Searching for queer utopias in digital islands and valleys

Inside the window between lockdowns, I go to a buddy’s birthday celebration. A bunch of touch-starved for the gay on the same sofa.

We joke regarding what sorts of Cottagecore, polyamorous transqueer commune we might hope to live on, once the wealthy were lifeless and climate apocalypse averted somehow.

“In all likelihood,” somebody claims, “we’ll only end up as

Mad Maximum

characters. Totally free, in a gross, Anarcho-Capitalist method.” Each of us make fun of.

“you can’ve changed shit” – the expectation can there be, coiled within the room – “although world finished,” my good friend’s spouse says.

They get-up to fetch the meal. “We’d merely roam the wasteland, burning off utopian power, stealing individuals teeth for barter,” people say through the cooking area.

The meal appears. My good friend and that I exchange tales about our

Animal Crossing: Unique Horizon Islands

and

Stardew Valley

save files.

I

know a few transqueer friends which play both video games for release, specifically during lockdown. A poet friend in

Stardew Valley

attracts their unique lovers into the electronic farmstead they invested the very first lockdown controlling. Everything is ethically acquired.

I join their particular video game and help all of them choose horseradish.

“This is what a transqueer utopia could appear to be, following world,” they content me over Discord.

While I think of the future, a transqueer the one that seems thus tantalisingly near, it is like I’m able to feel the individual i’m going to be, achieving backwards and egging myself onto make certain they are real.

Every thing – digital wheat-fields, cows, berry shrubs, apple woods – might be cost-free, of the very own volition. There are not any markets adequate to need pesticides, factory agriculture or exploited labour. The area never already been violently colonised; it would possibly fit in with alone someday. Indigeneity is not an undeniable fact during these video games. The union because of the area you occupy is unproblematic, the video game states.

I believe of my key desire to be a Cottagecore lesbian/trad partner on a farm with my buddies, raising chickens and looking after one another’s youngsters. The fact it generally does not exist, and not will, is beside the point.

Personally I think the same exact way about

Animal Crossing

‘s area. It cann’t be an extend to phone utopia a body, based in space.

Except here, the video game tells me, it is simply my body, isolated, struggling to carry out damage to any person. I am the custodian of a fluid outcropping of land offered in my experience by a Racoon man. I can terraform it without consequences, except personal regrets. There’s absolutely no gender, except a spectrum of style alternatives.

L

ockdown pulls after which begins once more. I have been likely to start HRT from inside the screen between lockdowns; You will find a list of circumstances I want to perform, increase in real-time as my personal hair expands right back prematurely and my body system weighs in at on me personally. But it’s fine because I’m sure i am going to do some worthwhile thing about it. A window, or gap from inside the doorway, is all I need.

I have a visceral sense of living with a great heart to my straight back, whispering in my ear. When lockdown begins again, the heart makes, and that I sink like a boat with a hole.

I receive my birthday celebration pal over to my personal island, during 2nd lockdown, in which we are able to simulate tea and dress up for each and every additional. The only residents are bipedal animals. They may be just moving by, unless we invite them to remain. It gets later part of the and I log down, welcoming my friend around a few weeks.

I wake-up the very next day, nonetheless in lockdown, check twitter, feel things, and check the area: most people are pleased, the scarcity and game play loop an indication more than anything. Everybody is calm in a manner that it is possible to only be if your needs tend to be perfectly satisfied and you are at leisure become who you really are, at last.

W

hy really does all of this issue? Something producing me personally seek out a transqueer utopia on these games?

My friend’s turn is put beside the screen, the city skyline coming. They got images in the CBD while they decided to go to work during lockdown. The roadways are ghostly and unoccupied. The length of time would it not decide to try reclaim these spaces, change the Myers into share-houses, with no-one sustaining them?

I imagine my pals in overturned garments racks, since delighted since their virtual selves, going to the places We laid out for them.

Utopia demands become realised, become generated genuine. My own body, what my own body is going to be, needs getting generated real, but can not be now. Utopia requires a narrative: a coming out story, a transition timeline, a location, a horizon.

My buddy quotes Jose Esteban Munoz’s

Cruising Utopia

in my experience: Queerness has actually a spatial aspect “insofar because it’s based in displacement… Queerness is mostly about futurity and wish. In other words that queerness is inside horizon”.

Internet rooms, brief events slashed small. an island where story is stilled, and your body’s enabled to check out the number of choices. I am hatching my strategies.

Josie/

Jocelyn

Deane is actually an independent editor/student at college of Melbourne. Their work has appeared in

Cordite, Southerly, Australian Poetry

and

Overland

, and others. They go on unceded Wurundjeri area.