This issue of Utopian Studies represents a journal milestone: thirty-five years of publication. Our gift to ourselves is the expansion of our editorial team, with Associate Editor Christian P. Haines overseeing the CRITICAL FORUM section of the journal. He is already at work on the FORUM for the upcoming special issue on Queer Utopias (vol. 36, no. 1). An associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Christian specializes in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to today, but his research and teaching interests extend to the environmental humanities, game studies, literary theory and continental philosophy, Marxism—and utopian studies. His first book is A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons (Fordham, 2019). A second and indeed a third are underway: The Scored Life focuses on finance and contemporary culture; and a future study of genre fiction, capitalism, and ecology (currently entitled Marxism, Ecology, and Form) is taking shape. He has contributed chapters to several edited volumes, and his articles have appeared in journals such as boundary 2, Genre, LIT, and Cultural Critique. He has also co-edited two special issues, one for Cultural Critique and the other for Minnesota Review. In short, Christian brings to the journal a valuable combination of expertise in literary and cultural studies, contemporary theory and philosophy, and editorial experience.We are also happy to welcome Kirsten Harris as the Managing Editor. Kirsten is a lecturer and Director of Teaching in Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. Her first book was Walt Whitman and British Socialism: The Love of Comrades (Routledge, 2016), and current research interests extend that interest into such areas as social print culture, the "socialist revival" in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry, utopianism, and the relationship between art and radical political movements generally. Kirsten actually is returning to the editorial team of the journal after a hiatus; we are grateful for her "institutional" knowledge in addition to her long-time dedication to utopian studies.Turning to the contents of this issue: Utopian Studies 35, no. 1, turns out to be an especially substantial set of essays and shorter articles.Among the contributions to the ARTICLES section you will find interesting (if unintentional) overlaps: Andreas Beck Holm's "Rousseau's Implicit Socratism: Utopianism in the Social Contract" and Jorn Janssen's "Hope Springs Eternal: Political Engagement in a Post-Anarchist Utopia" are meticulously argued studies of the political philosophies of two, obviously very different, figures: French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau on one hand and the post-Hegelian German thinker Max Stirner on the other, as read through the philosophical perspectives of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir. Both essays seek to locate and describe the "utopian impulse" that dwells in the writings of Rousseau, particularly in the Social Contract and Second Discourse; and of Stirner, whose notion of post-anarchism, Janssen argues, "despite its anti-political inclination" nonetheless "finds solace in the tragic and ceaseless nomadic pursuit of societal amelioration."Another set of essays, by Ori Tavor and by Claudia Gärtner, describe contemporary efforts to imagine and to actualize sustainable communities that are based in traditional belief systems: Confucianism and Christianity, respectively. In fact, Tavor's "In Tradition Is the Preservation of the World: A Twenty-first-century Confucian Utopia" continues the trend of focusing on a particular philosopher, in this case Confucian philosopher Zhang Xianglong (1949–2022). While, Tavor argues, Zhang distanced himself from the label "utopian" he nonetheless drew from both ancient Chinese depictions of ideal societies and Western utopian models, and advocated—for over two decades—for the establishment of "Special Districts for Confucian Culture" (SDC) as sustainable green communities that could "offer an authentic Confucian alternative to mainstream urban society." Claudia Gärtner's "The Monastic Cell as Utopian Niche" describes a different kind of ecotopian space, the monastery. She shows how religious communities (their own kind of "special districts," for Christianity) can be regarded as forms of what she calls a refigurative practice. Challenging the typical view of monasteries as static and rule-bound, these religious communities model process-utopia ideals: not measuring success in terms of a righteous achieving of a perfectly sustainable community, but rather in terms of the persistent effort, despite any failures, to keep going. This kind of transformative persistence is applied as well to the communities' outreach efforts, designed to teach and encourage, rather than dictate.John Michael Duvall's "The Curious Tales of The Scarlet Empire," steers us quite away from sustainable visions, in describing a little known 1906 novel by David Maclean Parry, a former President of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The novel, argues Duvall, was an effort to counter contemporary, often left-leaning utopian writing with a "redemptive adventure romance narrative" that is not only anti-socialist but anti-utopian, instead "serv[ing] capitalist ideological purposes and has the protagonist combining tremendous wealth, a powerful faith in individualism, and a recovered masculine subjectivity to become a captain of industry and paragon of a hegemonic masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century." Interestingly, Parry evidently was aware of the suasive power of literature and art, and sought to fill a perceived gap in capitalist-friendly literature for a specifically middle-class reading public.The power of art underlies the argument of the final regular essay, "Paradise on Fire: Dialectics of Utopia in Edward Bond's The War Plays" by Asiyeh Khalifezadeh and Tahereh Rezaei. Reading Bond's plays through an Adornian lens, the authors demonstrate "how Bond's early confidence in the capacity of art to drive positive societal change evolves into a more nuanced position that recognizes both the enduring impact of cultural norms, and their tendency to recur throughout history." (Perhaps here there is even a connection with the Gärtner essay, insofar as Bond comes to a more incremental view of social change.) The authors conclude that by "summoning Adorno's utopian visions and his principles of negative dialectics and determinate negation," the dramaturgy of Bond's The War Plays "calls for a transformation of consciousness and an awakening achieved through critical reflections on the past and the present circumstances."The CRITICAL FORUM, "Cultural Encounters and Textual Speculations in the Mediterranean," features new scholarship in the growing field of Mediterranean studies specifically, and spotlights more generally the turn toward non-Anglophone and/or non-Western utopian and speculative writing and thought. The FORUM'S special editors are three Turkish scholars familiar to many of us: Burcu Kayışcı Akkoyun (Boğaziçi University), Emrah Atasoy (University of Warwick), and Merve Tabur (Utrecht University). Their introduction opens the conversation among the section's five essays, which together advocate "shifting from Western-centric approaches to more nuanced modes of interpretation with a specific focus on the Mediterranean, which has itself been a contested discursive site in Mediterranean studies." With references to Turkish and North African (here, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Tunisian) literary texts, the essays "explor[e] speculative configurations in the Mediterranean through literary representations of cultural encounters, social conflicts, and environmental crises"; they also emphasize the need to contextualize these representations historically, politically, and artistically. The Mediterranean itself, they argue, is more than a geographical site, but a transnational and transcultural domain demanding a reorientation of the general Western notion of "the Mediterranean" as "European," neglecting, at least conceptually, the presence of North African and Middle Eastern nations, cultures, and politics.Following the CRITICAL FORUM section, described above, we feature this issue's DESIRE LINES contribution, "Utopia on Earth? Sustainability, White Tourism, and Neocolonial Desire," by Robyn Fraser. "Inspired" by the example of the well-known (and UNESCO-protected) Auroville community in India, Fraser thinks about the phenomenon of spiritual tourism in "the East." Historicizing this site, Fraser places Auroville, "a utopian destination for white imagination and white self-actualization," with the broader history of Western travel to seek out a "more authentic" and ecologically gentler life, as well as a "deeper" spiritual experience. Fraser unpacks the colonialist and racist undercurrents of the history of this sort of travel—while also thinking about her own privileged position as a white American scholar who does fieldwork on labor practices and sustainability in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. As we seek a better world today, Fraser proposes, we need to acknowledge our own complicity in shaping the world as it is as we think about what we would like it to be.The DESIRE LINES section is followed by a RESEARCH NOTE contribution on "euthanasia in utopia" by the founding editor of Utopian Studies, Lyman Tower Sargent.This issue's BOOK REVIEWS section begins with Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan's White Power and American Neoliberal Culture (University of California Press, 2023), which is another outcome of the two utopian scholars' ongoing collaboration. For Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, the co-authored book contributes an important intervention as it delivers on one of the most persistent desiderata in utopian studies, that is, a sustained analysis of notions of race and white supremacy together with utopian/dystopian theorizations and critical readings. John Storey's review of Mark Schmitt's monograph Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) discusses the relationship of the field of cultural studies to utopia, noting the pronounced interest in utopianism of two of its founding figures, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. Storey suggests that Spectres of Pessimism represents a significant revival of utopianism in cultural studies.The BOOK REVIEWS section then turns to three books that are devoted to the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction: Brian Attebery's Fantasy: How It Works (Oxford University Press, 2022; reviewed by Ana Tejero-Marín); Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras's co-edited essay collection Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2023; reviewed by Mariana Batista da Cruz); and Hua Li's Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (University of Toronto Press, 2021; reviewed by Shaoming Duan). With Li's monograph the section also turns from studies of contemporary American and British literature and culture to books that explore utopian visions in different areas of the world at different times: Chinese science fiction in the post-Mao era; Dante's search for a new utopian Romantic mythology in Europe, discussed in Daniel DiMassa's Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth (Bucknell University Press, 2022; reviewed by Brenda Deen Schildgen); and the roadmap to a fossil-fuel-free world laid out with a decolonial, indigenous-centered lens by Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker in The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada (Between the Lines, 2023; reviewed by Evangeline Kroon). The section concludes with Mark A. Allison's review of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by Kristen R. Ghodsee. Against the tendency of other recent works of "popular neo-utopianism" to focus on the public sphere (e.g., Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists; Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism), Ghodsee interrogates the domestic for utopian experiments that may help us rearrange the private worlds subtending the public sphere. Everyday Utopia showcases practices and institutions from around the world, with a particular interest in examples that are under-examined in the existing literature.There are three CONFERENCE BRIEFINGS in this issue. Reporting on this year's meeting of the Possibility Studies Network are Kseniya Fiaduta Prokharchyk (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Luciana Dantas de Paula (University of Brasilia), who emphasize the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the collaborations and dialogues of this field. The report stresses the interest in new pedagogical practices that help students–and future students–navigating the assuredly difficult challenges ahead.The University of Salamanca hosted a semester-long series of connected talks entitled Early Researchers' Seminar for Science and Speculative Fiction: Gendered Geographies across Time. This was the first such seminar, and according to BRIEFING authors Beatriz Hermida Ramos and Miguel Sebastián-Martín, the success of the "distributed" seminar spoke to the "buoyancy, diversity, and potential" of studies in Science and Speculative Fiction not just among young scholars, but among established faculty and, in an unusual turn from the standard academic conference, among the reading public, who were also invited to participate as equal partners in the discussions of speculative thinking, narrative form, and the practice of utopia.The Solar Media Collective at Concordia University sponsored a day-long seminar on "the multiscalar dimensions of just and hopeful energy transitions." Thus this event too focused on utopian practice: "day-to-day practices, coalition building, collective action, and the articulation of desires" that will mobilize communities toward strong commitments to the "struggles for justice" and to the creation of "a better world across scales." At the same time, however, the central role of hope was top of mind. "In José Esteban Muñoz words," the Collective concludes, "concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many."

This second issue of Utopian Studies 34 comprises a variety of historically and theoretically grounded contributions, ranging in time and place from medieval Persia to Cold War America to contemporary global media culture. The issue opens with a surprising look back at utopian myth-making . . . by the U.S. frozen food industry. Author Justin Nordstrom reads a 1954 short story, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which foresees global cooperation, new technologies, and the emancipation of women from domestic labor—all thanks to the advent of frozen meals and microwave cooking. Nordstrom demonstrates how this “frozen fantasy” of the Cold War period reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs (from Cockaigne to Bellamy)—but also challenges their essential arguments.The next several articles reach back in time, first to twelfth-century Persia. In “Utopia’s Cauldron: Travelers’ Lore and Korea (‘Belisa’) in the Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked,” author Kaveh Hemmat revaluates the role of the medieval epic Kushnameh, as an anticipation of later utopian sources connected to Islamic political theory. Hemmat argues that the epic’s focus on the formative processes that make its “quasi-fictional” society of Besila possible results in an important precursor to More’s sixteenth-century text. The “invention” of the utopian genre may have deep roots, the author concludes, in the Kushnameh, with its interest in the development of a paradisiacal city, its articulation of universal monotheism, and its focus on geographical knowledge and travel.The geographical character of the island of Utopia is the subject of Chun Liang Lin and Mark Hansley Chua’s article, “Mapping Utopia as an Enclosed Renaissance Garden.” Participating in the longtime scholarly effort to “map” More’s island nation, the authors report on a mapping experiment that attempts to understand the geomorphology of Utopia according to metaphorical ideals of Renaissance humanism, rather than through mathematical calculation.“An Archival Paradise: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Early Modern Info-Utopianism” by Georgie Newson focuses on the seventeenth-century British philosopher’s proposal for a new “universal language” for use by scholars, travelers, diplomats and others during an expansionist era of exploration and trade. Newsom reclaims the “Essay” as “legitimately” utopian, contesting earlier critical dismissals of it as such and instead claiming it as an early example of what she calls “info-utopianism.” An info-utopian tendency can be located in a number of other early modern utopian works, the article contends, and it concludes with implications for contemporary utopian theory.The next two essays look toward anticipations of, and responses to, future crisis society: Rafael Baquero asks us to revisit the understudied contributions of Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, to contemporary efforts within the Marxist tradition to reclaim utopian Hope. By exploring Sánchez Vasquez’s Philosophy of Praxis and by highlighting its anthropological assumptions, this study demonstrates the extent to which his works provide theoretical underpinnings and resources for contesting contemporary discourses on the “end of history” and for recovering utopia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Finally, literary scholar M. Keith Booker revisits the stunningly drawn global posthuman world(ing) of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) in his article, “A New Expansion: Climate Change, Posthumanism, and the Utopian Dimension in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.” Booker argues that despite the twenty-third-century postapocalyptic setting, the text offers clear elements of hope and “utopian energies,” driven particularly, he argues, by “the motif of genetic engineering,” which opens up possibilities of a more enlightened politics, and of new kinds of relationality between the human and more-than-human world.The second half of this issue marks the appearance of several new Utopian Studies sections. We are delighted to launch The Critical Forum and Desire Lines. The Critical Forum is a space for critical conversation in a “bloc” of essays addressing together a specific theoretical problematic related to utopian, dystopian, and speculative texts or thought. The first Forum features four essays that emerged from a two-day seminar in April 2023 on the topic of antiutopianism and/in contemporary culture. The seminar was organized by Darko Suvin, who is well known to utopian and science fiction scholars, and Patricia McManus, author of the recently published Critical Theory and Dystopia (2022), whose introduction outlines the goals of this zoom seminar. Anchored by Suvin’s opening contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” responses from Antonis Balasopoulos (“Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation: Some Reflections”), from McManus (“The Shape of Power and of Pain in Game of Thrones”) and from Lazar Atanasković (“On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones”) take up various aspects of Suvin’s wide-reaching meditation. Balasopolous’s contribution speaks directly to one aspect of Suvin’s argument; as their titles suggest, McManus and Atanasković narrow their discussions to a single epic manifestation of the contemporary antiutopian mood: the Game of Thrones series.Our next section is Desire Lines, the second new feature of Utopian Studies 34.2. The opening essay by Assistant Editor Stephanie Peebles Tavera explains the purpose of Desire Lines in a “performative essay”: that is, she models the kind of contributions we hope to receive in her own inaugural Desire Line. Following this introduction are the first two Desire Lines received from readers. Ali Riza Taskale offers a thoughtful meditation on the notion of “boring utopias” by taking a backward glance at Edward Hopper’s “haunting” paintings of isolation and loneliness–and why they resonate in our own post(?)-COVID times. Finally, Mark Jendrysik recalls his first travel to and exploration of the utopian horizon in “Utopian Enterprises: Growing Up with Star Trek.” The experience of watching the original series (“TOS”) decades ago, he writes, steered him not only toward his career as a scholar of American literature and culture but also toward his first understandings of what “utopia” is, is not, or might be.Finally, the Utopian Studies practice of publishing Conference Briefings continues in this issue, with a compilation of responses to the Spring “Green Utopia Now” conference. Six young scholars and presenters report what they took away from an event that elicited new voices in the study of utopia and sustainability.This issue marks the first curated – from start to finish – by the new editors of Utopian Studies. We hope that this issue signals to new and longtime readers of the journal the vision that the editors have for the next generation of Utopian Studies: our commitment to showcasing cutting-edge scholarship in the field, to nurturing conversations between scholars regardless of professional status, and to providing a place for scholars to reflect on the import of own commitments to becoming utopian.

How do you trace the evolution of desire? Our desires are often invisible to others—and sometimes even to ourselves—made manifest only when we act upon our desires. Yet, desire leaves a trace. It marks us, impacts us. Desire is often described as a “strong” feeling, so strong that, once felt, we are no longer the same. Desire determines the shape of our lives: It affects the decisions we do (and do not) make, the worlds we build, the things we create. And when there is no path forward toward the thing we desire, we forge our own path. This is what we call a “desire path”: “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning.”1 In other words, when the established pattern of life does not fulfill our desire, we create our own way forward—“off the beaten path,” as they say—for ourselves and for others to follow, and we tread the path again and again until it becomes a fixture of the landscape. This is true of hiking trails in the woods, of dirt roads that cut across highways, and of social media threads that hyperlink ideas. Desire paths, or desire lines, unearth a want for resistance to the norm.Isn’t that, by its very definition, utopian?Desire Lines is a new essay series in Utopian Studies. We, the editors of the journal, intend this act of resistance against traditional academic discourse to become a permanent feature of the journal. Desire Lines creates a space for academics to reflect on the affect of their research: its past impact, its current significance, its potential for longevity. One might think of Desire Lines essays as a form of “public humanities” or “public intellectual” writing that disrupts the form of traditional academic discourse in creative yet productive ways. After all, like essays in the public humanities, Desire Lines encourages writers to repackage their research into a shorter, more accessible form for a non-expert audience. Yet, as the call for papers describes, Desire Lines is also about “how culture cultivates desire” or, more precisely, how a single cultural artifact encapsulates the knowledge one has gained from research and how that research engenders feelings about our place in the world.This is a defining feature of Desire Lines: an invitation to sit with our feelings about and engendered by our research. Feelings are notoriously elusive. Invisible, palimpsestic. They fade, shift, evolve. And because they are loaded with cultural narratives of gender, race, and disability, feelings are weighty. No wonder we wish to avoid them. Yet, whether we acknowledge their presence or not, feelings leave behind traces. They hedge at the margins of bodies, both human bodies and bodies of art. Since I am a literary historian and theorist by trade, perhaps the easiest way to describe how Desire Lines helps us access the feeling of research is to turn to art or literature. I find the person of Addie LaRue from the novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020) particularly evocative of how desire functions, and therefore, a useful figure for describing the shape of Desire Lines. The entire premise of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab hinges on this one gorgeous line: “Art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”2 Addie becomes the material embodiment of this principle. In a Faustian move, Addie makes a deal with the devil to escape her arranged marriage. In turn, the devil curses her with invisibility or, more specifically, the curse of being forgotten. “I can’t hold a pen,” Addie explains of her curse, “I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember” (261). Any attempt to leave a mark, such as in a photograph, is simply erased.Yet, she finds that she can act as a muse—an object of desire—for others. Addie LaRue hedges at the contours of Matteo Renatti’s early nineteenth-century painting of a woman by the sea. She is there in the flecks of light that burrow through the carvings of a 1960s silhouette sculpture. She even manifests in the lyrics of a 2014 pop rock ballad. Addie LaRue refracts her existence through the expressions of others because she cannot document her feelings, or even the fact of her existence, for herself. This is the momentum of desire. A concrete artifact such as a painting, a sculpture, song lyrics, or even a novel refracts our feelings—our desires—by helping to make those feelings visible, while simultaneously creating the necessary distance to examine those feelings objectively, apart from ourselves and displaced into the body of another (the artifact). And, of course, one of our greatest human desires is to leave a legacy of our existence. Proof that we were once here.As an affect theorist, tracing the impact of desire is of particular interest to me. In my own book, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship, I trace the evolution of a specific desire that hedges at the contours of woman-authored medical fiction: That of the autonomous female body.3 On March 3, 1873, Congress passed “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” (Ch. 258, § 2, 17 Stat. 599), the first anti-abortion law in our nation’s history. You read that right: abortion was legal prior to 1873. But this law wasn’t just anti-abortion. It also prohibited access to birth control, sex education, and medical literature—whether fiction or nonfiction—about reproductive health. The Comstock Law, as it was called in honor of its champion and enforcer Anthony Comstock, scapegoated “evil reading” as the reason for immoral sexual behavior in the United States. And so, just as Luc, the god of darkness, sought to erase Addie LaRue from society, Comstock and his ilk worked to erase the idea of the autonomous female body from American culture and society. Neither was wholly successful. After all, palimpsests leave traces. Yet present-day politicians are still trying to take a page out of Comstock’s book—quite literally—by preventing the spread of what they consider a dangerous idea.4 Unsurprisingly, it’s the exact same idea against which their late nineteenth-century political counterparts fought: the autonomous non-cis-male body.What interests me is how the power of narrative plays a role in the evolution and dissemination of desire, whether in the form of fiction or a television series or an oil-on-canvas painting. Narratives are our livelihood as scholars. Tracing those narratives—those desires lines—helps us reflect on where we’ve come from, personally, professionally, historically, as well as tells us something about where we might be going. No wonder I can’t read contemporary novels like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue without hearing echoes of the past. The analytical part of my brain is so well trained to pick up on connections that it cannot help itself. It’s like that annoying friend who hypercorrects you with a gentle “Did you know?”Except I’m that friend.And I’m betting you are, too. That’s what makes us researchers.In the novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, a PhD candidate in art history named Beatrice Caldwell curates a postdoctoral art exhibit entitled “In Search of the Real Addie LaRue.” The (fictional) exhibit traces evidence of Addie LaRue’s impact upon a series of artworks created at different periods of time across 300 years of her immortal life. Always, the evidence includes a constellation of seven freckles, arranged in the same recognizable pattern in every text. It is the recurrence of the freckles that leads Beatrice to conclude that “they’re portraits of the same woman” (259, emphasis original). There is no precedent for this practice in formal schools of art, Beatrice explains to a disbelieving audience. “This is like putting a girl with a pearl earring in a Warhol, and a Degas, without ever seeing the Vermeer” (259). Caldwell describes Addie LaRue as “the ghost in the frame” who functions as “a piece of connective tissue between the eras,” tracking the evolution of desire over centuries (258, 259). The artist’s desire to remember against the subject’s desire to be remembered.As utopian scholars, we share Beatrice Caldwell’s ambition to trace the desires of nations, communities, and people across time and space in search of better alternatives. We look for clues across the corpus of others’ work and we document our findings in the corpus of our own work. But why do we do this? Why do we study what we study? For me, the answer is pretty self-evident: I am a woman with a history of disability and mental illness who is committed to reproductive autonomy for myself and others, and in my immediate community (the state of Texas), people in positions of power are threatening to take away our reproductive autonomy. Although there is no direct reference to reproductive health in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, one could argue that the entire narrative hinges on reproductive autonomy: “There will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies, it will be as though she never lived,” Schwab summarizes of Addie’s life in small-town seventeenth-century France (42). In the act of fleeing her arranged marriage to a widower with three children, Addie makes the decision to be single and child-free. That is the very definition of reproductive autonomy. She just made a deal with the devil to gain access.What I study matters. It reminds us that we are not alone in our struggle toward a more equitable world. Would I go as far off the beaten path as Addie LaRue to achieve my desire? Maybe. The purpose of the Desire Lines series is to create a safe space to reflect on those kinds of questions. We invite scholars to think critically about the kind of affect, or impact, you imagine your research or teaching makes upon audiences: What is the lived reality of the knowledge you possess? What makes that knowledge utopian or dystopian? To forge a desire line, we must boldly go to confront our own desires whether we traverse that road with Captain Jim Kirk, Edward Hopper, or Addie LaRue.

ABSTRACT This article discusses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) as a work of medical fiction and partial sex education manual that engages in conversation with various Progressive-era reproductive health discourses, especially scientific sex education theory and the birth control movement. Sex education at the fin de siècle often drew upon biological texts rather than anatomical or medical texts as a way to teach reproductive health during a period of censorship under Comstock Law. Gilman's use of satire rescripts this popular comparative biology approach to sex education by using entomology rather than plant or animal biology. Through satirical inversion, parthenogenesis functions as a defense for female body autonomy—or “voluntary motherhood”—and access to birth control. Although Gilman was sincere in her feminist argument for basic reproductive rights, a feminist disability studies reading of satire in Herland reveals a eugenics approach that eliminates impaired or disabled bodies from utopia.

In this paper, I offer an environmental ethics for corporations and corporate behavior in an effort to decrease their potential for global geological destruction in the Anthropocene. Like Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier, I posit that corporations will not simply disappear, even in our attempts to move toward a postcapitalist economy. Moreover, we would not want corporations to disappear given their positive impact in some contexts. Corporations hold the potential for an environmental ethics in their "corporate personhood" status, which I read through Haraway's cyborg theory to argue that the corporation always already exists as cyborgian in its interaction with human and nonhuman material bodies. In (re)inventing the cyborg corporation, I extrapolate the potential for an environmental ethics in corporate personhood from the utopian trend in science fiction's representation of multinational corporations, beginning with Edward Bellamy's industrial army in Looking Backward (1887) and culminating in Bacigalupi's agribusinesses in The Windup Girl (2009) and Winterson's MORE in The Stone Gods (2009). Although Bellamy fails to address environmental impact, and Bacigalupi and Winterson find the corporation responsible for environmental degradation, I suggest that Haraway's socialist-feminist cyborg provides an alternative theoretical framework for re(en)visioning the corporation as a socialist entity akin to David Schweickart's proposal in After Capitalism or its pragmatic counterpart, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation.