You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Minor: Suicide
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
There is a great amount of this book that I loved– "Introduction: Feeling Utopia" and "Queerness as Horizon" in particular– but there are also large swaths that feel outdated or out of touch with different queer identities and a praxis that changes the current lived experience(s) of queers imagining and creating utopias.
This is a book best consumed in conversation, critically and actively.
This is a book best consumed in conversation, critically and actively.
God. I bought this book a few summers ago and didn't understand a thing! But I read it because the idea of queerness on the horizon, of the future being better and yet unachievable appealed to me a great deal. I didn't get through it on the first reading, but after 2 years of gender studies, I get more of it now. It's very academic (in the language it uses anyway), yet it's personal and political. It uses art and history, storytelling and theories from other fields to approach the enactment of queerness, without ever really defining queerness (as, I think, it ought to be). This book is a constant inspiration and a reminder to have hope and to look forward even as we recognize the harm done now and in the past.
This is my favorite sort of theory to read, because it uses close reading to both explicate the theory it proposes and to make it practical, in a sense, as far as theory can ever be practical. These close readings, which range from dissections of drag performances to punk music, also resurface works of queer art that have been forgotten, which plays into Muñoz’s idea of the interconnectedness of queer time, or the necessity of drawing a queer future from the past. This is also a political text, which borders sometimes on manifesto. Muñoz holds no punches when it comes to the current state of queer politics, which he pegs, rightfully, as normative and assimilationist. While I wanted more of an investigation and dismantling of normative queer politics, the topic could easily have taken space away from the spotlighting of radical queer art, so I can understand the decision to make this topic secondary to the actual theory. Plus, there is little room to spare when it comes to utopia and the idea, which Muñoz threads throughout the book, that we are not yet queer, that the true sense of queerness remains always on the horizon.
I picked this up off the new-books shelf at the library because the title caught my eye, but was really disappointed in it. Since he is explicitly critiquing the current LGBT movement, I had hopes that his "queer" wasn't a synonym for gay men as it (and LGBT, really) so often is. Alas, while there are a handful of lesbians here and there and an aside about a trans friend, this book is totally about gay men, mainly pre-AIDS gay male culture and art.[return][return]I could have rolled with that if the book had otherwise been interesting, but the academic language made it difficult for me to read, plus the whole thing lacked cohesion and just felt more like a collection of essays about this art/period he liked rather than something that was building towards a whole. Also, mainly he talked about what he liked about queer movements in the past, and what I had picked up the book hoping for was a critique of the current LGBT movement. But other than saying he doesn't like it, he doesn't really go into it at all.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Don't think I can give this one a rating, since I was reading it with my Work Brain, but here are some thoughts.
- I respect Muñoz's project, and the way it pushes back against gay pragmatism-turned-pessimism, but it often feels like it's trying to compensate for this to the point of overshooting? like yeah I think being LGBT is on some level innately linked to wanting Not This, and that this is shored up by seeking out a community of other like-minded gays to dream together with, but hmmmm
- will not recap my ideological and philosophical issues with Queer Studies as a field here, but this book sure did hit a ton of those
- either the first few chapters are genuinely better than most of the rest, or I just got more fatigued the more I went on. maybe this was just because I'm not big on art or performance studies or whatever else? but I definitely didn't feel like his core thesis had enough legs to sustain this whole book
- likewise, I really respect that Muñoz works to sketch a vision of utopia that includes brown and black bodies; but even though this book was written in the late 2000s and I get that things were different back then, it still feels mostly very cis, and overwhelmingly reliant on case studies produced by cis mlm and linked to the gay culture of 60s New York. and though this was certainly an unintentional consequence of these case studies, it was hard to read this as a gay transmasc and feel like there's any room in these mapped-out utopias for someone like me
Basically, I think I felt like the good parts of this are really interesting, and the less good parts are really exhausting? Anyway.
- I respect Muñoz's project, and the way it pushes back against gay pragmatism-turned-pessimism, but it often feels like it's trying to compensate for this to the point of overshooting? like yeah I think being LGBT is on some level innately linked to wanting Not This, and that this is shored up by seeking out a community of other like-minded gays to dream together with, but hmmmm
- will not recap my ideological and philosophical issues with Queer Studies as a field here, but this book sure did hit a ton of those
- either the first few chapters are genuinely better than most of the rest, or I just got more fatigued the more I went on. maybe this was just because I'm not big on art or performance studies or whatever else? but I definitely didn't feel like his core thesis had enough legs to sustain this whole book
- likewise, I really respect that Muñoz works to sketch a vision of utopia that includes brown and black bodies; but even though this book was written in the late 2000s and I get that things were different back then, it still feels mostly very cis, and overwhelmingly reliant on case studies produced by cis mlm and linked to the gay culture of 60s New York. and though this was certainly an unintentional consequence of these case studies, it was hard to read this as a gay transmasc and feel like there's any room in these mapped-out utopias for someone like me
Basically, I think I felt like the good parts of this are really interesting, and the less good parts are really exhausting? Anyway.
challenging
hopeful
informative
slow-paced