#cruising utopia

[memoriesofthingspast]

“a forward-dawning futurity;” ~

“we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” ~ josè esteban muñoz;”cruising utopia” [2009]✨

[1000rh]

Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. Historically, evidence of queerness has been used to penalize and discipline queer desires, connections, and acts. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present, who will labour to invalidate the historical fact of queer lives—present, past, and future. Queerness is rarely complemented by evidence, or at least by traditional understandings of the term.

– José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009)

[kimoipilled]

[oleanderblooms]

from a conversation that i was having with a friend a few days ago after i made them watch 4 eps of hotd in a row

[mermaid-cake-pop]

...That hope will be disappointed, and fail us, is not its negation but its condition of possibility. When the acute failures and dangers of the present (of "normal", "straight", "white", or "capitalist" time) threaten us, we turn to the utopian imaginary in order to activate queer and minoritarian ways of being in the world and being-together. We do so to survive the shattering experience of living within an impossible present, while charting the course for a new and different future. The frequent and even necessary disappointment of hope is due to an incommensurability: things do not line up; loved objects (whether persons, theories, or social movements) let us down. Theories about identities and politics frequently miss actually existing subjects in their complexity, messiness, and plurality. To paraphrase Muñoz's powerful concluding paragraph in "Hope in the Face of Heartbreak," however, this missed encounter, this incommensurability, far from disqualifying queer of color critique or cultural production, is instead the very condition--however blasted and painful it can sometimes feel--of our being-with others. Hope may not be commensurate to reality; our hopeful actions may not produce--may not ever produce once and for all--the hoped-for end. But this prizing of the incommensurate over the equivalent is a queer angle of vision, a queer ethics for living through the gaps between what we need and what we get, what we allow ourselves to want and what we can survive and transform in the now.

--Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong'o, and Anne Pellegrini

from "Before and After", the forward to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz (xiv-xv)

[ladespeinada]

Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity · José Esteban Muñoz

[produitslaitiers]

"Landscape could be the discarded shirts of the artist himself or of a friend or of an acquaintance or perhaps of a lover. But the piece is called Landscape and not Portrait, and thus one needs to consider that these shards of a life represented through fabric also have a spatial connotation. The painting represents a life as a landscape. The life of a tree is deciphered through an examination of the rings in a trunk or stump that becomes part of a landscape. Men’s shirts touch other men’s shirts, setting a tonality that is not only about the landscape of a person’s inner life but also about the various intimacies connoted by the collision of one’s wardrobe touching another’s apparel."

José Esteban Muñoz on Jim Hodges's Landscape (1998) in Cruising Utopia (2009)

[protectyouropacities]

“We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. Queerness is illegible and therefore lost in relation to the mind’s mapping of space.”

— José Esteban Muñoz, “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity”