Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition

Brilliant, extraordinary, and necessary, Muñoz’s critical refusal of queer pragmatism, his commitment to the utopian force of the radical attempt—the radical aesthetic, erotic, and philosophical experiment—is indispensable in an historical moment characterized by political surrender and intellectual timidity passing itself off as boldness. -- Fred Moten, author of In the Break
Gay liberation's activist past and pragmatic present are merely prologue to a queer cultural future, Muñoz suggests in this critical condemnation of the political status quo. 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. More defiantly, he exalts the persistence of commercial sex spaces in the face of ‘antisex and homphobic policings,’ and celebrates the overlay of punk and queer in performance spaces. * Publishers Weekly *
In the course of an introduction, a conclusion, and the ten lush chapters in between, Cruising Utopia elaborates an archive of queer aesthetic practices from the present and the recent past. -- Kevin Floyd * Meditations: The Journal of the Marxist Literary Group *
Muñoz takes Ernst Bloch as his Virgil as he descends into the dark woods of futurity looking for signposts along the way that will guide him to a place of hope, belonging, queerness and quirkiness. Refusing to simply sign on to the & anti-relational, anti-future brand of queer theory espoused by Edelman, Bersani and others, Muñoz insists that for some queers, particularly for queers of color, hope is something one cannot afford to lose and for them giving up on futurity is not an option. -- Jack Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place
In this interesting study of queerness and identity politics, Munoz (performance studies, New York Univ.) invites readers to look beyond the immediate present and toward a queer future. * Choice *
In the decade since its publication, Cruising Utopia has been influential across and beyond a range of academic disciplines. This tenth anniversary edition — published six years after Muñoz’s death in 2013 — includes two unpublished essays that extend the scope of the original project...Muñoz investigates a strain of queer utopianism that he locates in art, poetry and performance from the years surrounding the 1969 Stonewall uprising. The book’s ten chapters each focus on a different theoretical or aesthetic aspect of this work, encompassing queer stages, gesture and ephemera, public sex, failure and virtuosity as well as queer world-making. -- Alex Hoyos Twomey * London School of Economics and Political Science Blogs *
José Esteban Muñoz argues that queer criticism should be infused with a “utopian function” that perhaps only a return to political idealism could affect...Structured around ten analytical chapters, and framed by an introduction and a conclusion, the book maps out a multiplicity of utopian feelings across aesthetic works of the past and the present. -- Pablo Assumpção * Hemispheric Institute *
Cruising Utopia is a hopelessly hopeful manifesto, a performative and polemical provocation that seeks to counter the stultifying effects of the contemporary gay agenda and the disabling nihilism of contemporary queer theory through an affective reanimation of critical idealism. -- Sara Warner * Modern Drama *
[This] book embraces the movement between the "no-longer-conscious" and the "not yet-here" to carve out a history of "doing" that is always on the horizon, exhorting us to refuse stultifying hierarchies, in search of queer collectives. -- Anjali Arondekar * Cultural Critique *