The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.
Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.
In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures, 13)

Arts & Photography

Muñoz, José Esteban

History & Criticism

NYU Press

There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. Jose Esteban Munoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture -- not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Munoz calls this process "disidentification, " and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.
Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. Whether examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, or television, Munoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.
Munoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color -- in Carmelita Tropicana's "Camp/Choteo" style politics, Marga Gomez's performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis's "Terrorist Drag, " Isaac Julien's critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat's disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's performances of "disidentity, " and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial a person environment of the MTV serial The Real World.

Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Volume 2) (Cultural Studies of the Americas)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Univ. of Minnesota Press

There is more to identity than identifying with one’s culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Muñoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.Muñoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color—in Carmelita Tropicana’s “Camp/Choteo” style politics, Marga Gomez’s performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis’s “Terrorist Drag,” Isaac Julien’s critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s performances of “disidentity,” and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serialThe Real World.

Disidentifications: Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics (Volume 2) (Cultural Studies of the Americas)

This special double issue of Social Text reassesses the political utility of the term queer. The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity—as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and an embattled legal category—demands a renewal of queer studies that also considers the global crises of the late twentieth century. These crises, which are shaping national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, include the ascendance and triumph of neoliberalism; the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; and the return to “moral values” and “family values” as deterrents to political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. 
In sixteen timely essays, the contributors map out an urgent intellectual and political terrain for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, family, and kinship. Collectively, these essays examine the limits of queer epistemology, the potentials of queer diasporas, and the emergence of queer liberalism. They rethink queer critique in relation to the war on terrorism and the escalation of U.S. imperialism; the devolution of civil rights and the rise of the prison-industrial complex; the continued dismantling of the welfare state; the recoding of freedom in terms of secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the politics of citizenship, migration, and asylum in a putatively postracial and postidentity age. Contributors. Michael Cobb, David L. Eng, Roderick A. Ferguson, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam, Janet R. Jakobsen, Joon Oluchi Lee, Martin F. Manalansan IV, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Hiram Perez, Jasbir K. Puar, Chandan Reddy, Teemu Ruskola, Nayan Shah, Karen Tongson, Amy Villarejo

Social Text 84-85: What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?

Literature & Fiction

HALBERSTAM, JACK

Eng, David L.

Duke University Press Books

The Sense of Brown (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Essays & Correspondence

The Sense of Brown&nbsp;is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons--a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures, 50)

A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work―an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination. On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates the lasting impact that Cruising Utopia has had on the decade of queer of color critique that followed and introduces a new generation of readers to a future not yet here.

Utopia Queer

Caja negra

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Muñoz, José Esteban. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Muñoz, José Esteban

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Muñoz, José Esteban. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures, 13)

Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Volume 2) (Cultural Studies of the Americas)

Disidentifications: Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics (Volume 2) (Cultural Studies of the Americas)

Social Text 84-85: What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?

The Sense of Brown (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

The Sense of Brown (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures, 50)

Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures, 50)

Utopia Queer