...Vincent Lim Professor Lloyd HISA 125E 5 June 2013 Final Part 2 Marge Piercy’s novel, Woman on the Edge of Time came to be described as a feminist utopia, where it doubts the society’s inability in achieving such utopia. In such utopia, Piercy alludes that gender roles have been eliminated, along with the racial and social tensions that plagued the 70’s in America. In Piercy’s novel, Connie Ramos serves a woman in her thirties, who has been declared clinically insane and turns to the utopia future as an escape. As she spends more time in the future, she is able to conceptualize a society of: equal inequalities, elimination of corruption within a societal state and the fear of homophobia of the time that existed in the United States. As a feminist activist during the 70s, Betty Friedan served as a strong leading figure for the women’s movement in the United States and is recognition for sparking the second wave of American feminism during the 20th century. Friedan would be content of what Piercy conveys in the novel about the equal inequalities that exist within the utopia society. Because of this she is able to explore the ideas of a women in finding a realization beyond the traditional role. As a writer for the feminist and women’s rights, Friedan took part in advancing women’s rights that recognized the women’s inequality as being a typical housewife that has a husband. This led her to the develop the National Organization for Women that aspired to bring the women...
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...Savannah Morris Faris Honors English IV 09 January 2015 A Maggot-Less World A Utopia is an imaginative place that is beautiful in every aspect and is the author’s perspective of a “perfect society”. Aldous Huxley creates this Utopia in his novel, “Island”. He creates a perfect society with limited technology and a union of all people to work together. Huxley creates this Utopia during a time period of corruption and new discoveries. As the nation enters the literary time period of “the beat period”, Huxley's unconscious idea of a Utopian society is displayed uncensored in “Island” as opposed to “Brave New World” and he provides his personal solution to the world’s problems. In “Island” by Aldous Huxley the main character, Will Farnaby,...
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...Published in 1516, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia drew attention to many of the issues contemporary European society faced at that time. While Utopia is considered a socio-political satire, there is little humor to be found in the problems of their day. Thomas More drew attention to the unfair socio-economic system, the egocentric kings and distrust in technology. Sadly, five hundred years later, the modern world still faces these same issues. Turn CNN on any time of the day and you will hear a multitude of examples. Currently, the United States faces an unfair socio-economic system that gives privilege and opportunity to wealthy citizens, while repressing minorities and the poor. The issues wealthy citizens face are represented fully and addressed...
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...despite the fact that such an ideal life has stayed in people’s mind, not too many people believe a real utopia exists. It is similar to when audiences watch a romantic movie with a perfect ending and tell themselves this can only happen on the screen where all the lines have been written and edited carefully. Without any hope for any possible alternatives, eventually, no one would strive to create a peaceful and fantasy world according to their dream. However, there is a country that is making the dream of a lot of people come true. In a recent decade, Singapore has been moving towards the idea of improving their social and economic problems through constructing the modern building projects. Needless to say, their significant achievement in economic social development has brought them opportunities to become one of the most stable economies in the world regardless of a limited space and sacred natural resources. Singapore is among the countries that has the lowest rate of unemployment, highest adequate living conditions and social pension, and fastest economic growth in Asia. Furthermore, it is also well known for the green environment and energy efficiency. Although Singapore is believed to be a clear example of how a utopian plan has improved human development, there are critics argue that its government is directing people in an oppressive setting through a so called utopia and that there is lack of innovation in a too stable economic organization. The rigid of the government...
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...America: On the Path to Utopia or Cyberpunk? As I sat and listened to multiple political science essays in the last few weeks of my Honors Colloquium class, some essential concepts really stuck out to me and resonated in my mind. The idea of a utopian society that was brought forth in class got me thinking of how our world would be like today if we adopted some utopian methods of living. In America we are very blessed to live in the land of opportunity yet we are always focused on what is the next and best opportunity for us to seize. The American people have grown accustomed to a fast paced living, never stopping to look around at the beauty of nature that surrounds them or share a smile with a stranger. We are always on to the next best thing and we forget to appreciate the aspects of human life that really matter. If we as a people decided to change our patterns of everyday living we could make America more than the land of the free and opportunity. If we connected with a utopian lifestyle, we might find ourselves actually enjoying life or maybe we will discover utopia isn’t the right choice for the direction of our country’s future. Either way in this paper, I am going to introduce the key elements of a utopian society and also another society that I think represents where America is heading today and into the future. A utopia is a community or society possessing highly desirable or perfect qualities. Utopia can be seen as an imaginary society of sorts because it does...
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...Adlai E Stevenson once said, “Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.” The communism Stevenson is referring to does not match the communism Karl Marx wrote about in his political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s pure, communist economy, the community makes decisions. “In today's communist countries, most economic decisions are made by the government. Its leaders make all economic decisions, a system known as a command economy. The decisions are outlined in a plan that is carried out with laws, regulations and directives.” (useconomy) The communist countries in the twentieth century were not Marx’s idea of communism because the government is involved instead of the community. In an ideal world, Communism would be utopia. Everyone would work together for each other’s benefit instead of personal gain. However, the state of communism in the world in the twentieth century was very different from the utopia Marx alluded to as seen in the communist Russian government. One of the major issues with communism is that it can kill any ambition or motivation of the people in the communist country. Because individual efforts only benefit the community as a whole and there is no chance of moving up in class, communist citizens often have no motivation to work hard in their jobs. This is one of the major reasons for the economic downfall of the Soviet Union during the...
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...Plato was one of the first to develop the concept of a political utopia. In The Republic, he attempted to outline the guidelines for a just society. Plato's Utopia appears, at first to be an excellent idea. However, his perfect society is less than the ideal, even from the contemporary perspective. Aristotle, through "The Politic” attempted to understand the nature of man in a "realistic" view. What Plato called ideal, Aristotle called unfeasible. He tries to make rationale judgment in the management of his ideal of a society, through understanding human behavior and logic, making it what he would deem a more realistic society. As humans we tend to care more about our individual needs prior to the needs of others. The values that we express reflect our own self-interest, where the good of the individual was the main concern and was not the same as that of the State. Plato saw this to be determinate to society based on the awareness that Guardians, such as civil leaders and assistants would care more about their individual desires, and their needs; disregarding anything else to fulfill their pleasures. "On this basis they will then be free from faction, to the extent tat any rate that human beings divide into factions over the possession of money, children, and relatives" (Stephanos 464e). Plato recognized this to create factions among individuals, where these divisions' main concerns were to themselves, their family, and to others that were close to them. Families create that...
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...THE AMERICAN DREAM THE AMERICAN DREAM Section #1 a. The impact cultures in North America have on the United States is that each region adapted the traditions and/or beliefs of those who settled in that area by maintaining dance, music, and crafts. Many English settlers did not respect the Native American cultures, and were seen as uncivilized and/or savages. Basically there was a clash of cultures, with new ideas pushing away old ways and mayor cultures oppressing others. b. Immigration and migration shape the early United States, for example: The first person to be processed at Ellis Island was Annie Moore who arrived from Ireland on January 1, 1892. As the first immigrant Annie Moore was given a $10 gold piece. She soon was married and gave birth to eleven children. While Annie Moore was the first immigrant, she was definitely not alone. Some famous immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island included Charles Chaplin, Cary Grant, Harry Houdini, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is easy to see from this list how immigrants have changed the face of the United States. All of these famous people contributed to the United States, giving a bright future for innovative contributions to the young nation. c. The most important change in the United States ‘ involvement in foreign affairs from 1789 to 1877 was expansion of its territory. Marked by a treaty with France buying Louisiana territory doubling the United States, and other treaties...
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...areas; biomedical technology and digital technology including virtual reality.” (Gilbert 2006). The play follows a young man, Om who signs up to the organ selling company Interplanta in order to earn money for his poverty stricken family, only to discover that his and his families lives would change forever, being ruled and watched over by who is thought to be an all American blonde called Ginni. The play follows Om and his family and their struggle to keep their identity and sanity through the hands of the Western Interplanta and the Western society who made them. There is much evidence of post-colonialism and globalisation in Padmanabhan’s Harvest, such as dehumanisation and orientalism, however the main focus points of this essay are utopia and dystopia, capitalism and the advances in technology. It can be seen that a prominent theme in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest is the one of post-colonialism. Western countries have dominated the world since the sixteenth century, at one point Britain owned fifty per cent of the world, however much has changed, and many...
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...Where Is Utopia in the Brain? DanieL s. Levine Introduction The designer of utopian societies, whether fictional or real, often confronts the limits of what is possible for members of our species. But how severe or flexible are those limits? The explosive growth of behavioral neurobiology and experimental psychology in the last decade has produced many results on the biological bases of social interactions. This growth suggests that we can now look to science for some partial answers to the question of limits. Until recently, the social sciences and the biological sciences have mainly developed separate and disconnected accounts of human behavior. In the “nature/nurture controversy,” for example, anthropology has tended to emphasize cultural influences on human nature whereas behavioral biology has tended to emphasize genetic influences. The journalist Matthew Ridley (Nature via Nurture) provides an accessible account of the intellectual history and rhetoric of these two fields. Yet an increasing number of scholars in both areas are now realizing that behavioral biology and anthropology are studying the same human phenomena from different viewpoints. This overlap means there should be an underlying reality that is consistent across the different disciplines regardless of any disagreements in terminology. The behavioral biologist Edward O. Wilson calls this type of interdisciplinary commonality consilience, a term coined earlier by the nineteenth-century philosopher William Whewell...
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...For this reason, I found that the discussion of her autobiography could be followed by a conversation on anger, injustice and transmissions of trauma. From the voices of Black and Latina scholars, we will engage with the uses of anger in fighting against injustice. Furthermore, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, as a combination of personal narrative and research, provides a smooth transition into the political implications of the recent ontological turn to affect in feminist and queer theory. The conversation on affect also seemed crucial for this course in terms of navigating the relevance of political depression in present times. In light of the discussion on the justice system that I anticipate the class to have during this week, I felt that an introductory course on Women and Gender Studies would not be complete without having a conversation on intersectionality. Therefore, during our seventh week we will be strictly focusing on Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality. Aside from reading Crenshaw, we will also engage with Jennifer C. Nash’s “Institutionalizing the Margins” and Brittney Cooper’s “Intersectionality.” We will not only study the context and the origins of the theory of intersectionality...
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...THE PROBLEM WITH WORK A JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN CENTER BOOK THE PROBLEM WITH WORK Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries KATHI WEEKS Duke University Press Durham and London 2011 © 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper co Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH LOVE TO JulieWalwick (1959-2010) Contents ix Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION i The Problem with Work i CHAPTF1 37 Mapping the Work Ethic CHAPTER 2 79 Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work CHAPTER 3 113 Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income CHAPTER 4 151 "Hours for What We Will": Work, Family, and the Demand for Shorter Hours 5 CHAPTER 175 The Future Is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope EPILOGUE 227 A Life beyond Work 235 255 Notes References 275 Index Acknowledgments thank the following friends and colleagues for their helpful feedback on versions of these arguments and portions of the manuscript: Anne Allison, Courtney Berger, Tina Campt, ChristineDiStefano, Greg Grandin, Judith Grant, Michael Hardt, Stefano Harney, Rebecca I would like to Karl, Ranji Khanna, Corey Robin...
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...Adolf used this story as propaganda to try to persuade the German population into getting into a movement that would transform the German society into a one based race. As Germany was in a financial, political, and social downfall at the time, the book became intriguing to the German population. As Adolf wrote two volumes, he shows zero mercy in giving his perspective on powerful expansion using brutal force and Semitism. Although the book contained profanity, frequent content of grammatical errors, and what seemed to be unachievable goals/targets, the book was able to produce over five million copies in eleven different...
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...1984 in 2014 In 1984, George Orwell describes life in a world with an ideal government that has society’s support and citizens that obey all laws. Otherwise known as a “negative utopia,” Oceania is ruled by The Party, composed of different Ministries to maintain their compliant citizens. Thought Police work for The Party to identify those who oppose The Party by monitoring every action taken and word spoken. “Telescreens" and hidden microphones allow for effective monitoring, but the only thing they cannot know for sure are the thoughts that citizens keep in the privacy of their mind. As Winston’s life progresses in 1984, he becomes more aware of his and other’s opposition to The Party, and accepts the memories that The Party does not want...
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...us part of a new digital world and a Digital Economy and as if it is making a citizen of a virtual digital world of which we are truly part of breaking out of all the physical, geographical and geopolitical boundaries and making us all part of that One World that we all truly belong to. In the previous two decades, while Digital technology was going through its own Renaissance movement, a state has been only achieved now that various morphs of the Digital world can be truly seen and felt and we are experiencing it now everyday. Is this the Utopia we all have dreamt of? While the existence of the digital world has been felt in various forms to impact our day to day life in terms of providing us instance access to information, making a huge impact on our personal, business lives and on the economy as a whole- Will it ever be able to transform itself as a powerful platform or medium to influence and completely morph the socio-political structure that exists today which divides people on the basis of these fake and shallow physical boundaries based on country, geographic affiliations and country unions (EU). While it is important to record the fact that it did make a deep impact on the global economy in transforming it into an almost truly digital economy with no artificial boundaries between people; this...
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