LA and its scene helped my proto-queer self, the queer child in me, imagine a stage, both temporal and physical, where I could be myself or, more nearly, imagine a self that was in process, a self that has always been in the process of becoming. More than ten years on from its original publication, in the face of our own stagnant and negative present, the book remains a joyful and provocative read, not just for students of queer cultural history, but anyone keen to accept Muñoz’s invitation to collectively step out of ‘this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter’ (189). Some of my favourite words—"hope" and "imagine" and "possibility" and "becoming"—are strewn across these pages. so maybe i'm just having difficulty onboarding onto this project, but i respect the challenge of this project, of reading utopianism and hope into tragic or banal or just fucked-over lives. I don't know if I bought ~every~ argument about the pieces that signify utopian futurity but I literally cannot complain.

He reframes and responds to Edelman's pessimistic notion of reproductive futurism with an alternative queer critique based on an analysis of queer and trans of color artistic production. Crucially, he insists that within queer utopia, hope is in a dialectical tension with its opposite, disappointment; one cannot exist without the other. Opening with the audacious claim that ‘queerness is not yet here’, the first page of Cruising Utopia introduces the reader to the book’s central thesis – that queerness is a future-oriented, profoundly utopian mode of being and doing in the world. 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. I do favor Dissidentifications, but this book has some fantastic subject matter and contributions to the field.

José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) was Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at New York University. The writing style of the book is described as "cruising" its subject matter, moving quickly between a wide range of topics.

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. i don't know if this emotional reaction is enough to radicalize, but i can't say it doesn't do anything, right? Muñoz is a brilliant close reader and I wished the scope of this academic project allowed for more of that.so i liked the idea of queerness as reaching, but i just think there is something fatalistic also; at times this book seems to romanticize where you're reaching *from* (homophobic violence, poverty, drug addiction, etc). I often found myself flabbergasted by supposed proofs and connections Munoz declared, while having done next to no engagement or close-reading with the materials at hand. there is something to the juxtaposition of what is-now and what can be or is-but-isn't-the-whole-world-it-just-is-in-this-moment that is beautiful in a sad way. In non-academic venues, the Gay Times and Publishers Weekly praised the book's optimism about queer liberation and its insights into pop culture, while noting that the scholarly prose might put off casual readers.

This tenth anniversary edition — published six years after Muñoz’s death in 2013 — includes two unpublished essays that extend the scope of the original project.suvin is saying that scifi's unreal points both at a de-realized current reality and points towards how it could be different. The opening passage speaks to Muñoz’s investment in concrete utopias (following Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who acts as Cruising Utopia’s primary intellectual influence), which he understands as linked to specific historical liberation struggles and (real or potential) collectivity. this book makes a necessary and thoughtful contribution not just to queer studies, its most explicit disciplinary frame of reference, but also to interdisciplinary cultural studies more generally.