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

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This is part of the academy-poisoning, and while I understand Munoz was doing this work in a professional capacity, work that is obfuscated and makes claims that it cannot substantiate isn’t some noble, underdog queer hope against all odds as we sail into the horizon; it’s alienating, exhausting, and makes the queer world feel small with an energy contrary to the intent; to be anti-academic for a moment, if you’re ever recommended this book by a fellow academic-type, ask them for three critical bullet points on the text that actually reference the writing and not the intent, and aren’t the things Munoz wastes too much time spuriously addressing (eg: why Bloch? I “invoke” (to borrow the bludgeoned verb from Munoz) Fisher to ask what are those of us left to do with these tasks assigned by dead men who largely wrote on the exact same problems as one another: a precarious present, and a look both forward and backward to that which never arrived and that which is yet to arrive. 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.

I am not a graduate students in any of these subjects, though I do enjoy reading and expanding my knowledge in areas new to me. I often found myself flabbergasted by supposed proofs and connections Munoz declared, while having done next to no engagement or close-reading with the materials at hand. Muñoz takes Ernst Bloch as his Virgil as he descends into the dark woods of futurity looking for signposts along the way that will guide him to a place of hope, belonging, queerness and quirkiness.The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and. In ‘Hope in the Face of Heartbreak’, one of two unpublished essays included in this new edition, Muñoz builds on this point, arguing that hope’s disappointment is down to an incommensurability – the fact that in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. 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. 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. of course in between the two is Delaney's scifi, and his memoirs and writings of gay public orgies and other liminal spaces where straight time is almost forgotten, and the skin between here-now and a better world is thin.

Casting his vision of a radical gay aesthetic through the prisms of literature, photography and performance, the author dismisses commonplace concerns like same-sex marriage as desires for ‘mere inclusion’ in a ‘corrupt’ mainstream. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. 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. A dazzling masterpiece of critical theory and cultural analysis, maintaining a firm focus on the key political issues while illustrating them through detailed and beautifully written analyses of queer performance and visual art.Refusing to simply sign on to the ‘anti-relational,’ anti-future brand of queer theory espoused by Edelman, Bersani and others, Muñoz insists that for some queers, particularly for queers of color, hope is something one cannot afford to lose and for them giving up on futurity is not an option.

Muñoz offers a view of queer utopia that recognizes queerness as the coming potentiality, something that has not yet arrived, a hopeful future beyond normativity and reproductive futurism. that really helped me think about camp, and care about the concept of camp, in a way i hadn't before. José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity breathed new life into North American queer studies when first published in 2009, rejecting the stagnant present in arguing for queerness as a future-oriented, profoundly utopian mode of being and doing in the world. Perfect example of how academic pontification on social justice can actively work towards rescinding the hard-won victories of marginalized groups.it doesn't work the same with two men, as in there is not the same potential for sex-based exploitation. Opening with the audacious claim that ‘queerness is not yet here’, the first page of Cruising Utopia introduces the reader to the book’s central thesis – that queerness is a future-oriented, profoundly utopian mode of being and doing in the world. Building on the queer-of-colour critique developed in his previous book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Cruising Utopia was situated at the intersection of performance studies, critical utopianism and a then-emergent literature on queer temporality. I wasn't totally sold on a lot of the philosophical moves he pulled but overall i thought this book was pretty fucking entertaining.