![]() the ostensibly “fifties” (or is it “sixties”?) cast of Eros and Civilization - he continues to be crucial for queer utopians. I would note that Marcuse is only slightly less central, and for all the suggestion that Marcuse’s thought travels into a contemporary setting less smoothly than, say, Adorno’s or Benjamin’s, that some of his most influential work can seem difficult to disentangle from its moment - e.g. But the priority on archive over conceptual apparatus is also paradoxically consistent with the work of the book’s most obvious theoretical influence, Ernst Bloch, thinker par excellence of that capacity to see utopian wish, utopian longing, utopian affect in cultural narratives, objects, and fragments all around us. James, Raymond Williams, and Derrida make important appearances. Cruising Utopia has a tendency to draw on whatever interpretive model it finds useful at the moment. In one respect the book considers its own analytic method less important than its archive. The book centrally traces movements that interrupt “the coercive choreography of a here and now that is scored to naturalize and validate dominant cultural logics such as capitalism and heterosexuality” (162). Indeed much of the book places special emphasis on performance that disrupts that form of routinized, instrumental enactment, in both work and leisure, that Marcuse called the performance principle. Utopian performance is registered less fleetingly in the work of the late dancer Fred Herko, whose ornamental, stuttering, flamboyant gestures - in the context of postmodern dance norms that prioritized the representation of quotidian movement - interfere with what Muñoz calls “straight time,” with normalized rhythms and tempos. So in a brilliant, moving examination of Baraka’s The Toilet, Muñoz locates a redemptive utopian longing in the most ephemeral gestures of intimacy and affection between two young men who form what we can at best tentatively call an interracial male “couple,” gestures to be discovered in a play that most spectacularly portrays racialized and heterosexist violence. Though a range of aesthetic genres are on display, a primary focus throughout is the utopian significance of gesture, of physical movement in performance art broadly defined, from theater to drag to dance. Utopia makes rich, telling appearances here in lots of places, including the denaturalizing figuration of nature in Warhol the ironic commodity-love of Frank O’Hara the tender, redemptive homoeroticism of a play by Amiri Baraka Jack Smith’s doomed Atlantis and what we need to call, as Muñoz suggests, the totality thinking of Samuel Delany. What is evident most immediately is the sheer range of material under examination. But the lens itself is also made less familiar, turned to a potentially startling angle. The book reads these practices through a utopian, dialectical lens that will be familiar to readers of Mediations. In the course of an introduction, a conclusion, and the ten lush chapters in between, Cruising Utopia elaborates an archive of queer aesthetic practices from the present and the recent past - the book reaches back as far as the fifties - practices we can certainly characterize as socially “marginal,” but which the identitarian, privatizing, and spatial logics of neoliberalism have made more so. That potential is abundantly evident in José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, a book one could argue is most centrally about potentiality as such. Such exceptions are important: sustained engagements with the Marxist tradition within the domain of queer studies carry a potential to invigorate and extend Marxian analysis itself. Occasional, scattered exceptions have appeared in journals like Science and Society and Rethinking Marxism, and this review is another. ![]() To the extent that Marxist intellectuals remain unaware of the way in which capital has become one of queer studies’ fundamental interpretive horizons, and Marxism one of its increasingly apparent touchstones, this is surely because in order to be aware of this development, one would have to follow journals like GLQ, the special queer studies issues of journals like Social Text, and book series like Duke’s “Series Q” and NYU’s “Sexual Cultures.” 1 And so if what looks like a kind of ongoing intellectual convergence also seems one-sided, if it also throws into relief a simultaneous and persistent divergence, this is a divergence operating much more clearly, today, at the level of academic marketing than at the level of ideas. ![]() ![]() If you listen closely, you can hear queer studies bearing witness to Marxism’s continuing vitality and, indeed, contributing to it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |