As I sat down to write these comments, I found myself thinking of another time and place, over ten years ago, when I initially encountered José Muñoz's first book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Upon reading the book I felt an immediate sense of queer intellectual kinship, and was struck by how resonant it was with the concerns that were animating my own project on queer diaspora. Indeed, reading Disidentifications at that critical juncture in my own intellectual trajectory emboldened me: it affirmed for me the kind of queer scholarship I wanted to produce. In both Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications, Muñoz traces his queer theoretical genealogy through sources as varied as women-of-color feminism on the one...>>
Cruising Utopia
In this dossier, colleagues offer critical appreciations of long-standing Social Text collective member José Esteban Muñoz's recent book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Read responses from Lauren Berlant, Barbara Browning, Gayatri Gopinath, and Ricardo Ortiz. Muñoz responds to his responses, and performance art legend Vaginal Davis contributes an original illustration inspired by Cruising Utopia.
For those of you who are concerned about the so-called "Gay Agenda," have no fear. The agenda is alive and well and its chief strategist is usually located in a bunker in the compound known as Washington Square Village. In fact, you'd probably all be welcome there, as long as you show up with a thermos of specialty cocktail and some kind of themed salad. As his beautiful book makes abundantly clear, José is on a mission to change the world, or at least to imagine (I'm quoting) "a place and time... fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter." That's not to say perfect. Although he's a utopian thinker, it's hard to imagine José being content in a place where one...>>
My title plays with as it traces a number of imbedded citations. First it conjoins the titles of the two texts that will concern, and, in their conjunction, provoke, me here . One echoes the title of José Esteban Muñoz's disarmingly lovely new book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity. The other names an extraordinary short story by the queer Chicano fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, a story which appears in his Zigzagger collection . The uncanny if superficial coincidence of these writers' surnames, their having inherited an identical patronymic signifier (there is in addition an echoing punning of apellido and appellation that I'm resisting here), allows me to exploit a certain opportunity to pervert the logics of...>>
Let's think about the "then and there" in the subtitle of Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, for these deictics are insistently aligned with the now-central question of how to induce utopian futures from within a negating present. The answer of course is that the aesthetic provides the affective ballast and concrete means to induce exuberant futures.>>
These responses to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity situate the project in extremely valuable and useful ways. These readers are all ideal for me: thus indicating my sense of ideality as incalculable and expansive. In each of these generous engagements with the book, the respondent speaks to aspects of my project that I most hoped would be noticed, taken up and hopefully, productively used. Gayatri Gopinath thoughtfully contextualizes the work in relation to my first book and the project of queer of color critique. While Cruising Utopia is not a book exclusively about queers of color, it is meant to be a performance of a queer of color critique that displaces static notions of subjectivity. This...>>
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