Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, a collection of essays co-edited by Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach. London: Routledge, 2002.
Embodied Utopias Reviews
“The subtext of the book is the modernist construction of utopianism critiqued by Grosz who asserts that utopia is always about enactment. Which brings us back to the origin of the book – the “utoping” of a group of academics to explore the intersection of utopianism, gender, embodiment and the city … The book demonstrates that utopia is the field against which gender, architecture, and the body play, and therefore has a much more central role in the making of the modern metropolis than has been fully explored.”
~ Lynda H. Schneekloth, Utopian Studies 13.2 (2002): 108-109.
“Anthologies such as this are a satisfactory means of preventing every utopian aspiration from being discarded along with the rejection of Utopia.”
~ Ton Verstegen, Archis 6 (2002): 115.
“Embodied Utopias will admirably serve graduate seminars in the disciplines it seeks to address, allowing students to compare the usefulness of a variety of scholarly kits as applied to the study of gender, architecture, and urban design. For practitioners, the book will challenge their all-too-common urge to impose single solutions on others, reminder them that there are multiple, constantly changing ways of being in the world, all or none of which can be satisfying to everyone.”
~ Tania Martin, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62.3 (September 2003): 415.
“The city, or the process of urban transformation, is a topic that has been dealt with from various disciplines … bringing these perspectives together in one book is really worth the effort.”
~ Anique Hommels, Social Studies of Science 33.6 (December 2003): 945-946.
“There is much to praise in this collection by Bingaman, Sanders and Zorach, including the wide range of contributors bridging the humanities and the social sciences, the abundant illustrations, and the bibliography that invites scholars to continue to read beyond this anthology… Any classroom that explores the idea of modernity and cities would benefit profoundly from this collection, especially its treatment of gender and space.”
~ Delano Greenidge-Copprue, Journal of International Women’s Studies 6.2 (June 2005): 175.