Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is a landmark text in Queer Theory and queer studies by José Esteban Muñoz, published by NYU Press. It argues that queerness is not a fixed identity or a present condition. It’s a horizon. Something not yet here.
The central argument
Queerness is futurity. Muñoz pushes back against the political pragmatism of “the here and now,” like the idea that we should focus only on what’s achievable, what’s already visible, what’s already legible. For Muñoz, that’s a trap.
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”
The “then and there” of the title is the space of queer imagination. A backward-looking into lost or suppressed histories, and forward-looking toward futures that haven’t been built yet.
Connections
- Deep conversation with Time Binds - Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories — both challenge chrononormativity and linear time
- Connects to hauntology: queer pasts that haunt and animate the present
- Grounds a lot of Queer Theory’s most generative threads, affect, performance, futurity
- The “concrete utopia” idea resonates with Time is not linear and the refusal of settled presents