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

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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. For example, the fourth chapter, ‘Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling’, opens with a childhood memory that segues into a description of contemporary ‘lounge-punk’ cabaret duo Kiki and Herb. Utopia in this book has been about an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning.

The idea that we must abandon an imperfect present in the worship of an untouchable, glorious future is enough to stop any liberation movement in its tracks. Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o and Pelligrini argue that ‘queerness, blackness, brownness, minoritarian becoming, and the utopian imaginary […] all cohere around a certain “failure to be normal”’ (xiv).He insists that even in eras of failure and tragedy for the movement, by reflecting on utopian movements of the past and looking towards the future, we can retain hope of our queer utopia arriving. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates the lasting impact that Cruising Utopia has had on the decade of queer of color critique that followed and introduces a new generation of readers to a future not yet here. Since he is explicitly critiquing the current LGBT movement, I had hopes that his "queer" wasn't a synonym for gay men as it (and LGBT, really) so often is. Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement. A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work-an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present.

This investment in the ‘positive image,’ in proper upstanding sodomites, is a mistake that is all too common in many discourses on and by ‘the other.It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. Alex Hoyos Twomey is about to commence a PhD at Newcastle University, exploring alternative art spaces occupying abandoned New York City public schools. so i liked the idea of queerness as reaching, but i just think there is something fatalistic also; at times this book seems to romanticize where you're reaching *from* (homophobic violence, poverty, drug addiction, etc). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Muñoz offers a radical political vision and critique, but does not fall into the trap of sheer negativity present in so much criticism.