Cruising Utopia Readthrough - Chapter 1
Mar. 1st, 2022 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureThis is part one of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by Jose Esteban Muñoz.
As noted earlier, I’m skipping the introduction and reading it last, so this week I’m looking at chapter one, “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism.”
Begin with a Poem
I think if you’d like to come to grips with this chapter, the first thing to do might be to read James Schuyler’s poem “A Photograph,” which enlivens the ideas about time and hope that Muñoz is presenting.
Caveats
I am out of practice at reading theory. This was a great way to remind myself about the deep challenges of reading a complex and unfamiliar text, even when you’re fairly familiar with the conversations around it.
This is a first reading, and I have no doubt missed or misunderstood things. I won’t hit every point here – Muñoz makes many – but I’ll try to get the broad contours down.
These are conversations I had many times over decades, often in my own head, so that while I have a lot of affinity for Muñoz’s thesis here, I also find myself wanting to push back in various places.
[ETA: I am urged (*cough*sovay *cough*) to write more about these personal responses, so I will try to include more of that in later posts. There are a few asides here.]
Thesis and Key Ideas in Brief
“The present is not enough,” Muñoz asserts: “it is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations” (27).
In “Queerness as Horizon,” Muñoz argues that we should not accept the strand of political thought that calls itself pragmatic, assumes that “we can only expect so much,” and believes that queer organizing should be directed towards assimilation into existing power structures – into “straight time.” Instead, we should look to the radical past of queer activism, the “no-longer-conscious,” for inspiration, and maintain a sense of openness and possibility about what queerness could be and look like – Muñoz’s famous assertion that “queerness does not yet exist” (22). Queer activism should aim towards a livable society for all, not just for inclusion in the current failing and toxic system.
Muñoz doesn’t use the word intersectionality here, but he wants us to recognize queer identities as multiple, cultural, variously bodied and abled, gendered, classed and racialized, and have queer activism reflect that. Rather than buying into the illusion that all queer people’s needs are represented by the priorities of a small, highly privileged community, Muñoz would say that the fundamental interests of most queer people lie in much deeper changes to society than gay marriage.
First Scan
Expectations and questions set up by the title
Other Visual Elements
I’ll omit the topic sentence outline I made (you’re welcome).
Breakdown of the Article
Muñoz begins by discussing an ancient text: “a 1971 issue of the gay liberation journal Gay Flames included a manifesto by a group calling itself Third World Gay Revolution” (19). The members were queer people of colour (29), but by identifying themselves (in the political language of the time) as “third world”, they declared a “decolonial” (29) allegiance beyond borders. “What We Want, What We Believe,” is a radical utopian manifesto: communist, collectivist, inclusive, demanding, among many other transformations, “free health care … free education … free art for all” (19).
Against this manifesto from the past, Muñoz contrasts two contemporary-to-him gay activists who would call themselves “pragmatic,” “pro-gay-marriage lawyer Evan Wolfson” (20) and academic Biddy Martin (21): the “multiple forms of being-in-difference and expansive critiques of social asymmetries are absent in the dominant LGBT leadership … and in many aspects of queer critique” (20). Muñoz is scathing about “homonormative interests leading the contemporary LGBT movement towards the goal of ‘naturalizing’ the flawed and toxic ideological formation known as marriage” (21).
(I feel more complicated about marriage, and about cultural practices in general, than this, but I take the point.)
Queerness as a potential, an aspiration, something in flux, is key for Muñoz: “queerness is not quite here; it is … a potentiality” (21). Rather than try to define what queerness is and is not, to accept any particular representation of queerness, he wants us to see it as a striving towards a liberation we can currently only aspire to. Because we are limited by the terms of the present, we cannot fully imagine queer futurity yet (22). Hence queerness as horizon. And this hope is not just for self-identified queer people: “queerness in its utopian connotations promises a human that is not yet here” as well (24-25).
(This reminds me of current thinkers like Alok Vaid-Menon, who speaks so eloquently about how what they want is not just the freedom to express themselves, but a world in which everyone can explore the fullness of their own beauty without shame or fear – everyone’s gender liberation. Like Vaid-Menon, Muñoz wishes “not to imagine an isolated future for the individual but instead to participate in a hermeneutic that wishes to describe a collective futurity, a futurity that functions as a historical materialist critique” (26).)
(Because my knowledge of Marxism is embarrassingly spotty, I am not sure how this futurity performs a historical materialist critique, and I’m going to end up scanting the Marxist references in general.)
This queer horizon is not a rejection of the present, though. We’re not supposed to ignore current events and bury ourselves in fantasies. Rather, queerness-as-horizon is a critique of what Muñoz calls “straight time” (22). Straight time takes the here and now as the way things must be, and the only future it offers is reproductive heterosexuality, “the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks” (22).
Muñoz returns to the idea of taking inspiration from earlier representations of queerness. This is where James Schuyler comes in. Muñoz shows how the poem “A Photograph” overlays the everyday (New York School FTW) with moments of ecstatic experience and ambitions for the future: “I really do believe / future generations can / live without the in- / tervals of anxious / fear we know between our / bouts and strolls of / ecstasy” (Schuyler in Muñoz, 24).
Then there’s this tricky idea about the performativity of the past: “rather than being static and fixed, the past does things” (28). I think he means that when we read the words of the past – the manifesto of the poem – they act on us. They do work in our minds, potentially seeding ideas about what the future could be. Again, Muñoz doesn’t want to do history so much as he wants to inspire better thinking about the present and the future (27-28).
Muñoz stresses that this utopianism may get called naïve (29), but that it is deeply rational. If the present is unbearable, it is only rational to seek to change it.
(I thought a lot of Daniel Heath Justice as I read this chapter. Justice writes in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter that the present is not livable for Indigenous people, and so it is rational and necessary to “imagine otherwise,” to imagine futures of Indigenous resurgence and thriving. To call that "unrealistic" is to assert that the only so-called realistic future for Indigenous people is death -- but that is the opposite of rational. It is genocidal ideology, not "fate" or "manifest destiny" or "pragmatism." The rational response is this particular kind of aspirational hope, this belief in the horizon of becoming.)
What about the hermeneutics?
I think that hermeneutics, the methodology of interpretation, shows up here in the idea that we should use interpretations of the past – our readings of past versions of queer movements -- to kindle aspirations for the future. We’re not acting as historians; rather, we’re finding sources of inspiration, ideas about what queerness could be that we’ve forgotten.
A Few Reflections
The present for this book would be about 2000 – 2010; it’s worthwhile to reflect from 2022, only 12 years later, and also, 1000 years and a toxic American presidency and part of a pandemic later. All this writing about hope feels right for 2008 and a little out of reach from 2022. (And yet also you know -- the rational response, if we want to survive.)
In some ways our present might be an even better example of the idea that “queerness has not yet arrived.” I see on Instagram and TikTok every day people performing and proliferating an incredibly creative multitude of genders, personae, desires, and affiliations across identities and experiences. Yet those performances are also aspirational – many of the performers are isolated and atomized, and frustrated or captivated by the technologies they rely on. And these ways of being are provisional: at the same time as this incredible flowering, Texas is doing its best to destroy trans children and their families, and many other states are doing the same. The people doing this beautiful work of becoming and manifesting queerness are often isolated, tired, and scared.
If this overview reads as though the chapter is something of a grab-bag of theoretical perspectives, yep, that is how it read to me – thinkers invoked for a paragraph or two, then abandoned. I’ve left out most of the references – to Heidegger, Derrida, Marcuse, Badiou, Bloch of course, Marx, Kant, Agamben.
I could be wrong, but I feel as though Muñoz is not invoking these theories and theorists in order to engage for long in any particular conceptual debate or lineage, but more as fuel for his thesis – so that in this chapter it doesn’t actually matter so much what Freud or Bloch might have meant by the “no-longer-conscious” as what Muñoz wants that term to do.
That’s in keeping with his idea about the past, that we should use it to fuel our imaginings of the future, rather than get bogged down in debating the details – he’s doing the same with theory.
This also means that sometimes the reading is slightly disappointing – I get that feeling many readers of theory complain about, that you work through the dense abstract language only to have the slipknot sensation that a much simpler message is actually being delivered than the language would suggest.
However, it’s equally possible that my understanding of the relevant theory is insufficient to take in the more complex points he’s making. I look forward to becoming wiser as my reading goes on.
I like his contrast of straight time vs. queer time, but again, this feels like a classification of convenience -- "nonce theory", as Sedgwick would put it – you could as easily say that queer time was focused on the present moment because it has to be, and straight time is always about deferring happiness into the future.
The “not-yet-conscious” is the most exciting idea for me, the concept that we can’t yet imagine the best version of ourselves because we are not yet able to perceive what that would be like. That feels useful and powerful as well as catchy.
* * * * * *
Okay, that's it! Thanks for reading. I think this may need to be a biweekly project instead of weekly, because that was a metric tonne of work.
{rf}
As noted earlier, I’m skipping the introduction and reading it last, so this week I’m looking at chapter one, “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism.”
Begin with a Poem
I think if you’d like to come to grips with this chapter, the first thing to do might be to read James Schuyler’s poem “A Photograph,” which enlivens the ideas about time and hope that Muñoz is presenting.
Caveats
I am out of practice at reading theory. This was a great way to remind myself about the deep challenges of reading a complex and unfamiliar text, even when you’re fairly familiar with the conversations around it.
This is a first reading, and I have no doubt missed or misunderstood things. I won’t hit every point here – Muñoz makes many – but I’ll try to get the broad contours down.
These are conversations I had many times over decades, often in my own head, so that while I have a lot of affinity for Muñoz’s thesis here, I also find myself wanting to push back in various places.
[ETA: I am urged (*cough*
sovay *cough*) to write more about these personal responses, so I will try to include more of that in later posts. There are a few asides here.]Thesis and Key Ideas in Brief
“The present is not enough,” Muñoz asserts: “it is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations” (27).
In “Queerness as Horizon,” Muñoz argues that we should not accept the strand of political thought that calls itself pragmatic, assumes that “we can only expect so much,” and believes that queer organizing should be directed towards assimilation into existing power structures – into “straight time.” Instead, we should look to the radical past of queer activism, the “no-longer-conscious,” for inspiration, and maintain a sense of openness and possibility about what queerness could be and look like – Muñoz’s famous assertion that “queerness does not yet exist” (22). Queer activism should aim towards a livable society for all, not just for inclusion in the current failing and toxic system.
Muñoz doesn’t use the word intersectionality here, but he wants us to recognize queer identities as multiple, cultural, variously bodied and abled, gendered, classed and racialized, and have queer activism reflect that. Rather than buying into the illusion that all queer people’s needs are represented by the priorities of a small, highly privileged community, Muñoz would say that the fundamental interests of most queer people lie in much deeper changes to society than gay marriage.
First Scan
Expectations and questions set up by the title
- The title seems to be setting up a contrast between two ways of being, queerness and gayness; for Muñoz, queerness is utopian and gayness is pragmatic.
- Readers of this journal have pointed out that this way of using gay / queer isn’t universal and can be alienating, so here I’ll mostly talk about the other way he names these two positions, as pragmatic or present-centred vs. utopian or future-looking, and I’ll use “queer” for pretty much everybody.
- The word “horizon” suggests aspiration.
- A “hermeneutics” is a strategy of interpretation. How will interpretation show up in this essay as a utopian act? (And why interpretation?)
Other Visual Elements
- Contains a long quote from a manifesto; either all or most of a poem; two quotes about Marxism
I’ll omit the topic sentence outline I made (you’re welcome).
Breakdown of the Article
Muñoz begins by discussing an ancient text: “a 1971 issue of the gay liberation journal Gay Flames included a manifesto by a group calling itself Third World Gay Revolution” (19). The members were queer people of colour (29), but by identifying themselves (in the political language of the time) as “third world”, they declared a “decolonial” (29) allegiance beyond borders. “What We Want, What We Believe,” is a radical utopian manifesto: communist, collectivist, inclusive, demanding, among many other transformations, “free health care … free education … free art for all” (19).
Against this manifesto from the past, Muñoz contrasts two contemporary-to-him gay activists who would call themselves “pragmatic,” “pro-gay-marriage lawyer Evan Wolfson” (20) and academic Biddy Martin (21): the “multiple forms of being-in-difference and expansive critiques of social asymmetries are absent in the dominant LGBT leadership … and in many aspects of queer critique” (20). Muñoz is scathing about “homonormative interests leading the contemporary LGBT movement towards the goal of ‘naturalizing’ the flawed and toxic ideological formation known as marriage” (21).
(I feel more complicated about marriage, and about cultural practices in general, than this, but I take the point.)
Queerness as a potential, an aspiration, something in flux, is key for Muñoz: “queerness is not quite here; it is … a potentiality” (21). Rather than try to define what queerness is and is not, to accept any particular representation of queerness, he wants us to see it as a striving towards a liberation we can currently only aspire to. Because we are limited by the terms of the present, we cannot fully imagine queer futurity yet (22). Hence queerness as horizon. And this hope is not just for self-identified queer people: “queerness in its utopian connotations promises a human that is not yet here” as well (24-25).
(This reminds me of current thinkers like Alok Vaid-Menon, who speaks so eloquently about how what they want is not just the freedom to express themselves, but a world in which everyone can explore the fullness of their own beauty without shame or fear – everyone’s gender liberation. Like Vaid-Menon, Muñoz wishes “not to imagine an isolated future for the individual but instead to participate in a hermeneutic that wishes to describe a collective futurity, a futurity that functions as a historical materialist critique” (26).)
(Because my knowledge of Marxism is embarrassingly spotty, I am not sure how this futurity performs a historical materialist critique, and I’m going to end up scanting the Marxist references in general.)
This queer horizon is not a rejection of the present, though. We’re not supposed to ignore current events and bury ourselves in fantasies. Rather, queerness-as-horizon is a critique of what Muñoz calls “straight time” (22). Straight time takes the here and now as the way things must be, and the only future it offers is reproductive heterosexuality, “the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks” (22).
Muñoz returns to the idea of taking inspiration from earlier representations of queerness. This is where James Schuyler comes in. Muñoz shows how the poem “A Photograph” overlays the everyday (New York School FTW) with moments of ecstatic experience and ambitions for the future: “I really do believe / future generations can / live without the in- / tervals of anxious / fear we know between our / bouts and strolls of / ecstasy” (Schuyler in Muñoz, 24).
Then there’s this tricky idea about the performativity of the past: “rather than being static and fixed, the past does things” (28). I think he means that when we read the words of the past – the manifesto of the poem – they act on us. They do work in our minds, potentially seeding ideas about what the future could be. Again, Muñoz doesn’t want to do history so much as he wants to inspire better thinking about the present and the future (27-28).
Muñoz stresses that this utopianism may get called naïve (29), but that it is deeply rational. If the present is unbearable, it is only rational to seek to change it.
(I thought a lot of Daniel Heath Justice as I read this chapter. Justice writes in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter that the present is not livable for Indigenous people, and so it is rational and necessary to “imagine otherwise,” to imagine futures of Indigenous resurgence and thriving. To call that "unrealistic" is to assert that the only so-called realistic future for Indigenous people is death -- but that is the opposite of rational. It is genocidal ideology, not "fate" or "manifest destiny" or "pragmatism." The rational response is this particular kind of aspirational hope, this belief in the horizon of becoming.)
What about the hermeneutics?
I think that hermeneutics, the methodology of interpretation, shows up here in the idea that we should use interpretations of the past – our readings of past versions of queer movements -- to kindle aspirations for the future. We’re not acting as historians; rather, we’re finding sources of inspiration, ideas about what queerness could be that we’ve forgotten.
A Few Reflections
The present for this book would be about 2000 – 2010; it’s worthwhile to reflect from 2022, only 12 years later, and also, 1000 years and a toxic American presidency and part of a pandemic later. All this writing about hope feels right for 2008 and a little out of reach from 2022. (And yet also you know -- the rational response, if we want to survive.)
In some ways our present might be an even better example of the idea that “queerness has not yet arrived.” I see on Instagram and TikTok every day people performing and proliferating an incredibly creative multitude of genders, personae, desires, and affiliations across identities and experiences. Yet those performances are also aspirational – many of the performers are isolated and atomized, and frustrated or captivated by the technologies they rely on. And these ways of being are provisional: at the same time as this incredible flowering, Texas is doing its best to destroy trans children and their families, and many other states are doing the same. The people doing this beautiful work of becoming and manifesting queerness are often isolated, tired, and scared.
If this overview reads as though the chapter is something of a grab-bag of theoretical perspectives, yep, that is how it read to me – thinkers invoked for a paragraph or two, then abandoned. I’ve left out most of the references – to Heidegger, Derrida, Marcuse, Badiou, Bloch of course, Marx, Kant, Agamben.
I could be wrong, but I feel as though Muñoz is not invoking these theories and theorists in order to engage for long in any particular conceptual debate or lineage, but more as fuel for his thesis – so that in this chapter it doesn’t actually matter so much what Freud or Bloch might have meant by the “no-longer-conscious” as what Muñoz wants that term to do.
That’s in keeping with his idea about the past, that we should use it to fuel our imaginings of the future, rather than get bogged down in debating the details – he’s doing the same with theory.
This also means that sometimes the reading is slightly disappointing – I get that feeling many readers of theory complain about, that you work through the dense abstract language only to have the slipknot sensation that a much simpler message is actually being delivered than the language would suggest.
However, it’s equally possible that my understanding of the relevant theory is insufficient to take in the more complex points he’s making. I look forward to becoming wiser as my reading goes on.
I like his contrast of straight time vs. queer time, but again, this feels like a classification of convenience -- "nonce theory", as Sedgwick would put it – you could as easily say that queer time was focused on the present moment because it has to be, and straight time is always about deferring happiness into the future.
The “not-yet-conscious” is the most exciting idea for me, the concept that we can’t yet imagine the best version of ourselves because we are not yet able to perceive what that would be like. That feels useful and powerful as well as catchy.
* * * * * *
Okay, that's it! Thanks for reading. I think this may need to be a biweekly project instead of weekly, because that was a metric tonne of work.
{rf}
no subject
Date: 2022-03-02 07:54 am (UTC)See, I am interested in your pushing back, because if I just wanted Muñoz by himself, I could read Muñoz by himself, but if I am reading Muñoz with you, I do want to know what you think.
Then there’s this tricky idea about the performativity of the past: “rather than being static and fixed, the past does things” (28).
The animation of the past is the part of that sentence that really attracts me, because on the one hand merely reperforming the past (or attempting to: it isn't possible; you know that, too many people who do great harm don't) gets you things like deep conservative nostalgia for the way things weren't and Muñoz's vision of straight time as uncritical reproduction of the present order, but on the other calling up the past and setting it loose in the present gets you things like A Canterbury Tale (1944)—
"There are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road and as you walk, think of them and of the old England. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill, just as you did. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today. And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme and the broom and the heather, you're only seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same rivers, the same birds are singing. When you lie flat on your back and rest and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people that you can hear the thrumming of the hooves of their horses and the sound of the wheels on the road and their laughter and talk and the music of the instruments they carried. And when I turn the bend of the road where they too saw the towers of Canterbury, I feel I've only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me."
—where what I love most about this speech of Colpeper's is that it is not about renouncing the present moment for the past, it is about summoning up the past until it merges with the present. (I am going to continue talking at you about this movie, I am afraid; I think you would like it.) The fusion creates the future, which he has trouble envisioning and accepting in its own self, which is part of the story.
The “not-yet-conscious” is the most exciting idea for me, the concept that we can’t yet imagine the best version of ourselves because we are not yet able to perceive what that would be like.
It's something you can observe with people in so-to-speak real time, too, not just suggest as a societal abstract, which makes it an especially helpful model.
I can't remember—have you read Mark Fisher? He doesn't cite Muñoz that I remember, but this chapter is already edging into the territory of hauntology, so they might run interestingly beside one another, although Fisher is emphatically not about hope.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-02 03:20 pm (UTC)That's fair. I just didn't want to get into the weeds, because these are things I can worry like a bone. There's so much emotion in all of it.
I haven't read the Fisher, but it seems very aligned conceptually, and sounds beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-02 05:14 pm (UTC)It's your journal: if it's not for bones, what is?
I haven't read the Fisher, but it seems very aligned conceptually, and sounds beautiful.
I loved both Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie (2016).
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 12:54 am (UTC)I struggled a bit with how much agency to attribute to the past here, and your excellent example makes me see I was under-selling it.
Now I'm reminded of Jeremy Dutcher explaining that his Wolastoq ancestors recorded themselves singing traditional songs in order to time travel -- so that they could send the songs forward in time for him to recover from the archive and sing.
Of course the past has intent and purpose. Of course it wants to act upon the present and the future.
Ha! I will look for it immediately.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 02:05 am (UTC)I like that very much.
Ha! I will look for it immediately.
I do not under normal circumstances have favorite anythings, but it has a very good claim to being my favorite film.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-02 07:44 pm (UTC)Then there’s this tricky idea about the performativity of the past: “rather than being static and fixed, the past does things” (28). I think he means that when we read the words of the past – the manifesto of the poem – they act on us. They do work in our minds, potentially seeding ideas about what the future could be. This is really poignant to me coming off discussions I've seen in about how queer people growing up post-AIDS do not have the same kind of community and community elders that older generations might have had. I've seen a push lately for young queer people to get back in touch with art and other work that queer communities were doing before this massive loss to the culture as a way of connecting with and forming new communities now, and to me, this speaks to that in a really nice way.
In some ways our present might be an even better example of the idea that “queerness has not yet arrived.” I see on Instagram and TikTok every day people performing and proliferating an incredibly creative multitude of genders, personae, desires, and affiliations across identities and experiences. Yet those performances are also aspirational – many of the performers are isolated and atomized, and frustrated or captivated by the technologies they rely on. And these ways of being are provisional: at the same time as this incredible flowering, Texas is doing its best to destroy trans children and their families, and many other states are doing the same. The people doing this beautiful work of becoming and manifesting queerness are often isolated, tired, and scared. YES! This is very astute. Social media lets queer people see each other and hopefully can be the starting point for deeper connection, to alleviate the isolation that we feel, but we can't yet know what the queer communities of tomorrow are going to look like because we first have to be able to imagine an end to the isolation that makes connecting over the internet necessary. Social media helping queer people to connect across an atomized culture is solving a problem that social media helped to create in the first place, I think. Increased isolation under capitalism leads to increased reliance on technologies that allow us to connect leads to increased willingness by those in power to erode the rights to free time, social spaces, and privacy leads to social media being even more necessary for people to connect, you know?
I don't feel that I'm articulate enough to comment on any more of this or in greater detail so I'll thank you again for sharing this book and your thoughts, it was very interesting and insightful to read and I'll definitely be following along in the future even if I don't have anything to add to a comment or discussion. Bi-weekly seems like it would be more than enough.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 01:00 am (UTC)Ha, me too. This is a bit like jumping off the high diving board, so thank you for reading and for being so supportive of the project!
That's a great example! I hadn't really heard about that specifically, and I love that idea. A kind of returning to what was severed. It makes me want to take myself immediately to the archive.
Yes! And we get used to the idea that we somehow need a layer of mediation for all of our interactions with one another.
Thank you for these insightful comments. I look forward to your thoughts on the next chapter.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-02 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 01:02 am (UTC)I feel like Justice actually cites Munoz somewhere, but I can't remember where.