Abstract
This chapter attempts to analyze Europe’s gay and lesbian visibility campaigns as places of utopian hope, acting for social change. We will scrutinize the social and political aspects of these community-based performative representations that project the utopic vision of the empowerment, celebration, and flourishing of queer intersubjectivities in public spaces. To examine this phenomenon of a new queer hope in utopianism, we dialogue with the ideas of Lee Edelman1 and draw on recent books by Laurent Berlant,2 José Esteban Muñoz,3 and Judith Halberstam4 while the philosophical work of Ernst Bloch5 and Hannah Arendt6 provides an inspiration for our thinking on utopias. Consequently, we interpret gay and lesbian visibility campaigns as taking action and as utopic making history and promise in futurity. By visibility campaigns we understand public images produced by a variety of queer organizations and displayed to foster lesbian and gay rights.
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Notes
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© 2013 Angela Jones
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Leszkowicz, P., Kitlinski, T. (2013). The Utopia of Europe’s LGBTQ Visibility Campaigns in the Politics of Everyday Life: The Utopic of Social Hope in the Images of Queer Spaces. In: Jones, A. (eds) A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias. Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311979_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311979_8
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