“If you think of utopias as imaginative explorations of the horizon of the possible - what could be, beyond the brute fact of what already exists - then it seems to me that anybody who is interested in change of any depth must be a kind of utopian.”
- Stuart Hall
What we want to say is, our exclusion from the institution of marriage actually provides us a possibility rather than being a liability. The fact that we’re excluded from marriage culture—particularly women, people who have been socialized in female bodies—being excluded from marriage culture is not a bad thing. Feminists for two, three hundred years have been saying that marriage is the coercion of young women into dependence and subsidiary roles in relationship to men. Suddenly, when gays and lesbians decide that they’ve been excluded from a constitutional right, we forget our feminist critiques of marriage, and we forget—exactly what you’re saying—that the wound can be the gift, and the exclusion can actually provide us with knowledge with how to do intimacy separately from these state-sponsored regulatory institutions.
— Jack Halberstam, interview here: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/02/01/jack-halberstam-queers-create-better-models-of-success/ (via meowmaniaa)
Prefer the Present: Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of...
Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems. What Gramsci terms “common sense” depends heavily on the production of norms, and so the critique of dominant forms of common sense is also, in some sense, a…
SCHOLASTIC CASTRATION
— The Invisible Committee
UTOPIA AS PROCESS
