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

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a b Vargas, Deborah. "Ruminations of Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic". American Quarterly. 66 (3).

Joy, Eileen (December 6, 2013). "Having a Coke With You: For José Esteban Munoz (1966-2013)". Punctum Books. In general (and most clearly on chapters 7 and 8) Cruising Utopia introduces queerness as an aesthetic protocol that organizes a refusal to accept “objective” reality and its entailing hierarchies. The “queer cultural maker is interested in art-directing the real,” and that means validating one’s reality principle in the aesthetic dimension (126). In a way, this is what dancer Fred Herko chose to do, and to a radical, deadly degree for that matter, as we so painfully read in Chapter 9. Herko’s embodiment of cultural surplus (the queer, speed junky who failed the normative protocols of canonization and value) is read across different choreographies and film appearances, as well as through his suicidal jeté out the window of a friend’s apartment building, as utopian traces of other ways of moving within the world. Failure is a recurring theme as well, and chapter 10 furthers the analysis of queer failure as an aesthetic radicalism that enables queer politics to release itself from the pragmatic prescriptions of capitalist notions of value and propriety. Though a range of aesthetic genres are on display, a primary focus throughout is the utopian significance of gesture, of physical movement in performance art broadly defined, from theater to drag to dance. So in a brilliant, moving examination of Baraka’s The Toilet, Muñoz locates a redemptive utopian longing in the most ephemeral gestures of intimacy and affection between two young men who form what we can at best tentatively call an interracial male “couple,” gestures to be discovered in a play that most spectacularly portrays racialized and heterosexist violence. Utopian performance is registered less fleetingly in the work of the late dancer Fred Herko, whose ornamental, stuttering, flamboyant gestures — in the context of postmodern dance norms that prioritized the representation of quotidian movement — interfere with what Muñoz calls “straight time,” with normalized rhythms and tempos. Indeed much of the book places special emphasis on performance that disrupts that form of routinized, instrumental enactment, in both work and leisure, that Marcuse called the performance principle. The book centrally traces movements that interrupt “the coercive choreography of a here and now that is scored to naturalize and validate dominant cultural logics such as capitalism and heterosexuality” (162).a b c boundary2 (2014-03-10). "The Sense of José | boundary 2". www.boundary2.org . Retrieved 2016-05-05. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) The current age is leaving queers feeling more and more hopeless; this book helped me combat this hopelessness. Munoz perfectly explains the necessity for performances of queer happiness. He demands a movement of radical queer optimism and disruption of the status quo rather than the focus on assimilation and normalization we've seen in 21st century queer politics. He insists that even in eras of failure and tragedy for the movement, by reflecting on utopian movements of the past and looking towards the future, we can retain hope of our queer utopia arriving.

boundary2 (2014-03-10). "The Sense of José | boundary 2". www.boundary2.org . Retrieved 2016-05-06. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link)Colucci, Emily (March 31, 2014). "Vacating The Here and Now For a There and Then: Remembering José Esteban Muñoz". LA Review of Books. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998). Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

So much of the commentary is vague, moderate, and antiseptic. A book that says “hey I’m going to invoke cruising as theory, and I’m going to ensure I hold several meanings of that up at once for a queerer reading” should be thrilling. But it falls short time and time again. There’s no play. There’s little to no ecstasy. Famous and Dandy Like B. 'n' Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat." Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Eds. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Heddaya, Mostafa (December 4, 2013). "Queer Theorist José Esteban Muñoz Dead at 46". Hyperallergic.

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boundary2 (2014-03-10). "Listening, Ephemerality, and Queer Fidelity | boundary 2". Boundary 2 . Retrieved 2016-05-06. {{ cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) Latino Theatre and Queer Theory." Queer Theatre. Ed. Alisa Solomon. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Stadler, Gustavus (March 10, 2016). "Listening, Ephemerality, and Queer Fidelity". boundary2.org. The B2 Review. But an impossible utopian worldmaking must nonetheless be practiced — immediately — because the stakes are high. Here is where the book’s autobiographical dimension becomes important, a dimension operating most powerfully when the emphasis is on those utopian performances the book associates with queer youth of color. Indeed, the “astonishment” the book recounts is often childish in the best sense, Muñoz explicitly identifying with queer youth of color and eloquently reminding us that he used to be one himself. This astonishment is not only a response to utopian beauty and warmth, but also to the social violence from which it is inseparable. Add Adorno, then, to the list of this book’s influences: Cruising Utopia consistently elucidates utopian gestures formed through and through by damaged life. The chapter on Baraka’s play, where queer, racialized hope is inseparable from queer, racialized violence and loss, is one example. And this chapter concludes with Muñoz’s now famous response to Lee Edelman’s very different take on childishness and futurity: Edelman can only refuse the future and the transcendent Child he sees as currently figuring that future because, in his account, “queer” is irreducibly white. Muñoz’s already widely cited response: “Racialized kids, queer kids” — unlike the fantasized Child we encounter in Edelman — “are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (95). They are, in fact, under threat; so we have to continue to seek “a ‘not-yet’ where queer youths of color actually get to grow up” (96). Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Pauln Knight, 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

In a starkly dissimilar manner, Leo Bersani’s own important essay in AIDS cultural criticism, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” debunks idealized notions of bathhouses as utopic queer space. Bersani rightly brings to light the fact that those pre-AIDS days of glory were also elitist, exclusionary, and savagely hierarchized libidinal economies. Bersani’s work does not allow itself to entertain utopian hopes and possibilities. His book of gay male cultural theory, Homos, further extends the lines of thought of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in different directions. Homos is even more concerned with dismantling and problematizing any simplistic, sentimental understanding of the gay community or gay politics. Through an especially powerful reading of Jean Genet, Bersani formulates a theory of anti-relationality. The most interesting contribution of this theory is the way in which it puts pressure on previous queer theories and exposes the ways in which they theorize gay identity in terms that are always relational, such as gender subversion. But this lesson ultimately leads to a critique of coalition politics. Bersani considers coalitions between gay men and people of color or women as “bad faith” on the part of gays. The race, gender, and sexuality troubles in such a theory—all people of color are straight, all gay men are white—are also evident in his famous essay. The limits of his project are most obvious when one tries to imagine actual political interventions into the social realm, especially interventions that challenge the tedious white normativity that characterizes most of North American gay male culture. Donald Preziosi, ed. (2009). The art of art history: a critical anthology (2nded.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.463. ISBN 978-0-19-922984-0 . Retrieved 8 February 2011. ...visual culture, none of which are determined in advance, make it possible for us to focus, as José Esteban Muñoz ... Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USAPP– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. Perfect example of how academic pontification on social justice can actively work towards rescinding the hard-won victories of marginalized groups. 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 was under the impression that the 'problematic' part of marriage was that men used it to exploit women...it doesn't work the same with two men, as in there is not the same potential for sex-based exploitation. Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories." Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. Ed. Dangerous Bedfellows. Boston: South End Press, 1996.

The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Joshua Chambers-Letson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018).Nyong'o Tavia : a b "Highly regarded author and professor José Esteban Muñoz dies" (Press release). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2013-12-04. Archived from the original on 2019-05-29 . Retrieved 2020-06-11. Royster, Francesca (February 2014). "In Memory of Jose E. Munoz: Making Queer Future". Windy City Times. 29 (20): 4. With Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley. Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Moten, Fred (February 24, 2016). "The Blur and Breathe Books: A Lecture by Fred Moten". Archived from the original on May 1, 2016 . Retrieved May 4, 2016.