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

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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. 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.

A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work-an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars 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. 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. The current age is leaving queers feeling more and more hopeless; this book helped me combat this hopelessness. 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.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. The writing style of the book is described as "cruising" its subject matter, moving quickly between a wide range of topics. I wasn't totally sold on a lot of the philosophical moves he pulled but overall i thought this book was pretty fucking entertaining. Muñoz challenges the erasure of race, class and gender in Edelman’s work, which posits sexuality as the primary signifier of difference.

I picked this up off the new-books shelf at the library because the title caught my eye, but was really disappointed in it.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. there is something kind of dangerous i feel about twinning queerness with not-yet-here-ness and not-yet-hereness with failure. With its emphasis on ‘getting lost’ within a network of social and sexual relations, Cruising Utopia performs a mode of evidencing queer lives and culture that is comparable to the act of cruising itself.

there is the suggestion that these traces can change your outlook and give you Hope, and that Hope is important for change, but not very many bones beyond that. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). It also discussed trans issues very little, but when it did it was done in a radical way and I think his discussions of queerness as a whole include trans/gnc issues anyway.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. Despite these small reservations, I recommend this book to any queer person struggling to find hope for our futures right now. the idea is that the amateurism points to failure and failure points to what's missing and an absence points to a potentiality for something better. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

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. but there are moments in this book that encouraged me to walk that knife-edge of hopefully accepting imperfect or not-yet-here queerness. Oh god, I wish I was back in school, and I could use the material in this book on a project of my own. 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. More than ten years on from its original publication, in the face of our own stagnant and negative present, the book remains a joyful and provocative read, not just for students of queer cultural history, but anyone keen to accept Muñoz’s invitation to collectively step out of ‘this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter’ (189).munoz is saying that queer performance is also almost-unreal, it's working not on 'straight time' (term munoz borrows for i guess the whole heterenormative capitalist hegemony), and in that way also points to how not-set the current reality is and points towards a queer future. 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). The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and. 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. 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.