A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias

Abstract

This chapter attempts to analyze Europe's gay and lesbian visibility campaigns as places of utopian hope, acting for social change. We will scrutinize the social and political aspects of these community-based per-formative representations that project the utopic vision of the empower-ment, celebration, and flourishing of queer intersubjectivities in public spaces. To examine this phenomenon of a new queer hope in utopianism, we dialogue with the ideas of Lee Edelman 1 and draw on recent books by while the philosophical work of Ernst Bloch 5 and Hannah Arendt 6 provides an inspiration for our thinking on utopias. Consequently, we interpret gay and lesbian visibility campaigns as taking action and as utopic making history and promise in futurity. By visibility campaigns we understand public images produced by a variety of queer organizations and displayed to foster lesbian and gay rights. Gay and lesbian visibility campaigns constitute utopian representations of queer "intentional communities" throughout the continent and our aim is to investigate these actions from the point of view of gender , sexuality, race, and class. We conduct an analysis of the visibility campaigns and of the current discussions on LGBTQ rights in Europe within the framework of the EU's human rights legislation. Queer rights visual campaigns create a utopian queer space that aims to transform the complex system of inequalities and prejudices that exist in various European countries. It is a vision of an imagined equal society of sexual diversities that tries to deal with and change the homophobic reality. In the discussion here we are asking: how successful has this been in a A. Jones, A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias