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radiantfractureWelcome back to the reliably erratic review of José Esteban Muñoz' Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity. This trebleweek, we're talking about "Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative."
Muñoz was a queer punk! So was I, after a fashion, though I wasn't terribly good at it. Like the last chapter, this discussion activated my own queer nostalgia -- and therefore perhaps hope.
As I consume further chapters, I more and more admire Muñoz' ability to layer new nuance onto the concept of utopia as a mechanism for imagining queer futures. It isn't a gimmick: each of these essays genuinely illuminates another way to think with the idea.
I found this the most conceptually straightforward and emotionally evocative essay so far. Muñoz himself seems to be having a better time -- he's more confident, less hedged, here. His central thesis is that spaces for queer performance create the potential for envisioning more livable, joyful and expressive queer lives.
That makes the idea sound simple, but Muñoz captures, without directly naming it, the almost (or actual) ceremonial quality of such performances -- they way performance is an imaginary thing that makes itself real, where the real here is livable, joyful queer life.
In the introduction to "Stages," Muñoz returns to the idea that utopia reorganizes time, that it uses the past to open up the potential for the future (97). I find myself appreciating the glimpses of the past Muñoz offers me, remembering the pleasure of simply learning a little queer history -- or even of remembering that it exists.
Utopia is a Stage
Early in the essay, Muñoz makes a pun on the word “stage”. He speaks of the homophobic cliché that queerness is just a developmental stage, and uses this idea of the stage to open up the workings of utopia.
At first I thought, are you really going to be able to make this pun pay off? But his use is elegant. He pours the idea of a stage as a time of potential into the space of the stage as site of potential, of queer performance that can evoke the emotions of belonging and the vision of a fulfilled eroticism, identity, joy.
Muñoz usefully contrasts potential with possibility via Agamben (of whom I know nothing). He uses possibility to mean what the present currently allows for; potential is what it does not yet allow. Utopia and queer performance are evocations of potential.
The central action of this essay is a close reading of a photo series called The Chameleon Club by LA artist Kevin McCarty. The photos show empty but lit stages in queer and punk LA clubs. Muñoz's reading is personal, intimate, a bit idiosyncratic, steeped in queer history, and very pleasurable. Muñoz describes the work of art, then drops us through its surface to the stage itself, then down further to the fragments of queer history beneath this stage and, as Muñoz says, outside in the parking lot.
Each of the stages offers a different potentiality: one signals black queer culture's link to fashion; another connects migrant Mexican queers with the historical culture of a homeland; another creates a hipster punk space that make Muñoz both nostalgic for his queer punk youth and anxious about aging.
The empty stages enact utopia in their anticipation of queer performance, the revelation of an image or a song you can carry out in your heart as a sign for a way to be queer in the world, or even of a queer worlding.
Oh I remember that. Seeing that and being that.
Extraction, Amateurism, Aging Out
While making his point through these eloquent images, Muñoz touches on a series of ideas that could have formed essays in themselves.
Twice he references what we would now call concerns about extractive academic work (101, 111) -- feeling that he's receiving more than he's giving back. As a reader I felt a certain division in myself, too, between the queer and the academic.
As an academic reader, I wished he would define "the queer utopian performative" more specifically; but my queer body felt like it knew exactly what Muñoz was talking about. That exquisite combination of desire, hope, and awe as you see some deep wish of your own given flesh onstage -- maybe something never uttered, maybe even unknown as yours until it appears before you.
A second point that caught me was the idea of the “aesthetics of amateurism“ (106), which Muñoz suggests was celebrated in early queer performance cultures. I really feel this. I like drag, costume, cosplay to be imperfect because I am imperfect. I like it to be human and a little bit "regional."
One of the things that worries me about contemporary mass queer culture and its focus on mediation through television and social media is that queerness has become professionalized: you don't just discover or explore your queerness, you brand it.
And look, I am glad if queer couples on Instagram can make a living just by performing being queer couples. What a marvel. There’s this incredible flowering of creativity, but also this pressure to perform a certain kind of highly stylized queerness that involves a lot of money and labour and the adoption or at least performance of narrow beauty ideals.
Not everyone does this, of course: I follow the hashtag #AlternativeDrag in an attempt to keep an eye on other options. But even these looks are often highly stylized, and it clearly requires hours of work to look that "bad."
Which reminds me of a third thing Munoz touches on: aging out of queerness and punkness.
I don’t want to make too much of this; my knee-jerk feelings of notbelonging don’t require any particular external trigger to activate them, and I think I’d probably find quite a lot of middle-aged people if I ventured out to the local lounge. This is a town that skews senior, after all. But we have not really resolved this idea that being middle-aged is not beautiful or glamorous and therefore not queer, especially if queer is a brand of professionalized beauty or coupledom. On Drag Race, being in your 40s is something to be embarrassed about. (On the other hand, it has also made being a drag queen hot instead of fringe.)
What this essay most woke in me was the desire to go out to a queer bar. After a dry spell of many years, we have two new and active and highly aesthetic queer bars, or rather a restaurant and lounge, with regular drag performances featuring drag kings and drag queens. What I would most like is to feel again that sense of potentiality, of another future life with more beauty and pleasure and joy.
{rf}
Muñoz was a queer punk! So was I, after a fashion, though I wasn't terribly good at it. Like the last chapter, this discussion activated my own queer nostalgia -- and therefore perhaps hope.
As I consume further chapters, I more and more admire Muñoz' ability to layer new nuance onto the concept of utopia as a mechanism for imagining queer futures. It isn't a gimmick: each of these essays genuinely illuminates another way to think with the idea.
I found this the most conceptually straightforward and emotionally evocative essay so far. Muñoz himself seems to be having a better time -- he's more confident, less hedged, here. His central thesis is that spaces for queer performance create the potential for envisioning more livable, joyful and expressive queer lives.
That makes the idea sound simple, but Muñoz captures, without directly naming it, the almost (or actual) ceremonial quality of such performances -- they way performance is an imaginary thing that makes itself real, where the real here is livable, joyful queer life.
In the introduction to "Stages," Muñoz returns to the idea that utopia reorganizes time, that it uses the past to open up the potential for the future (97). I find myself appreciating the glimpses of the past Muñoz offers me, remembering the pleasure of simply learning a little queer history -- or even of remembering that it exists.
Utopia is a Stage
Early in the essay, Muñoz makes a pun on the word “stage”. He speaks of the homophobic cliché that queerness is just a developmental stage, and uses this idea of the stage to open up the workings of utopia.
At first I thought, are you really going to be able to make this pun pay off? But his use is elegant. He pours the idea of a stage as a time of potential into the space of the stage as site of potential, of queer performance that can evoke the emotions of belonging and the vision of a fulfilled eroticism, identity, joy.
Muñoz usefully contrasts potential with possibility via Agamben (of whom I know nothing). He uses possibility to mean what the present currently allows for; potential is what it does not yet allow. Utopia and queer performance are evocations of potential.
The central action of this essay is a close reading of a photo series called The Chameleon Club by LA artist Kevin McCarty. The photos show empty but lit stages in queer and punk LA clubs. Muñoz's reading is personal, intimate, a bit idiosyncratic, steeped in queer history, and very pleasurable. Muñoz describes the work of art, then drops us through its surface to the stage itself, then down further to the fragments of queer history beneath this stage and, as Muñoz says, outside in the parking lot.
Each of the stages offers a different potentiality: one signals black queer culture's link to fashion; another connects migrant Mexican queers with the historical culture of a homeland; another creates a hipster punk space that make Muñoz both nostalgic for his queer punk youth and anxious about aging.
The empty stages enact utopia in their anticipation of queer performance, the revelation of an image or a song you can carry out in your heart as a sign for a way to be queer in the world, or even of a queer worlding.
Oh I remember that. Seeing that and being that.
Extraction, Amateurism, Aging Out
While making his point through these eloquent images, Muñoz touches on a series of ideas that could have formed essays in themselves.
Twice he references what we would now call concerns about extractive academic work (101, 111) -- feeling that he's receiving more than he's giving back. As a reader I felt a certain division in myself, too, between the queer and the academic.
As an academic reader, I wished he would define "the queer utopian performative" more specifically; but my queer body felt like it knew exactly what Muñoz was talking about. That exquisite combination of desire, hope, and awe as you see some deep wish of your own given flesh onstage -- maybe something never uttered, maybe even unknown as yours until it appears before you.
A second point that caught me was the idea of the “aesthetics of amateurism“ (106), which Muñoz suggests was celebrated in early queer performance cultures. I really feel this. I like drag, costume, cosplay to be imperfect because I am imperfect. I like it to be human and a little bit "regional."
One of the things that worries me about contemporary mass queer culture and its focus on mediation through television and social media is that queerness has become professionalized: you don't just discover or explore your queerness, you brand it.
And look, I am glad if queer couples on Instagram can make a living just by performing being queer couples. What a marvel. There’s this incredible flowering of creativity, but also this pressure to perform a certain kind of highly stylized queerness that involves a lot of money and labour and the adoption or at least performance of narrow beauty ideals.
Not everyone does this, of course: I follow the hashtag #AlternativeDrag in an attempt to keep an eye on other options. But even these looks are often highly stylized, and it clearly requires hours of work to look that "bad."
Which reminds me of a third thing Munoz touches on: aging out of queerness and punkness.
I don’t want to make too much of this; my knee-jerk feelings of notbelonging don’t require any particular external trigger to activate them, and I think I’d probably find quite a lot of middle-aged people if I ventured out to the local lounge. This is a town that skews senior, after all. But we have not really resolved this idea that being middle-aged is not beautiful or glamorous and therefore not queer, especially if queer is a brand of professionalized beauty or coupledom. On Drag Race, being in your 40s is something to be embarrassed about. (On the other hand, it has also made being a drag queen hot instead of fringe.)
What this essay most woke in me was the desire to go out to a queer bar. After a dry spell of many years, we have two new and active and highly aesthetic queer bars, or rather a restaurant and lounge, with regular drag performances featuring drag kings and drag queens. What I would most like is to feel again that sense of potentiality, of another future life with more beauty and pleasure and joy.
{rf}
no subject
Date: 2022-04-27 08:12 pm (UTC)I don't want to shade anyone for getting good at something -- that seems counterproductive, too -- but I want space for appreciating what people can manage with an hour and twenty bucks.
I'd also like to hear the story of your ironic thesis topic turned real.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-27 08:28 pm (UTC)And then a lightbulb went off and I thought that that was a really historically underexplored area for which there was this amazing archival resource!