Pedagogies of Desire, The 35th Conference of the Society for Utopian Studies, Austin, Texas, United States, November 9–11, 2023

At a time when humanities programs across the country are being defunded, how do we bring utopian thinking into the classroom? For some of our students, survival—and the chance of landing a job that pays the rent—feels like the only possible reason to seek an education. When the arts are steadily devalued, students are increasingly commodified as customers of the university, and educators are expected to shoulder the growing burden of emotional labor, how can we uphold our responsibility to the people entering our classrooms? These are just some of the questions discussed at the most recent Society for Utopian Studies (SUS) conference under the umbrella of the conference theme “Pedagogies of Desire.” The thirty-fifth SUS conference took place in 2023 in Austin, Texas, a city that has worked to “Stay Weird” in the midst of big-tech gentrification and tightening restrictions on women’s health throughout Texas.Throughout the conference, presentations and discussions returned again and again to Ruth Levitas’s depiction of “utopia as method.” In The Concept of Utopia (1990), Levitas states that “utopia is the expression of the desire for a better way of being or of living, and as such is braided through human culture.”1 This was nowhere more evident than in the keynote lecture by Jonathan Alexander (University of California, Irvine), which reaffirmed the need for utopia within the context of a quarantined pandemic world. In his talk “Writing (as) Desire: A Utopian Possibility?” Alexander drew on his personal experience of lost time and found opportunity at the height of the pandemic to consider a time when we could not be embodied together, and how this sharply restructured our lives. COVID-19 allowed new identities (for the self) and new community formations. Podding became like a kind of polyamory: committing yourself to a group of people and promoting a reimagining of the family, love, and what it means to keep each other safe. As with new community formations during the AIDS epidemic, Alexander noted, there was suddenly an awareness that contact meant a much greater web of relations, both social and sexual, so that it caused a reorganization of what it meant to be queer. For Alexander, and others at the conference, utopia is inherently queer because there is no utopian method without difference. Alexander turned to both writing and fine art as queer speculations and new imaginaries for being together. He stated, “Art won’t change policy; but if you want to see the structures of the policies and imagine alternatives, art is near perfect.” In the end Alexander asked us to consider what it means to see something as beautiful, to desire something. When imagining utopian parameters, “desire” is more interesting and encompassing than “beauty” or “truth.”The diversity of panels available this year displays just how widely utopian desire is “braided through” our culture. Presenters engaged with literature from around the globe, and across eras and forms. Panelists dove into the past to discuss utopias of antiquity, and looked ahead to queer futures. They examined public health and the connection between medicine and the humanities, and looked for new ways to apply pedagogical models from thinkers like bell hooks (1952–2021) and Paulo Freire (1921–1997). In a time when teaching and the humanities alike are undervalued, SUS gathered to examine, defend, and uphold the virtues of storytelling and pedagogical connection.Placing desire at the heart of the 2023 annual SUS conference encouraged participants to consider the question, “What do you long for?” The call for papers asked, “What lights us up, individually and collectively, and inspires us to become better people and build better worlds?” Participants were encouraged to imagine how embodied pedagogies might come from a place of hope and inspiration. However, as we know, experiences of yearning and desire often emerge from lack or dissatisfaction. Thus, the “Pedagogies of Desire” conference sessions sifted through the rubble of a broken world to chart a future worth desiring. Tom Moylan has argued that to accomplish this work, a subject must continually “become utopian,” a process which “requires the individual to break from the ideological formation . . . within which she or he has been constructed and to tear through its sutured confines so as to be able to acknowledge that the existing world order is no longer sufficient, to see that something is missing and that something better can be achieved for all.”2 The process, in other words, is ongoing, and requires careful, collective attention.The drive to educate desire was showcased particularly well during a roundtable discussion, “‘If you can manage to break in, you can do anything you want in there’: Ant Farm, Spirits of Spatial Memory, Unplanned Pedagogy, and Feminist Hospitality,” about Antioch College with scholars Liz Flyntz (Independent), Coco Gagnet (University of Texas at Dallas), and Natalie Suzelis (Antioch College). As an abolitionist, co-education institution Antioch College promises much in terms of a justice-centered, student-driven, and community-focused pedagogy. However, due to a variety of funding shortages and shutdowns, many of the college buildings have been abandoned. And yet, students continually reclaim left-behind spaces for creative reimaginings. Whether filming horror movies, hosting poetry slams, or organizing political events and groups, the roundtable scholars noted that perhaps it is “precisely because of the deficiency and absence [across Antioch College] that students come into their own sense as political subjects.” While the history of community governance and alumni financial support would be of great interest to utopian scholars, perhaps what this roundtable did best was highlight that we are in desperate need of that which is both present and absent to imagine things otherwise. When one is left with remnants of an archive or building (as in the case of Antioch College), how do these remains invite both memory and possibility? When faced with its crumbling, how might we strive not to reconstruct the past, but to gather the pieces and use them anew? To be clear, this is not about settling for scraps but about scavenging fragments that might be transformed into previously unimagined possibilities.Continuing to look toward the college setting, Amanda Kosel (Texas Woman’s University), and Alexander Morgan (Western University) asked us to consider how embodied pedagogies can destabilize the normative structures of the classroom. In the spirit of feminist and disability studies, Kosel’s personal narrative highlighted the potential for greater faculty support during times of burnout and mental health crises. Morgan then explained his use of Indigiqueer speculative fiction in the classroom as a pedagogical model for students to craft alternative visions of their future. Both scholars emphasized the importance of resilience through social connection and telling your story. These presenters offered reflections on what it might mean to teach “joyously animated rather than merely alive” and “show up as full bodies, not just teachers.” Said differently, how can educators embody and breathe life into their pedagogy by resisting the university’s standard operating mode of process and production?Participants approached pedagogy with an expanded sense of how teaching and education can structure and sustain desire outside the classroom. Many sessions focused on how we would do well to learn from areas of literature, erotica, and queerness to deepen our desire for utopian horizons. Consider the ways participants Carter Hanson (Valparaiso University), Ellen Rigsby (St. Mary’s College of California), and Wendy Wood (Houston Community College) turned to literature to explore utopian temporalities in texts like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909). In each presentation, participants demonstrated how potentially realizable futures require some type of radical disruptive break from the present while never forgetting that the charge for the future also depends on the present.“The Future of Utopia is Queer” session with Sarah Nolan-Brueck (University of Southern California), Madison Johnson (Western Sydney University), and L. Lamar Wilson (Florida State University) turned to contemporary, audio, and forgotten storytelling to foreground queerness in our understanding of utopia. Remembering the city of Austin’s commitment to “Stay Weird,” Johnson’s claim that queer potentialities consist of the weird, the utopian, and the queer seemed particularly fitting. Based on their work, Johnson noted enlightening overlaps between each element: the weird and the utopian disrupt time and expectations, the utopian and the queer share dissatisfaction with reality, and the queer and the weird are passionate about disrupting norms. Bookended with Nolan-Brueck’s discussion of trans embodiment in young adult speculative fiction and Wilson’s revitalization of Gloria Naylor’s work, this session reminded us that utopianism is tied up in queerness as it runs counter to (cishet) normative formations and is portrayed most intensely through interdisciplinary approaches.New book celebrations have become an important recent feature of the SUS conference. The roundtable “First Book Celebration” featured three authors who came to discuss their recent monographs with utopian scholars. First-time book authors Patrick Whitmarsh (College of the Holy Cross), K. Allison Hammer (Southern Illinois University), and Jennifer Allen (Yale University) were able to weave together the utopian threads of their disparate projects. Though Whitmarsh noted that his book Writing our Extinction (2023) has been called pessimistic, the framing of its argument is utopian. He finds that Anthropocene fiction engages in the strange temporality of finding the end of our existence already inscribed on the Earth. Like many scholars at the conference, Whitmarsh stressed that we must cling to hope in the midst of the climate crisis, despite the bleak outlook ahead of us.Hammer also turned toward hope in discussing their work, Masculinity in Transition (2023), which argues in part that as traditional models of masculinity have caused many of the crises Whitmarsh details, it is time to examine the utopic possibility for masculinities that reject domination as an organizing principle/goal. Hammer was careful to note that their book thinks with trans joy, rather than fixating on the fetishization of trans death, especially where women of color are concerned. They are determined to find the utopian in the queer, rejecting individual autonomy and the consistency of toxic masculinity to hope for something better.Allen’s discussion of her Sustainable Utopias (2022) brought the conversation to a more specific material scenario; she gave an engrossing talk on the Stolperstein, “stumbling stones” placed in the ground where victims of the Holocaust had last lived of their own volition. These mini-monuments are an effort to realize the utopian project in real life—a micro-practice operating on a massive scale, occupying public space actively (in the street) rather than passively (on display for viewing only).The meaning of utopia continues to shift and grow. Throughout the 2023 SUS conference, utopia became the redirecting of desire—a retraining in the moment—as we attempted to find how utopian structures of feeling emerge in the present as method and need, rather than as a future to which we aspire. In this way we found utopia embodied in the mundane, which is a powerful statement of resistance to a world in which the future has become so destabilized and uncertain. We embody utopia now because we’ve reached a state of incredible need. We do this work because it sustains us, and we hope it will continue to do so. We hope because we must.