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

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Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Pauln Knight, 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. a b c d e f g h Muñoz, Jose Esteban (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press. Brecht, Stefan (1986). Queer Theatre, The original theatre of the City of New York, From the mid-60s to the mid-70s, Book 2. New York/London: Methuen. 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.”

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. a b c Muñoz, José Esteban (January 1996). "Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts". Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 8 (2): 5–16. doi: 10.1080/07407709608571228. a b c d e f g Pakis, Elisavet. "Locating Hope and Futurity in the Anticipatory Illumination of Queer Performance. Book review of José Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity". www.academia.edu . Retrieved 2016-05-05. Feminist Theory Workshop Keynote "The Brown Commons" (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huGN866GnZEKirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998). Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 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). What's Queer about Queer Studies Now," with David. L. Eng and Judith Halberstam in Social Text: What's Queer about Queer Studies Now? ed. with David L. Eng and Judith Halberstam, Vol. 23, Nos. 84-86 (Fall/Winter 2005): 1-18. 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. More than ten years on from its original publication, this influential 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’, writes Alex Hoyos Twomey. Colucci, Emily (March 31, 2014). "Vacating The Here and Now For a There and Then: Remembering José Esteban Muñoz". LA Review of Books.

Muñoz, José Esteban (2020). Utopía Queer. El entonces y allí de la futuridad antinormativa. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. ISBN 978-987-1622-84-9.

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. 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. As I write this, a special issue of GLQ, “Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism” (17.3 [2011]), is going to press.

What Muñoz identifies as “antirelational” mode of criticism is inaugurated by Leo Bersani’s influential book Homos, in which it is argued that homo-ness instances a pontentially revolutionary inaptitude—inherent in gay desire—for sociality as it is known (1995). Muñoz will argue that such denouncing of relationality is based on a concept of queerness that distances it from various contaminations by race, gender, class, and other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference. Johnson, William (December 4, 2013). "Writer and Academic José Esteban Muñoz has Died". Features: Remembrances: Article. Lambada Literary.

In this Book

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. boundary2 (2014-03-10). "The Beauty of José Esteban Muñoz | boundary 2". www.boundary2.org . Retrieved 2016-05-05. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) 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:

a b c d e f g Muñoz, José Esteban (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-3015-8. Shaked, Nizan (2008-01-01). "Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement". American Quarterly. 60 (4): 1057–1072. doi: 10.1353/aq.0.0043. JSTOR 40068561. S2CID 144620841. a b Vargas, Deborah. "Ruminations of Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic". American Quarterly. 66 (3). 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.In 2014, the art collective, My Barbarian, was selected to participate in "Alternate Endings", [61] a video program put on by Visual AIDS, for the 25th anniversary of Day With(out) Art. Begun in 1989, the annual event is meant to commemorate the AIDS crisis and give artists a platform to display work that reflects and responds to the history of HIV/AIDS. Titled, "Counterpublicity", the video performance is based on Muñoz's essay on Pedro Zamora. [8] In the embodied performance, the three artists recreate scenes from The Real World: San Francisco in an exaggerated manner, critically examining the politics of reality television. [62] Lyrics for the piece were adapted from Muñoz's theory of counterpublic spheres. In a panel, My Barbarian said, "the video is a remembrance within a remembrance: to Pedro Zamora and to José Esteban Muñoz." [63] The video premiered at Outfest in Los Angeles. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-3015-8. a b "La Chica Boom". hemisphericinstitute.org. Archived from the original on 2016-06-04 . Retrieved 2016-05-04. body politics: políticas del cuerpo en la fotografía latimoamericana by marcelo brodsky and julio pantoja The book is at its most powerful in this refusal to separate the aesthetic from the political, in its emphasis on performative gestures that bleed into sociopolitical reality, that exceed the bounds of the static aesthetic object. What performance can perform, Muñoz shows, is a dialectical thinking and feeling beyond those ways of differentiating the aesthetic from the political that we encounter in so much of the dialectical tradition on which he draws.