Anjali Arondekar

Review of Cruising Utopia by José Munoz. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

This is obviously not a review. After all, there is little need to rehearse the scope and impact of José Munoz’s pathbreaking Cruising Utopia. It is a text that endures, seduces, politicizes, inviting us into messy and magical worlds of queer peril and possibility. A staple of any intellectual debate on race and sexuality, the book has ascended to almost saintly stature on any queer syllabus, an honor that I am sure would have made José queasy! In its 10th anniversary edition, we are gifted with two additional essays that amplify José’s commitment to a brown-commons, to queer of color critique, to radical hope “in the face of heartbreak.” The two new essays bring us back to José’s voice, its refusal of a dogged queer pragmatism, its summoning of bolder, playful and more audacious futures, not yet here. And then there’s La Rona. She’s here, she travels, and she’s got our number. Cruising Utopia may be our only way out.

When I started rereading José’s book in preparation for these meditations, I was struck by how it felt somehow new, crisp and energizing, even though I had read and taught the text many times before. Or perhaps the pandemic had colored my critique, made me hanker for queer play, queer possibilities and the directed imprecision of José’s prose. Come away with me, the book seemed to say (again), activate that critical and collective longing for a utopic function, preach that damned queer futurity despite or because of our historical struggles. Drawing from Ernest Bloch’s temporal dialectic (1995), the book embraces the movement between the “no-longer-conscious” and the “not yet-here” to carve out a history of “doing” that is always on the horizon, exhorting us to refuse stultifying hierarchies, in search of queer collectivities. “Take Ecstasy with Me,” the book’s final chapter, for example, fittingly calls for a queer intoxication, a sort of temporal excess, that melds the exigencies of the here, with the politics of a future delirium.

Even as I could feel myself absorbed by the exuberant jumps of José’s analysis, his deft tracking of utopian traces within aesthetic performances across fields of writing, visual/ conceptual art, film, dance, nightlife, theater, public sex and political protest, I could equally sense my old discomforts with the text resurfacing, albeit in a slightly different tenor. José’s writing, its uniquely associative style of analysis, with its leaps between the author’s life and the historical sites he examined, are a hallmark of the book’s illuminations on the potentialities of a queer futurity. And yet, I wondered now, as I did then, should, or more precisely, could such a utopian hermeneutics become a critical vernacular, outside the confines of a US-based American studies? After all, queer utopias (fantasmatic, performative, material) are still provisional geographies, imaginaries spaced within provincialisms of difference. As someone who works at the intersection of critical area studies (read South Asia) and sexuality studies (read sex of the non-West), I am overly attentive to epistemological translations and transactions, and the fervor with which geopolitics is still summoned (yes, yes, there have been many years of critique, yet . . .) to enliven the globalizing arc of a US-based queer studies. Reproductive futurism, as I have argued elsewhere, is “always geopolitical futurism, queer utopia is equally queer geography, where “other worlds” (to use a Spivakian concept-metaphor here) are continually re-produced as contexts, exemplars, at best, interruptions in a journey that inevitably and necessarily shepherds us back into the diversified holdings of a queer American studies project.”1 If, as José reminds us, in his critique of Lee Edelman’s No Future Here, the difference of sexuality speaks gender, race, class and more (jettison that white child please), it is as much a story of geopolitical difference. To put it more bluntly, could José’s utopic turn to queer futurity also enable a queer geopolitics? Or do the book’s ambition stay cloistered within the imaginaries of US empire, despite its performance of a radical and racialized queer politics? What would a utopian analysis have to embrace within it, if it were not looking back and forth (however tenuously) to the US as epistemic exemplar? How would José’s summoning of a utopia to-come challenge its own spatialized temporality and homed futurities within the US? I ask these questions less to speak to the limits of the text than to other worlds of possibility it should and could travel.

Other worlds, as Gayatri Spivak reminded us all those years ago, still function as evidentiary fodder for taxes, laws, war and the persistent seduction of restorative action, not as texts of risky reading, of epistemological liveness, or even (pace Heidegger) queer worlding.2 If the last decade of scholarship is an indicator of the focus on other worlds, one has to only look at the efflorescence of queer scholarship on the worlding of literature, history, politics and so on. In each instance, the turn to geopolitics (often described as global south, subaltern) allows for a generative and on-going engagement with being-in-the world, as it were, even as it continues to build from concepts spawned by colonial histories and geographies. Queerness, it appears, is the refurbished and extractive mission civilisatrice, a baggy monster of homo-capitalism, feminist carceral politics, whiteness and a merry gang of gay and trans internationals. Could the performative hermeneutics of José’s cruising utopia dodge this extractive queerness? And could an engagement with geopolitics forge a politics that carve a more robust vision of dissent?

To address these queries and more, I want to reflect on my recent experiences as co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of a 2016 special issue of GLQ on the entanglements of geopolitics and queer studies.3 Rather than inclusivity or coverage—the seductions that the “worlding” form so often pulls into shape as it incites presence—the issue culled the provocations of dispersal/of the question of what it means to think sex with geopolitics. Our initial call for essays garnered hefty responses, pages filled with depictions of queers in other worlds, vivid exemplars of unnatural natives, curiously indifferent to the conceptual frameworks of the areas and/or regions that produced them. It was as if no theorizations of sexuality, gender, subjectivity existed outside of the purview of a US-based queer studies, we were all just fixtures in an already queer world. In many of the submissions we received, geopolitics was a way of telling a familiar story, of herding queers into the backroom of a well-lit waiting room of history. It is also worth noting here that we received no submissions from scholars who practiced “queer of color” critique, or embraced José’s utopic formulations; the references to area studies in our call for papers perhaps serving as a deterrent to such engagements? Cruising utopia remained cloistered within the geopolitics of the West, despite its refusals of the very moorings of that epistemic marker. That absence in itself was a timely provocation for many of the issues we wished to explore. For example, why did a topic such as area studies generate such alarm, curiosity, even consternation? As we wrote in our introduction to the special issue, if area studies was a moribund form, then surely so was empire (US and otherwise), both historical by-products of specific modes of colonial power and knowledge.

To be clear here, as editors, we were not in search of lavish native epistemologies, indigenous (im)purities, or readings of a radical politics that would eschew the West for the Rest. Rather we were eager to find work that translated, transacted across geopolitics, languages and histories, work that stirred critique, and niggled at the very joints of our field-formations within queer and area studies. The meditations that finally made their way into our issue signal some modes of a geopolitics of dissent that we hoped would engender debate, contestation, and even a healthy dose of angry hand wringing about the impossible nature of the questions we were asking. Some contributors baulked at the very idea of an issue on sexuality and geopolitics, calling us sellouts in the great game of intellectual innovation, trading area for space in the a(r)ena of the academy. How can we read (other)wise, one essay asked, if we write and publish in US based journals that can only be read and accessed in the West? Others spoke to the analytical fatigue of the queer project, and offered figurations of sexuality that spoke through lineages of caste and temporality, than gender and embodiment. And as editors, we wrote too, longingly, and perhaps with some lament, of a queer geopolitics that would allow us to think forms such as race outside the racial formations of the Atlantic slave-model. What, we asked, would happen if queer geopolitics was blockaded by provincializing queer theory, nominalizing it, or reframing it as area studies? How could we cruise futurity, utopia and refusal with geopolitics, without attenuating meaning and value? How could we assemble a brown commons of desire and dissent? Let me end then with a scene of potential dissent: