Rumination on ‘Soft Utopia’

Impression - monotype - Japanese paper and black ink.

I want joy but I also want a soft utopia and in that the capacity for failure and grief.

حالا من، اینجا، در آستانه همان دری ام که تو ردش کردی و دارم به  مفهوم " آرمانشهر نرم" فکر میکنم

I dream of a soft utopia where queer futurity is not simply a path on a progressive linear temporality but a flashing moment from past/present.

Soft utopia is a term I coined to name our shared capacity to dream toward a future otherwise.

In this dreaming, we hold space for both joy and grief—whether a resonant memory from the past or a fleeting spark of joy in the now. Soft utopia defies linear time, instead creating space for reimagining the 'here and now.' It is not a destination, but a collection of moments, a process unfolding.

For me utopia is not synonymous with future, at least not a future understood through linear temporality. A soft utopia exists in a there and then and sometimes I catch a glimpse of it in a here and now.

Living with and under the violent oppressive systems, logics, and histories of both Imperialism and religious dictatorships, I ask what does it means to think about the imagination as resistance? What potentialities open up when we deny linear ways of thinking, writing, telling, or feeling narratives of our pasts, presents, and futures. Or, as Muñoz writes, the potentialities that arise when we abandon the prison house of the here and now to think and feel a then and there. Can we desire a soft utopia where our bodies do not succumb to the violence of a white-supremacist cis heteronormative society? Where they do not have to endure self-hatred imposed by institutionalized religion and theocracies. A there and then when we are ‘alive’ because we are cared for, loved or better yet desired.