Biopolitics

This chapter argues that biopolitical utopianism is a conceptual and aesthetic register more than a genre. It travels across the boundaries between genres, renewing the utopian imagination by shifting its focus from space to flesh. The literary works participating in this kind of utopian practice defy the opposition between utopia and dystopia, upending the commonplace tale according to which the utopian fictions of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries give way to the dystopian ones of the twentieth and twenty-first. These texts are less interested in differentiating good from bad than in using bodies as figures for radical social transformation. In short, utopia becomes less a matter of the good place than of life, transformed utterly.