Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz

       Foreword

       Before and After

      By Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, 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 …

      —Theodor Adorno, in conversation with Ernst Bloch¹

      TO THINK, WRITE, dream, and live in the wake of heartbreak: this is the challenge posed by “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak,” the short essay that is published for the first time in this new edition of Cruising Utopia. It is also the charge we are faced with here: how to think and write after José Muñoz—and also for him—in the painful, temporally out of joint forever “after” of this foreword.

      “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak” was written to be heard and was given as a talk, in September 2013, at the University of Toronto to celebrate the launch of the Women & Gender Studies Institute’s PhD Program. The manuscript bears the traces of the live occasion; it also carries the literal traces of the one who wrote and spoke its words aloud. “Hope’s biggest obstacle is failure,” the manuscript begins, its opening words neatly typed and printed. But, midway through the opening paragraph, the typeface is interrupted by hand-writing. The pivot by hand, to handed-ness, happens at a critical juncture where Muñoz is reminding his audience of a distinction made by Ernst Bloch (key interlocutor of Cruising Utopia), between abstract and concrete or educated hope:

      In part we must take on a kind of abstract hope [that] is not much more than merely wishing and instead we need to participate in a more concrete hope, what Ernst Bloch would call an educated hope, the kind that is grounded and consequential, a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of this hoping.

      The words “this hoping” are crossed out. The revised sentence reads “… a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of obstacles that so often feel insurmountable.” So, if the original sentence repeated the word “hoping,” the revised one doubles down on the “obstacles.” On the manuscript, we can glimpse the handwritten word “our,” also crossed out, before he settles on the word “obstacles.” Hope falters, gives way to more obstacles.

      “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak” is revisiting and also expanding on arguments made in Cruising Utopia. At this early moment in the talk, it’s as if Muñoz needs to stress the “obstacles” as a wedge against overly hopeful or romanticizing readings of Cruising Utopia. In our conversations with our late friend and comrade, he occasionally expressed disappointment that his defense of utopia was enthusiastically read by some as uncritical optimism. His work testifies to the contrary. Hope is work; we are disappointed; what’s more, we repeatedly disappoint each other. But the crossing out of “this hoping” is neither the cancellation of grounds for hope, nor a discharge of the responsibility to work to change present reality. It is rather a call to describe the obstacle without being undone by that very effort.

      A sentence later, still in the hand-written addition, there is another crossing out; obstacle is not a hard stop, it is a challenge: “… I have chosen to focus on two texts, one scholarly [Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons] and one cultural [Anna Margarita Albelo’s film Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf?], that offer snapshots at of some of the obstacle challenge[s] we need to not only survive but surpass to achieve hope in the face of an often heart breaking reality.” The first page of the short manuscript ends with these hand-written words: “in the face of an often heart breaking reality.” We who survive are left to face this challenge without him. We are also charged by him to do so.

      A common sight during his lifetime: Before giving a paper, he’s sitting on a panel, hunched over, crunching on ice, and listening intently to the person speaking. Multi-tasking, he simultaneously flips through the pages he’s set on the table in front of him, and takes his pen and scribbles something across the page: a revision in the text. Back to listening, pulling his right foot across his left knee, a glance out over the room to see who is there, before glancing down at another page and posing the pen for another revision.

      One can only imagine what revisions he might have made for this edition of Cruising Utopia. The challenge we faced in writing this foreword is that a foreword or introduction assumes an anterior stance, with the authors and readers positioned before the text. But as we stand in the author’s stead, introducing the text by meditating on revisions that Muñoz cannot make, we do so because we introduce him in the time after his death.

      If we have never been queer, as Muñoz famously asserts throughout the text, then there is a degree to which we are always standing before queer loss. This is the nature of queer grief. It is informed by life lived after the historical accumulation of queer deaths: a collection of losses that have taught us to know (because our survival depends upon this knowledge) that we are also standing before losses that have yet to come.

      Queer grief is characterized by the simultaneity of grieving those we have loved and lost, alongside mourning for a queerness and the forms of queer life that we have not yet known and are still yet to lose. Lingering on Muñoz’s handwritten notes and imagining the types of revisions he might have made is a way of inhabiting the incommensurable simultaneity of before and after. It is to perform within the reparative matrix of queer temporality proposed by Muñoz’s teacher, Eve Sedgwick: “Because the [reparative] reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”² Throughout Cruising Utopia, Muñoz mines the past for glimmers of utopian potential that are rich with the possibility of a past that “could have happened differently from the way that it actually did.” He invites us to put these glimmers to work, both as we cast a negative or critical picture of

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