Queer Utopia Munoz
Terina
This anthology is a symposium on the inchoate debates about queer futurity and queer utopias. Through the empirical work by contemporary queer theorists, this book aims to create a critical dialogue about the emergence of queer spaces and the ways in which these spaces aim to further queer futurity. This cutting-edge volume pushes current debates about the future of queer-identified individuals out of the purely theoretical realm, and demonstrates how queer futurity is currently being shaped by individual behavior in praxis; its focus is the quotidian practices that demonstrate the potential for queer futurity. This book brings academic rigor and empiricism to a field generally dominated by polemics and albeit intriguing but often less than rigorous cultural analysis, which is generally delivered in sesquipedalian loquaciousness that masquerades as academic nuance and complexity.2 This book makes a distinct and felicitous methodological contribution to the field; truly interdisciplinary, the chapters compiled in this text utilize archival research and historiography, cultural analysis, discourse analysis, interview methods, ethnography, autoethnography, social cartographies, and reflective topical autobiography to explore the quotidian practices that buttress the promise of hope for queer futurity.
With that reading in mind, the history of the space that birthed voguing is essential to understanding why it is utopian. Expressed through a variety of styles, vogue is a dance form that evolved out of the Harlem ballroom culture of the 1960s. The ballroom was a specific LGBTQ+ subculture that offered community and safety to Black and Latine queer folks. Family units organised into Houses where experienced elders (House parents) provided guidance to youth (House children).
The pioneering House of LaBeija was specifically set up to offer a home for racial and ethnic minority LGBTQ+ youth as a response to the racist structures of the early drag pageant circuit. All major Houses still consist of mostly Black and Latine members, though there has also been a recent growth in Asian Houses and queer mentors like Kumari Suraj. Notably, the ballroom scene is especially protective and celebratory of its trans and gender-diverse members. It is in this space of love and acceptance that voguing came to be.
Vogue supposedly takes its name from the famous fashion publication, the heavily stylised cover images of which are replicated by dancers when they pose. Sharp movements frame the face, complemented with exaggerated hand choreography and different walks. There are various styles (like old school, new school, and femme), each with a slightly different focus and scoring system. But at its heart, voguing is about redirecting scorn because the types of effeminate motions that are ridiculed to bully and victimise queer folks are the same movements that are celebrated in the dance form.
There is often a risk in trying to unconditionally universalise the power of utopian thinking (a common critique of Michael Shermer, and one of the reasons why Karl Marx disliked the term being applied to his theories), but this ignores the fact that conditions of liberation vary according to context. Importantly, this does not mean that different movements cannot have the same objective of a better future, but the means of achieving this must be mindful of realities on the ground.
In the case of queer liberation, the type of politics and empowerment offered by voguing and the ballroom is different to, say, queer diversity initiatives in the workplace and higher education, or the normalisation of Pride. All of them share the same goal but approach it in specific ways; vogue can be studied from a utopian perspective precisely because of its connection to community, space and place, and commitment to radical change.
Theorists like David Bell and Sara Ahmed have written extensively about the potential of community organising, with a theoretical understanding that material challenges vary for each case study and, thus, solutions need to be adaptable without losing the overall universal goal of equity. (I have also had similar reflections on queer of colour community building for the Queer Asia blog series.) All of these works are framed from an explicitly utopian standpoint, where community organising from a vulnerable or marginalised perspective is inherently about creating an objectively better world.
This is not to say that non-queer folks cannot engage with voguing in a utopian sense. In the ballroom competition Legendary, one of the participating Houses consisted of cisgender women, many of them white and heterosexual. But the difference here is that this group is being invited into a space to perform and enhance the value of vogue without profiting from it, not disconnecting it from its topos. Where Madonna simply does the choreography, the House in Legendary embodies the politics.
The takeaway from this piece is not that utopianism can only happen under certain conditions. Rather, utopias are a response to forms of oppression contemporary to their imagining that are produced by and centre the marginalised and the vulnerable. This liberatory imagination is also central to the ethos of voguing. Actions like voguing, in other words, are heavily influenced by conditions of temporality and space, and denying any of these circumstances is denying the utopian power that resisting them can have.
To take it a step further, it is not just a directionless act of resistance; vogue imagines a better space by actively challenging cisheteronormative standards of living. There is an intentionality behind it that speaks poignantly and authentically to the types of new worlds that utopia imagines.
Am I missing something there, or is he in fact arguing that though we might be queer yesterday or tomorrow there can never be queer today? Politically, I think that's really quite problematic. And theoretically I also struggle with it; if this other world exists in the same moment, how can a chronological distinction operate? Queerness is, I would have said, about the enlargement of the perceived here and now to accommodate more of the range of things that actually exist. If the Other was only potential we'd never have change because everything would only be what is.
So okay, I must be missing something. Is there a background to the use of this term I have skipped over?
Thanks for that great, important question Jonathan: the passage does beg it, doesn't it?
Jos is arguing from a point of exhaustion: he states that contemporary queer theory has come to an impasse, propelled there by certain restrictive modes of thinking about relationality and futurity. Jos turns to the past (which for him I must admit mostly extends back only into the late 1960s or so) to find moments of utopian promise that, although present, were never activated or fulfilled -- say, in the work of Andy Warhol, or -- to go back further -- German idealists like Ernst Bloch. Jos's project is to reinsert educated utopian striving into contemporary discourse over the queer to try to bring about a less restricted, more open, more multiplicitous future. So when you write, quite well that:
Queerness is, I would have said, about the enlargement of the perceived here and now to accommodate more of the range of things that actually exist.
I think that Jos would add:
Queerness is .. about the enlargement of the perceived then and about to be, to accommodate more of the range of things that can exist.
Thankyou, Jeffrey, that makes much more sense, and also catches me in an oddly presentist mien it seems. My politics and my medievalism rarely meet; this would be one point where they might find a conversation.
We encourage essays that open new areas of scholarly research, and invite contributions touching on intersections of utopian thought, speculation, and possibility with any of the following: animal studies; Anthropocene studies; the arts and architecture; critical race studies; feminist studies; queer and trans studies; global studies; communications, social media, and new media; cartographies; communal studies; cultural studies; economics; education; environmental studies; digital environments; insularity and island studies; film studies; food studies; future studies; game studies; history; indigenous studies; global literatures; music and sound studies; philosophy and aesthetics; political science and theory; psychology; radical thought and movements; reader reception studies; sociology; technology studies; urban planning; and more.
ALL CONTRIBUTIONS MUST BE RECEIVED NO LATER THAN JUNE 15, 2024, AND SUBMITTED THROUGH OUR EDITORIAL MANAGER SYSTEM. To submit a manuscript to the editorial office, please visit and create an author profile. The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your manuscript.
Submissions must follow the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. Please see the complete submission guidelines: here.
To submit a manuscript to the editorial office, please visit and create an author profile. The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your manuscript.
Submissions must follow the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. Please see the complete submission guidelines: here.
Nicolas Shannon Savard: Hello and welcome to Gender Euphoria: The Podcast, a series produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I'm your host, Nicolas Shannon Savard. My pronouns are they, them, and theirs. Today I am joined again by Raja Benz and Joy Brooke Fairfield for part two of our conversation on queer trans intimacy work. The first episode focused specifically on the workshops they've designed, Working with Trans and Nonbinary Artists and Staging Intimacy Beyond the Binary with Theatrical Intimacy Education.
In this second episode, we've taken a broader overview of Joy and Raja's work. I asked how their art and their intimacy work is informed by and in conversation with queer theory and critical theory. And dear listeners, strap in. It is a journey. We are going to be bouncing between queer of color and decolonial and disability theory and the dim glow of the nightclub; between past, present, and future; between the ideas we are sure of and the ones we are working out in real time.
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