In the first episode of 2020, Ghat Saad continues her exploration of the concept of "Queer Utopia" and the work of a person at McGill University, Olivier Valorant, in a piece called "Home is the Place We All Share: Building Queer Collective Utopias."
00:00:00.320Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. I was sitting working on my latest book and in doing some searches I came up with a term and concept that you've heard me discuss before, but it's one that you really can't get enough of.
00:00:16.320And so I did some more searches and I thought to continue the tradition of me reading you some of these great works from academia.
00:00:23.420This is a wonderful piece of work, actually from a person at McGill University, one of my alma maters.
00:00:30.760It's published in, let's see, the Journal of Architectural Education.
00:00:39.340Okay, the title is Home is the Place We All Share, Building Queer Collective Utopias.
00:00:47.240So this is part of the field of queer architecture.
00:00:50.820The gentleman's name is Olivier. I'm thinking he's a gentleman, but he may be non-binary or two-spirit. We don't know.
00:01:01.140But the person's name, they's name, theirs name is Olivier Valorant from McGill.
00:01:18.440In the early 1990s, feminist challenges to mainstream architectural discourses were taken up by queer space theorists who broadened the focus from understanding how space is gendered and sexualized to suggest new ways of inhabiting space.
00:01:38.620In the last decade, a new generation exemplified by artists Elmgreen and Draxet's transformation of architectural spaces further pushed the challenges, offering a communitarian ideal that puts aside traditional public and private divisions.
00:03:17.160With this suggestion, Munoz adds another layer to an already complicated definition of queer that has evolved and diffused throughout various disciplines since it was reclaimed by activists and theorists in the late 1980s.
00:03:32.960In architecture, however, the influence of queer theory has been fairly limited after an initial burst of interest in the mid-1990s.
00:03:44.940This disinterest in queerness is surprising, considering the history of domestic spaces in the 20th century.
00:03:53.940Looking back at this history, one is confronted with a series of contrasting utopian desires, visions of domesticity that implicitly and explicitly address gender and sexuality.
00:04:06.680From Le Corbusier's dream of a machine for living in, fueled by the changing values of modernity to the radical networks of controlled environments of the 1950s and 1960s,
00:04:20.820these critical projects most often aimed at transforming the individual living cell to make it more efficient and protective,
00:04:29.800even if often anchored in larger social critics.
00:04:34.560While these utopias have been repeatedly challenged from various points of view,
00:04:39.680I focus here on recent queer utopias that suggest a radically new way of building collectivity.
00:04:48.340These utopias call for the blurring of traditional understandings of public and private
00:04:53.380and attempt to open windows onto new potentiality towards freeing queer futurity.