Response

Gayatri Gopinath thoughtfully contextualizes the work in relation to my first book and the project of queer of color critique. While Cruising Utopia is not a book exclusively about queers of color, it is meant to be a performance of a queer of color critique that displaces static notions of subjectivity. This approach is in the spirit of performance studies’ emphasis on performativity (doing) over epistemology (meaning). Gopinath identifies this work as the experiment of attempting to think through the project of performing impossibility in the face of the pragmatic. More locally, my long-time colleague Barbara Browning thinks about the writing project in relation to the pedagogical and larger relational sphere that encompasses our shared post-disciplinary project. She succinctly describes one of the project’s main archiving impulse as the desire to write about loved objects. Ricardo Ortiz reads the work within the philosophical grain it attempts to traverse. He hears my attempt to open the text in “full song” and responds with his distinct theoretical eloquence. Lauren Berlant is also incredibly sensitive to my most accented points of argumentation. She hones in on the book’s subtitle. Berlant comprehends the essential formulation as an attempt to enact a feeling of futurity in the face of what some many of us experience as a “negating present.” The idea here is not to dismiss the present as a lost cause; indeed futurity is more than anything a figurative move calibrated to offer the reader an expanded sense of the present and the possible.

 

Finally, my dear friend Vaginal Davis’s drawing of Fred Herko graphically conveys what my attachment to the tragic and beautiful luminosity of the dancer and all the things his work promised in its felicity and infelicity. In Herko I found the power and potential of failure as transformative aesthetic and political force, and Davis’ commissioned piece joyously cuts to the chase of that particular observation.