Can there be norms in utopia?

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?

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