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. so i liked the idea of queerness as reaching, but i just think there is something fatalistic also; at times this book seems to romanticize where you're reaching *from* (homophobic violence, poverty, drug addiction, etc). Another reason for Cruising Utopia‘s enduring influence is the critique it offered of the ‘anti-relational thesis’ that dominated North American queer studies in the early 2000s, exemplified by Lee Edelman’s 2004 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. I mostly really liked his choice of case studies/subjects and how he picked art, stories, and cultural artifacts that he liked and believed in and built his book around them. 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.

that's the inversion i think; while munoz is pushing that queerness is about enacting something that doesn't exist and Hope-fully, that does kind of just mean that you are really living something that doesn't exist right now. For example, the fourth chapter, ‘Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling’, opens with a childhood memory that segues into a description of contemporary ‘lounge-punk’ cabaret duo Kiki and Herb. José Muñoz's academic partiality to performance studies greatly enhances his argument for queer futurity. Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement.

Because I have to say I'd have been annoying to have in class for discussion if we were talking about this. 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). The current age is leaving queers feeling more and more hopeless; this book helped me combat this hopelessness. He was co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997) and founding co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.

Crucially, he insists that within queer utopia, hope is in a dialectical tension with its opposite, disappointment; one cannot exist without the other. the starting position of expressing out against de-fanged gay liberal marriage-equality-ass assimilationism is fine, and the joy and feelings-of-power in counterculturalism or in sort of subliminally registering that a different world is possible is also fine, but there aren't any Results in this book. 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.there is something to the juxtaposition of what is-now and what can be or is-but-isn't-the-whole-world-it-just-is-in-this-moment that is beautiful in a sad way. 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 don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging […] the idea is not simply to turn away from the present.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. That said, it was a let down to have so many of those sources be almost exclusively men,mostly cis, mostly able-bodied, mostly thin. The title was used for a recent exhibition of work by Peter Hujar, whose gorgeous black-and-white photographs capture downtown New York’s ‘cruising utopia’ of the 1960s and 1970s. 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.

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.In the decade since its publication, Cruising Utopia has been influential across and beyond a range of academic disciplines.