Imperfect Utopias: What might the future be if we have to share it with ‘them’?
By Andrew McCartan and Kath Browne
Dr Andrew McCartan is a postdoctoral research scientist and lecturer in the School of Geography at University College Dublin, Ireland. His research focuses on the spatio-temporalities of queer activisms in 'post-equality' landscapes, resistances and contestations around and within LGBT equalities and communities, and sense of belonging amongst diverse undergraduate students. His current work on the 'Beyond Opposition' project involved taking the lead on the designing, facilitating, and analyzing of the research workshops in Glasgow that are discussed in this blog, as well as curating the Glasgow section of the imperfect utopia's exhibition, which he hopes you will check out.
Kath Browne is a Geography Professor at University College Dublin (UCD). Her research interests lie in Social and Cultural Geographies, and particular people's spatial experiences of sexualities and genders. Her work has focused on the impact of legislative changes to sexual and gender equalities in the 21st Century.
This is the second article for the World Without Gender newsletter guest authored by Kath Browne et al. See more about her and her work on the tri-national Beyond Opposition project at this link.
We are extremely grateful to Drs. McCartan and Browne who share with us here their arts-based Imperfect Utopias project, bringing to you, our readers, important and opportune efforts and insights through new discplines.
Art by Tim Fish
Do you think it could be possible to imagine a shared utopian space with the people you disagree with on issues relating to gender, sexualities and/or abortion?
If we are to create new and better worlds, we need to imagine them. This means envisioning a future that represents an ideal version of the world, a world that would be perfect for ‘us’ to live in. Yet, to only consider the ‘us’ neglects the ‘them’ who may always be present in the worlds we imagine.
Our visions of a perfect world can be shaped by the positions we hold surrounding gender, sexuality and abortion. They are grounded in terrain that is divisive and polarising, in ways that can cause everyday shared spaces to be experienced as toxic and unbearable when we come into contact with those who disagree with us, implicated within so-called ‘culture wars’. In knowing and naming our own hopes and desires, we can form solidarities and shared visions through working together with other people who agree with our ideas and want the same futures. Perhaps we seek a world without gender and imagine the future in that arena, but others may want futures that reaffirm binary gendered norms within what they understand as two sex bodies.
How we arrive at the futures we desire can be hard to fathom in face of such contentious opposition. Even imagining these futures can seem impossible. Where perfect utopian worlds are imagined, the fate of those who might oppose them is rarely, if ever considered. Yet if our dreams were to become a reality, what happens to ‘them’ after we get there? Conversely, if those who disagree with us get their version of a perfect utopia, what will have happened to ‘us’?
Beyond Opposition is a research project which takes the premise that despite the best efforts of social movements and activism, there is no one shared future in gender, sexualities and abortion and not everyone’s mind will be changed – but we will need to continue living with each other. We explored the question of living together in future worlds by running a series of three arts-based workshops in Vancouver, Dublin and Glasgow. These brought people with various positions on gender, sexualities and abortion (for example pro-life, pro-choice, gender critical, trans inclusive) together to explore the question of how we might live together with those who want different realities from us. The workshops did not find, indeed they did not aim to find, a solution, and so to continue this exploration we created an online exhibition that would extend the invitation out to you, to join us in imagining shared utopias. This post will now look at how we devised the workshops and exhibition, to look at the apprehensions and hopes involved in imagining utopias that are shared and as we found necessarily imperfect. It asks you to consider if these futures could be (im)perfect for you.
Engaging ‘them’ with ‘us’
Would you want to engage in research with those who hold different positions and/or identities to you? When devising the workshops, we were not sure if it would be possible to bring together groups of people holding different, sometimes fundamentally different, and conflicting positions on issues related to gender and sexuality. Ireland, Canada and Great Britain were chosen to host the workshops as each have legislation on same-sex marriage, gender recognition, and abortion, but the context around these in each location was not the same, shaping different ‘heated’ issues and levels of familiarity with engaging in public debates on a range of these issues. During the recruitment stage, various people holding different positions told us in social media comments and emails that they held suspicions and apprehensions about participating in a research activity asking them to work with people who they felt would be damaging or dangerous to them and their lives. Engaging with those who might fundamentally disagree with our positions is, of course, challenging and difficult work – as we have written here previously - and not something that everyone should agree with or be able to do.
Where perfect utopian worlds are imagined, the fate of those who might oppose them is rarely, if ever considered. Yet if our dreams were to become a reality, what happens to ‘them’ after we get there? Conversely, if those who disagree with us get their version of a perfect utopia, what will have happened to ‘us’?
Our workshops were carefully created, through various recruitment calls, extensive discussions and reassurances, and a clear set of guidelines. We sought and believe that we managed to create a controlled space which we could reasonably manage. Guidelines included not to debate the issues or try to change each other’s minds, and to respect and use the terms that people ask you to use for them. The participation guidelines meant not everyone would agree to be in the room, for example those who did not want to use the term pro-life, or those who would not use people’s preferred names/pronouns. However, most of those who got in touch agreed to be involved, often demonstrating a curiosity for the possibilities of meeting those with whom you might never agree. There is a desire to engage, to understand. Whereas participants held different hopes for the future, based on their positions, they also came with experiences of opposition on these topics and hopes for finding other ways to live with each other.
Doing it through art
Our arts-based workshops allowed us to explore the divisions and polarisations between participants in ways that avoided debating the issues. Each workshop was created through a collaboration with a local artist using their art form as a starting point. Workshops were co-designed to use art – textiles, music, and drama – to explore how a shared utopia might feel, sound, and look, and what would be happening there. To give you a flavour of what we did, we will briefly focus on the Glasgow workshop in which we collaborated with theatre-practitioners Culture Junction to devise drama-based activities for imagining utopias. If we understand opposition as a performance, then theatre offers a stage through which to intervene into how we perform and rehearse new possibilities.
In Glasgow, the nine participants who joined us held different positions to each other around trans/gender issues, abortion and same-sex parenting. Over the Sunday workshop they engaged in a series of drama exercises that introduced them to a range of theatrical tools, covering language, voice, and movement, before working in groups to devise, rehearse, and perform scenes depicting versions of what a shared utopia. A crucial stage in the workshop’s arc was the ‘Duologues’ exercise, in which participants were asked to perform a scene from a script of two or three characters interacting in a future ‘perfect world’ where ‘they’ still exist, which you can see in the starting cartoon. Participants worked together to make decisions on what the space would look like, and how their character would speak their interactions. This involved negotiating their different ideas to agree on a setting for the shared space. It also allowed them to develop their own motivations, and play with the subtext of the scene through their voice and embodied performance. Some groups took us to fantasy future worlds with marshmallow trees or luscious open green fields, others took us to the local pub or to a coffee shop, or to new worlds fashioned around ancient civilisations. What these spaces all share in common, is that they are imperfect.
Our participants let us know this through how their characters expressed suspicion and dissatisfaction in their scenes – they are not sold on the idea that everything in a shared utopia is perfect. One group in particular told us that they could not imagine a shared utopian space: that they could not exist in each other’s perfect world. For the group who are presented in animated form at the start, the idea of a shared utopia is perfect only in its imperfection, not perfect at all. The idea that ‘they’ are ‘still here’ is a ‘shame’. Therefore, whereas engaging in dramatic-arts allowed participants to experiment and play with ideas for these new spaces, some participants ultimately could not reconcile their needs for the future into a shared utopia that would be satisfying and desirable. This meant we reached an impasse, where participants recognised that they are incompatible with each other’s utopias. That’s where the exercise took us, but where might it take you?
Now it’s your turn
To extend the experience of the Beyond Opposition artist-led workshops and particularly to invite people to consider what it is like to work across difference, we designed a virtual exhibition that aims to continue the different kinds of creative explorations provoked by the workshops. More than just presenting what happened in the workshops, the exhibition invites you, the viewer, to form your own responses to the questions asked in the artist-led workshops. Creating the exhibition involved changing the modes of communication such as abstract art, sound and drama into an online format. This invites you to imagine futures freely and creatively in online space.
For exhibiting the Glasgow workshop, for example, we worked with artist Tim Fish to turn the scenes performed in the workshop into comic strips, that allows you to engross yourself in the worlds they created. You can walk with the characters in the fantasy marshmallow world and reflect on whether the idea of a shared utopia is just a fantasy; you can sit with the characters in the pub and consider if we actually already have spaces where we live well with those who will never have the same positions on sexuality, gender and abortion; and you can reach the participants at the impasse and grapple with the lack of resolution in imaging perfect shared worlds. You can also explore how we navigated similar questions through visual arts and sound, in the Dublin and Vancouver exhibition pages.
Imperfect Utopias, the exhibition, is an immersive multi-arts virtual space that welcomes you into our research to explore new words. It asks you to consider how the future might be if you must share it with those who may never agree with you on gender, sexualities and abortion. This is not to negate the hope of achieving our perfect worlds or working towards them in multiple or conflicting ways, but to hold on to it alongside the hope of living better within division. Can you see yourself desiring a shared utopian future? It could be perfect… even though it’s not.
You can find our exhibition at https://imperfectutopias.eu/
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