Cruising Utopia

To commemorate José Esteban Muñoz’s brilliant work following his untimely death on December 3, 2013, and to remind readers of the vibrant discussions he helped catalyze, we’ve reposted this special dossier on Cruising Utopia—alongside remembrances of Muñoz by two colleagues and fellow Social Text collective members, Jack Halberstam and Ann Pellegrini. In the dossier below, originally published in 2010, Lauren Berlant, Barbara Browning, Gayatri Gopinath, and Ricardo Ortiz offer critical appreciations of José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, followed by Muñoz’s response to his respondents. Performance art legend Vaginal Davis provides the cover image with an original illustration inspired by Cruising Utopia.

José Esteban Muñoz – 1967-2013

jack halberstam

Jack Halberstam commemorates the life, work, and friendship of José Esteban Muñoz on Bully Bloggers, a queer blog site featuring the collaborations of Muñoz, Halberstam, Lisa Duggan, and Tavia Nyong’o.

For José

Ann Pellegrini

  Writing for the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Ann Pellegrini offers the following words on the passing of brilliant and beloved colleague and friend, José Esteban Muñoz.

The Aesthetic Utopian

lauren berlant

Let’s think about the “then and there” in the subtitle of Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, for these deictics are insistently aligned with the now-central question of how to induce utopian futures from within a negating present. The answer of course is that the aesthetic provides the affective ballast and concrete means to induce exuberant futures.

Response

José Esteban Muñoz

These responses to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity situate the project in extremely valuable and useful ways. These readers are all ideal for me: thus indicating my sense of ideality as incalculable and expansive. In each … Continue reading “Response”