Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity PDF
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Cruising Utopia SEXUAL CULTURES General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers- Letson Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini Titles in the series include: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Samuel R. Delany Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations Phillip Brian Harper In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies Mandy Merck Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America José A. Quiroga Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel Gregory Forter Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan Black Gay Man: Essays Robert F. Reid- Pharr Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity Paul Morrison The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces Juana María Rodríguez Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture Frances Négron- Muntaner Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era Marlon Ross In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives J. Jack Halberstam Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality Dwight A. McBride God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence Michael Cobb Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual Robert Reid- Pharr The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory Lázaro Lima Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth- Century America Dana Luciano Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz Another Country: Queer Anti- Urbanism Scott Herring Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination Darieck Scott Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen Tongson Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading Martin Joseph Ponce Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled Michael Cobb Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias Eng- Beng Lim Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law Isaac West The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings Juana María Rodríguez Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism Amber Jamilla Musser The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies Rachel C. Lee Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men Jane Ward Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance Uri McMillan A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire Hiram Pérez Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Katherine Franke The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography Ariane Cruz Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post- Humanist Critique Robert F. Reid- Pharr Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible Malik Gaines A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain Christina Crosby The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia Gayle Salamon Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody Melissa M. Wilcox After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life Joshua Chambers- Letson Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance Amber Jamilla Musser Afro- Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life Tavia Nyong’o Queer Times, Black Futures Kara Keeling Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition Melissa E. Sanchez For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition The Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz With two additional essays by the author and a new foreword by Joshua Chambers- Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2009 by New York University Foreword and two additional essays © 2019 by New York University All rights reserved “For Freddy, Fucking Again,” poem by Diane di Prima, from Freddie Poems (Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1974). Courtesy of the author. “Having a Coke with You,” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, by Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville- Smith, Administratrix of The Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. “A photograph,” Collected Poems, by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. “One Art,” from The Complete Poems, 1927– 1979, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Muñoz, José Esteban, author. Title: Cruising utopia : the then and there of queer futurity / Jose Esteban Munoz; with new essays and a foreword by Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini. Description: 10th Anniversary Edition. | New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Sexual cultures | Revised edition of the author’s Cruising utopia, c2009. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046341| ISBN 9781479813780 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479874569 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479868780 (eISBN) | ISBN 9781479896226 (eISBN) Subjects: LCSH: Queer theory. | Utopias. | Homosexuality and art. | Performance art. Classification: LCC HQ76.25 .M86 2019 | DDC 306.7601—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046341 New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword: Before and After ix Cruising Utopia Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Feeling Utopia 1 1. Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism 19 2. Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories 33 3. The Future Is in the Present: Sexual Avant- Gardes and the Performance of Utopia 49 4. Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance 65 5. Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity 83 6. Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative 97 7. Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System 115 8. Just Like Heaven: Queer Utopian Art and the Aesthetic Dimension 131 9. A Jeté Out the Window: Fred Herko’s Incandescent Illumination 147 10. After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity 169 Conclusion: “Take Ecstasy with Me” 185 vii viii Contents Two Additional Essays Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 193 Hope in the Face of Heartbreak 207 Notes 215 Bibliography 235 Index 245 About the Author 253 Color illustrations appear as an insert following page 130. Foreword Before and After By Joshua Chambers- Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini One may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner. Every at- tempt to describe or portray utopia in a simple way, i.e., it will be like this, would be an attempt to avoid the antinomy of death and to speak about the elimination of death as if death did not exist. That is perhaps the most profound reason, the metaphysical reason, why one can actu- ally talk about utopia only in a negative way . . . — Theodor Adorno, in conversation with Ernst Bloch1 TO THINK, WRITE, dream, and live in the wake of heartbreak: this is the challenge posed by “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak,” the short essay that is published for the first time in this new edition of Cruising Utopia. It is also the charge we are faced with here: how to think and write after José Muñoz— and also for him— in the painful, temporally out of joint forever “after” of this foreword. “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak” was written to be heard and was given as a talk, in September 2013, at the University of Toronto to celebrate the launch of the Women & Gender Studies Institute’s PhD Program. The manuscript bears the traces of the live occasion; it also carries the literal traces of the one who wrote and spoke its words aloud. “Hope’s biggest obstacle is failure,” the manuscript begins, its opening words neatly typed and printed. But, midway through the opening paragraph, the typeface is interrupted by hand- writing. The pivot by hand, to handed- ness, happens at a critical juncture where Muñoz is reminding his audience of a distinc- tion made by Ernst Bloch (key interlocutor of Cruising Utopia), between abstract and concrete or educated hope: ix x Foreword In part we must take on a kind of abstract hope [that] is not much more than merely wishing and instead we need to participate in a more concrete hope, what Ernst Bloch would call an educated hope, the kind that is grounded and consequential, a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of this hoping. The words “this hoping” are crossed out. The revised sentence reads “. . . a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present them- selves in the face of obstacles that so often feel insurmountable.” So, if the original sentence repeated the word “hoping,” the revised one doubles down on the “obstacles.” On the manuscript, we can glimpse the hand- written word “our,” also crossed out, before he settles on the word “ob- stacles.” Hope falters, gives way to more obstacles. “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak” is revisiting and also expanding on arguments made in Cruising Utopia. At this early moment in the talk, it’s as if Muñoz needs to stress the “obstacles” as a wedge against overly hopeful or romanticizing readings of Cruising Utopia. In our conversations with our late friend and comrade, he occasionally expressed disappointment that his defense of utopia was enthusiastically read by some as uncritical optimism. His work testifies to the contrary. Hope is work; we are disappointed; what’s more, we repeatedly disappoint each other. But the crossing out of “this hoping” is neither the cancellation of grounds for hope, nor a dis- charge of the responsibility to work to change present reality. It is rather a call to describe the obstacle without being undone by that very effort. A sentence later, still in the hand- written addition, there is another crossing out; obstacle is not a hard stop, it is a challenge: “. . . I have cho- sen to focus on two texts, one scholarly [Robyn Wiegman’s Object Les- sons] and one cultural [Anna Margarita Albelo’s film Who’s Afraid of Va- gina Wolf?], that offer snapshots at of some of the obstacle challenge[s] we need to not only survive but surpass to achieve hope in the face of an often heart breaking reality.” The first page of the short manuscript ends with these hand-w ritten words: “in the face of an often heart breaking re- ality.” We who survive are left to face this challenge without him. We are also charged by him to do so. A common sight during his lifetime: Before giving a paper, he’s sit- ting on a panel, hunched over, crunching on ice, and listening intently to the person speaking. Multi- tasking, he simultaneously flips through the pages he’s set on the table in front of him, and takes his pen and scribbles
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