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

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my beef i think is , especially post-hennessy "profits and pleasure", feeling a little unromanced by the Utility of looking for queer utopia in art. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. De tekst is vol van ideeën en dromen, en mag zodanig niet ontbreken wanneer we praten over queerness: ‘ I contend that if queerness is to have any value whatsoever, it must be viewed as being visible only in the horizon. More defiantly, he exalts the persistence of commercial sex spaces in the face of ‘antisex and homphobic policings,’ and celebrates the overlay of punk and queer in performance spaces.

For Muñoz, painful as it is, incommensurability (or ‘non-equivalence’) is a condition of living in relation to others; acknowledging this allows us to ‘achieve hope in the face of an often heartbreaking reality’ (207). 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.Crucially, he insists that within queer utopia, hope is in a dialectical tension with its opposite, disappointment; one cannot exist without the other. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Muñoz takes Ernst Bloch as his Virgil as he descends into the dark woods of futurity looking for signposts along the way that will guide him to a place of hope, belonging, queerness and quirkiness. I wanted it to be a bit more critical but nonetheless, it is an important resource from a beloved scholar.

To explore this, Muñoz investigates a strain of queer utopianism that he locates in art, poetry and performance from the years surrounding the 1969 Stonewall uprising. I do favor Dissidentifications, but this book has some fantastic subject matter and contributions to the field.

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 opening passage speaks to Muñoz’s investment in concrete utopias (following Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who acts as Cruising Utopia’s primary intellectual influence), which he understands as linked to specific historical liberation struggles and (real or potential) collectivity. My only reservations about the book are that at times it was excessive with the philosophical jargon and somewhat pedantic in discussions of definitions; this was more so the case in the final few chapters about a few artists and their movements. 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.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).Despite these small reservations, I recommend this book to any queer person struggling to find hope for our futures right now. Still, this is an essential required reading for those promoting an alternative homosexual agenda, especially those ole gays such as myself who feel disheartened by the majoritarian, normative, capitalist pig focus of the gay world today.

And perhaps because they literally begin to tackle the problem of the gulf between an academic treatment and the real world. 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.

Perfect example of how academic pontification on social justice can actively work towards rescinding the hard-won victories of marginalized groups. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation. sure, kids and heteronormative reproduction are a kind of violence, munoz admits, but not one that elides or obfuscates the ability of queer theory and queer lives to create something fleshy, significant, and other than the pessimistic or scolding. José Muñoz's academic partiality to performance studies greatly enhances his argument for queer futurity.