Sex and Utopia

Why did so many of the utopian communities that dotted the nineteenth-century North American landscape place sex, gender, and sexuality at the center of their new designs for living? The celibate Shakers, the gender-bending Public Universal Friends, the polygamist Latter-day Saints, the free love anarchists of Modern Times, the communally married Oneida Community, and so many other religious and political communities made changes to normative gender and sexuality foundational to their utopian visions.

What was it about how these communities organized labor, commerce, relationships, faith, and politics that required them to so fundamentally reimagine sex, gender, and sexuality? And why was it these changes—rather than drastic departures from normative politics or socialistic economics—that made mainstream nineteenth-century observers regard these communities with suspicion, and in many cases actively work to destabilize and destroy them? Guided by questions of temporality, identity, and embodiment, we will explore how the imagined and built world of utopian communities wove gender, sex, sexuality, and the body into their visions of a different life.

We will draw upon primary sources from several utopian communities and their detractors to understand how utopians saw themselves and how they were seen in their own time, as well as more contemporary historical analyses that highlight the conflicts that drove the creation and dissolution of utopian communities. Our secondary readings will span from the mid-20th century advent of New Left historical studies of communalism to recent writings from queer and trans theory and religious studies, the shifts between which will demonstrate the ways in which how historical utopias are discussed and narrated reflects dominant moral and political concerns of the era in which they are written. Finally, by incorporating queer theory, gender theory, and historical analyses with active investigation of how these communities imagined a new way of being in the world, we will explore how the echoes of nineteenth-century concerns still reverberate in the world’s politics, identities, and theologies today.