futures.
Alexandra T. Vazquez, Muñoz’s student, writes that “our teachers leave behind care instructions for any and all kinds of arrivals and departures.”3 The students of Cruising Utopia (past, present, and future) might thus approach the text as an instruction manual for how to have hope both before and after the death of the teacher. To read the text in the time after Muñoz’s death is to be reminded, once more, that queer of color life occurs within this out-of-joint temporality such that queer of color death is not a negating after to Cruising Utopia. Rather, the negation that is queer death presupposes the text’s entire critical enterprise (and was crucial to the opening of his first book, Disidentifications, with its extended critical account of racial melancholia).4 To approach the text from this vantage is to be confronted with the question that animates Muñoz’s address: How are we to have hope while living simultaneously in the before and after of queer heartbreak? The answer, far from veering away from the discourse of negation, requires a counter-intuitive turn toward the negative. For utopia, though it bears many positive qualities, also bears negation, as originating from the Greek for “no place” or “not place.” Utopia is not the antithesis of negation in this sense, so much as it is a critical means of working with and through negation. Queer utopia is the impossible performance of the negation of the negation.
Since its publication ten years ago, Cruising Utopia has had a wide impact across and beyond a range of academic fields. Appearing at the height of the controversy regarding the anti-relational thesis in queer studies, the book invited the field to turn the page on a somewhat stalled debate by rearticulating the critical negativity associated with anti-relationality in a new way. Without acceding to the assimilationist vision of queer futures that underpinned homonormativity, it performed a negative dialectic that nevertheless expressed a politics of hope: “Here the negative becomes the resource for a certain mode of queer utopianism.”5 The audacious opening move of the book, to declare that we are “not yet” queer, drew on the critical utopianism of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch as much as it was in dialogue with a still-expanding literature on queer temporality, whose interlocutors included Sedgwick, Carolyn Dinshaw, Jack Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman.6
Throughout Cruising Utopia, Muñoz presumes and builds upon the queer of color critique pioneered in his first book, Disidentifications. And, as with Disidentifications, a key reason for Cruising Utopia’s wide influence has been its astounding archive. The book moves promiscuously and enthusiastically across its sources in order to braid together the “no-longer-conscious” of queer world-making with the “not-yet-here” of critical utopianism. No doubt, the richly described worlds of the text stand in some tension with the tradition of negative utopianism he draws upon. For Bloch, and especially his interlocutor Adorno, utopian thought is first and foremost a negation; Bloch even characterizes the hope that inspirits utopian thinking as “the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible.”7 It is through drawing out this almost apophatic concept of hope and of utopia that Muñoz is able ingeniously to reframe queer cruising. As one alert reviewer of the first edition noticed, cruising is a way of moving with “no specific destination”; the ultimate goal is “to get lost [ … ] in webs of relationality and queer sociality.”8 Cruising, that is to say, is as much the method of the book as is critical utopianism.
After Muñoz’s death, his friend and colleague Barbara Browning issued a call for people to inscribe the following passage from the book’s opening paragraph in a paradigmatic location of queer cruising, the bathroom stall: “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 word, and ultimately new worlds.”9 People sporadically performed the act in bathrooms or other public spaces (including a bathroom in the department where Muñoz taught), sometimes posting a photo of the transgression (or of the encounter with its written trace) to social media. It circulated in other ways as well: a group of queer activists designed and distributed stickers with the passage printed across Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (an installation of balloons discussed in the book’s eighth chapter). And in a statement to the Windy City Times discussing her gender transition, the film director Lilly Wachowski wrote: “I have a quote in my office … by José Muñoz given to me by a good friend. I stare at it in contemplation sometimes trying to decipher its meaning but the last sentence resonates: ‘Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.’”10
The popularity and circulation of this sentiment—which pits futurity against the present—is reflective of the general reception of Cruising Utopia since its publication, which draws upon and emphasizes the text’s positive elaborations on queerness, hope, and futurity by positioning them against the (negating) poverty of the present. As Muñoz insists throughout the book, “The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations.”11 But along these very lines, an overemphasis on futurity, a flat rejection of the present, and an over-romanticization of the past risk eliding Muñoz’s nuanced insistence on the political (if not revolutionary) dimension of a queer utopian imaginary as a negative dialectic.
Muñoz warned us against disappearing wholly into futurity since “one cannot afford” to simply “turn away from the present.” The present demands our ethical consideration and the task at hand is not to refuse the present altogether, but rather to maneuver from the present’s vantage point at the crossroads of life that is lived after catastrophe (as may be the case with queer, black, and brown life) and simultaneously before it. The utopian impulse yields the idealist power of the utopian imaginary to offer a negative critique of the present and past (framing the insufficiencies of both) while opening up different avenues through which we might construct alternative possibilities for queerness’s future beyond the limited options that are presently before us. That we are standing before the possibility, even likelihood, of hope’s disappointment does not so much negate the principle of hope as confirm it.
Throughout Cruising Utopia, Muñoz insists that “hope and disappointment operate within a dialectical tension in this notion of queer utopia.”12 The utopian imaginary is understood to be an act of failure in the face of a stultifying regime of pragmatism and normativity: “Utopia’s rejection of pragmatism is often associated with failure. And … utopianism represents a failure to be normal.”13 Queerness, blackness, brownness, minoritarian becoming, and the utopian imaginary thus resonate with each other as they all cohere around a certain “failure to be normal,” unwilling or unable to submit to the pragmatic dictates of majoritarian being. This failure, which is situated both after and before defeat does not counter-intuitively confirm the totality of defeat, however, so much as it opens up queer avenues for other potentials to flicker in (and out) of being.
Bloch described hope’s failure as the ontological grounds on which hope is defined: “It too can be, and will be, disappointed; indeed, it must be so, as a matter of honor, or else it would not be hope.” 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
