Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Sexual Cultures #50

by José Esteban Muñoz, Joshua Chambers-Letson (Foreword), Tavia Nyong'o (Foreword)

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. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago. 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.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Theory, LGBT, Philosophy, Academic, Queer Studies

Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 2009

About the author

José Esteban Muñoz was a writer and scholar living in New York City. He taught at and served as chair of the department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Reviews

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muñoz is a brilliant close reader and I wished the scope of this academic project allowed for more of that. I mean the chapter connecting vogueing to Elizabeth Bishop, or the discourse on how camo is queer, and countless others of the many critical reading sections -- all genius. I was less compelled by the actual overarching theme of seeking utopia and making the world a better place by dreaming of the future. To call it naive is wrong because nothing about this book's ideas is anything but utterly sophisticated, I just wasn't compelled by that as a guiding force. Still, this is an essential required reading for those promoting an alternative homosexual agenda, especially those ole gays such as myself who feel disheartened by the majoritarian, normative, capitalist pig focus of the gay world today. If you spit on HRC's grave, this is the book for you.

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up off the new-books shelf at the library because the title caught my eye, but was really disappointed in it. 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. Alas, while there are a handful of lesbians here and there and an aside about a trans friend, this book is totally about gay men, mainly pre-AIDS gay male culture and art.[return][return]I could have rolled with that if the book had otherwise been interesting, but the academic language made it difficult for me to read, plus the whole thing lacked cohesion and just felt more like a collection of essays about this art/period he liked rather than something that was building towards a whole. Also, mainly he talked about what he liked about queer movements in the past, and what I had picked up the book hoping for was a critique of the current LGBT movement. But other than saying he doesn't like it, he doesn't really go into it at all.

[Fran · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perfect example of how academic pontification on social justice can actively work towards rescinding the hard-won victories of marginalized groups. The idea that gay men who want the ability to get married (or as Muñoz puts it, 'participate in the problematic institution of marriage') are somehow regressive for fighting for that right is absolutely ludicrous. I was under the impression that the 'problematic' part of marriage was that men used it to exploit women...it doesn't work the same with two men, as in there is not the same potential for sex-based exploitation.

In spite of its refreshing frankness about gay sex, this text is shockingly detached from the actual struggles average gay people face every day, and about what gay liberation actually looks like. The ideas that gay suicide is an act of self-liberation, that gay men who enjoy masculine men are brainwashed or ignorant, that the fight for gay marriage rights is not one worth fighting, are not just the opinions of an academic writing theory to further his career--they are active dangers to the rights gay people have fought tooth and nail to hold.

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. Hopefully no one from Twitter gets ahold of this.

And, sidenote, but I was supposed to read this for class, but it got cut because of COVID. And thank God it did. Because I have to say I'd have been annoying to have in class for discussion if we were talking about this.

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

My main takeaway is that clocks are heterosexual nonsense and must be destroyed if we want to achieve Utopia

[b · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this a 3/5, but I think the inclusion of the two extra essays in the new edition actually speak to Munoz’s ability to write with less spurious, less academy-poisoned posture, and reflect my longing for a followup that would’ve built on the many budding ideas in this work.

The academic nonsense the majority of the book falls prey to is the worst kind: constantly outlining justifications and clarifications of non-points in anticipation of criticism from other theory-saturated navel-gazers.

Munoz also seems to miss the most salient point of Halberstam’s writing on queer time and failure, most frustratingly that the queer world is not just a set of NY artists from a pretty narrow temporal sample.

I often found myself flabbergasted by supposed proofs and connections Munoz declared, while having done next to no engagement or close-reading with the materials at hand. This is part of the academy-poisoning, and while I understand Munoz was doing this work in a professional capacity, work that is obfuscated and makes claims that it cannot substantiate isn’t some noble, underdog queer hope against all odds as we sail into the horizon; it’s alienating, exhausting, and makes the queer world feel small with an energy contrary to the intent; to be anti-academic for a moment, if you’re ever recommended this book by a fellow academic-type, ask them for three critical bullet points on the text that actually reference the writing and not the intent, and aren’t the things Munoz wastes too much time spuriously addressing (eg: why Bloch?); the generally uncritical praise of the book stunts the productive work we ought to be doing to make it useful and communicative, and any bible-like canonization of material like this must be regarded skeptically, always, whether or not the writer dies too young and is well beloved and tried real dang hard.

So much of the commentary is vague, moderate, and antiseptic. A book that says “hey I’m going to invoke cruising as theory, and I’m going to ensure I hold several meanings of that up at once for a queerer reading” should be thrilling. But it falls short time and time again. There’s no play. There’s little to no ecstasy.

The two additional essays I do think demonstrate that Munoz was aware of this problem with the work. Maybe this is because they do much closer engagement / close reading of the materials at hand, or maybe it’s because it approaches work that feels so much more difficult to tackle, so much more barbed and combustible and ecstatic troubling work. And perhaps because they literally begin to tackle the problem of the gulf between an academic treatment and the real world. We actually see the c-word (communism, and not in the clannish, obtuse academic way even). But these two glimmers of excellence aren’t the book at hand.

And this new edition, which I only recently picked up as I returned to the book, having struggled with it on and off for years now, has a frightening forward.

Perhaps it’s just because I’m reading this so closely on the Heels of a return to Mark Fisher, but in the forward of this edition (in addition to many “manifestos” on wilderness and queerness and the future in other publications) Munoz is getting the highly sterile academic-hagiographic treatment, instead of looking to what did and didn’t work in the book, where it’s been contested and where it’s flourished and instead of imagining what the future could’ve held (which the book asks us to do but never seems to try itself), etcetera, and this intensive canonizing feels untrue to the spirit of the book and Munoz’s work in general; the spirit of the book is perfection, but the execution falters. I “invoke” (to borrow the bludgeoned verb from Munoz) Fisher to ask what are those of us left to do with these tasks assigned by dead men who largely wrote on the exact same problems as one another: a precarious present, and a look both forward and backward to that which never arrived and that which is yet to arrive.

Fisher has by and large become a meme at this point, which is also disheartening, and also frustrating and seemingly contrary to the spirit of Fisher’s work. The difference is, Fisher’s treatment of the same anxieties is eminently readable, and concretized. Munoz is looking ahead to wonder when we manifest concretized hope. Fisher has the exact same aspiration. But Fisher, as a meme, has greater reach and influence specifically because of his (imperfectly) proletarian treatment of the problems.

All this said, I’m glad to be reading the two in conversation. I’m very glad to have gotten the chance to read the additional essays. I do wish Munoz were still here to put his brilliant brain to less distracted ends.

[blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love queer theory. It breaks my brain every time, but I love it.

———————————————————————————

“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”

“It is important not to be content to let failed revolutions be merely finite moments. Instead we should consider them to be the blueprints to a better world that queer utopian aesthetics supply. Silver clouds, swirls of camouflage, mirrors, a stack of white sheets of paper, and painted flowers are passports allowing us entry to a utopian path, a route that should lead us to heaven or, better yet, to something just like it.”

“Gay and lesbian studies is often too concerned with finding the exemplary homosexual protagonist. 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.’ The time has come to turn to failed visionaries, oddballs, and freaks who remind queers that indeed they always live out of step with straight time.”

[Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite. José Muñoz's academic partiality to performance studies greatly enhances his argument for queer futurity. That is to say, Muñoz exemplifies the necessity for change embodied in time and space, and the constant (re)consideration(s) of hope and potentiality inherent in queer Otherness. Where the text lacks rhetorical frankness, it excels in intellectual thought, adds to the critical advancement of queer thought that continues to challenge queer assimilation into popular, heteronormative culture.

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh god, I wish I was back in school, and I could use the material in this book on a project of my own. This is an "academic text" so it isn't pleasure reading, per se. But Muñoz's theories really hit home. Some of my favourite words—"hope" and "imagine" and "possibility" and "becoming"—are strewn across these pages. It was a difficult but stirring read.

Muñoz attempts to define "queerness" as something we haven't quite achieved yet. It's a radical term that defies the conservative "normalizing" of those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and aims for something BIGGER and BETTER. It is what he calls "a great refusal":

"Queerness, as I am describing here, is more than just sexuality. It is this great refusal of a performance principle that allows the human to feel and know not only our work and our pleasure but also our selves and others." ["A quick translation of the performance principle would cast it as the way in which a repressive social order is set in place by limiting the forms and quantity of pleasure that the human is allowed. [...] It most succinctly means, "Men do not live their own lives but perform preestablished functions.""]

We tell children that "utopias" are not worth our time and will all surely fail. But after reading Muñoz, it's easy to think that these warnings are just more conservatism that keeps us from making real progress. Like the way mainstream horror novels are often bluntly conservative in the way they paint otherness as a black/white binary, "dystopian literature" often creates a similar binary. Only in "looking toward utopia" and "feeling utopia" that we can reach a vision of a possible world that makes room for ALL peoples:

"*Cruising Utopia* can ultimately be read as an invitation, a performative provocation. Manifesto-like and ardent, it is a call to think about our lives and times differently, to look beyond a narrow version of the here and now on which so many around us who are bent on the normative count. Utopia in this book has been about an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning. I offer this book as a resource for the political imagination. This text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective political becoming. These pages have described aesthetic and political practices that need to be seen as necessary modes of stepping out of this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter. From shared critical dissatisfaction we arrive at collective potentiality."

For an academic text, I found this to be pretty readable, and while I struggled a little when Muñoz was talking about dance and movement, his explication of queer literature and songs (I will never see "Take Ecstasy With Me* the same way) was superb. And of course, the interjection of the personal brought the whole project to life:

"Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture, and through what I call the utopian critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place not yet there, a place where I tried to live. LA and its scene helped my proto-queer self, the queer child in me, imagine a stage, both temporal and physical, where I could be myself or, more nearly, imagine a self that was in process, a self that has always been in the process of becoming."

I will never forget reading this book and will probably reread it as I further my queer studies. And who knows, maybe I will go back to school after all.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muñoz is at his absolute best when he's weaving and recontextualizing philosophical strains around the concept of a forward-dawning queer futurity, using queer movements and gestures such as dance, cruising, drag, and protest as evidence of the utopian longing at the core of queer desire. He reframes and responds to Edelman's pessimistic notion of reproductive futurism with an alternative queer critique based on an analysis of queer and trans of color artistic production. However, the analysis ultimately falls flat for me when it approaches material culture; I question the way Muñoz often distracts from lack of engagement with the material realities of visual art by focusing on performative function, assuming his own associative/felt resonance to be self-evident without close visual and historical analysis. My ongoing frustration is that the conceptual framework he constructs is applicable to an art historical critique, but his mode of critical analysis—ideal for understanding the lingering "trace" experiences after an ephemeral performance—doesn't translate to discussions of material culture, in which frequently more than mere traces exist as part of an object history. Ultimately it's beside his point—which is to sketch a broad-strokes framework for utopian thinking/feeling in queer studies—but coming from an art historical background I wanted more historical and material consideration from his analysis of non-ephemeral art.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dazzling masterpiece of critical theory and cultural analysis, maintaining a firm focus on the key political issues while illustrating them through detailed and beautifully written analyses of queer performance and visual art.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

queerness as not-here-yet, queerness as a utopia, a horizon, queerness as a continually unfolding process that is always existing through a revolutionary potentiality.

[Francisco Risso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es inconmensurable todo lo que este libro me hizo pensar/sentir, ya ni siquiera creo en ese dualismo como tal. Como Muñoz reflexiona a partir de su vida me llevo a Preciado y sus estrategias al momento de escribir.
Hubo un par de secciones que me dieron fiaca porque se concentraban mucho en las performances como tal y no en pensar dichas performances.
Secciones a destacar:
la primera, la tercera, la quinta, la sexta, la séptima, la octava (porque retoma eros y civilización de Marcuse, la novena es absolutamente increíble y su reflexión sobre si la lucha lgbt fue para mejor o no es muy interesante y problemática de hacer. La sección diez y la conclusión están buenas porque finalmente ahí si piensa a la política a partir de una critica queer del presente.

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s easy to understand why this text has become so foundational in contemporary queer critique: there is such a far reaching and generous scholarship exhibited here that touches upon queer temporalities, performativities, and possibilities. In particular, Muñoz’s work regarding queer performance in ballroom/club culture is both incisive and extensive, as is much of his incomparably elegant close reading. Also, I’ve never read the word “quotidian” so much in my life.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming back to this book after finishing Authoring Autism since Munoz’s utopian queerness is taken up in definitions of neuro-queerness. I took Queer Theory from Munoz in 2002 and this book transported me back to almost forgotten conversations and classes. Also briefly mentioned, another favorite teacher Andre Lepecki. I guess there was a time I thought these kinds of books and the performances they describe would be my life… and I look back jealously at those years spent skulking around NYC with a bank account of about $5. (Sigh) But I paid off my student loans a few years ago and have absolutely no regrets about my trying (and failing) to find my place in academia. After all, I still get to read all these books.

[Oliver Terrones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hermoso pensar en 'lo queer' como una utopía necesaria al tiempo que se problematiza a 'lo utópico'. Disfruté mucho las referencias a Warhol, Elizabeth Bishop y Bloch. Pues sí, como escribió Wilde: "Un mapa del mundo que no incluya Utopía, no merece ni mirarse".

[Mills College Library]

306.7601 M9675 2019

[churrosconclipper · Rating 1 out of 5]

abandoné el libro y la verdad, no me pesa en absoluto. venía con ganas de encontrar un libro que me diera una perspectiva nueva sobre lo queer, una reflexión que no se quedara en lo típico, algo que realmente desafiara el presente y propusiera un futuro interesante. pero lo que encontré fue un amasijo de contradicciones, romantización de lo precario y una obsesión con la clandestinidad que raya en lo absurdo.
para empezar, muñoz insiste en que lo queer no es lo gay, que lo gay ya ha sido absorbido por el capitalismo y que lo queer tiene que ser una utopía, algo más allá del sistema. y suena bien… hasta que te das cuenta de que él mismo no es capaz de diferenciar ambos términos. habla del "pragmatismo gay" como si fuera lo peor del mundo, pero luego te vende la idea de que lo queer es algo revolucionario mientras básicamente usa "gay" y "queer" como sinónimos cada dos páginas. spoiler alert: no lo son. de hecho, muchas veces son directamente antónimos. se nota que sigue siendo un cisgay con aspiraciones de queer, pero que no llega. y se nota en sus ideas.
ahora, la idea de lo queer como algo a lo que aspirar me parecía interesante. el concepto de que la comunidad LGTBIQ+ no debería conformarse con ser aceptada dentro del capitalismo (que de por sí es un sistema violento) y que en su lugar deberíamos pensar en nuevas formas de vida… eso sí me parecía valioso. pero queda completamente eclipsado por toda la mierda que suelta por la boca. en serio, no hay forma de disfrutar una teoría cuando cada dos páginas tienes que tomar aire y preguntarte si de verdad estás leyendo bien.
porque aquí viene lo peor: la romantización descarada de la clandestinidad, la prostitución y el sexo público. no, no es revolucionario que en los 80 los bares gays fueran espacios de sexo anónimo en plena crisis del VIH. no, no es heroico que la gente tuviera que recurrir a la prostitución porque no había otra opción. y NO, la prostitución no es más aceptable solo cuando hablamos de prostitutos gays. la prostitución sigue siendo una mierda, un síntoma de precariedad, no un modelo a seguir. pero muñoz lo pinta como si fuera la cumbre de la resistencia queer, algo subversivo. me dio tanta rabia que casi lanzo el libro por la ventana. y lo peor es que lo dice con tal seguridad que casi parece que quiere convencernos de que esto es el futuro que deberíamos desear. ¿perdón!!?
además, habla del "sexo queer" como si su visión fuera la única válida. como si lo verdaderamente queer fuera el sexo en público, anónimo, casi mecánico. ¿y qué pasa con lo queer que pone el consentimiento, la confianza y el placer de ambas personas en el centro? ah, claro, eso no entra en su narrativa porque no es lo suficientemente "subversivo". pero la verdad, lo realmente revolucionario sería dejar de consumir cuerpos como si fueran desechables. porque si algo es violento y capitalista, es justamente el consumo exacerbado de cuerpos sin ningún tipo de conexión.
en resumen: utopía queer tiene un par de ideas rescatables, pero están enterradas bajo capas y capas de hipocresía y romantización de lo precario. si alguien quiere leer sobre lo queer como horizonte utópico, mejor busquen otras referencias. aquí lo que hay es un cisgay con ínfulas de radicalidad, dándonos un discurso que en algunos puntos da más pena que revolución.
así que sí, lo dejo aquí, página 133. next.

[boocia]

i think i am on the back foot with this one; sort of trying to like it though a lot of it i didn't find too resonant, but also this is a book for like professionals and i have no idea what munoz is talking about; very willing to drop references to other theorists and theories i've never read, building arguments off of things i have no context for personally, so bad layman takes i guess below

that being said it's one of those really cool books where for days after you look at the world entirely differently; i am seeing little utopia-pointings everywhere; so maybe it's doing its job unconsciously

my beef i think is , especially post-hennessy "profits and pleasure", feeling a little unromanced by the Utility of looking for queer utopia in art. like when you leave the theater or art show are you really any closer to actionable material revolution or anything like it. but maybe Munoz is skipping steps here because it is obvious to his intended readers, that if people watch a play and see within it a queer utopia they will become more radicalized or feel more community or something, so that this book really didn't feel the need to connect any dots to why reading utopia into drag performances will ultimately like, do anything.

but nevertheless this attitude for ME at least ended up feeling pretty myopic. the starting position of expressing out against de-fanged gay liberal marriage-equality-ass assimilationism is fine, and the joy and feelings-of-power in counterculturalism or in sort of subliminally registering that a different world is possible is also fine, but there aren't any Results in this book. of like how warhol's art actually changed anything or could change anything. another way to put it is that Munoz is interested in things he calls 'ephemera' or 'traces' of utopia which maybe i'm just off-put by, because these traces never become anything more in his analysis. there is the suggestion that these traces can change your outlook and give you Hope, and that Hope is important for change, but not very many bones beyond that.

same critique at another angle; it felt weird to talk about Fred Herko, an artist who at the end of his life was homeless and addicted to amphetamines and ultimately suicidal; and i guess not talk about what societally or culturally had failed him ? and instead to talk of his art, and how his amphetamine-usage made him airy and thin and already not-of-this-plane(maybe reaching for a different utopian plane?). like the material circumstances were secondary. so maybe i'm just having difficulty onboarding onto this project, but i respect the challenge of this project, of reading utopianism and hope into tragic or banal or just fucked-over lives. again i am fresh off rosemary hennessy, who has a bit about how trying to read life 'artistically' is sort of a weird luxury of western queer lives, that maybe doing so obfuscates rather than alleviates changeably cruel conditions.

anyway all that beef aside; interesting things --

- loved the synergy of queer futurity and suvinian scifi horizons; they're both riffing off bloch. suvin is saying that scifi's unreal points both at a de-realized current reality and points towards how it could be different. munoz is saying that queer performance is also almost-unreal, it's working not on 'straight time' (term munoz borrows for i guess the whole heterenormative capitalist hegemony), and in that way also points to how not-set the current reality is and points towards a queer future. so it's fun to think about how by munoz' measurement queer performance is science fictional. of course in between the two is Delaney's scifi, and his memoirs and writings of gay public orgies and other liminal spaces where straight time is almost forgotten, and the skin between here-now and a better world is thin. good resonances.
- i liked the observation that camp is about amateurism/failure and virtuoso all at once. that really helped me think about camp, and care about the concept of camp, in a way i hadn't before. the idea is that the amateurism points to failure and failure points to what's missing and an absence points to a potentiality for something better. i think this can be a bit of a reach, but i see the appeal of this interpretation of failure in certain contexts. i like how he connected this to punk aesthetics as well. i like thinking about the fusion of amateurism and voyeurism as missing something like resources and time and support and having something like ability or passion or hope. it just makes sense and feels good.
- there is something kind of dangerous i feel about twinning queerness with not-yet-here-ness and not-yet-hereness with failure. that's the inversion i think; while munoz is pushing that queerness is about enacting something that doesn't exist and Hope-fully, that does kind of just mean that you are really living something that doesn't exist right now. which in addition to being daunting isn't entirely true. but there are moments in this book that encouraged me to walk that knife-edge of hopefully accepting imperfect or not-yet-here queerness. it helped also to think about Louis Gluck's Eros the Bittersweet; which was sort of about knowledge+love, and how knowledge+love is an action of reaching towards something perfect but not attaining it perfectly, just reaching all the time. 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). idk about that attitude vs the rosemary hennessy bit of just being outraged and angry abt it. anger and grief feel like a way of reaching out from bad circumstances too? maybe they're just too banal .
- all that being said i did cry during every set the first time i went to a drag performance. just full on tears. i also cry every time i watch old town road's music video, for some reason. there is something to the juxtaposition of what is-now and what can be or is-but-isn't-the-whole-world-it-just-is-in-this-moment that is beautiful in a sad way. i don't know if this emotional reaction is enough to radicalize, but i can't say it doesn't do anything, right?

ultimately i like what this book did to my brain but i don't know if i was really equipped, academically, to understand or like it

[Dominik · Rating 4 out of 5]

niepomiernie przyjemna lektura z jej optymistycznymi uwagami w stronę utopii, choć mniej produktywna niż bym sobie życzył, a bardziej osadzona w szukaniu tych niewypowiedzianych utopijnych impulsów w sztukach. choć ogółem - coś ślicznego

[Elizabeth]

lmk why it took a month to read a book i already know

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been a while since I've read a theory book front to cover. Brilliant book.

[lids :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love dense queer theory. muñoz combines critique and personal account in relation to performativity and utopianism... very neat!

[Divine Angubua]

this book will rescue my life one day, if it hasn’t already.

[Hamonkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as one forfeits the future...
he acquires a taste for many

[Manel]

Not about cruising

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een onmisbare tekst, eigenlijk. De tekst is vol van ideeën en dromen, en mag zodanig niet ontbreken wanneer we praten over queerness: ‘I contend that if queerness is to have any value whatsoever, it must be viewed as being visible only in the horizon.’

[Roisin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging […] the idea is not simply to turn away from the present. One cannot afford such a maneuver […] the present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds.”

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't totally sold on a lot of the philosophical moves he pulled but overall i thought this book was pretty fucking entertaining. I mostly really liked his choice of case studies/subjects and how he picked art, stories, and cultural artifacts that he liked and believed in and built his book around them.

[Gabriella · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion. We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present.”



Everyone has to read this book!!!!!

[Brennan]

A lot of focus on cis gay men but still a wonderful methodology for hope and resistance.