Heterotopias

This paper considers the idea of heterotopia through a small plot of land in Boulder, Colorado. Located in a floodplain, it transformed from a red light district in the 1880s to a site of ramshackle dwellings in the 1910s, then to a city park and public library. This transformation was aided by several catastrophic floods that destroyed brothels and saloons, and it was propelled by moralizing forces. Relying on newspapers, oral histories, city and national archives, and city government reports, this paper will engage in a critical conversation with heterotopia through a space on the outskirts of morality and traditional notions of religion. By examining the interplay between human-driven meaning-making and climate-related events, this microhistory narrates the efforts of social forces to define and control the floodplain but also unveils the environmental challenges, adaptations, and the interplay of sacred spaces in the face of climate-related shifts.

This co-authored paper offers a dialogic analyses of two U.S. American social institutions--early nineteenth century prisons and mid twentieth century sexual closets--at a key moment in their respective historical formation. Building on Michel Foucault's theorization "heterotopias," we analyze these sites as spaces of containment for perverse masculinities, with attention to these material spaces of containment as sedimentations of religious and non-religious imaginations, practices, and institutions. We explore, in particular, how religious imaginaries shape and are shaped by material spaces regarded as “secular.” These secular heterotopias, we argue, were and are materialized through particular Protestant discourses. At the same time, in the dialectic between the imagined and the materialized, they each produce yet another heterotopia--queer and spectral in form-- in which other worlds are imagined, thus queering the hetero of heterotopia. 

In Britain, a revival of Victorian era-style spiritualism is arguably underway. Yet, instead of seances or mediumship demonstrations in domestic homes, theatres, or the Spiritualist Church (as during the ‘golden age of spiritualism’), public houses (‘pubs’) have emerged as the latest collective space for contemporary spirit communication. Drawing on innovative ethnographic research, and engaging with Foucault's concept of heterotopia, we argue that pub psychic nights destabilise social norms and empower marginalised participants, as well as encourage reflection and the potential for real-time social change, especially for working-class women. The broadly accessible and commonplace nature of the British pub helps to scaffold and promote the development of alternative beliefs and practices, beyond more traditional locations for spirituality. Despite critiques, in a context where religious institutional affiliation has dramatically declined, pub psychic nights function with transformative potential and offer new spaces that combine spirituality with social change.

In this paper, I propose that a more theoretically promising understanding of the concept of ‘heterotopia’ is possible only if we attend to its utopian roots. To do this I examine the ambiguous utopia/heterotopia that is the Métis community of Ste Madeleine - a small settlement near where I grew up that was destroyed by the settler government. By re-theorizing ‘heterotopia’ conceptually from utopian studies, and particularly the work of Louis Marin, we arrive at a more theoretically useful concept for analyzing the actual places/spaces that Foucault gestures toward in his original articulation of the concept.