Chambers-Letson, Nyong’o and Pelligrini argue that ‘queerness, blackness, brownness, minoritarian becoming, and the utopian imaginary […] all cohere around a certain “failure to be normal”’ (xiv). José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity breathed new life into North American queer studies when first published in 2009, rejecting the stagnant present in arguing for queerness as a future-oriented, profoundly utopian mode of being and doing in the world. It's a radical term that defies the conservative "normalizing" of those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and aims for something BIGGER and BETTER. 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. 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.

that really helped me think about camp, and care about the concept of camp, in a way i hadn't before. I do favor Dissidentifications, but this book has some fantastic subject matter and contributions to the field. Muñoz allows his movement through the archive to be directed by something more relational and associative than mere chronology.As he moves continually between one historical moment and the present, Muñoz gleefully undermines the linear, sequential logic of traditional cultural history. sure, kids and heteronormative reproduction are a kind of violence, munoz admits, but not one that elides or obfuscates the ability of queer theory and queer lives to create something fleshy, significant, and other than the pessimistic or scolding. In No Future, Edelman argues that if queer people have been positioned in opposition to the ‘reproductive futurity’ of heterosexuality, they should abandon the future altogether in favour of a more nihilistic, radical engagement with the present. As a work of theory, Cruising Utopia is dense, and its array of artistic and theoretical sources could be off-putting for the unfamiliar reader.

Likewise, Muñoz rejects anti-relationality’s romanticisation of the negative; for him, queerness is about collectively imagining a future that moves beyond the negative present. 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. 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. The bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between: this is the fifth volume of the Heartstopper series.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. Me gustó mucho el capítulo 4, en el que narra como el primer comentario homófobo que recibió a través de su primo mayor cuando tenía 6 años le hizo obsesionarse con su gestualidad, hasta el punto de masculinizarla. 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. Muñoz offers a radical political vision and critique, but does not fall into the trap of sheer negativity present in so much criticism.

But after reading Muñoz, it's easy to think that these warnings are just more conservatism that keeps us from making real progress. 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. 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. No obstante, me alegró leer que cuando se encuentra con sus amigos los maricones, disfruta de ser el más camp. He insists that even in eras of failure and tragedy for the movement, by reflecting on utopian movements of the past and looking towards the future, we can retain hope of our queer utopia arriving.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. Hermoso pensar en 'lo queer' como una utopía necesaria al tiempo que se problematiza a 'lo utópico'. The book was widely praised by scholars and influential in beginning new conversations in queer theory.