Munoz Tuesday, Chapter 3: The Future is in the Present

Welcome to the first Muñoz post of the day! If you're looking for the post where we draw fanart of Muñoz and Blackbonnet in a big queer hug, that's the next one.

This is part three of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz. We're looking at Chapter Three, “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia.”

Note that this discussion of sexual avant-gardes includes mentions of sex work, AIDS, and police brutality.

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Remember how I mentioned Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water last week? This week’s chapter is all about it! I either had no idea that was the case or I forgot it was so.

(Somehow I no longer have my copy of Delany’s book. This makes me grumpy.)

( In fact, Munoz connects the memoir, gax sex clubs, stickering campaigns, and police brutality )

Anyway, on to the communal queer visions of Our Flag Means Death. Let's see what it can do for us.

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Queer Chat Time! Our Flag Means Queer Futurity, or Munoz + Waititi 4 Ever

This is the post where we take the Muñoz doll and the Our Flag Means Death dolls and make them kiss.

So I’ve been doing a (roughly) fortnightly series here reading José Esteban Muñoz’ book of queer theory Cruising Utopia (2009, 2019), chapter by chapter.

And then we all watched Our Flag Means Death.

It just seems right to try a mashup and see what happens.

Muñoz’s project in Cruising Utopia is to find and (re)claim visions of queer utopias in order to provide inspiration for livable queer futures outside of the stultifying constraints of capitalist heteronormativity.

Pirates are semi-famous for somewhat similar endeavours. Can Our Flag Means Death do some of that work (and play) with and for us? What visions can we use it to conjure?

We could boil down the central questions of the first three chapters of Cruising Utopia sort of like this:

• How can the utopian visions of past queer communities inform our visions of a future that's livable for all queer folks, not just the privileged few?
• What do the utopian visions of the past tell us about what we are missing and longing for right now?
• What practices already exist in our present communities that could provide inspirations for queer futures?

So some questions about Our Flag Means Death might be these:

• What images from the past (history, media) do you see Our Flag Means Death talking back to?
  • Ex. histories of piracy, readings of history, queerbaiting in mainstream series, Black Sails?
• What are you longing for that these pirates have? How does OFMD illuminate what is missing in the present?
• What about this show (or how it came to be) could be useful in thinking about how to make queer art / art about queers going forward?
• Alternatively, what do you know about queerness and community that Our Flag Means Death doesn’t yet know?

For example, I really like that you do not have to be cool to be part of this queer pirate crew. In fact, trying to be cool makes you miserable, fake, and impossible to live with (Izzy Hands, the French). Being a big ridiculous grimy mess is ideal on the Revenge. I appreciate this.

Anyway, the formal invitation is to think about Muñoz with OFMD, but feel free to party any way you like, provided it's respectful and consensual.

And if part of the way you appreciate things is to talk about what's flawed or disappointing about them, that is welcome, too.

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Previous posts on Munoz:

Munoz Chapter 1

Munoz Chapter 2

Munoz Chapter 3



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How Much More Munoz?

Poll #26823 How Much Munoz

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

What chapters from Cruising Utopia Should Frac Discuss?

View Answers

Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance
1 (11.1%)

Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, Radial Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity
4 (44.4%)

Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative
6 (66.7%)

Utopia's Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System
1 (11.1%)

Just Like Heaven: Queer Utopian Art and the Aesthetic Dimension
2 (22.2%)

A Jete Out the Window: Fred Herko's Incandescent Illumination
0 (0.0%)

After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity
3 (33.3%)

Race, Sex, and the Incommeasurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
2 (22.2%)

Hope in the Face of Heartbreak
6 (66.7%)

You know, having engaged with the first three chapters and feeling pretty good about how that went, I'm no longer feeling the completist urge to work through every single chapter of Cruising Utopia right this minute.

I feel like I understand the project of the book, that I enjoy what he's doing -- I like the way he layers his ideas -- and that I'm okay to widen the critical conversation and then come back to Muñoz.

sovay has mentioned Mark Fisher a couple of times as a strong companion read to Muñoz, and sabotabby, you've been rallying for a Fisher readthrough. Rather than work through every chapter of Muñoz now, I was thinking I might do one or two more chapters now, and then move over to Fisher for the summer. Get some variety into the reading.

In that spirit, and in full awareness that the total respondents to this poll may equal exactly Me, here is a poll about which remaining chapters / essays from Cruising Utopia to cover in this journal.