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Chapter 1 presents a detailed history of the Nazi euthanasia program and of its commemoration by means of an analysis of the former killing center of Grafeneck in southern Germany and various recent commemorative events associated with it. This analysis facilitates an exploration of the historical reasons for the marginalization of the memory of Nazi euthanasia within the discourse on the Holocaust, as well as the various steps that have been and are being taken to overcome this marginalization. The chapter incorporates not only Grafeneck's postwar history but also its present-day function as a home for the disabled. This ambiguous status challenges visitors’ assumptions about what commemoration is or should be and how it invites them to consider the place of disability in contemporary society. The chapter concludes with a reading of Grafeneck as what Michel Foucault terms heterotopia, a liminal space suspended between reality and unreality, past and present. This offers a key to understanding the uncanny character of the site.

Drawing from ethnographic and archaeological data collected by The Undocumented Migration Project in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this chapter investigates the ways in which unauthorized border-crossing is remembered. The memories are posited as heterotopic, that is, as institutional counter-sites with various actors who have competing aims, different experiences, and polarized socio-political positions. Grabowska and Doering-White highlight how identity, landscape, and materiality oscillate while memory works through personal recollection, cultural construction, and analytic interpretation. Grabowska and Doering-White show, for example, how artifacts can recall stories that migrants forget, and how the memories of border-crossers can equally contest the agendas of humanitarians and anti-immigration militias. In so doing, Grabowska and Doering-White seek to add variation to the border-crossing narrative while self-reflexively considering the strength of a mixed methodology.

This chapter discusses the Ottoman coffeehouse against the backdrop of the understanding that the emergence of the coffee house in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe indicates the rise of a modern liberal and secular public sphere. The new institution of the coffeehouse (just like coffee itself) had, after all, been imported from the early modern Ottoman Empire, where it had emerged as early as the sixteenth century, thus well before any substantial European influence. The Ottoman coffeehouse, it is argued, operated as a Foucauldian “heterotopia,” constituting a public and secular counterpart to the mosque. The absence of the outspoken anticlericalism featured by its European counterpart reveals, however, the Eurocentrism of Habermas's rationalist conceptualization of the public sphere.

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or functional buildings (the hospital in Le Boucher) become places in which generic battles take place and the real and the virtual come to a head. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is used to illuminate these unstable and overcoded Chabrolean topographies through the following case studies: the boarding house and park in La Rupture; the crystal house in Juste avant la nuit; the hotel room in Violette Nozière and the Gothic houses in Poulet au vinaigre and La Demoiselle d’honneur.

In Chapter 5, Eleanor Harrison-Buck and colleagues describe their use of drones to quickly and economically map roughly 7 km² of plowed fields at the site of Saturday Creek in the middle Belize River Valley. They argue that Saturday Creek was a central node on the landscape from Preclassic to Colonial times, serving as an important crossroads between east-west and north-south transportation routes. The authors consider the dense settlement around the site core of Saturday Creek to be part of a larger monumental landscape and consider activities taking place in the vacant terrain on the fringes of the peri-urban settlement—what they refer to as the “heterotopia” (borrowing from Foucault). These spaces were separate from the settlement, but integral to its operation and included environments such as the pine ridge that served as an important transportation corridor, vast tracts of wetlands with ditched and drained agricultural fields, and broad floodplains with rich alluvial soils, which were likely places of cacao cultivation. The authors conclude that these “heterotopian” spaces in the monumental landscape are important to consider in settlement studies because they played a vital role in maintaining long-term, dense populations in urban and peri-urban centers like Saturday Creek.

In the context of transnational and border-crossing migration, this chapter focuses on the newly emerged (post-2008) queer films created by and for queer people, and the underlying queer mobilities on and off screens, as vehicles to understand the issue of home and migration through autobiographical and cinematic queer homecoming and homemaking. Through an investigation of the heterotopic non-places in migration, this chapter examines queer people’s emotionally embodied experiences of mobilities. The unfulfilled homecoming and homemaking and the unsettled bodies and desires in the long process of uprooting—with or without the chance to put down the roots for regrounding—inevitably become constituent of and productive of the stretched kinship structure.

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or artificial womb. Close reading demonstrates how the novel proves more complex than initial readings might suggest in its careful working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator for parenting, motherhood, and the duty of care towards the young. The chapter argues how the existence of Athos with the wider Vorkosigan series is significant, part of an ongoing and series-wide project by Bujold to demonstrate the range of possible futures that the uterine replicator might permit. At various points, Ethan of Athos is brought into conversation with Huxley’s Brave New World to contrast Bujold and Huxley’s visions of reproductive futurities. The chapter shows how Bujold’s saga-length project of creating a diverse science-fictional heterotopia involves a thorough working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator, of detaching reproduction from a gestational body, in which Ethan of Athos plays a necessary part.