Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (review)

Cruising Utopia is a hopelessly hopeful manifesto, a performative and polemical provocation that seeks to counter the stultifying effects of the contemporary gay agenda and the disabling nihilism of contemporary queer theory through an affective reanimation of critical idealism. That there is something inherently queer about utopia and utopian thinkers is an idea José Muñoz introduced over a decade ago in his first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. In it, he writes, "[D]isidentificatory performances and readings require an active kernel of utopian possibility. Although utopianism has become the bad object of much contemporary political thinking, we nonetheless need to hold on to and even risk utopianism if we are to engage in the labor of making a queer world" (25). This highly influential text outlines the process by which racial and sexual minorities negotiate dominant cultures by working on, with, and against hegemonic structures. Cruising Utopia picks up where Disidentifications leaves off, celebrating artists who dare to imagine, and indeed stage, queer utopias in an increasingly homonormative political landscape dominated by neo-liberal gays and lesbians preoccupied with pragmatic issues such as marriage and military service.

This book leads readers on a joyride through queer, pop, and punk subcultures from the 1950s to the present. There is no specific destination. Cruising, a utopian performative par excellence, is a means without end. If Muñoz has a goal, it is to get lost - in a poem, an archive, a crowd, a chemical romance, a sexual encounter - which is to say in webs of relationality and queer sociality. Getting lost, the author maintains, is precisely how we find the horizon of potentiality that is utopia. In defining queerness as a temporal arrangement, one that is a being and a doing for the future, Muñoz challenges the ethics and efficacy of the anti-relational mode of queer theory, which emerged in the mid-1980s with Leo Bersani's work on psychoanalysis, AIDS, and gay male sexuality and which achieved its most extreme articulation in Lee Edelman's No Future. An act of reparative criticism, Cruising Utopia serves as a rejoinder to cynical progressives who, having lost faith in a politics of transformation, dismiss utopian imaginings as naïve, if not retrogressive.

Muñoz's book invites comparison to Jill Dolan's recent Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Both he and Dolan are queer scholars who work in the same academic discipline (performance studies), engage with the same critical lexicons (Marxism, feminism, sex and gender studies, critical race theory), and take as axiomatic the same two assumptions (that any transformational criticism must be oriented toward the future in order to stay attuned to desire and that the aesthetic provides the erotic charge and the affective force to inspire concrete utopias). Dolan associates utopia with passionate spectatorship, with the visceral and affective experience of sociality that the theatre engenders. Her interest is in live performance, which provides a forum for community engagement, rehearses alternative realities, and serves as a catalyst for social change. As participants in the erotic process of connection and commonality that is live theatre, spectators apprehend, if only for a moment, what a better world might feel like.

Muñoz offers a different take on the relationship between performance and utopia. His heuristic protocol strategically displaces the live object of performance and actively resists what he deems an over-investment in "the Hegelian shell game of absence and presence (appearance and disappearance) that dominates . . . performance theories" (100). Cruising Utopia distinguishes itself from Dolan's book, in part, by calling into question Peggy Phelan's oft-cited assertion that the ontology of performance is disappearance and that, in consequence, live art indexes a unique mode of representation without reproduction. A preoccupation with liveness and the presentness of performance, Muñoz suggests, ensures that we remain mired in the here and now...