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

Product Information

These new essays alone justify getting hold of this tenth anniversary edition of Cruising Utopia, alongside the new foreword, which offers an excellent introduction to the ideas (and outsized reputation) of the original text. 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. This tenth anniversary edition — published six years after Muñoz’s death in 2013 — includes two unpublished essays that extend the scope of the original project. Brilliant, extraordinary, and necessary, Muñoz’s critical refusal of queer pragmatism, his commitment to the utopian force of the radical attempt—the radical aesthetic, erotic, and philosophical experiment—is indispensable in an historical moment characterized by political surrender and intellectual timidity passing itself off as boldness.

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).De tekst is vol van ideeën en dromen, en mag zodanig niet ontbreken wanneer we praten over queerness: ‘ I contend that if queerness is to have any value whatsoever, it must be viewed as being visible only in the horizon. And yet, the general reception of Cruising Utopia has focused on the book’s emphasis on hope and futurity. Ultimately it's beside his point—which is to sketch a broad-strokes framework for utopian thinking/feeling in queer studies—but coming from an art historical background I wanted more historical and material consideration from his analysis of non-ephemeral art.

I was less compelled by the actual overarching theme of seeking utopia and making the world a better place by dreaming of the future. I wasn't totally sold on a lot of the philosophical moves he pulled but overall i thought this book was pretty fucking entertaining. Silver clouds, swirls of camouflage, mirrors, a stack of white sheets of paper, and painted flowers are passports allowing us entry to a utopian path, a route that should lead us to heaven or, better yet, to something just like it. Some of my favourite words—"hope" and "imagine" and "possibility" and "becoming"—are strewn across these pages. LA and its scene helped my proto-queer self, the queer child in me, imagine a stage, both temporal and physical, where I could be myself or, more nearly, imagine a self that was in process, a self that has always been in the process of becoming.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. As a work of theory, Cruising Utopia is dense, and its array of artistic and theoretical sources could be off-putting for the unfamiliar reader. Munoz also seems to miss the most salient point of Halberstam’s writing on queer time and failure, most frustratingly that the queer world is not just a set of NY artists from a pretty narrow temporal sample. With their discussions of incommensurability and the collective world of the queer of colour commons, in these essays Muñoz sketches ideas that he would develop more fully in his final work, the posthumous The Sense of Brown (2020).

That a book like Cruising Utopia resonates beyond academia is no bad thing, but Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o and Pelligrini remind us to not allow overly romantic readings to obscure Muñoz’s critical utopianism. 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. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.

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). A hope in the possibility of not becoming weighed down in pragmatic political debates about marriage and gay rights. Perfect example of how academic pontification on social justice can actively work towards rescinding the hard-won victories of marginalized groups. In No Future, Edelman argues that if queer people have been positioned in opposition to the ‘reproductive futurity’ of heterosexuality, they should abandon the future altogether in favour of a more nihilistic, radical engagement with the present. 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.