Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photographer. Saturday, April 3, 2010. A topless march by women and supporting men, down Congress St. sidewalk from Longfellow Square to Tommy’s Park to promote the freedom of women to be topless in public like men, attracted many supporters of the idea. Here the lead five are crossing at the corner of Free Street and Congress to a welcoming and supportive crowd.

 It was a beautiful hot summer day, perfect weather for one brave woman to march shirtless down Congress Street. The woman welcomed all the reactions from the shocked public with an expressionless face. She looked straight ahead not looking around to validate/nullify anyone’s reaction. It was clear that this brave woman risked being harassed in hopes that she would liberate her constricted female body from its garments. She attempted to disrupt the norm by pushing the boundary in a public manner which forced bystanders to reevaluate their idea of how the female body should be presented in public.

The most interesting thing about the event was the reaction from bystanders which would go to proof why her public performance was/is needed. Among the crowd were my sister and me along with other younger women who cheered the performer, encouraging her on. Then there were those in shock and confused about what was happening. Then there were the men who cheered for a whole different reason as they lustfully followed the women with their eyes and cheerful applauds. The most interesting spectators were mothers who rushed to cover their children’s eyes and stared at the woman with disapproving and disgustful eyes.

One quick google search showed results of similar performances down Congress Street before were, “Hundreds of men attended the march – some to take off their shirts in solidarity with the female marchers and some to shout, take pictures and gawk” and “One man had climbed a traffic light and others shouted “boobs!” at the top of their lungs” (The Free Press). Marchers also reported that “The only negative things I heard today were from other women, comments like ‘it’s just lesbians’” (The Free Press).

I find it interesting that the quotes above from the topless march in 2010 and the one I witnessed about 3 years later had similar reactions. The women in 2010 and the woman in 2013 were marching for a queer-oriented future. A future that does not define women by their bodies, a future where women will be able to roam shirtless and not be subjected to similar reactions. I am guessing their idea of a queer future allows self-expression in that people will not be defined by their bodies and the body will be taken for what it is- just a body.

The men who easily neglected to acknowledge the message of the march were in the moment living in their own ideal utopian world- free access to “boobs”. I think with such contrasting ideas of what a utopian world might look like, the question becomes, who should have a say in what the ideal utopian world entails?

Now for the mothers/women who had the most negative reaction, do women become anti-feminist, anti-queer-oriented future once they become mothers? How do you help work towards a queer future if the oppressed do not fully support the transformative effort?

The difference between the women who marched and those who judged is the difference between what Munaños calls abstract vs concrete utopia. Mothers often dream of a better world for their children but the women who marched are making that dream come through. Indeed, the efforts towards a queer-oriented future cannot be the work of only a few but require equal participation from all.

“They never stop, these Stepford Wives. They just clean and work like robots!” 

The mundane suburban lives of The Stepford Wives is a fantastical dream to many men, dare I say a Utopia beyond their wildest dreams. The Stepford society allowed the men to control their wives, with the click of a remote, this was a society that valued wives staying at home to cook and clean and tend their children, this was a society whose norms are to stay friendly and not challenge the status quo, or why that woman is glitching. So who would want to live in a boring Stepford wife’s world? Who would want to live in this “Utopia”?

Utopian societies are all about cultivating a set of norms and values that align with a dream or ideal “perfect society”. However no norms and standards need to be set in place in society, subconsciously just by interacting and surrounding yourself with people in a social setting norms will automatically get made. People are drawn to a system or set of standards that surround them. So when thinking of creating a queer utopia, whether it’s inclusive or transformative (or really a mixture of the two) there will be standards and expectations. 

However, the idea exists that there shouldn’t be norms in a perfect world or that in a perfect world (like a Utopia) everyone just lives in peace and is welcome to be exactly who they are. But by describing a world that is peaceful and inclusive I am implying that the norm would be acceptance. So there inherently have to be norms no matter what, in any society. Norms are a part of who we are as a collective. We should not be disregarding them, we should be constantly questioning and analyzing the norms that we build today. It’s just a matter of what the norms in our dream world can be and what rules come out of a world that accepts everyone, is inclusive of all identities, and transforms who is in power and who is being represented (ideally).  

But this all begs the question of how are norms created? How do we change the norms we exist in today if we don’t know how the norms came to be in the first place? The majority of our society would say that we should move away from the norms that create the Stepford Wives and create new norms that can lend women and all individuals the freedom to live their lives, without the remote control.

Are there social norms in a queer utopia? Can or should there be? Normativity (the social imposition to fit the norm) is often conceptualized as the basis of much anti-LGBTQIA+ existence. Yet norms are often necessary for some of the very liberation goals of LGBTQIA+ people. The turn to utopian thought as a horizon of what queer life could be raises the question of how such utopian social relations might be cultivated or sustained without norms (or laws, or some mode of “discipline”). Using the spatializing language of orientation, we might also question how norms (and their temporal existence in the ‘now’ and spatial existence in the ‘middle’) might be compatible or incompatible with utopic queerness as a horizon (with its orientation towards the ‘not yet’ and the ‘far off’). Further, queer theory treats norms as an object of critique and utopia as an object for imagination. Is the very desire to combine critique and imagination itself utopic?