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

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations

Phillip Brian Harper

In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies

Mandy Merck

Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

Jos A. Quiroga

Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel Gregory Forter

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg

The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

Paul Morrison

The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater

Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain

Christina Crosby

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Amber Jamilla Musser

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyongo

Queer Times, Black Futures

Kara Keeling

Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Melissa E. Sanchez

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

Jos Esteban Muoz

With two additional essays by the author and a new foreword by

Joshua Chambers-Letson,

Tavia Nyongo, and Ann Pellegrini

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

2009 by New York University

Foreword and two additional essays 2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

For Freddy, Fucking Again, poem by Diane di Prima, from Freddie Poems (Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1974). Courtesy of the author.

Having a Coke with You, from The Collected Poems of Frank OHara, by Frank OHara, edited by Donald Allen. Copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of The Estate of Frank OHara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

A photograph, Collected Poems, by James Schuyler. Copyright 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

One Art, from The Complete Poems, 19271979, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Muoz, Jos Esteban, author.

Title: Cruising utopia : the then and there of queer futurity / Jose Esteban Munoz; with new essays and a foreword by Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyongo, and Ann Pellegrini.

Description: 10th Anniversary Edition. | New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Sexual cultures | Revised edition of the authors Cruising utopia, c2009. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018046341| ISBN 9781479813780 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479874569 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479868780 (eISBN) | ISBN 9781479896226 (eISBN)

Subjects: LCSH: Queer theory. | Utopias. | Homosexuality and art. | Performance art. Classification: LCC HQ76.25 .M86 2019 | DDC 306.7601dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046341

By Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyongo, and Ann Pellegrini

One may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner. Every attempt to describe or portray utopia in a simple way, i.e., it will be like this, would be an attempt to avoid the antinomy of death and to speak about the elimination of death as if death did not exist. That is perhaps the most profound reason, the metaphysical reason, why one can actually talk about utopia only in a negative way...