An Essay on Heterotopia (Because I’m Too Busy to Write a Real Post)

Foucault describes what he calls a “heterotopia” as a sort of other space – a place where things aren’t as they are in natural world around them. For example, a garden contains plants which don’t, outside of that microcosm, coexist. The residents (temporary) of these heterotopias are, as well, not as they usually are. I, myself, can attest to being a part of a heterotopic society, as a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. It is not, however, the fraternity itself that I wish to focus on, but rather the building which houses 13 of its members and plays host to meetings, parties, and lectures.
The members of this particular fraternity are diverse in their interest, coming from various background both financially and geographically. However, in this house they are all brought together in a close knit system. While this may be true about the dormitory system of any college, due to the minute scale of this particular house, it holds especially true. The groups of friends that these brothers who live in the house tend to cling to elsewhere and would otherwise have been content with had they not joined a fraternity are far ranging and yet are shed within the confines of the DU house. The brothers adopt an entirely different persona – the romantic gentleman, the football player, the comic book aficionado, the economics protege – all transform into a brother.
The parties that are hosted in the house are collections of students from different dorms who wouldn’t typically exist in the same location outside of this particular setting. They come to live outside of the world around them in an environment totally different than one that would occur elsewhere. They can be viewed, to a certain extent, as crisis heterotopias, as drunkenness can be a state, much like elderliness, of crisis.
Even the pets that call the house home are similar to the plants in the garden – a cockatiel, a chinchilla, and several guinea pigs. All of these animals would never exist in the same acre of land outside from this setting. Indeed, the hetertopia of the Delta Upsilon fraternity is unique in its ability to bring people of mixed backgrounds together in a community, allow others to change their identity and persona while within its walls, and create a specific microcosm that exists nowhere else in the world.
Thus we have an example of not only a crisis heterotopia, but a heterotopia of deviation, for all of the activities that occur in the fraternity’s house as well as entrusting 13 college students (and the 30 other members of the fraternity) to care for the house can be seen as a deviation from societal norms.