Bammer’s Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s is primarily concerned not with historical recovery, but with the theoretical relationship between feminism and utopianism, and in particular the impact of feminism on the idea of utopia itself. She argues that ‘cumulatively, the feminisms of the 1970s recuperated the concept of the utopian as a vital dimension of a radical politics. “I want to counter the notion of the utopia as unreal with the proposition that the utopian is powerfully real in the sense that hope and desire (and even fantasies) are real, never ‘merely’ fantasy. It is a force that moves and shapes history.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 108-109

Bammer locates particular texts and textual strategies in the different politics of the United States, France and East and West Germany, noting that actual utopias are always historically situated and thus contain both utopian and ideological elements; the focus on gender inequality is sometimes accompanied by alarming blindness to questions of ethnicity and class. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 109

against [stasis and perfection] she [Bammer] posits a shift from timelessness into time that is also a move towards agency in which women become the subjects of history. For Bammer feminism itself is intrinsically utopian. It is driven by anticipation, by the recognition of patriarchy as an unnatural state, and by the belief in and pursuit of an alternative. But the nature of that alternative is hard to define because women have first to experience and articulate their authentic experience in the world. As we struggle to find this, questions of embodiment and of language become central, and utopia is redefined in a new and critical way, as a journey and not a goal. This demands an open and indeterminate future, which refuses the ‘illusory coherence’ of a fully worked-out alternative. Bammer argues that conventional utopias are inherently conservative by virtue of their form; their transformative potential is undermined by their closure, their ‘apparatus of self-containment’. Feminist utopianism, as Lucy Sargisson also argues, thus opens up both the concept and the content of utopia. The openness, the radical indeterminacy of consciousness and of the future, are seen as feminism’s contribution to a new utopianism. Bammer’s characterization of the place of utopia within the process of social change implies utopia as method: we should think of utopia not as antithesis, but as ‘a series of utopian moments within the shifting configurations of the possible’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 109