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

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Other additions include colour reproductions of work that previously appeared in black and white, and a new foreword, ‘Before and After’, in which Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o and Ann Pelligrini reflect on the book’s legacy. 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.

same critique at another angle; it felt weird to talk about Fred Herko, an artist who at the end of his life was homeless and addicted to amphetamines and ultimately suicidal; and i guess not talk about what societally or culturally had failed him ? To this end, Muñoz puts the historical archive — the New York School poets, the Judson Memorial Church dance theatre and Warhol’s Factory — into conversation with contemporary queer art and performance (mostly that of Black and Latinx artists) and personal recollections of growing up a gay Cuban American punk in suburban Miami. that really helped me think about camp, and care about the concept of camp, in a way i hadn't before. 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. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is a book in the field of queer theory by José Esteban Muñoz, published in 2009.

i like thinking about the fusion of amateurism and voyeurism as missing something like resources and time and support and having something like ability or passion or hope. there is something kind of dangerous i feel about twinning queerness with not-yet-here-ness and not-yet-hereness with failure. 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.

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. 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.Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. but maybe Munoz is skipping steps here because it is obvious to his intended readers, that if people watch a play and see within it a queer utopia they will become more radicalized or feel more community or something, so that this book really didn't feel the need to connect any dots to why reading utopia into drag performances will ultimately like, do anything. 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. He engages with queer photography, art, literature, and performance as windows into the possibility of queer utopia.

The long-awaited second instalment in Samantha Shannon's Sunday Times and New York Times-bestselling series Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. Building on the queer-of-colour critique developed in his previous book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Cruising Utopia was situated at the intersection of performance studies, critical utopianism and a then-emergent literature on queer temporality.

In this interesting study of queerness and identity politics, Munoz (performance studies, New York Univ. I am not a graduate students in any of these subjects, though I do enjoy reading and expanding my knowledge in areas new to me. In the other new essay, ‘Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’, Muñoz utilises incommensurability as a way of thinking about queer politics.

Because I have to say I'd have been annoying to have in class for discussion if we were talking about this. I used this book several times for my MA thesis, so it was definately an important part of my graduate experience.

Gay liberation’s activist past and pragmatic present are merely prologue to a queer cultural future, Muñoz suggests in this critical condemnation of the political status quo. 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. His works include Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), as well as the forthcoming The Sense of Brown . 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).