Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures)

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that's the inversion i think; while munoz is pushing that queerness is about enacting something that doesn't exist and Hope-fully, that does kind of just mean that you are really living something that doesn't exist right now. One cannot afford such a maneuver […] the present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds. Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present.

but maybe Munoz is skipping steps here because it is obvious to his intended readers, that if people watch a play and see within it a queer utopia they will become more radicalized or feel more community or something, so that this book really didn't feel the need to connect any dots to why reading utopia into drag performances will ultimately like, do anything. Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU, 2003).Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is a book in the field of queer theory by José Esteban Muñoz, published in 2009. The idea that gay men who want the ability to get married (or as Muñoz puts it, 'participate in the problematic institution of marriage') are somehow regressive for fighting for that right is absolutely ludicrous.

We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience. Me gustó mucho el capítulo 4, en el que narra como el primer comentario homófobo que recibió a través de su primo mayor cuando tenía 6 años le hizo obsesionarse con su gestualidad, hasta el punto de masculinizarla. Muñoz is a brilliant close reader and I wished the scope of this academic project allowed for more of that. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.The book’s ten chapters each focus on a different theoretical or aesthetic aspect of this work, encompassing queer stages, gesture and ephemera, public sex, failure and virtuosity as well as queer world-making. More defiantly, he exalts the persistence of commercial sex spaces in the face of ‘antisex and homphobic policings,’ and celebrates the overlay of punk and queer in performance spaces. Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o and Pelligrini argue that ‘queerness, blackness, brownness, minoritarian becoming, and the utopian imaginary […] all cohere around a certain “failure to be normal”’ (xiv). It might seem odd that a book about futurity is so firmly situated in the past, but for Muñoz, queerness’s utopian potential ‘can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future’ (1).

Fisher has by and large become a meme at this point, which is also disheartening, and also frustrating and seemingly contrary to the spirit of Fisher’s work. Muñoz allows his movement through the archive to be directed by something more relational and associative than mere chronology. In non-academic venues, the Gay Times and Publishers Weekly praised the book's optimism about queer liberation and its insights into pop culture, while noting that the scholarly prose might put off casual readers.

i think this can be a bit of a reach, but i see the appeal of this interpretation of failure in certain contexts. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging […] the idea is not simply to turn away from the present. In ‘Hope in the Face of Heartbreak’, one of two unpublished essays included in this new edition, Muñoz builds on this point, arguing that hope’s disappointment is down to an incommensurability – the fact that in practice, things rarely turn out as expected or desired. On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago.