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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
I like a lot of the theory that Muñoz presents, but I also think it's almost counterproductive to discuss hope with utopia, as if we cannot have hope in the here and now. Muñoz's ideas for a utopia are also a little stringent, and I found myself struggling to accept this sort of thinking as a critical text of queer theory. As it is so often about deconstructing everything that is (no labels, no binaries, nothing), queer theory usually tends to shy away from rather formal guidelines like the ones Muñoz and utopias present. As I said, it's a fascinating theoretical take on queer theory (and I really enjoy how authors like Billy-Ray Belcourt have incorporated Muñoz into their ideas of a future), I was nonetheless left a little without hope, which I think is the opposite effect.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
A dazzling masterpiece of critical theory and cultural analysis, maintaining a firm focus on the key political issues while illustrating them through detailed and beautifully written analyses of queer performance and visual art.
I love queer theory. It breaks my brain every time, but I love it.
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“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”
“It is important not to be content to let failed revolutions be merely finite moments. Instead we should consider them to be the blueprints to a better world that queer utopian aesthetics supply. Silver clouds, swirls of camouflage, mirrors, a stack of white sheets of paper, and painted flowers are passports allowing us entry to a utopian path, a route that should lead us to heaven or, better yet, to something just like it.”
“Gay and lesbian studies is often too concerned with finding the exemplary homosexual protagonist. This investment in the ‘positive image,’ in proper upstanding sodomites, is a mistake that is all too common in many discourses on and by ‘the other.’ The time has come to turn to failed visionaries, oddballs, and freaks who remind queers that indeed they always live out of step with straight time.”
———————————————————————————
“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”
“It is important not to be content to let failed revolutions be merely finite moments. Instead we should consider them to be the blueprints to a better world that queer utopian aesthetics supply. Silver clouds, swirls of camouflage, mirrors, a stack of white sheets of paper, and painted flowers are passports allowing us entry to a utopian path, a route that should lead us to heaven or, better yet, to something just like it.”
“Gay and lesbian studies is often too concerned with finding the exemplary homosexual protagonist. This investment in the ‘positive image,’ in proper upstanding sodomites, is a mistake that is all too common in many discourses on and by ‘the other.’ The time has come to turn to failed visionaries, oddballs, and freaks who remind queers that indeed they always live out of step with straight time.”
ngl, a lot of this went over my head but there's something very compelling about queerness operating outside of straight time and utopian longing/world-making being a cornerstone of queer experience
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I always reference his theory in all my essays I love U Muñoz
okay, technically i didn’t FINISH finish this, but i sat down for three and a half hours and read 80% of it in a small leftist library in a spell and just to congratulate myself i’m going to count it.
if in a way so much of this book’s wonderings and ruminations felt obvious to me, it is because i think i live and think in a post-this landscape; thinking about how it responded to a field divided between celebrating gay marriage and lee edelman’s no future, i appreciated the carefulness and depth with which Muñoz sought to synthesise the critique offered by gay pessimism into something more, something politically vested in a better future that still rejected happy gay neoliberals.
this really, really spoke to me in the ways that it traces a line between the modes of feeling i have always been so drawn to: the weird dangling yearning around memory, around the small and the mundane and what you can excavate from within—and the kinds of political futures i wish for. i loved every touchpoint and moment that Muñoz chose—i loved the ways in which the book deftly straddles between thinking about yearning, feeling, and haunting, while being very materialist in its frameworks. I have no original thoughts, basically—this is one part of the elusive thing I’ve been trying to say in my thesis, and what I’m still struggling to say and materialise.
I was a little hesitant and curious about the choice to fixate so much on Warhol, who I’ve basically always shat on as the epitome of late capitalism, art as a kind of endless commodification of image and object over and over. Which I think points to the bigger issue with this whole project—Muñoz focusing on these emblematic images and figures of gayness who have kind of been so commodified that it feels difficult to reclaim them, especially as Muñoz claims to come from a Marxist background…but idk! I don’t have the answers. Ultimately, it was very potent, if very academic and Art coded. I wished there was more Felix Gonzales-Torres in it: I wondered how Muñoz would talk about the sweets, the melting away and the grieving of it, in opposition to or together with the idea of utopia (as the presence of something not-there!)
if in a way so much of this book’s wonderings and ruminations felt obvious to me, it is because i think i live and think in a post-this landscape; thinking about how it responded to a field divided between celebrating gay marriage and lee edelman’s no future, i appreciated the carefulness and depth with which Muñoz sought to synthesise the critique offered by gay pessimism into something more, something politically vested in a better future that still rejected happy gay neoliberals.
this really, really spoke to me in the ways that it traces a line between the modes of feeling i have always been so drawn to: the weird dangling yearning around memory, around the small and the mundane and what you can excavate from within—and the kinds of political futures i wish for. i loved every touchpoint and moment that Muñoz chose—i loved the ways in which the book deftly straddles between thinking about yearning, feeling, and haunting, while being very materialist in its frameworks. I have no original thoughts, basically—this is one part of the elusive thing I’ve been trying to say in my thesis, and what I’m still struggling to say and materialise.
I was a little hesitant and curious about the choice to fixate so much on Warhol, who I’ve basically always shat on as the epitome of late capitalism, art as a kind of endless commodification of image and object over and over. Which I think points to the bigger issue with this whole project—Muñoz focusing on these emblematic images and figures of gayness who have kind of been so commodified that it feels difficult to reclaim them, especially as Muñoz claims to come from a Marxist background…but idk! I don’t have the answers. Ultimately, it was very potent, if very academic and Art coded. I wished there was more Felix Gonzales-Torres in it: I wondered how Muñoz would talk about the sweets, the melting away and the grieving of it, in opposition to or together with the idea of utopia (as the presence of something not-there!)