Violent Shame and Utopia in Toni Morrison's Paradise

This project centers around Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel, Paradise and José Estaban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). In seeking to understand the ways in which utopia can be pragmatic and tangible, this project explores what perverts attempts at utopia. Hence, this paper explores the dystopian implications of shame in Morrison’s Paradise. Works like these provide us the opportunity to “surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and [allow] one to see a different time and place,” (Muñoz 5). In this thesis, I am writing toward an otherwise by actively working against the structures and systems of our material reality that inhibit safety, freedom, and imagination.