Queertopia: A Strange Place

What is queertopia? Can such a place exist? And what is its future? Who is in such a place? And who is part of such a future, a rather queer future - perhaps? These are questions that are raised in a show I recently saw entitled Queertopia. According to the description of the play it is "based on true stories" that are "youth-driven oral histories" that "investigate[s] violence within and against the LGBTQA communities in America while imagining and performing a future just beyond our grasp." It is a show, an organic show whose script, as the cast discussed in the talk-back after the show, is constantly evolving and changing. It tells stories of youth, different kinds of youth, queer in different ways, but in such stories there emerges a haunting of the past - a past that haunts the lives of LGBTQA persons. Yet, such haunting propels forward uncharted possibilities not seen in the show itself, but imagined in the time and space after the show ends and the dance party begins. It is a play between the past, the present (as performed), and the future always "a day away" or "just beyond our grasp".

Within the show and perhaps the future it imagines, performance and dance become the modes not only of cathartic release, but of imagination, of not thinking about the real, but of thinking about the imaginary - about images that could someday be a part of the real images we see in our lives. It is a reach for, a dreaming of a queertopia.

Within the show, space and time interact..space is changed over time and time impacts what space is available and how such space is seen. And a part of this dynamic relates to the bodies involved in such space and time. How are bodies oriented within the space and time and what amount of time does it take to orient bodies in particular ways within a space? How do the stories of the characters illuminate different paths for "queer" bodies and different responses to the violence of existence?

But back to the concept of queertopia...

I think it is necessary to begin in the present thinking about queertopia by looking backwards to the past to the etymology of what seem to be important terms - namely utopia, dystopia, and then finally the etymology of the queer in queertopia. Utopia is a neologism, first used in Sir Thomas More's book Utopia (1516). It emerges from Greek to mean broadly "good place." More used the term allegorically, noting such a place could not actually exist, but imagining such a place offers potential critical insights into possibility. Dystopia, a modification of utopia, is according to its etymology, first uttered by John Stuart Mill in 1868 in a speech in the British House of Commons. It means broadly a "bad or ill place." Utopia is founded on the "good life" while dystopia is its negative counterpart, a utopia with a problem. So, what about queertopia? I had not heard of the concept "queertopia" until this show...so let's look to the etymology of queer to begin an understanding of such a concept. Queer means "strange" or "peculiar" or "eccetric;" "off-center" or "oblique". And in the 20th century becomes associated with (homo)sexuality - an association that cannot be avoided with the utterance of "queer" as noted queer theorist Eve Sedgwick notes in Tendencies. So a queertopia is a strange or peculiar place, but a strange and peculiar place that is intimately connected with sexuality - particularly non-normative sexualities. It is perhaps a space and time where non-normative sexualities exist in a different paradigm BUT is neither good nor bad, it is peculiar...it is ambivalent about good and bad.

It is this ambivalence of the queertopia that I find quite useful and quite well engaged in the show. Depending on how one might read "queertopia" there are perhaps two immediate responses. One might imagine the show as playing with the notion of utopia - providing an overly positive spectacle of same-sex lovin'...one that imagines a world without violence, filled instead with love and gaiety. Or, one might imagine the show as playing with the notion of dystopia - imagining a future that is filled with violence, with queer bashing in order to provoke rage and calls for queer resistance. Both readings while somewhat present in the show, are inadequate for what happens. Instead, the viewer gets a merging of these two and in such a merging the show engages ambivalence where the good and the bad, the right and the wrong become much more complicated. The "queer bodies" are not merely victims, but also violators. Violence is not only inflicted from the outside, in BUT also from the inside out as the psychic wounds and the social wounds dance to produce the queer subjects.

And it is this production - both the literal production of the show and the metaphorical production of the lives such a show re-presents - that creates the queertopia. A space, a place and therefore a time somewhere and nowhere fleetingly showing the world we live in, the world as it once was, and how the world might be always struggling with the violence of existence and the (in)ability to escape such violence. This (in)ability both opens up the space to counter violence (an ethics of non-violence) while recognizing the presence of violence in the constitution of the human - we are violated by coming into existence (e.g. through naming, through being slapped on the butt by the doctor, or having our sex determined for us in the case of intersex babies). We cannot become subjects, we cannot become bodies, without violence but as Judith Butler argues "it is precisely because one is formed through violence, the responsibility not to repeat the violence of one's formation is all the more pressing and important" (2009, 167).

Legalize Gay

I recently was walking past American Apparel and saw this shirt that said "Legalize Gay". I was running late for a meeting so I couldn't stop and purchase it on the spot...I had to wait and hope that such a beautiful shirt would be still available two hours later.

It was still available two hours later. It was available in numerous colors and numerous sizes. I got a small, hoping it would shrink a little and then look super gay. But that's neither here nor there. My purchase of the shirt was done with a hint of irony. Actually, it was bought because I thought it was ridiculous and hysterical. I found it ridiculous and hysterical because I didn't get it and wondered why we should ask to "legalize gay". Of course, you, the reader, might be asking why that is odd so I will explain.

It seems odd because I am not sure how one "legalizes" an identity or perhaps why one would seek such legalization? It seems odd to ask for the government to "legitimate" an identity through legalization because specifying particular identities limits other possible identities. If I change my mind and don't want to be "gay" anymore, am I still a legal or legitimate being if I choose to "be" or "do" something different than "gay"? Such a demand seemingly limits other possibilities not yet "legalized" and as such gives the "government" the capability to delegitimate those identities that are not "legal". Along with this comes of course other areas of life that work along side the "government" such as the medical profession and education system that will also not recognize or "pathologize" those "identities" not legal - and therefore abnormal or delegitimate.

Of course, I recognize the impetus behind the shirts is in relation to Prop 8 in California and the argument to legalize "same sex marriage". Believing that if "gays" can marry, they become first class citizens, failing to see the loss that such a gain simultatenous entails. But I want to think about this in a different way. It seems odd that we "fight" to keep the government out of our bedrooms by relying on that very government to legislate such a request. We want you out of our bedrooms, but we want you in our bedrooms at the same time because we ask that you are in our bedroom so that you "see" that what we do is not "illegal" or something that will put us behind bars. Of course there are benefits to this...the legal realm provides a certain amount of possibilities - legitimate possibilities and safety from the prison. Yet, it also while producing possibilities of legitimacy, simultaneously occludes other possibilities - further marginalizing those possibilities that do not yet have "movement" to seek legitimation or possibilities that refuse to rely on the "legal" to make them legitimate. This can poignantly be seen, not in the realm of the legal, but the realm of the psychiatric where homosexuality was depathologized only to provide the space for gender non-conformity to be pathologized in the form of Gender Identity Disorder. We see in this that as the "homosexual" became officially healthy that other transgressive ways of being (i.e. a sissy boy; a manly girl) became officially 'unofficial' and deemed unhealthy.

What then does it mean to "legalize gay"? Does it mean to normalize the "gay" and move away from the arguably transgressive "nature" that was once associated with "gay" but perhaps moreso these days the "queer"? Does legalizing "gay" also normalize it to be "like them" just as some have sought the "gay" to be...we're just like you and deserve the same rights...While such a strategy provides recognition in the "traditional" sense, does it fail at changing anything? Does "legalizing" gay inevitably defeat what is most desired?

Wounding Words, Words that Wound, and Physical Aggression

Recently, "famed blogger" Perez Hilton had a physical altercation while in Toronto. I am not sure who his attackers were as there are competing stories nor do I write this to condone such violence. However, as I listened to Perez's video discussing the events I was intriqued by the multiple forms of violence being played out. On the one hand Perez was physically assaulted - his body was inflicted with violence via the punches, slaps, kicks of some other or others but on another hand Perez himself assaulted, linguistically, an other via language, his wounding words. Perez recounted these both, noting that violence is never the answer, but positioned violence solely on the side of the physical.

It is at this point that Perez falls short of his analysis. Or more so, provides an analysis that positions him as the victim and the one to be felt for constructing perhaps a binary between the "good" and the "bad"; between the perpetrator and the victim. Now of course there is some importance to this for the trauma of experiencing such violence is something that will take time to understand and bring into symbolization but such will be done through the language that is available to Perez to come to an understanding. He perhaps needs to be the "victim" in order to help himself come to terms with the violence that has been inflicted on his body. BUT, what he fails to address is the violence that his words inflict. He does note that he writes things that anger people or upset them, but he never has physically assaulted anyone or been physically assaulted for saying such things that he says.

Yet, here is where he misses the connection between his words that anger and their wounding capability. He misses the possibility or perhaps wants to deny the possibility that his words that anger some "other" have physical consequences. They are words that inflict bodily harm - just in different ways. They are words that "upset" or "cut" as seen in phrases uttered like "that cut me deep when you said 'x'" or what you said "took the breathe out of me". Words and actions then are not as distinct as often made out to be - a point developed extensively by Judith Butler in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. This is not to argue for a silent society where words are not uttered but to argue for an engagement with the language that is used, the words uttered to think about what possibilities and impossibilites they present.

This, the precarity of language, is something that Perez should perhaps know or have at least experienced in "being" a "gay" man. With epithets like "queer" and "faggot" and "sissy" thrown at many an "out or closeted or assumed" gay or experienced through the narratives told of such subjects, the experience of having the "wind knocked out of you" or feeling "sick" because of what someone has hailed you in such injurious ways, seems rather common. Yet, according to one story, Perez shouted "faggot" at Will.I.Am. Perez used wounding words against another subject and perhaps in doing so created an atmosphere of "threat" where his threat was countered, subverted by another threat, another wounding act - one of a physical nature. Perez then is perhaps not the innocent victim nor the guilty perpetrator but exists between those two positions...where he hailed using a violent word and such hailing provoked a violent act in return.

The fascinating aspect of this all then, as Butler expresses, is how words and wounds are related...how words wound, are embodied, just as physical violence wounds and is embodied. How then are we to interact or "speak" to others? What are the ethical responsibilties to think about the words we use and how such words can wound? How can Perez perhaps fight against the use of hate speech while simultaneously using it? How do both instances expose the vulnerability language places on the human subject?