How Imagining a Feminist Utopia Mends the World

I arrived at the second Rising Voices Fellowship retreat late, slightly discombobulated, and thrilled to see the other Fellows. After seven months of separation since the first retreat in August, I missed their company as friends, but also the feelings that emerged when we were together: empowerment, curiosity, and inspiration. The community I have found within the Fellowship contrasted so greatly with my life at home that it seemed like I was entering a new world, some kind of accepting feminist utopia. Well, the night I arrived at the retreat, we had a workshop about exactly that.

In the feminist utopia workshop, we were asked to think of questions to answer from the perspective of an idealized society free of oppression. We started asking questions like:  “What would underwear look like?” or “What would voting look like?” I quickly became frustrated by the specificity of the questions and felt like I couldn’t work through issues without confronting the deeper structures of our society. 

As the night progressed, I was unable to see how the questions we were asking helped us build a utopia. My initial frustration during the workshop didn’t surprise me. What did, though, was how it didn’t feel like any of the other fellows were discouraged by the challenge. The first part of the workshop was reading the introduction to the book The Feminist Utopia Project, which starts off by acknowledging how accustomed we are to misogyny that it comes to “feel like gravity.” It’s true. Misogyny was, and is, holding us down. But witnessing the other fellows’ enthusiasm and creativity made me feel like I could fly.

I realized that I needed to step back and see why we were focusing on seemingly small change: fully reinventing society all at once was impossible. The tiny changes we were imagining could become larger transformations. For example, our discussion of underwear symbolized greater empowerment and redefined gender roles without needing to fully upturn history. I started to lean into small dreams, small upheavals of norms and societal rules that would build a utopia.

These so-called small dreams embody the heart of tikkun olam, the Jewish value of mending the world. The Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria, taught that all things contain a spark of the Divine, and it is through our actions that we uncover and restore those sparks. It is through mending the world that we search for the Divine. This idea suggests that at its core, the world is innate goodness that was created by God (or is God, depending on how you think about it), and humans face the challenge of reconnecting with it through our actions. Instead of deconstructing society to search for a single feminist solution, I’ve learned that I can dream of changes that will connect us further with the innate goodness of our future, no matter how small they are.

The final activity of the workshop was building a collage on what a feminist utopia could look like across three different spheres of society that we chose: the justice system, language/media, and sexuality. As our worktime neared the end, we presented our group’s poster to the room. The silly magazine clippings, handwritten bullet points, and drawings on our posters were our small blueprints to improve the world. We practiced tikkun olam with our imaginations and found the divine spark within our dreams.