QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. 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. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing…. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.
(José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 1)
José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is a fitting end to this month’s series. In this powerful book Muñoz offers the mind-blowing suggestion that queer, far from being an identity, is also a future oriented project. That what is queer is not the status quo, but is perhaps always on the horizon, something that we can feel but can never quite touch. In this way, Muñoz refuses the foreclosure of the future as something that will always fail us. Instead, queerness is a mode of striving, of wanting more than the present can offer. This month, as I have attempted to reflect on things that make me think about queerness, I end with Muñoz because he gives us the space to dream and desire otherwise. I am always simultaneously satiated but parched every time I return to his reminder that “queerness is not yet here.” I’ve never read the anticipatory mood of Cruising Utopia as a denial of queerness’ present. Rather it’s a way to unsettle us. To shake us up. And to compel us to never be so arrogant as to presume that we have queerness figured out. Muñoz reminds us of the transformative power of our optimism to make new worlds and to unsettle and remake even the things we feel that we know as intimately as ourselves. 🥂
