Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness

First, this article draws from Michel Foucault to examine the creation of what is conceptualized here as queer heterotopias. Queer heterotopias are material spaces where radical practices go unregulated. They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists, engage in what we might call a radical politics of subversion, where individuals attempt to dislocate the normative configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with crafting a queer identity. Second, this article, utilizing Gilles Deleuze analyzes the process of becoming queer. The ways in which queerness develops in everyday life must be seen less as a clearly-defined political program and more as a spiritual journey individuals embark on. This article explores the development of queer heterotopias, and the problematic way in which queerness is being made, re-made, and fixed by academics and well-meaning activists who would like to appropriate, qualify, and fix queer subjectivity in order to advance a rights-based political program. The current policing of queerness, by both heteronormative and homonormative logic works against the development of queer heterotopias.