Dispatches from Utopia: Black Queer Nightlife in Shakedown

Abstract

Abstract Many critics have discussed the ways in which Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking 1996 film The Watermelon Woman employs an exploration and interrogation of history as a means of creating and reshaping the present and future, a utopian extraction (which is ultimately an invention) of a symbolic Black lesbian figure who has been obscured and ignored throughout history. In this vein, this essay examines a work that similarly uncovers Black queer utopias of the past and actualizes queer potential for existence in the present: the 2018 documentary Shakedown, directed by Leilah Weinraub, which depicts a series of Black lesbian strip events in early-2000s Los Angeles. Drawing from a theoretical background that expands the political implications for queer sexuality, community, and performance, including queer of color critique, performance theory, queer utopia, and queer temporality, I present the ways in which joyful and utopic possibilities for Black lesbian being and belonging are opened in the strip clubs depicted by the film. Putting Foucault's model of heterotopias, or actualized utopic spaces existing across cultures, in conversation with these theories, I develop the concept of the “homotopia,” a queer utopian countersite that is both historically relational and temporally detached, existing affectively for queer viewers in multiple times and spaces. I argue that the film therefore not only represents an archival project of capturing and preserving a homotopic nightlife, but, further, carries it across space and time to shape an affective, digital utopia for the viewer. In this way, the documentary's depiction of these events constructs a homotopic space of its own, stimulating the spectator to engage in imagining alternative queer futures.