Muñoz offers a view of queer utopia that recognizes queerness as the coming potentiality, something that has not yet arrived, a hopeful future beyond normativity and reproductive futurism. With its emphasis on ‘getting lost’ within a network of social and sexual relations, Cruising Utopia performs a mode of evidencing queer lives and culture that is comparable to the act of cruising itself. I wasn't totally sold on a lot of the philosophical moves he pulled but overall i thought this book was pretty fucking entertaining. 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 .

That a book like Cruising Utopia resonates beyond academia is no bad thing, but Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o and Pelligrini remind us to not allow overly romantic readings to obscure Muñoz’s critical utopianism.Likewise, Muñoz rejects anti-relationality’s romanticisation of the negative; for him, queerness is about collectively imagining a future that moves beyond the negative present. I often found myself flabbergasted by supposed proofs and connections Munoz declared, while having done next to no engagement or close-reading with the materials at hand.

i don't know if this emotional reaction is enough to radicalize, but i can't say it doesn't do anything, right? The current age is leaving queers feeling more and more hopeless; this book helped me combat this hopelessness. there is the suggestion that these traces can change your outlook and give you Hope, and that Hope is important for change, but not very many bones beyond that. 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.Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. munoz is saying that queer performance is also almost-unreal, it's working not on 'straight time' (term munoz borrows for i guess the whole heterenormative capitalist hegemony), and in that way also points to how not-set the current reality is and points towards a queer future. 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. 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.

He engages with queer photography, art, literature, and performance as windows into the possibility of queer utopia. 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.I picked this up off the new-books shelf at the library because the title caught my eye, but was really disappointed in it. He speaks back to Edelman and Bersani in important and I think constructive ways, and his analysis of different artists and performers just sweeps me up and away into those utopic spaces.

Muñoz offers a radical political vision and critique, but does not fall into the trap of sheer negativity present in so much criticism. Perfect example of how academic pontification on social justice can actively work towards rescinding the hard-won victories of marginalized groups.it helped also to think about Louis Gluck's Eros the Bittersweet; which was sort of about knowledge+love, and how knowledge+love is an action of reaching towards something perfect but not attaining it perfectly, just reaching all the time.