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

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But an impossible utopian worldmaking must nonetheless be practiced — immediately — because the stakes are high. Here is where the book’s autobiographical dimension becomes important, a dimension operating most powerfully when the emphasis is on those utopian performances the book associates with queer youth of color. Indeed, the “astonishment” the book recounts is often childish in the best sense, Muñoz explicitly identifying with queer youth of color and eloquently reminding us that he used to be one himself. This astonishment is not only a response to utopian beauty and warmth, but also to the social violence from which it is inseparable. Add Adorno, then, to the list of this book’s influences: Cruising Utopia consistently elucidates utopian gestures formed through and through by damaged life. The chapter on Baraka’s play, where queer, racialized hope is inseparable from queer, racialized violence and loss, is one example. And this chapter concludes with Muñoz’s now famous response to Lee Edelman’s very different take on childishness and futurity: Edelman can only refuse the future and the transcendent Child he sees as currently figuring that future because, in his account, “queer” is irreducibly white. Muñoz’s already widely cited response: “Racialized kids, queer kids” — unlike the fantasized Child we encounter in Edelman — “are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (95). They are, in fact, under threat; so we have to continue to seek “a ‘not-yet’ where queer youths of color actually get to grow up” (96). Cvetkovich, Ann (2012). Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5238-9. Muñoz's theory of disidentification builds on Michel Pêcheux's understanding of disidentification and subject formation by examining how minoritarian subjects whose identities render them a minority (e.g. queer people of color), negotiate identity in a majoritarian world that punishes and attempts to erase the existence of those who do not fit the normative subject (i.e. heterosexual, cisgender, white, middle class, male). Muñoz notes how queer people of color, as a result of the effects of colonialism, have been placed outside dominant racial and sexual ideology, namely white normativity [24] and heteronormativity. In his own words, "disidentification is about managing and negotiating historical trauma and systemic violence." [8] The disidentificatory subject does not assimilate (identify) nor reject (counter identify) dominant ideology. Rather, the disidentificatory subject employs a third strategy, [25] and, "tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form." [8] Aside from being a process of identification, [26] disidentification is also a survival strategy. [8] Through disidentification, the disidentifying subject is able to rework the cultural codes of the mainstream to read themselves into the mainstream, [27] a simultaneous insertion and subversion. By the mode of disidentification, queer subjects are directed towards the future. Through the use of shame and "misrecognition through failed interpellation, queer collectivity neither assimilates nor strictly opposes the dominant regime," but works on strategies that result in queer counterpublics. [16]

a b Vargas, Deborah. "Ruminations of Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic". American Quarterly. 66 (3).

So much of the commentary is vague, moderate, and antiseptic. A book that says “hey I’m going to invoke cruising as theory, and I’m going to ensure I hold several meanings of that up at once for a queerer reading” should be thrilling. But it falls short time and time again. There’s no play. There’s little to no ecstasy. From Surface to Depth, between Psychoanalysis and Affect," Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Vol. 19, No 2 (July 2009): 123–129. 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. Muñoz: Tisch School of the Arts at NYU". Archived from the original on 2015-08-17 . Retrieved 2011-05-10. Luis Alfar's Memory Theatre." Corpus Delecti. Ed. Coco Fusco. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

Moten, Fred (February 24, 2016). "The Blur and Breathe Books: A Lecture by Fred Moten". Archived from the original on May 1, 2016 . Retrieved May 4, 2016. Smith, Andrea (2010). "Queer Theory and Native Studies – The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 16 (1–2): 41–68. doi: 10.1215/10642684-2009-012. S2CID 144483580. I would have given this a 3/5, but I think the inclusion of the two extra essays in the new edition actually speak to Munoz’s ability to write with less spurious, less academy-poisoned posture, and reflect my longing for a followup that would’ve built on the many budding ideas in this work.The Autoethnographic Performance: Reading Richard Fung's Queer Hybridity." Performing Hybridity. Eds. Jennifer Natalya Fink and May Joseph. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 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.

Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 31, No 3 (2006): 675–688.

The Then and There of Queer Futurity

A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars AIDS, Visual. "The video is a remembrance within a remembrance: to Pedro Zamora and to José Esteban Muñoz". Visual AIDS. Archived from the original on 2016-06-23 . Retrieved 2016-04-27. a b c d e Muñoz, José Esteban Muñoz (2000). "Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's "The Sweetest Hangover (And Other STDS)". Theatre Journal. 52 (1): 67–79. doi: 10.1353/tj.2000.0020. S2CID 143419651. Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue," with Lisa Duggan, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Vol. 19, No 2 (July 2009): 275–283. Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance." in _Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexuality On and Off the Stage_ Ed. Jane Desmond. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Colucci, Emily (March 31, 2014). "Vacating The Here and Now For a There and Then: Remembering José Esteban Muñoz". LA Review of Books.

With Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley. Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 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).Nyong'o Tavia : Though a range of aesthetic genres are on display, a primary focus throughout is the utopian significance of gesture, of physical movement in performance art broadly defined, from theater to drag to dance. So in a brilliant, moving examination of Baraka’s The Toilet, Muñoz locates a redemptive utopian longing in the most ephemeral gestures of intimacy and affection between two young men who form what we can at best tentatively call an interracial male “couple,” gestures to be discovered in a play that most spectacularly portrays racialized and heterosexist violence. Utopian performance is registered less fleetingly in the work of the late dancer Fred Herko, whose ornamental, stuttering, flamboyant gestures — in the context of postmodern dance norms that prioritized the representation of quotidian movement — interfere with what Muñoz calls “straight time,” with normalized rhythms and tempos. Indeed much of the book places special emphasis on performance that disrupts that form of routinized, instrumental enactment, in both work and leisure, that Marcuse called the performance principle. The book centrally traces movements that interrupt “the coercive choreography of a here and now that is scored to naturalize and validate dominant cultural logics such as capitalism and heterosexuality” (162). 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.