Event Program

8:30 AM – 9:00 AM

Registration, coffee, bagels

9:00 AM – 9:15 AM

Opening Remarks

  • By Symposium Co-Chairs Liz Montegary (Cultural Studies, UC Davis), Toby Beauchamp (Cultural Studies, UC Davis), and Cathy Hannabach (Cultural Studies, UC Davis)

9:15 AM – 10:15 AM

Panel 1: FICTIONS OF UTOPIA

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Panel 2: STRATEGIC HISTORIES, STRATEGIC COMMUNITIES

11:45 AM – 12:45 PM

Panel 3: QUEER MAPPINGS

12:45 PM – 2:00 PM

Lunch (provided)

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Panel 4: FUCKING UTOPIA

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM

Keynote address by José Esteban Muñoz

  • “After Jack: Queer Virtuosity, Queer Failure”

4:15 – 4:30 PM

Closing Remarks by Symposium Co-Chairs

6:00 PM

Drinks & Dinner for Symposium Speakers and Planning Committee

Emilia Nielsen

“Unbecoming Lesbian”: Contingent Queerness in the Heterotopia

Sara Ahmed’s recent theoretical text (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, utilizes the concept of “orientation” to introduce a dialogue between queer studies and phenomenology. Ahmed suggests that “Phenomenology can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as it emphasises the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (2). Here Ahmed argues “If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit spaces as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we inhabit spaces with” (1). In sum, “queer phenomenology” might explicate how, in relation to lived experience, queer social relations are spatially organized and to what effect(s).

In this paper, I will employ Ahmed’s “queer phenomenology,” however, I fundamentally question Ahmed’s handling of “queer” and propose that in addition to the two ways she reveals to “slip” between meanings—“off line” and “specific sexual practices” (161)—she additionally positions “queer” as synonymous with “lesbian.” It is worth questioning then whether Ahmed unwittingly figures a kind of “utopian lesbianism” whereby “the contingency of lesbian desire makes things happen” (107), a supposition that might be read in relation to Annamarie Jagose’s Lesbian Utopics. Ahmed seems to suggest that lesbianism is inherently “non-normative,” which is essentially at odds with discussions of “homonormativity” (Duggan; Halberstam).

Therefore, I will trouble Ahmed’s “contingent lesbian” whereby she proposes to challenge the intrinsic heteronormativity of Freud’s categorical “contingent invert” by utilizing the “contingent invert/lesbian” “to do a different kind of work” (93). Ahmed proposes “becoming lesbian” engenders getting off line and opening into possibility whereby lesbian desire facilitates connections that are discordant with “the straight line.” Yet I query if embedded in this is the insinuation that “becoming lesbian” might suggest a finality of desire and/or identity? To counter this, I invoke “unbecoming lesbian” theorizing, for example, “lesbians” who have sexual contact with “men” and “lesbians” who transition from “female to male,” exploring what happens when these narratives of “disorientation” converge.

In a differently nuanced discussion of “disorientation,” Ahmed suggests that “sexual disorientation slides quickly into social disorientation” (162). But might “disorientation” in its very “undoing” of the familiar offer new possibilities for queerness? I propose that feelings of “dislocation” enable queer desire and provoke the creation of alternative spaces for the “contingent queer.” Here, I employ Michel Foucault’s formulation of “heterotopias” “which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). I propose to re-engage queer phenomenology in light of “contingent queerness” as one is not so much “queer” in isolation, but rather in contingency with others. As such, I will speak to the heterotopic queer spaces created in Vancouver, BC such as the queer dance parties “Bent,” “Fuck Off and Dance,” and the “Oddball.”

John Morrel

Brokeback Mountain as Queer Utopia?

Through an ecocritical investigation of Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” and Ang Lee’s screen adaptation of the same, this paper explores the complex relationship between capitalism, public land, private property, and queer identity politics in the post-frontier American West. Popular media attention has focused on the ways in which both story and film overtly engage discourses of gender and sexuality, ostensibly in an attempt to deconstruct the heteronormative myth of the American Cowboy. However, Brokeback Mountain engages another discourse as well, one less visible in popular commentary about the story and film: environmentalism and the debate over public land ranching and the livestock industry’s place in the history and mythology of the West. The intersection of these several discourses (gender, sexuality, land use, the commons, ecology) offers a productive space for considering the hermeneutic and activist potential of a queer-ecocritical perspective.

Within the narrative of the story and film, the wilderness of Brokeback Mountain is located importantly on public land—Forest Service land in Wyoming—and seems superficially to provide a democratic, utopian space for working out alternatives to the oppressive hegemony of a homophobic culture. Joint-ownership of private land, on the other hand, feels forbidden to the main characters because of their fear of brutal public censure. Sustained analysis of landscape and land use in Brokeback Mountain, however, reveals that the utopian promise of preserving wilderness—and thereby preserving a wildness tantamount to queerness—through protected public lands is subverted by its use as an exploitable resource for capitalist enterprise, which reorganizes the logic of this unique public sphere towards its own ends, reproducing normative structures of power and dominance. This paper argues for a reconsideration of the place of public lands in queer activism, for a reclamation of the queer potential of “wilderness” and “wildness,” and for the relevance of queer theory to contemporary environmentalist discourse.

Sucheta M. Choudhuri

Alternative Cartographies of Desire: Reconfiguring Queer Utopias through the Diasporic Imaginary.

My readings of Nisha Ganatra’s film Chutney Popcorn and Shani Mootoo’s short story “Out on Main Street” examine how the queer female diasporic subject is positioned to negotiate the concepts of tradition, displacement, ethnic identity and sexual difference. Is the adoptive homeland the utopia that the queer diasporic subject often imagines it to be— a utopia where differences are resolved or at least tolerated? Or is it a locus where repressive (in this case heteronormative) social structures are reinforced? Does the marginalization— or indeed the “impossibility”, as Gayatri Gopinath suggests— of female same-sex desire in the diaspora force us to question the very concept of queer utopia, or does the queer female diasporic imaginary reconfigure utopia in a way that departs radically from liberal Eurocentric interpretation of the term? In this paper, I examine how the concept of queer utopia is transformed vis-à-vis the experience of the queer diasporic subject. Mootoo’s short story underscores the queer immigrants’ disenchantment with the imagined utopian space they had aspired for: having left Trinidad for Canada, the narrator and her lover find themselves analyzed thorough the inescapable parameters of race, ethnicity and (hetero)sexuality within the diaspora. The quest for utopia in this case results in seemingly endless reenactments of exile. Queer utopia in inscribed differently in Chutney Popcorn, a film that focuses on South Asian immigrant experience in the US. Given the tendency of the nationalist and diasporic imaginary to valorize reproductive sexuality and to conflate women with the lost homeland, an “outed” homosexual like Ganatra’s Reena is alienated from the family home. Reena’s “home”— the apartment that she shares with her partner and another lesbian couple— is recognizably distinct from her mother’s, an open space celebrating not only same-sex desire but unconventional art and non-traditional kinship pattern where one would imagine the diasporic queer subject’s quest for utopia has finally ended. However, the film ultimately transcends the urge to valorize what, in Gopinath’s definition, could be called a “homonormative” imagining of queer utopia. The film ends with melding the two spaces together: I read Reena’s decision to become a surrogate mother to her sister’s child and her return to the family home not as a capitulation to heteronormativity, but as a restructuring of the hetero-patriarchal domestic space and redefining queer utopia by accommodating homoeroticism.

Katherine Ness

Love in the Time of Famine: The Depiction of Homosexuality in The Hunger

David Rees’ 1986 novel, The Hunger, deals with some of the issues which Ireland’s documented history largely omits. Written before the 1993 decriminalization of homosexuality in Ireland, Rees’s novel is a homosexual love story between an Irish Catholic peasant and an atheist British landlord set in rural Ireland at the beginning of the Great Famine. Interjected throughout the story is the voice of a “modern” narrator: one who sees and comments on the situation from a 1980’s perspective. Through this narrative device, Rees is able to make political commentary about the treatment and history of homosexuality in Ireland and England. Rees uses anachronisms throughout the text to contextualize the narrator’s perspective. While occasionally problematic, the anachronisms also serve to illuminate the lack of progress for gay rights in Ireland by continually commenting on the historical situation from a contemporary perspective. In The Hunger, Rees tells a love story set during a turbulent time in Ireland’s history, challenging his reader to consider the existence and identity of those that history does not acknowledge.

Paul Goddard

“English” Utopias: the queer aesthete, the neo-liberal and the problem of class

In an interview given on receipt of the Man Booker Prize for his 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst suggests that the cultural opprobrium of the 1980s – the terrain of his debut The Swimming-Pool Library – represented a perpetuation of national class identities under neo-liberalism rather than a categorical affront to established modes of Englishness. This re-formulation of collective identity opens up provocative re-examinations of the relationships between competing utopias, specifically the cultural principle as it was promulgated by the queer Aesthete and the post-war consensus ‘wets’ of the ruling Conservative Party on the one hand, and the market-led assumptions of Thatcher’s ‘dries’ on the other. The question that this re-appraisal demands is thus: to what extent has the individualised imperative to master the neo-liberal spirit of the new capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2000; Sennett, 1998, 2006) traded on, been made possible, or even perpetuated and re-inforced by, elements already integral to the pre-existing conjunctions of masculinity, sexuality, and aspirationalism, the frameworks of personal and national merit we elusively term “Englishness”?

This paper, arguing through The Line of Beauty, interrogates the changing nature of the parameters of inclusion and exclusion as it is experienced by the queer aesthete and the other dissident identities encountered as he expresses the range of his identity in the distinct urban spheres of race, politics and class. An examination of the complexity of the queer aesthete identity when there is a problem of class indicates how the dissident is vulnerable to exploitative co-optation by those in the hetero-/neo-liberal field. In the neo-liberal move to formalise citizenship in terms of contract, how is this stratagem of belonging manipulated so that the subject of the contract himself polices and contains other dissident identities that promise to explode the class aspirations of the neo-liberal family (here, a sexualised bi-polar daughter)? How does the queer become exchangeable as the stamp of cultural authority for neo-liberal agents in their bid to translate avant-garde practice into traditional utopian norms when that samesame corporate movement renders that dream anachronistic, nostalgic, tainted? How may the queer aesthete resource its compromises under neo-liberalism in order to traverse and fracture the fault-lines already inherent within these contradictory and contradicting utopian projects? From this last question, the paper offers an alternative queer critique of these covalent utopias and their meta-cultural discourse of opposition by considering the problem posed by class.

Alison Cardinal

Norbert Zongo’s The Parachute Drop: Anti-Utopian Novel as Postcolonial Resistance

This essay examines the way Burkinabe writer Norbert Zongo critiques the use of the utopia as a mode of resistance against neocolonialism in his novel The Parachute Drop. Zongo’s novel is an in-depth look at the psychology of an African dictator named Guoama, a parody of the French-established leader of Burkina Faso, Blasé Campare. In an effort to understand Zongo’s analysis of the corrupt postcolonial dictator and what conditions must be in place for him to continue to stay in power, I use Fredric Jameson’s theory of the postmodern utopia found in his book Archeologies of the Future. Using Jameson as a lens, I argue that Zongo’s parody reveals that he fears two types of utopias: closed and open systems. The closed utopia, familiar to dictatorships, is a vision of the future that cannot allow other utopias to co-exist, leading to the violent suppression of competing utopian systems. The closed system requires absolute belief, not only from the oppressed but also of the oppressors, leaving the country open to manipulation by colonial powers. The open system, equally as dangerous, is a utopia in which there is only the promise of happiness without a concrete political method or promise of material benefits. The open system is used by the African dictator in the novel to keep the postcolonial subjects in a perpetual state of suffering and exploitation. Zongo, however, also offers his own utopian vision. Through the mouths of protesting students, Zongo delineates his own utopia by showing that the utopia’s existence in the postcolonial state can only be one that sacrifices its own vision for the sake of competing utopias. The only form of the Utopia that is acceptable in a place like Burkina Faso is one which sees not happiness as the ultimate utopian end but freedom.

Greg Youmans

“Historicizing the Moral Panic around Child Sexuality, as a Strategy of Resistance”

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee Edelman famously argues that the social order maintains itself through a logic and mandate of “reproductive futurism,” wherein all viable political positions and all possible historical imaginations share an investment in the child of the future. Within this schema, nonreproductive queer subjects figure the death drive, the undoing of social (re)productivity. As a strategy for resisting the social order and its cult of the Child, Edelman calls upon queer subjects to reject liberal fantasies that gays and lesbians might be included within the institutions of marriage and family, and to insist instead that we are not “fighting for the children.”

Edelman’s text has productively brought attention to the ways the moral panic around child sexuality structures mainstream U.S. politics, gay and lesbian movement politics, and mass media. However, in doing so the book constructs a reified and dehistoricized model of “the social order,” a model that I argue also dangerously reifies the moral panic around child sexuality that his book would seek to resist.

As a corrective to this, in the first half of my presentation I historicize the moral panic around child sexuality in the U.S. This moral panic is not constitutive of “the social (or Symbolic) order” per se; rather, it is a localized and by no means transhistorical phenomenon. In the U.S., the shift from a more liberal moment to our current climate of reaction occurred in the late 1970s, and if there was a Great Paradigm Shift, it was arguably Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, indelibly tied to both the rise of the religious Right and the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian movement.

In the second half of the presentation, I examine the costs to queer theory and activism of not historicizing this moral panic. Here I consider the ways that it has become naturalized and now invisibly structures queer theory itself, including the anti-teleological move within recent scholarship on “queer temporality,” of which Edelman’s book is the most famous representative. I demonstrate the ways that Edelman’s text is immanent to this moral panic despites its desire to counter and to step outside of it: notably, I analyze his strange insistence that figures of child-haters (humbugs and misers like Ebenezer Scrooge and Silas Marner) rather than child-lovers (pedophiles) are signs of the unassimilable queerness that haunts and threatens the social order. Indeed I interrogate the overall absence of sex within Edelman’s analysis.

I argue that a corrective to the constitutive aporias of Edelman’s text is to be found not through a rejection of linear historical investigation but rather through a revalorization of it, in particular through an excavation of histories of the late 1970s that have been lost to us because of the intervening AIDS epidemic. This period in American history, and in American gay and lesbian history, has many parallels to our own. Against both utopian and dystopian moves that would dangerously reify and dehistoricize “the social order” that they seek to counter, I turn to the 1970s to offer a historical and political analysis of the shared origins of the rise of religious-Right political dominance, the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian movement, and the contemporary moral panic around child sexuality, seeking thereby to expose all three as unstable and impermanent.

E. Mara Green

Utopian Compromises: Informal Interpreting in a Deaf-Queer World

In this paper, I reflect on the phenomenon of “informal interpreting” in a queer, Deaf and hearing, American Sign Language-centered community in Portland, Oregon, of which I was a part from 2003-2005. While I became involved through a grassroots organization founded by two Deaf-hearing lesbian couples, the community was also constituted by life-long friends who had graduated from the nearby Washington School for the Deaf as well as other Deaf institutions; students – and dropouts – from the interpreting program at a nearby community college; and partners, ex-partners, flings, friends, native fluent signers, and first-time ASL learners. This particular, shifting, and nebulous (though at times claustrophobically well defined) configuration of people, as individuals and/or as a group, took part in offering and taking ASL classes, forming a Dragon Boat paddling team, fundraising for a Deaf trans man’s top surgery, filming a documentary, and providing formal and informal interpretation at local queer events, as well as dating, fucking, and living together.

Part experimental ethnography, part memoir, and all interpretation, this piece seeks to situate one of these practices – informal interpreting – from the perspective of a hearing individual (me). With this term I mean to designate both the actual English-to-ASL interpretation produced by hearing signers at events such as drag king shows, poetry readings, and everyday social encounters, and the affective social relations through which this practice became normal and expected. In contrast to formal interpreting, where informational and discursive equivalency are necessarily foregrounded, informal interpreting highlights the mutual moral orientation of social actors. Through engagement in spontaneous as well as planned informal interpreting, I will argue, Deaf and hearing queers in Portland produced a present-centered utopian compromise, grounding their social bonds in the pleasures of language and the acknowledgement of differential access to certain of its modalities. Recognizing, refusing, and occasionally reinstating dichotomies of public-private, data-anecdote, personal-political, Deaf-hearing, speech-sign, queer-straight, and utopia-dystopia, this piece explores the sociality and corporeality of translation, intimacy, power, erotics, anxiety, and joy. It also moves between the styles and lexicons of descriptive vignette, ethnographic detail, and anthropological, linguistic, and queer theory, seeking thus to perform its own theoretical concern with communicative compromise.

Jenny Hubbard

The Political Efficacy of Queer Eutopia: Why the Women of the College Settlement Association Fail to Do Their Civic Duty

The College Settlement Association (CSA) was a short-lived social experiment undertaken by a small segment of first generation college women in the Northeastern United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. These women conceptually re-modeled Oxford University’s Settlement project, which sought to produce class cooperation and harmony by sending university men to live and teach in the poor and working class districts of London. Unlike its English precursor, the CSA did not provide a stepping-stone to a career in government (there were none), nor did it have a clearly defined intent, goal, or program. The CSA provided educated, middle-class, white women an opportunity to extend their experience of community beyond the ivied walls of their colleges and into the inner city. There they opened the first floor of their brownstone “homes” for general public use, educational programs, union meetings, daytime childcare, and various recreational pursuits. This paper will analyze how these women produced, for themselves, a space for communal enjoyment and serious, but unpredictable, social transformation and how this eutopic project was waylaid by emerging discourses of civic domesticity, Christian sacrifice, and moral evaluation.

College Settlements were queer spaces and the CSA was a queer organization, not because these first generations of college women are notorious for their failure to marry or for their Boston marriages, but because this particular project was grounded by an attempt to create the infrastructure, physical and communal, for an open-ended, unpredictable, and ongoing project of learning to desire differently. College settlement house workers describe their work:

“These relations are new as yet, the development we cannot predict; but we who live here feel that a new world is open to us – a world were every good thing we have ever received may be handed on to others, and where we ourselves gain a widened outlook and deepened experience, which will enable us to desire with more intelligence as well as more intensity the better social order of the future.”

Twelve years after its foundation, the CSA still has no clear or static protocols for relations within the house or within the neighborhood. Colonial benevolence gives way to a detailed description of the transformational hopes of the settlement workers themselves. Members of the CSA sought to expand their previous limited horizons, not to primarily to assimilate urban immigrants or control social unrest, though this was part of the project, but in order to orient their own desire and community toward an unpredictable future, with increased intelligence and intensity. This production of eutopic spaces of enjoyment, transformation, and intelligent, intensive desire, ended when the CSA disbanded rather than integrate their projects with those of the state. Other settlement house projects, Jane Addams’ Hull House and Robert Woods’ Andover House, for example, had no such qualms. The ability to end the project rather than give up on their desire, historically marked the CSA as a failure, but a failure that provides insight into the relation between desire, enjoyment, and resistance.

Steven Blevins

On Bondage and Vagabondage: The Meta-topian Politics of Recognition and Repair

Judith Butler has argued that the desire for recognition necessarily entails the “undoing” of the subject. “[I]f the schemes of recognition that are available to us are those that ‘undo’ the person by conferring recognition, or ‘undo’ the person by withholding recognition, then recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced.” If to recognize is to “confer humanness,” then the markers of recognition must be brought into a regime of visibility and legibility. Recognition is, thus, an ambivalent normalizing regime capable of determining which lives we value, what violence is permissible, whose deaths are grievable, and who is deserving of social inclusion. Recognition admits us into the human, but in the process we submit to its regime of power.

Likewise, Paul Ricoeur has recently traced the shifting meanings of the term recognition to discover a set of interlocking, if not sliding, significations that might help us understand the complexity of the demand to recognize or be recognized within the play of admission and submission Butler suggests. In his book, The Course of Recognition, Ricoeur argues that the conceptual movement captured under the rubric of the master-slave dialectic involves a series of turns or reversals in which the horizon of meaning shifts from an “active” (to recognize) to a “passive” mode (to be recognized), a movement he ascribes to the Hegelian revolution of negative dialectics. To recognize is both to admit and to submit, he avers. “To admit is to put an end to hesitation concerning the truth, but also to acknowledge it.” Yet to admit is also “to submit to the authority of some person. […] The shift from admit to submit is hardly perceptible.” My hope is that this constellation of meanings garnered from Ricoeur’s careful genealogy might help us understand the role of recognition historically with liberal political thought, but also seek out possibilities for thinking recognition in its more radical implication.

Ultimately, Ricoeur finds possibilities for thinking about mutuality, drawing on the political and social philosophy of Axel Honneth, in our most intimate “love” relations. While Ricoeur’s understanding of love is maddeningly heteronormative, and equally idealist, the bond he identifies between lovers offers provocative possibilities for queer appropriation by emphasizing the mechanisms of intimacy that link two (or more) individuals together, such as the play of presence and absence, supported by the mediations of what Honneth calls the “transitional objects” that link the spaces of separation that divide one lover from the other. Additionally, Ricoeur develops model of reciprocity translatable into legal and social forms of mutual recognition that operates outside a logic of calculation and equivalency, and subsequently what he calls “states of peace,” and economies of gift giving that underwrite it. These states of peace provide an “alternative to the idea of struggle in the process of mutual recognition, based on symbolic mediations as exempt from the juridical as from the commercial order of exchange.”

Drawing upon Butler and Ricoeur, my paper pushes the notion of such gift giving into queerer territories of sadomasochistic exchanges within the crucible of contemporary racial politics. I turn to Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant (1993) as a model for such exchanges precisely because of its insistence on historicizing s/m through Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and the history of colonial slavery and the slave trade. It is though the action of gift giving that a system of exchange capable of transmitting mutual recognition between individuals is made “possible.” I conclude by looking at Julien’s video installation Vagabondia (2000) to argue that such “meta- topian” thinking is essential for thinking about postcolonial demands for redress and reparations today.

Damon Young

Pornographic dystopias

In the early 1970s, gay liberation and hardcore pornography emerged “on scene” at the same moment – hand in hand, as it were. Perhaps as a result of this historical concurrence, early gay pornographers like Wakefield Poole linked their pornographic endeavors to the liberation effort. Representing gay sexuality as something “beautiful” became a political imperative in the struggle for equal rights, and in films like Poole’s Boys in the Sand (1971), we are treated to the spectacle of similar-bodied men switching up sexual positions in a manner that seems to literally embody the liberal ideology of equality in difference. Gay porn, then, was the site for the elaboration of a fantasy of a sexually-elaborated utopia, which was nothing other than the liberal utopia of equal rights.

Thirty-five years later, things look very different in the world of gay pornography. And if in the dystopian texts of a generation of online porn users, difference still reigns supreme, it is no longer under the sign of “equality” but rather as an inexorable formal principle, which radically negates, rather than asserts the rights of, the liberal subject. In the sub-genre I call “pain porn,” it is precisely the radical negation of the liberal subject of rights and responsibilities that is at stake. This paper asks: what might this contemporary pornographic dystopia have to teach us about the relation between sexuality and a projected political horizon? Does this shift from the “pornotopia” of the ‘70s to the “porno-dystopia” of the ‘00s merely announce the end of the era of “liberation”? Or does it (also) suggest a more troubling critique of our liberal understanding of sexuality, and the utopian claim for “rights” that has historically rested upon it? Pain porn offers a challenge to our conceptions of sex that it remains to take stock of if we hope to understand what “queer politics” might possibly mean today.