Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Muñoz is a brilliant close reader and I wished the scope of this academic project allowed for more of that. I mean the chapter connecting vogueing to Elizabeth Bishop, or the discourse on how camo is queer, and countless others of the many critical reading sections -- all genius. I was less compelled by the actual overarching theme of seeking utopia and making the world a better place by dreaming of the future. To call it naive is wrong because nothing about this book's ideas is anything but utterly sophisticated, I just wasn't compelled by that as a guiding force. Still, this is an essential required reading for those promoting an alternative homosexual agenda, especially those ole gays such as myself who feel disheartened by the majoritarian, normative, capitalist pig focus of the gay world today. If you spit on HRC's grave, this is the book for you.

I picked this up off the new-books shelf at the library because the title caught my eye, but was really disappointed in it. Since he is explicitly critiquing the current LGBT movement, I had hopes that his "queer" wasn't a synonym for gay men as it (and LGBT, really) so often is. Alas, while there are a handful of lesbians here and there and an aside about a trans friend, this book is totally about gay men, mainly pre-AIDS gay male culture and art.[return][return]I could have rolled with that if the book had otherwise been interesting, but the academic language made it difficult for me to read, plus the whole thing lacked cohesion and just felt more like a collection of essays about this art/period he liked rather than something that was building towards a whole. Also, mainly he talked about what he liked about queer movements in the past, and what I had picked up the book hoping for was a critique of the current LGBT movement. But other than saying he doesn't like it, he doesn't really go into it at all.

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.<br /><br />In spite of its refreshing frankness about gay sex, this text is shockingly detached from the actual struggles average gay people face every day, and about what gay liberation actually looks like. The ideas that gay suicide is an act of self-liberation, that gay men who enjoy masculine men are brainwashed or ignorant, that the fight for gay marriage rights is not one worth fighting, are not just the opinions of an academic writing theory to further his career--they are active dangers to the rights gay people have fought tooth and nail to hold.<br /><br />The idea that we must abandon an imperfect present in the worship of an untouchable, glorious future is enough to stop any liberation movement in its tracks. Hopefully no one from Twitter gets ahold of this. <br /><br />And, sidenote, but I was supposed to read this for class, but it got cut because of COVID. And thank God it did. Because I have to say I'd have been annoying to have in class for discussion if we were talking about this.

My main takeaway is that clocks are heterosexual nonsense and must be destroyed if we want to achieve Utopia

Exquisite. José Muñoz's academic partiality to performance studies greatly enhances his argument for queer futurity. That is to say, Muñoz exemplifies the necessity for change embodied in time and space, and the constant (re)consideration(s) of hope and potentiality inherent in queer Otherness. Where the text lacks rhetorical frankness, it excels in intellectual thought, adds to the critical advancement of queer thought that continues to challenge queer assimilation into popular, heteronormative culture.

Oh god, I wish I was back in school, and I could use the material in this book on a project of my own. This is an "academic text" so it isn't pleasure reading, per se. But Muñoz's theories really hit home. Some of my favourite words—"hope" and "imagine" and "possibility" and "becoming"—are strewn across these pages. It was a difficult but stirring read.<br /><br />Muñoz attempts to define "queerness" as something we haven't quite achieved yet. It's a radical term that defies the conservative "normalizing" of those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and aims for something BIGGER and BETTER. It is what he calls "a great refusal": <br /><br /><blockquote>"Queerness, as I am describing here, is more than just sexuality. It is this great refusal of a performance principle that allows the human to feel and know not only our work and our pleasure but also our selves and others." ["A quick translation of the performance principle would cast it as the way in which a repressive social order is set in place by limiting the forms and quantity of pleasure that the human is allowed. [...] It most succinctly means, "Men do not live their own lives but perform preestablished functions.""]</blockquote><br />We tell children that "utopias" are not worth our time and will all surely fail. But after reading Muñoz, it's easy to think that these warnings are just more conservatism that keeps us from making real progress. Like the way mainstream horror novels are often bluntly conservative in the way they paint otherness as a black/white binary, "dystopian literature" often creates a similar binary. Only in "looking toward utopia" and "feeling utopia" that we can reach a vision of a possible world that makes room for ALL peoples:<br /><br /><blockquote>"*Cruising Utopia* can ultimately be read as an invitation, a performative provocation. Manifesto-like and ardent, it is a call to think about our lives and times differently, to look beyond a narrow version of the here and now on which so many around us who are bent on the normative count. Utopia in this book has been about an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning. I offer this book as a resource for the political imagination. This text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective political becoming. These pages have described aesthetic and political practices that need to be seen as necessary modes of stepping out of this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter. From shared critical dissatisfaction we arrive at collective potentiality."</blockquote><br />For an academic text, I found this to be pretty readable, and while I struggled a little when Muñoz was talking about dance and movement, his explication of queer literature and songs (I will never see "Take Ecstasy With Me* the same way) was superb. And of course, the interjection of the personal brought the whole project to life:<br /><br /><blockquote>"Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture, and through what I call the utopian critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place not yet there, a place where I tried to live. 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."</blockquote><br />I will never forget reading this book and will probably reread it as I further my queer studies. And who knows, maybe I will go back to school after all.

I would have given this a 3/5, but I think the inclusion of the two extra essays in the new edition actually speak to Munoz’s ability to write with less spurious, less academy-poisoned posture, and reflect my longing for a followup that would’ve built on the many budding ideas in this work.<br /><br />The academic nonsense the majority of the book falls prey to is the worst kind: constantly outlining justifications and clarifications of non-points in anticipation of criticism from other theory-saturated navel-gazers. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. 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?); the generally uncritical praise of the book stunts the productive work we ought to be doing to make it useful and communicative, and any bible-like canonization of material like this must be regarded skeptically, always, whether or not the writer dies too young and is well beloved and tried real dang hard. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />The two additional essays I do think demonstrate that Munoz was aware of this problem with the work. Maybe this is because they do much closer engagement / close reading of the materials at hand, or maybe it’s because it approaches work that feels so much more difficult to tackle, so much more barbed and combustible and ecstatic troubling work. And perhaps because they literally begin to tackle the problem of the gulf between an academic treatment and the real world. We actually see the c-word (communism, and not in the clannish, obtuse academic way even). But these two glimmers of excellence aren’t the book at hand.<br /><br />And this new edition, which I only recently picked up as I returned to the book, having struggled with it on and off for years now, has a frightening forward. <br /><br />Perhaps it’s just because I’m reading this so closely on the Heels of a return to Mark Fisher, but in the forward of this edition (in addition to many “manifestos” on wilderness and queerness and the future in other publications) Munoz is getting the highly sterile academic-hagiographic treatment, instead of looking to what did and didn’t work in the book, where it’s been contested and where it’s flourished and instead of imagining what the future could’ve held (which the book asks us to do but never seems to try itself), etcetera, and this intensive canonizing feels untrue to the spirit of the book and Munoz’s work in general; the spirit of the book is perfection, but the execution falters. 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. <br /><br />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. The difference is, Fisher’s treatment of the same anxieties is eminently readable, and concretized. Munoz is looking ahead to wonder when we manifest concretized hope. Fisher has the exact same aspiration. But Fisher, as a meme, has greater reach and influence specifically because of his (imperfectly) proletarian treatment of the problems.<br /><br />All this said, I’m glad to be reading the two in conversation. I’m very glad to have gotten the chance to read the additional essays. I do wish Munoz were still here to put his brilliant brain to less distracted ends.

Muñoz is at his absolute best when he's weaving and recontextualizing philosophical strains around the concept of a forward-dawning queer futurity, using queer movements and gestures such as dance, cruising, drag, and protest as evidence of the utopian longing at the core of queer desire. He reframes and responds to Edelman's pessimistic notion of reproductive futurism with an alternative queer critique based on an analysis of queer and trans of color artistic production. However, the analysis ultimately falls flat for me when it approaches material culture; I question the way Muñoz often distracts from lack of engagement with the material realities of visual art by focusing on performative function, assuming his own associative/felt resonance to be self-evident without close visual and historical analysis. My ongoing frustration is that the conceptual framework he constructs is applicable to an art historical critique, but his mode of critical analysis—ideal for understanding the lingering "trace" experiences after an ephemeral performance—doesn't translate to discussions of material culture, in which frequently more than mere traces exist as part of an object history. 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 love queer theory. It breaks my brain every time, but I love it. <br /><br />———————————————————————————<br /><br />“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. 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 future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”<br /><br />“It is important not to be content to let failed revolutions be merely finite moments. Instead we should consider them to be the blueprints to a better world that queer utopian aesthetics supply. 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.”<br /><br />“Gay and lesbian studies is often too concerned with finding the exemplary homosexual protagonist. This investment in the ‘positive image,’ in proper upstanding sodomites, is a mistake that is all too common in many discourses on and by ‘the other.’ The time has come to turn to failed visionaries, oddballs, and freaks who remind queers that indeed they always live out of step with straight time.”

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.