigor cortado,
que aunque en el alma me
daña,
prestando á vuestra aspereza
fortaleza,
crecer puede vuestra saña,
mas no mengnar mi firmeza.
El suave son de la lira, la dulzura
de la voz, la harmonía de los
versos fué tal, que echó el sello á
todo lo passado, y habiendo
Filida hecho traer de sus
cabañas una curiosa caxa de
ébano fino, allí en presencia de
todos la abrió, y sacando della
ricas cucharas de marfil, cuchillos
de Damasco, peines de box y
medallas de limpio cristal, con
gran amor lo repartió de su mano,
y los pastores, con gran alegría
recibieron sus dones, salvo
Filardo que no había cosa que le
pudiesse alegrar, y assí él solo
triste y todos los demás
contentos, salieron á la ribera con
la hermosa Filida, y por la orilla
del cristalino Tajo se anduvieron
recreando. ¡Oh, quién supiera
decir lo que aquellos árboles
oyeron! porque Siralvo y Florela
gran rato estuvieron solos; Finea
y Alfelio lo mismo; Pradelio y
Filena, por el consiguiente. Pues
Sasio y Arsiano, Campiano y
Mandronio, bien tuvieron que
hacer en consolar á Filardo, y la
sin par Filida, como señora de
todo, todo lo miraba y todo lo
regía; hasta que el sol traspuesto
forzó á todos á hacer otro tanto. Á
Filida acompañaron los dos
maestros del ganado y sus
pastoras, Celia y Florela, y á
Filena los demás, porque assí
Filida lo ordenó; sólo Filardo,
viendo cuán poco allí granjeaba,
por diferente parte tomó el camino
de su cabaña; y sólo yo, fatigado
deste cuento, un rato determino
descansar, y si hay otro que
también lo esté, podrá hacer lo
mismo.
 QUINTA PARTE
DEL PASTOR DE FILIDA

No es possible que á todos

agrade el campo, los árboles y las
hierbas; mas ya sabemos que las
selvas fueron dignas de resonar
en las orejas de los cónsules: la
diferencia es salir el son de la
zampoña de Titiro ó de la mía;
mas esto tiene su descuento, que
de más y menos se ordena el
mundo, tan aína hallaremos quien
oya el tamboril de Baco como la
lira de Apolo. Haré una cosa
dificultosa para mí, pero fácil para
todos, que será passar en silencio
lo que nos queda del florido Abril
y del rico y deleitoso Mayo, donde
nuestros pastores entre sus
bienes y sus males con Fortuna y
Amor, perdiendo y ganando,
passaron cosas dignas de más
cuenta que la que yo agora hago.
Porque Pradelio y Filena en este
tiempo, entre mucho dulzor,
hallaron mucho acíbar, el pastor
celoso y perdido y la pastora
apremiada y confusa. Fanio y
Finea fueron creciendo en las
voluntades, hasta hacerse de dos
almas una. Ergasto y Licio
trujeron á Celio, y hallaron á Silvia
enamorada, no se puede decir de
quién, que cuando se sepa, será
un notable hechizo de Amor; y lo
que sin lágrimas no podré contar,
aquella sin par nacida, principio y
fin de la humana hermosura (que
por estos nombres bien puede
entenderse el suyo), oprimida de
su bondad natural y del
conocimiento de su valor, dexó
los bienes, negó los deudos y
despreció la libertad, consagróse
á la casta Diana y llevóse tras sí á
los montes la riqueza y
hermosura de los campos: pues
al cuitado pastor que más que á
sí la amaba, nada nuevo la pudo
llevar; porque el alma dada se la
tenía, pero dexóle en lugar de su
dulcíssima presencia una noche
de eterno dolor y llanto en que
ocupado passaba la mezquina
vida. No buscaba los montes,
porque no osaba; no seguía la
ribera, porque le afligía; lo más
del tiempo, solo en su cabaña
entre memorias crueles, esperaba
la muerte, y si alguna vez salía,
no por la sombra de los árboles ni
por la frescura de las fuentes,
pero por riscos y collados, donde
el sol de Junio abrasaba la
desierta arena, sobre ella tendido
llamaba en vano á la hermosa
Filida, y entre estas
lamentaciones, un día, sentado
sobre el tronco seco de un acebo,
repentinamente sacó el rabel que
estaba tan olvidado, y los ojos
tiernos y helados, que se pudiera
juzgar que no veía, desta manera
acompañó sus lágrimas:

SIRALVO
Filida ilustre, más que el sol
hermosa,
sol de mi alma, sin razón
ausente
destos húmidos ojos
anublados,
¿cuándo veré la cristalina
fuente?
¿Cuándo el jazmín? ¿Cuándo
el color de rosa
con los dos claros ojos
eclipsados?
¿Cuándo piensas romper
estos nublados
y mostrarnos el día,
Filida, dulce mía?
Si en algún tiempo á los
desconsolados
mancilla hubiste, tenla de mi
pena;
cesse tan triste ausencia,
que en tu presencia la fatiga
es buena.

Filida, tú te fuiste, que de

otra arte
estar ausentes no fuera
possible,
porque nunca de ti yo me
apartara.
Que ni acidentes de dolor
terrible
ni peligros de muerte fueran
parte
para partirme de tu dulce cara.
Ven, no te muestres á mi amor
avara;
que si gusto te diera,
Filida, si bien fuera,
entre tigres de Hircania te
buscara;
mi mal me hace que á mi bien
no acierte,
y estando tú escondida,
busco la vida y topo con la
muerte.

Filida, mira con quién vivo

ausente;
mira de quién estoy
acompañado
y lo que saco de su compañía.
La esperanza ligera, el mal
pesado,
el bien passado con el mal
presente
y el interés morir en mi porfía;
mas si yo viesse un venturoso
día
en que tu rostro viesse,
Filida, aunque muriesse
¡por cuán vivo y dichoso me
tendría!
Mas ay de mí, que temo más
que espero:
temo que si hay tardanza,
esta esperanza morirá
primero.

Filida, cuantas lágrimas

envío,
no son ya tanto porque no te
veo
cuanto porque jamás espero
verte;
no sé si tiene culpa mi desseo,
bien sé que tiene pena, y yo lo
fío,
que al que espera salud, no
hay dolor fuerte;
¿qué juzgarías que perdí en
perderte?
Perdí la misma vida,
Filida mía querida,
que en tu ausencia no es vida,
sino muerte;
perdí los ojos, que sin ti los
niego,
y negarlos conviene,
pues quien los tiene y no te
mira es ciego.

Filida, tal quedé de ti

apartado
cual sin el alma el cuerpo, ó
cual la nave
sin marinero, ó cual sin sol el
día;
muriendo aprendo, ciencia
harto grave,
á conocer un buen y un mal
estado,
y cuánto va de un es á un ser
solía;
edificando estoy de noche y
día
labores sin cimiento:
Filida el argumento;
y el oficial mi vana fantasía;
mas en siendo la torre
levantada
trazada á mi deseo,
luego la veo por tierra
derribada.

Filida mía, consuelo de mi

alma,
más agradable que la luz
serena
y muy más que la misma vida
cara,
¿dónde suena tu canto de
sirena?
¿Quién goza tu amistad
sincera y alma?
¿Dónde se mira tu hermosa
cara?
¡Oh! cuán de veras me ha
costado cara
la lumbre de los ojos,
Filida, que mis ojos
de espaldas ven el bien, el mal
de cara,
la triste vida que posseo me
culpa,
y ella misma me pena:
sufra la pena quien causó la
culpa.

Filida, en tanto que el sereno

Apolo
ciñe nuestro horizonte, y entre
tanto
que le da cuna el húmido
Neptuno,
mis ojos, no en reposo, mas
en llanto,
su oficio es llorar solo, y como
solo
á solas estas rocas importuno,
excúsome que sepa ya
ninguno
vida tan trabajosa.
Filida mía hermosa,
si contasse mis males de uno
en uno,
corta sería la vida, el tiempo,
el modo,
corto el entendimiento,
que mi tormento no se
entiende todo.

Filida, viva ó muera, llore ó ría

ó trabaje ó repose, ó duerma ó
vele,
ora tema, ora espere y dude y
crea,
ha de estar firme lo que
siempre suele,
 firme el querer y firme la porfía
del que mirarte y no otro bien
desea.
Escrito está en mi alma, allí se
lea,
tu nombre y mi deseo.
Filida, allí te veo,
mas haz que con mis ojos hoy
te vea;
míralos viudos, tristes y
enlutados,
coronados de nieblas,
con las tinieblas por Amor
casados.

Ya falta aliento al espíritu

cansado
que vencen las passiones,
Filida, y las razones
con mi seca ventura se han
helado;
muero, y si quieres que
contento muera,
doquier que estés, señora,
acoge agora mi razón
postrera.

Apenas Siralvo puso fin á su

afligida canción, cuando, llamado
de un súbito ruido, volvió los ojos
al monte, y por la falda dél vido
venir un ligero ciervo herido de
dos saetas en el lado izquierdo,
sangrientas las blancas plumas, y
tan veloz en su carrera, que sólo
el viento se le podía comparar, y á
poco rato que entró por la
espessura del bosque, por las
pisadas que él había traído
llegaron dos gallardas cazadoras,
que con presuroso vuelo le
venían siguiendo. Descalzos
traían los blancos pies y
desnudos los hermosos brazos;
sueltos los cabellos que, como
fino oro, al viento se esparcían;
blanco cendal y tela de fina plata
cubrían sus gentiles cuerpos, las
aljabas abiertas y los arcos
colgando. Pues ahora, sabed que
la una destas era Florela, que
juntamente con Filida seguía los
montes de Diana, y como vido á
Siralvo, casi forzada de amor y
compassión le dixo: Pastor, ¿has
visto por aquí un ciervo herido
que poco ha baxaba de la altura
deste monte? Sí he visto,
respondió Siralvo lleno de
turbación de ver quién se lo
preguntaba. Pues guíanos,
pastor, dixo la cazadora, que las
saetas que lleva nuestras son y
tuya será parte de los despojos.
No respondió Siralvo, pero atónito
y contento tomó la senda del
bosque, obligándolas á correr
más que solían, y después que
gran rato anduvieron por la
espessura, á un lado oyeron
bramar el ciervo, y acercándose á
él se hallaron cerca de una
fuente, que al pie de un pino
salía, asiendo de la hierba sobre
el agua. Prestamente, Siralvo le
asió por los anchos cuernos y con
el puñal le cortó las piernas, con
que quedó tendido al pie del
árbol. Las cazadoras, contentas
con la presa, pidieron á Siralvo
que le quitasse los cuernos y los
pusiesse en lo alto del pino en
tanto que ellas se alentaban de la
larga carrera. Poco tardó Siralvo
en hacer esto y menos Florela en
hablarle cuando á la compañera
vió dormida. Siralvo mío, le dixo,
¿qué buena suerte te ha traído
por donde yo te topasse? Esa,
dixo Siralvo, mía sola la puedes
llamar, si siendo tan buena puede
ser de quien tan mala como yo la
tiene. Esso me enoja, dixo
Florela; viva Filida y contenta; tú
en su gracia, ¿cómo puedes
quexarte de tu suerte? Desde
ahora, dixo Siralvo, mal contado
me sería que sé de ti tales
nuevas; pero ausente de su
hermosura y ignorante de su
contento, desesperado del mío,
¿cómo juzgas, Florela, que yo
podría estar? Como tú dices,
respondió la cazadora; pero
porque á ti y á Filida no ofendas,
te certifico dos cosas: la una, su
gusto, y la otra, tu favor; mira si
es razón que basten contra tus
melancolías y vuelvas al tiempo
de tus deleites, pues que nunca
ha habido mudanza en la causa
dellos, ya que en el estado la
haya. ¿Esso te parece poco, dixo
Siralvo, una privación continua de
ver su beldad como solía? Pues
sabe que aunque los ojos del
ánima nunca de Filida se
apartan, éstos que la vieron y no
la ven bastantes enemigos son
para aguar mis consuelos. ¿Y si
yo hago, dixo Florela, que la
veas? Harías conmigo, dixo
Siralvo, más que el cielo, pues lo
que él me niega tú me lo dabas.
Pues alégrate, pastor, dixo
Florela, y vete en buen hora, que
me importa quedar aquí; mira qué
quieres que le diga á Filida, que
de la misma arte se lo diré. Dile,
Florela, dixo el pastor, que aquella
misma vida que en virtud de sus
ojos se sustentaba, está ahora en
su ausencia. ¿Qué más le diré?
dixo Florela. Dile más, dixo
Siralvo, que se fué y me dexó; y
basta, que ella sabe más de lo
que tú y yo le podemos decir. Lo
que ves en mi cara le podrás
contar, y el bien que me hubiere
de hacer sea á tiempo que
aproveche, porque me llama la
muerte muy aprissa, y aunque
ahora por ti entretendré la vida, si
tardas en confirmarla no sé qué
será de mí. Pierde cuidado,
pastor, dixo Florela, que yo le
tendré como verás; con lo cual
Siralvo se partió della, y por
pensar mejor en su sucesso,
entró por lo más espesso del
bosque, entre temor y esperanza,
lleno de turbación, y sentándose
en aquella soledad sombría oyó
un sospiro tan tierno que le juzgó
por proprio suyo. ¡Oh, sospiros
míos, dixo Siralvo, si será
possible que algún día lleguéis á
las orejas de Filida, y vosotros,
tristes ojos, veáis en los suyos
vuestra lumbre verdadera!
Resuma el cielo en este solo bien
cuantos pensare hacerme, Aqui
Siralvo quedó suspenso consigo,
y á poco rato oyó otro sospiro
muy más tierno, y volviendo los
ojos á la parte donde había
salido, por entre la espessura de
sus ramas vió un bulto que no
determinó si de pastor ó de
pastora fuesse, y levantándose en
pie, lo más quedo que pudo se
fué acercando hasta llegar donde
vido, el cuerpo en la tierra y en la
mano la mexilla, una pastora, en
tanto extremo hermosa, que si no
hubiera visto la hermosura de
Filida, aquélla estimara por la
primera del mundo. Su vestidura
humilde era y el apero humilde,
pero su suerte tan extraordinaria,
que Siralvo quedó admirado. Sus
cabellos, cogidos en ellos
mismos, despreciaban al sol y al
oro; el color de su rostro, vestido
de leche y sangre, con una
ternura que representaba el alba
cuando nace; sus ojos eran
negros, rasgados, con las
pestañas y cejas del color mismo;
la boca y dientes excedían al rubí
y á las finas perlas orientales. Tan
nueva cosa le pareció á Siralvo,
que sacó el retrato de la sin par
Filida; mas en viéndole,
arrepentido de haberle opuesto á
beldad humana, le tornó á cubrir,
y representándose á la pastora le
dixo: Si supiesses al tiempo que
me llego á ti, verías lo que has
podido conmigo. De tu tiempo,
dixo la pastora, poco puedo yo
saber; del mío te sé decir que es
el peor que nunca tuve. Si tu
congoja, dixo Siralvo, es tal que
un pastor con sus fuerzas pueda
remediarla, dímela, gentil pastora,
que assí halle yo quien por mí
vuelva como tú hallarás á mí.
¿Qué te mueve, dixo la pastora, á
tanta cortesía con quien no
conoces? Paréceme, dixo el
pastor, que es mucho lo que
mereces. Mejor le diré yo, dixo la
pastora, que es ser tú noble de
corazón y quizá haberte visto en
necessidad como me veo. Essa
deseo saber, dixo Siralvo. Por
ahora, dixo la pastora, no es
possible; pero yo voy barruntando
que tú y los demás pastores
destas selvas y riberas seréis
testigos deste mal y no podréis
remediarle. Bien podrá ser, dixo
Siralvo; pero yo ganoso estoy de
servirte, y si me pruebas,
hallarme has muy á punto. Soy
contenta, dixo la pastora.
¿Conoces á Alfeo, un pastor
nuevo de esta ribera? Sí conozco,
dixo Siralvo. Pues búscale, dixo la
pastora, y dile que no tengo aquí
más armas de un cayado y un
zurrón, y que si todavía me teme,
se traya consigo á la serrana
Finea que le quite el miedo. A la
hora entendió Siralvo quién era,
mas no quiso hacer
demostración, y sin más
detenerse, tomando aquello á su
cargo, dió la vuelta á su cabaña,
donde ya Alfeo le estaba
aguardando, triste y pensativo,
lleno de dolor. Siralvo, pues,
aunque confuso, contento iba y
animado en las palabras de
Florela; mas ahora sin tratar nada
de sí: pastor, le dixo, ¿qué
congoja es ésta en que te hallo?
La mayor, dixo Alfeo, que me
pudiera venir. Sabe que Andria,
en hábito de pastora, es venida á
buscarme y está en el bosque del
pino. ¿Cómo lo sabes, dixo
Siralvo? ¿Cómo? dixo Alfeo.
Como me ha enviado á llamar.
También yo lo sé, dixo Siralvo, y
te trayo un recado suyo, porque
pasando yo por el bosque
encontré con ella y preguntándole
quién era no me lo quiso decir,
pero rogóme que te dixesse que
estaba sola, sin más armas que el
cayado y el zurrón, y que si assí
la temías, llevasses contigo á
Finea que te quitasse el miedo.
Luego conocí quién era y te vine
á dar aviso. Harto hemos
menester ahora, dixo Alfeo, para
no errarlo; á ti te basta tu mal sin
ponerte á los ajenos; yo estoy
necessitado de consejo y de
favor, y no sé adonde lo halle.
Pastor, dixo Siralvo, no creas que
mis passiones han de estorbarme
el buscar remedio á las tuyas; yo
quiero volver á Andria y saber
della lo que quiere, y conforme á
su intención podremos apercebir
la nuestra para lo que mejor te
estuviere. Muy bien me parece,
dixo Alfeo, y quedándose en la
cabaña tornó Siralvo al bosque, y
por presto que llegó, halló con ella
á Arsiano, que era con el que
primero había topado y había
enviado á llamar á Alfeo, y como
volvió tan turbado de la nueva,
volvió luego á la pastora á darle
cuenta de lo que passaba; por
parte llegó Siralvo que los dos no
le vieron, y gran rato estuvo
escondido oyendo sus razones.
Ella le dixo que era una pastora
de Jarama, que se llamaba
Amarantha, y por cierta
adversidad era allí venida, y Alfeo
era un pastor que le estaba muy
obligado, y se admiraba que en el
Tajo se hubiera hecho tan
descortés que no viniesse
llamándole. Arsiano le decía que
Alfeo no se osaba apartar de la
serrana Finea, y que ninguna
cosa querría ella mandar que no
la hiciesse él tan bien y mejor que
Alfeo. A esto la pastora replicaba
que ninguna importancia al
presente tenía, sino verse con
Alfeo en parte donde nadie lo
pudiesse juzgar; que se le
truxesse allí si quería dexarla muy
obligada. Arsiano parece que,
pesaroso de apartarse della, tornó
con aquel recado, y Siralvo que la
vió sola llegó con el suyo; pero el
mismo despacho tuvo que
Arsiano, y assí volvió á su
cabaña, donde llamaron á Finea y
le dieron cuenta de lo que
passaba. Su parecer, entre mil
temores, fue que Alfeo se
escondiesse algunos días y se
echasse fama que se había ido,
para que Andria también se
fuesse á buscarle; y cuando
Arsiano volvió certificáronle que
Alfeo, en sabiendo la venida de la
pastora Amarantha, se había
despedido dellos y ídose no
sabían adónde. Con esto volvió
Arsiano á la pastora, y ella, que
amaba y era mala de engañar,
posponiendo el crédito al enojo,
con Arsiano se vino á la ribera
donde, vista su gran hermosura,
no quedó pastor ni pastora que no
se le ofreciesse, y ella,
agradecida á todos, escogió la
cabaña de Dinarda, por consejo
de Arsiano, que estaba herido de
su beldad, sin bastar su cordura
para dissimularlo, y assí la noche
siguiente, cubierto de la capa del
silencio, tomó la flauta, y puesto
donde Amarantha le pudiesse oir,
con estos versos acompañó su
instrumento:

ARSIANO
Si sabéis poco de amores,
corazón,
agoras veréis quién son.
Esta empresa á que os
pusistes,
confiado en no sé qué,
es la que os hará á la fe
saber para qué nacistes;
no os espanten nuevas tristes,
corazón,
pues vos les dais ocasión.
Llevaréis la hermosura,
que os ofende, por amparo,
pues este solo reparo
os promete y asegura
que no os faltará ventura,
corazón,
aunque os falte galardón.