Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

by Jose Esteban Munoz
ISBN-10:
0814757286
ISBN-13:
9780814757284
Pub. Date:
11/30/2009
Publisher:
New York University Press
ISBN-10:
0814757286
ISBN-13:
9780814757284
Pub. Date:
11/30/2009
Publisher:
New York University Press
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

by Jose Esteban Munoz
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Overview

The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.
Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.
In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814757284
Publisher: New York University Press
Publication date: 11/30/2009
Series: Sexual Cultures Series , #13
Pages: 234
Sales rank: 299,652
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) was Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at New York University. 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. 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Feeling Utopia
1 Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism
2 Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories
3 The Future Is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia
4 Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance
5 Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity
6 Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative
7 Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System
8 Just Like Heaven: Queer Utopian Art and the Aesthetic Dimension
9 A Jeté Out the Window: Fred Herko’s Incandescent Illumination
10 After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity
Conclusion: “Take Ecstasy with Me”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In this interesting study of queerness and identity politics, Munoz (performance studies, New York Univ.) invites readers to look beyond the immediate present and toward a queer future."-CHOICE,

"As his beautiful book makes abundantly clear, Jose is on a mission to change the world, or at least to imagine (I'm quoting) 'a place and time... fuller, vaster, more sensual, brighter.'... Jose's is a book which sustains rigor even as it occasionally indulges in the anecdotal."-Barbara Browning, Social Text/Periscope,

"In both Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications, Muñoz traces his queer theoretical genealogy through sources as varied as women-of-color feminism on the one hand, and a certain tradition of Marxian thought on the other. He cruises theory, moving seamlessly from Anzaldúa and Alarcón to Ernst Bloch, CLR James, Adorno, Derrida and Raymond Williams, those figures in leftist thought whose work is not typically mined within queer scholarship. Similarly if we trace the genealogy of what has now come to be known as queer of color and queer diasporic critique, Muñoz's work—with its insistence on the endlessly imaginative modes of being that emerge within queer, and particularly queer of color, subcultures—stands as a crucial milestone."-Gayatri Gopinath, Social Text/Periscope,

"Cruising Utopia opens in full song, in a complex contrapuntal (Cuban?) chant, equal parts poetry and counterpolemic, in order to usher in a crowd, a choreographic mass of often queer interlocutors as likely to come from a literary (O'Hara, Schuyler, Myles) as from a critical-philosophical (beyond the Germans, and perhaps too briefly: Butler, Felman, Sedgwick) tradition, as from the worlds of art, pop, and performance. "-Ricardo Ortiz, Social Text/Periscope,

"I love the "Public Sex" and "After Jack" chapters the best, and think the O'Hara discussion is brilliant and perfectly emblematic of the project to extract the utopian from moments of affective density that are lived. But all of the writing is astonishing, vibrant and memorable."-Lauren Berlant, Social Text/Periscope

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