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Kaci Faylee Elder
"Contemporary American Utopias: Diverse Intentional Communities from a Young Feminist Perspective"
Sponsor: Caren Kaplan, Associate Professor of Women's Studies

• Project Description
• Scholar's Photo
• Scholar's Journal

Kaci's project creatively links a study of contemporary intentional communities with the rich history of nineteenth century utopian experiments in the United States. Kaci plans a road trip this summer that will take her to five very different cooperative living communities in Los Angeles, Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oregon and the Bay Area. In order to dispel the popular notion that the "commune" was born as a concept in the 1960s, Kaci will investigate our national two hundred year history of utopian experiments-both actual and literary-to place her participant-observation studies of young women's socialization in these modern American utopias in context. Combining academic theory with personal narrative, Kaci's Women's Studies Senior Honors Thesis will be deeply grounded in her own personal commitments and experiences as a feminist active in the student cooperative movement.

"You ladies need anything?" the warm voice sweetly asks me. I squint up from the postcard I'm writing in its direction; my legs are sprawled out along the sidewalk. At least ten minutes have passed since the first morning yawn escaped through my unbrushed teeth, and I still don't know where we are. I'd fallen asleep around three or four in the morning, leaving the New Mexico interstate to my driving accomplice, Sonya, and the Clash for the remainder of the night. The blazing heat had woken me from a fitful sleep, and I discovered that Sonya had left the mini-van parked along a tree-lined street somewhere in suburbia. I didn't want to nudge her sleeping body to ask our whereabouts, so, for the first morning in memory, I don't know the neighborhood, city, or even state I've woken up in.

The middle-aged woman with the warm voice still towers above me, and I realize that we're parked in front of her suburban house. She must have been waiting for hours for me to wake up! My body nervously scrambles off the sidewalk to meet the owner face to face. She smiles and holds out two breakfast bars and two cans of Dr. Pepper.

"I thought you girls might be hungry", she grins.

Welcome to southern hospitality, Armarillo Texas style!