queer of color critique or cultural production, is instead the very condition—however blasted and painful it can sometimes feel—of our being-with others. Hope may not be commensurate to reality; our hopeful actions may not produce—may not ever produce once and for all—the hoped-for end. But this prizing of the incommensurate over the equivalent is a queer angle of vision, a queer ethics for living through the gaps between what we need and what we get, what we allow ourselves to want and what we can survive and transform in the now.
The value and the challenge of the incommensurable are the focus of another essay published in this expanded edition of Cruising Utopia, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” In this essay, too, we can see Muñoz clarifying arguments he first made in Cruising Utopia. The focus of this essay, which was first published in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, edited by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis, proleptically figures this foreword: Muñoz is writing about the collaboration between Fisher and Sedgwick. Fisher, like Muñoz, was one of Sedgwick’s graduate students (Fisher at Berkeley, Muñoz at Duke). When Fisher died in 1994, too young and “ahead of his time,” as the saying goes, Sedgwick took on the task of editing and publishing a collection of his short stories and poems, Gary in Your Pocket (1996). Muñoz is interested in the difficult reception of this text, and what it can tell us about “a kind of queer politics of the incommensurable”—an incommensurability characterized by differential power dynamics (advisor and student), race (Fisher’s blackness and Sedgwick’s whiteness), and gender. But he is equally referring to Fisher’s and Sedgwick’s collaboration and a communism begun in life, continued after the death of one of them, living on in their readers—known, anticipated, never imagined—after the death of all.
This mode of communism was anticipatory, but also material. Muñoz understood it as manifest, or performed, within the lived experiences of queers of color and in the brown commons. In “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” he illustrates this mode of communism (as he did in Cruising Utopia) through stories about relationships between incommensurably different types of beings (here, Sedgwick and Fisher) as well as the aesthetic example (Fisher’s short story “Arabesque”). This commons was an experience of, in Muñoz’s words, “a dynamic that partially transpires under the sign of ‘queer of color,’ that is routinely misread by the lens of a politics of equivalence, but that becomes newly accessible as a sharing (out) of a nonequivalent, incommensurable, and incalculable sense of queerness.” This theorization of the queer of color commons anticipates the turn in his final works toward describing a brown commons. There, he was attending to the way certain racialized people (primarily Latinx, but not solely) are made to be brown through “global and local forces [that] constantly attempt to degrade their value and diminish their verve. But they are also brown insofar as they smolder with a life and persistence; they are brown because brown is a common color shared by a commons that is of and for the multitude.”14 This brown commons, like the mode of queer of color communism depicted in the essay on Sedgwick and Fisher, is “an example of collectivity with and through the incommensurable.”
As editors, we find ourselves incommensurate to the task of completing his work, even as we recognize that this form of adjacency was precisely what he sought to theorize in some of his very last writings on the concept of being singular plural. Some interpret this concept as a pretty but vague synonym for something like “community,” but community was a normative, even hegemonic term, of which Muñoz remained consistently skeptical. More than any actually existing collectivity in the here and now, his reconsideration of the ethics of Sedgwick’s being with Fisher leads to a proposal that we think of queer relationality as incommensurate with itself. His work, and our work on his work, point us to a spacing out in time—futures, pasts, and presents—in which we may not yet be queer, but can nonetheless orient ourselves to queerness’s horizon.
CRUISING UTOPIA
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK HAS been in the works for over ten years. I cannot hope to properly acknowledge all the people who have been supportive of the writing and research that went into these pages. I have presented the writing that became these chapters at seemingly countless universities, museums, performance spaces, and conferences. At these various institutions many audiences listened to this work and engaged in beneficial ways. Queer friendship has proven to be the condition of possibility for imagining what queerness can and should mean. The actual relational circuits I am lucky enough to find myself belonging to whet my desire for future collectivity.
I have had the gift of extraordinary research assistance. Joshua Chambers-Letson has invested so much of his own energy and intelligence in this book. Sujay Pandit has been indispensable in my completing this project. The manuscript benefited from the attention of Julia Steinmetz and Chelsea Adewunmi. So many excellent students have proven to be such great interlocutors for this book as it emerged. This list will be woefully incomplete: Hypatia Vourloumis, Jeanne Vacarro, Frank Leon Roberts, Sandra Ruiz, Katie Brewer-Ball, Eser Selen, Tina Majkowski, Karen Jaime, Ellen Cleghorne, Beth Stinson, Alex Pittman, Lydia Brawner, Roy Peréz, Albert Laguna, Andre Carrington, Leticia Alvardo, Anna Fischer, Jonathan Mullins, Ronak Kapadia, Stephanie Weiss, and Justin Leroy. One of the greatest rewards in teaching is when your former students become your colleagues and friends: there are no better examples of this in my life than Christine Balance, Ricardo Montez, and Alexandra Vazquez. Also in that category is Shane Vogel, who also gave me great feedback on this volume. I teach in a relatively small department that I have chaired for the past few years, and I am grateful for the climate of mutual support and respect achieved in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Colleagues like Barbara Browning, Karen Shimakawa, Richard Schechner, André Lepecki, Diana Taylor, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, Allen Weiss, Anna Deavere Smith, Deborah Kapchan, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini make institutional life rewarding. Ann has been a coeditor of the series this book appears in, and I could never have anticipated enjoying such a fun and harmonious working relationship. I cannot begin to express properly my gratitude to the staff at Performance Studies who enable my work as a chair, a faculty member, and a scholar. Thank you Noel Rodriguez, Patty Jang, and Laura Elena Fortes for your extreme competence and good humor. Many friends outside of Performance Studies at NYU need to be thanked for their contributions to the texture of my life and thinking. The first to be mentioned is Lisa Duggan, who has been a staunch ally, loving friend, and brilliant interlocutor. Other friends include Anna McCarthy, Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Gayatri Gopinath, Ana Dopico, Phillip Brian Harper, and Carolyn Dinshaw.
The three scholars who have read this book for the press in different drafts offered me welcomed engagement. Elizabeth Freeman and I met each other as precocious graduate students on the conference circuit, and I see in her work some of the best thinking of my second-generation queer theory cohort. Judith Halberstam has simply been an ideal colleague and reader. She is also an amazing friend. I feel privileged to have the brilliant Fred Moten as a friend, comrade, and interlocutor. My editor, Eric Zinner, read this book with great care and skill. Ciara McLaughlin and Emily Park have been also been extremely helpful. A grant from the Tisch Dean’s Faculty Development Award has helped me include color images in this book. I am especially grateful to Marvin Taylor and Ann Butler at the Fales Library, New York University.
John Andrews showed up in the middle of this writing project. He has responded to my work with equal parts enthusiasm and skepticism. He has been a perfect reader and the very best company I could have asked for. My other great companions during the writing of this book have been my princess bulldogs. The late great Lady Bully showed me the grandeur of companion-species utopias, and Dulce Maria is herself the sturdy embodiment of the good life. My family are amazingly supportive. My brother Alex’s support is very touching. My cousin Albert strolled into my everyday life quite unexpectedly and has become a lovely presence, helping me watch the Northern Front. Sam Green is my kindred utopian spirit; his work and our bond inspire me. I am fortunate to know Jennifer Doyle, who has responded
