Introducing the Feminist Policy Project

The Feminist Policy Project (FPP) is a prefigurative policy reform project that produces, and critically evaluates, ‘utopic’ feminist policies via the innovative methodological approach of ‘critical utopian policy analysis’ (CUPA). This paper introduces both CUPA and its realisation through the FPP. CUPA is comprised of three stages designed to generate (and critically evaluate) historically grounded, creatively enacted, utopian policies. Stage One calls for a critique of an existing state policy, one which goes beyond the prosaic surface of a policy as text to expose the complex of assumptions, power relations, and competing interests that structure it. This stage is prefatory, a deconstructive effort to identify injustices in existing political discourse and provide context for reform. Stage Two mobilises unorthodox epistemic habits and affective registers to produce speculative and imaginative knowledge. It requires hopeful and playful prefiguration in two guises: an ‘as if’ guise and a ‘mimetic’ guise. Theorists are invited to play ‘as if’ they are an influential state-based policy-maker, possessed of the power to author policy which reflects their utopic desires. Simultaneously, they must consider themselves constrained by contemporary state assemblages – in their codified and otherwise habitual forms. This, then, requires that theorists mimic, i.e., playfully emulate, the processes, structures and agonisms that modulate policy possibilities. Identifying and emulating state assemblages is a necessary partial and interpretivist, as well as contingent on the resources and objectives of theorist. Stage Three draws attention to this contingency, as well as the provisionality and partiality of utopian knowledge generally. Utopic policies are produced in socio-historically specific conditions, in response to select conditions, and by embedded subjects whose capacity to desire is socially constituted. This stage, therefore, calls for thoroughgoing auto-critique. Thus, CUPA is a circular methodology: ongoing, continuous, committed to a future of ‘better’ failures. The FPP mobilises CUPA to both express and explore feminism. Theorists are encouraged to express demonstrably feminist desires through both critique and utopian policy writing, in a way that: interrogates the promise of feminist dreaming, rehearses a feminist future, and enables a reflexive and generative approach to articulating political demands.