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 and London
© 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
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Contents
1. Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism
2. Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories
3. The Future Is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia
4. Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance
5. Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity
6. Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative
7. Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System
8. Just Like Heaven: Queer Utopian Art and the Aesthetic Dimension
9. A Jeté Out the Window: Fred Herko’s Incandescent Illumination
10. After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity
Conclusion: “Take Ecstasy with Me”
Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Hope in the Face of Heartbreak
Color illustrations
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 attempt 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 actually 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