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B2 W5: Theory and Critical Research - Queerness as Horizon

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Pragmatism” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32.

Do not dismiss the "we" of utopian visions and demands as "merely identitarian logic", but rather "The "we" speaks to a "we" that is "not yet conscious," the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment." p.20

Links to Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and the way she addressed the queer future - where people of all races and sexualities are able to relate to each other equally - it is not naive, it is optimistic.

"The particularities... are not things in and of themselves that format this "we"; indeed the statement's "we" is "regardless" of these markers, which is not to say that is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences, but, instead, that it is beside them." p.20

"the field of utopian possibility is one in which multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity." p.20

Homonormative interests of the LGBT movement include gay marriage, which only affords "freedom" to few, whilst not questioning "the flawed and toxic ideological formation known as marriage." p.21

What is "straight time"? "Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life." p.22

"we gain a greater conceptual and theoretical leverage if we see queerness as something that is not yet here." p.22

Define quotidian: of or occurring everyday

"utopian is an impulse that we see in everyday life." p.22

"Moments of queer relational bliss... are viewed as having the ability to rewrite a larger map of everyday life." p.25

"Queerness's time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time. Straight time is a self-naturalizing temporality. Straight time's "presentness" needs to be phenomenologically questioned, and this is the fundamental value of a queer utopian hermeneutics. Queerness's ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world." p.25

"past pleasures stave off the affective perils of the present while they enable a desire that is queer futurity's core." p.26

"to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer." p.26

"The queer utopian project addressed here turns to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative. It is drawn to tastes, ideologies, and aesthetics that can only seem odd, strange, or indeed queer next to the muted striving of the practical and normalcy-desiring homosexual." p.26

"Evidencing protocols often fail to enact real hermeneutical inquiry and instead opt to reinstate that which is known in advance. Thus, practices of knowledge production that are content merely to cull selectively from the past, while striking a pose of positivist undertaking or empirical knowledge retrieval, often nullify the political imagination." p.27

"The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds." p.27

Bloch's approach to the past: "The idea is not to attempt merely to represent it with simplistic strokes. More nearly, it is important to call on the past, to animate it, understanding that the past has a performative nature, which is to say that rather than being static and fixed, the past does things." p.27-28

"If time is prior to space, then we can view both the force of the no-longer-conscious and the not-yet-here as potentially bearing on the here of naturalized space and time." p.29

"a critique of our homosexual present is not an attack on what many people routinely name as lesbian or gay but, instead, an appraisal of how queerness is still forming, or in many crucial ways formless." p.29

"A resource that cannot be discounted to know the future is indeed the the no-longer-conscious, that thing or place that may be extinguished but not yet discharged in its utopian potentiality." p.30

David Harvey on neoliberalism: "The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture." p.30

"To see queerness as horizon is to perceive it as a modality of ecstatic time in which the temporal stranglehold that I describe as straight time is interrupted or stepped out of." p.32

"Seeing queerness as horizon rescues and emboldens concepts such as freedom that have been withered by the touch of neoliberal thought and gay assimilationist politics." p.32

"Rationalism need not be given over to gay neoliberals who attempt to sell a cheapened and degraded version of freedom. The freedom that is offered by an LGBT position that does not bend to straight time's gravitational pull is akin to one of Heidegger's descriptions of freedom as unboundness." p.32

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “The Future is in the Present: Sexual Avant-gardes and the performance of utopia” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32.

"Futurity can be a problem" (Muñoz, 2009: 49)


Writing about the homosexuals who back conservative mayors of New York City, Muñoz says “the contract they have signed is one of fake futurity. Rather than investing in children, they invest in an assimilation that is forever over the rainbow.” P.55

Minoritarian performances “transports us across symbolic space, inserting us in a coterminous time when we witness new formations within the present and the future. The coterminous temporality of such performance exists within the future and the present, surpassing relegation to one temporality (the present) and insisting on the minoritarian subject’s status as world-historical entity.” P.56

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