In opposition to the call for the social reproduction of policy, only cuts within the cracks and fissures of the system can generate spaces capable of queering the financialization of social relations and taking down the bastion of normalcy

Using a deconstructive lens to view place, we realize that place was never actually place at all. Rather, place was always already space. Given the pervasive power of heteronormativity (and other such power structures), this understanding is important. Queer utopic cuts flip the meaning inherent in ideologically settled places and turns them into ideologically contested spaces, thereby opening new zones of queer freedom. This space-based approach also has particular significance for the heterotopic nature of queer utopic cuts. By cutting back against heteronormativity, queer utopic spaces seek to portray the contestable state of gender and sex. If it is true that the spatial metaphor invites scholars to understand the multiple conflicting realities experienced by people as contingent rather than static, then a space-based understanding is integral to understanding these spaces and what they attempt to change. Moments of queer utopia must then exist contingently in particular spaces, queering the heteronormative reality created in that location. ACT UP, for example, takes this space-based approach to queerness as well. The point of these demonstrations is to “occupy a space that’s not supposed to be yours” and to “usurp public spaces.”141 In other words, by protesting, ACT UP sought to change spaces that were predominantly heteronormative into spaces of queerness. ACT UP thus further reminds us that a space-based approach to queerness is valuable. For the purpose of thinking about the cut then, a space-based approach has a few implications. This approach reminds us that heteronormativity, while hegemonic in modern-society, does not exist uniformly throughout society. Rather, this power structure manifests itself in particular ways. Because of this, the queer utopic cut must operate differently throughout time and space, rejecting a monolithic approach towards fighting back. If the cut is as fluid and space-based as I have suggested it is, then the ability for this queer utopic cut to create long-lasting change is stymied. In other words, if heteronormativity is constantly changing based on particular spaces, then so must the cut portraying a better future. There cannot, by definition, be one giant cut that stops heteronormativity, but rather multiple smaller space-based cuts that chip away at this power structure. If it is true that queer utopias are confined to particular spaces, I have stumbled across an interesting conundrum. How can they create long-lasting change in a system of power that pervades other spaces? If they do only serve to fight back in particular spaces, rather than targeting the power structure itself, then aren’t they simply cutting off each of the heads of the hydra separately, allowing room for the other heads to grow back while in battle? I believe that the solution to this problem lies in the aftermath of these cuts, through the creation of queer worldmaking and queer counterpublics. But before I turn to a discussion of those concepts, I want to further discuss the moments in which queer utopic cuts occur, and how they change the reality of the spaces they occupy. Queer Relationality When Gust Yep wrote “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies,” he wanted to further “make sense of the individual and collective suffering produced by nonnormativity.”142 He recognizes that heteronormativity, even in academia, can create “deep feelings of isolation, worthlessness, and shame to diminished access to opportunities, decreased life chances, and multiple forms of death.”143 In response, he questions how queer individuals can “maintain wholeness” in a world that fundamentally wishes they did not exist.144 This, I believe, is the major effect of the queer utopic cut in the moment—it creates a space that opens room for queer individuals to maintain wholeness in a world that rejects them. In other words, queer utopic moments establish a kind of queer relationality. Queer relationality can be thought of as a kind of affective connection, a communal understanding of relations between and among queer individuals. It creates a sense of intimacy, a kind of interdependence that exists between people who are not wanted by the outside world. Much like Judith Butler’s work on cohabitational vulnerability and mutual dependency,145 queer relationality recognizes a world in which queer people need to care for and about each other. It involves “closeness, deep knowing, mutual attunement, sensuality, and eroticism that could range from fleeting to enduring, and spheres of desire;” it creates an emotional interconnection that oftentimes cannot be explained through discourse.146 In many ways, queer relationality reflects the discursive components of rhetorics of difference as elucidated by Lisa Flores. For Flores, A rhetoric of difference includes repudiating mainstream discourse and espousing self-and group-created discourse. Through the rejection of the external and creation of the internal, marginalized groups establish themselves as different from stereotyped perceptions and different from dominant cultures…. The naming that comes about through a rhetoric of difference allows groups to reflect on the uniqueness of their identity. Pride and solidarity within one’s group are essential.147 Queer relationality rejects the mainstream, discursive construction of queer individuals and instead invites queers to create their own communities of discourse. By arguing for intimate interrelations designed to protect queer folks, queer relationality calls for a unique kind of pride and solidarity within the queer community. The process also establishes a separate space by deconstructing heteronormative conceptions of queerness itself. In doing so, queer relationality invites queer people to “transform their space into a home,” thereby embodying this rhetoric of difference.148 Queer relationality thus pushes towards what Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa call “El Mundo Zurdo,”149 or the left-handed world, “the place where the misfits suddenly fit.”150 Queer relationality, however, cannot only be understood in terms of difference. To do so risks replicating an understanding of queerness as solely abject or difference, as theorists such as Lee Edelman have famously done.151 This is not to suggest that Flores’ work does this—indeed, in her work, Chicana feminists find their agency within this difference—but given the understanding of queer as abject resulting from queer anti-relationality, we risk stumbling into queerness as abject through an analysis of difference. Instead, we must draw from queerness as abject to think of queer bonds in a simultaneously positive and negative way, being defined through a kind of difference but also through a connection between individuals. This is what Joshua Weiner and Damon Young describe as a bond of extimacy, their psychoanalytic reading of intimacy: What do we make of the fact that today we experience so many social spaces in which queer bonds—however precariously and temporarily—manage to appear through something other than just an act of defiance or resistance?.... We suggest that some ‘we,’ however fugitive, has always appeared in the interstices of historically conditioned homophobic interpellation, perhaps in the simplest experience of two or more people realizing their queer desire for each other…. Our queer bonds are not merely a bulwark of resistance, via determinate negation, of the normative socio-symbolic order. It is on the terrain of a social death that a ‘we’ precipitates into a mobile and precarious assemblage perennially in excess of the negations it survives…. If we are ‘intimate’ when we can recognize a symbolically articulated commonality, whence a shared identity, here we should perhaps speak of ‘extimacy.’152 Extimacy takes Edelman’s starting point that the queer is abject and Flores’ rhetoric of difference as a site of social agency to develop new modes of queer bonds. If queer relationality and bonds can be thought of as a form of extimacy, then the creation of these bonds renders agency out of that which cannot have agency—mainly, the abject—and queers the very starting point of interpersonal relations. This process thus imagines a queer future where heteronormativity does not define queerness in such a violent manner. Extimacy then establishes a bond that “occasions a certain discursive, erotic and political transconnectivity, and configures a relationality that persists in fraught ways, whether acknowledged or not.”153 This is a benefit to the queer utopic cut in the moment. By revealing a world in which their relations are not demonized but rather celebrated, queer people are invited to create powerful interconnections. These interconnections create a zone of comfort and love that reminds queer individuals that they do deserve to even be. Some of those interconnections may be long lasting, and some may be temporary. Regardless, in this manner, the queer utopic cut operates as a kind of queer survival strategy. By “continuing to unpack normativities, and exploring queer relationalities,”154 the queer utopic cut inverts the space it exists within to open room for queer life to exist. This may only be momentary and aspirational, but just the invocation of queer utopias can create positive change. A tangible example of queer relationality is the Positive Space Campaign, a social campaign taking place at various universities in Canada designed to help alleviate heteronormativity by inverting the university space to create room for queerness. Through the distribution of posters and buttons and the creation of public rallies and workshops, this campaign contributes “to an imagined space that confronts homophobia and heteronormativity in the hopes of creating a campus that embraces sexual and gender diversity.”155 By fighting heteronormativity, this campaign envisions a university environment in which queer students can freely be themselves. It operates as a kind of “'powerful intervention in the routine lexicon’ of the hallways or other university space,” and “disrupts the dominance of heteronormativity simply by being visible and drawing attention to the fact that LGBTQ people are on campus.”156 These campaigns can and do have a positive impact by opening the space for queer life to exist. I’d like to think that this is enough, but, unfortunately, it is not. Given the pervasive nature of heteronormativity, this power structure adapts to this space of queer life and boxes it in. Heteronormativity may even seep into a queered space, re-claiming it as its own bastion of normalcy. Thus, while creating a tear in the fabric of heteronormative power is valuable, it cannot be all that the queer utopic cut does. Rather, there must be beneficial, long-term after effects of the cut for creating lasting change. Queer Worldmaking One of these important after effects comes in the form of queer worldmaking. This process can be thought of as developing a world outside of heteronormativity for queers to thrive. In Disidentifications, Muñoz says The concept of worldmaking delineates the ways in which performances-- both theatrical and everyday rituals-- have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspective; they are oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of ‘truth’ that subjugate minoritarian people.157 Queer worldmaking is a process of creating an entirely queer world, challenging the heteronormative structure that exists now. Through queer worldmaking, queer utopic cuts utilize their heterotopic nature to create new spaces that explore a world absent heteronormativity. This is “a messy enterprise driven by a vision of another world, another way of living,” that fights for a more equitable future.158 Queer worldmaking thus consists of “practices and relationships that contest the logics of compulsory heteronormativities,” challenging normative understandings of identity and society through new futures.159 This is not an aspirational push, but one that engages in “the contemporary situation with its historical legacies, varying interests, and much more.”160 In other words, queer worldmaking is a kind of world-shattering that draws a new world from the one that currently exists. This establishes a kind of Blochian concrete utopia. Queer worldmaking is thus an important part of the queer utopia that the queer utopic cut sets out to establish. It “engender[s] a now and a future with promise and hope that must not be discarded as always already hetero- and homonormative,” imbuing a vision for a more perfect world. As Muñoz even says, “queer world-making, then, hinges on the possibility to map a world where one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in any map of the social.”161 In other worlds, queer worldmaking is the perfectly queer part of queer utopianism, embracing a queerness sans heteronormativity.162 Queer worldmaking, however, cannot be conceptualized in a conventional manner. Gust Yep indicates that queer worldmaking consists of creating spaces where “individual freedom and collective possibilities” are freely explored;163 Thomas Nakayama and Charles Morris think of queer worldmaking as “not a strategic plan, organized by anyone, but a bottom-up engagement with the everyday.”164 In this manner, the road to creating a queer world is rhizomatic, rejecting straight paths in favor of queer ones that turn and bend along the way. In creating a queer world, the world as we know it is reformulated and becomes radically different. A rhetorical approach to queer worldmaking is necessary to understand how it comes to life. If it is true that “queer world-making is a process brought to life, in part, by the vernacular contestation of discourse,” then an approach that starts from that discourse is necessary to theorize this cut.165 In other words, queer worldmaking becomes operationalized through the rhetorical invocation of the queer utopic cut. This happens by inverting the space that the queer utopic cut occupies. By undermining the normative and embracing the non-normative, the queer utopic cut rewrites what a space means. In revealing a world sans heteronormativity, this cut divulges a vision of a queer world. It is a performative rhetoric in the Butlerian sense, simultaneously performing and becoming the world that it seeks to create; it “attempts to remake the world in its image.”166 In this manner, the queer utopic cut exists within a similar position to queer kissing for Morris and John Sloop; it exhibits a “heightened sense of kairos,” insofar as it “effects a powerful affirmation for queer communities… with potentially profound material and symbolic implications for the constitution of sexuality.”167 The cut may also push towards queer worldmaking in a visual manner.168 In fact, this “visual affirmation of queer lives” is oftentimes “the first step in instigating productive modes of world-making.”169 Jeffrey Bennett takes this as a starting point in his analysis of the queer worldmaking of the Born This Way blog, a website designed to portray the queerness of its contributors. If they so wish, people visiting the blog may upload pictures of themselves as children, portraying images of queerness at a young age. These pictures may include photographs of boys wearing dresses and acting in effeminate manners or girls wearing male costumes. For these contributors, then, their queerness was showing at such a young age that they could have uncovered and revealed it much sooner than they did. However, due to internalized and external homophobia and heteronormativity, these contributors did not understand their queerness until they were much older. In these instances, the visual representations of queerness portray an imagined utopia whereby the contributors to this blog could have been openly queer at a younger age.170 When ACT UP sought to redefine what it meant to be somebody living with AIDS, they were actively utilizing queer worldmaking to change societal understandings of what it means to be someone with AIDS. As they protested, AIDS activists articulated a new way of conceptualizing people with AIDS in order to create this queer world. This change was not only rhetorical, changing the literal discourse used to describe people with AIDS, but was also visual, as demonstrators used images of their AIDS-filled bodies to re-write what it was to be someone with AIDS. ACT UP is thus a prime example of queer worldmaking. In addition, queer worldmaking acts as a form of healing. In creating separate worlds through forms of queer relationality, the queer utopic cut reminds queer people that heteronormativity is not an innate phenomenon, but rather one to be deconstructed. For example, Benny LeMaster writes about the Trans Empowerment Group (TEG for short), a campus-based support group for transgender students. Through ethnographic data, LeMaster explores the queer worldmaking process of this group as transgender students engage each other in group meetings. For the students involved in TEG, meeting spaces push towards a queer world. One of the ways this is operationalized is through the laughter of the students. As LeMaster says, “We all laugh. Through our collective laughter, we process our relative intersectional degrees of deviation from the mythical norm.”171 Through this laughter, the students involved in the group simultaneously engage in a learning process whereby they become more familiar with the process of deviation from heteronormativity—and thus push towards making a queer world—and experience a temporary, cathartic release from the norms they are consistently constrained by. Thus, by envisioning and pushing towards a queer world rhetorically, the queer utopic cut can begin to heal the wounds inflicted by heteronormativity. The telos of queer worldmaking is not to suggest an immediate change, even if queer worldmaking does have valuable, immediate effects, like queer healing. Rather, this is a longterm project—the world cannot be revolutionized in a day. Thus, queer worldmaking must be a part of the afterlife of a queer utopic cut. In much the same way that Morris and Sloop argue that “in order to achieve a queer world, a ‘critical visual mass’ of same-sex public kissing must exist,” the call for queer worldmaking must be repeated endlessly to counter heteronormativity.172 Queer worldmaking thus demands an endless repetition of the queer utopic cut.