Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

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.

Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 11/30/2009
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780814757284


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/28/2009 pg. 55
Choice 07/01/2010

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.