Cruising Utopia
Book by José Esteban MuñozWikipedia
7
MENTIONS
3
EPISODES
3
PODCASTS
Search complete. 7 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Cruising Utopia".
Oct 2, 2026
Taylor MacGUEST
Yes, a little bit, but not well, yeah.
Zach StaffordHOST
He, um, wrote, you know, one of his last books, Cruising Utopia.
Zach StaffordHOST
And sorry I keep going, "Do you know? Do you know?" This is not a test.
Zach StaffordHOST
[laughs] I keep on testing you with names.
Ellie AndersonHOST
Especially the government of Tudor England, a quote, conspiracy of the rich that seized people's land, squandered resources on gold and armies, and created thieves and then punished them for stealing.
Ellie AndersonHOST
But there is one good government, the book claims, on a distant island called Utopia.
Ellie AndersonHOST
Let's go to the tape.
Ellie AndersonHOST
Picture yourself here.
Ellie AndersonHOST
Hmm.
Ellie AndersonHOST
All right.
Ellie AndersonHOST
This message has been sponsored by the Utopia Board of Tourism.
Ellie AndersonHOST
It sounds pretty groovy, and a little like the communes I heard about growing up in California.
BarksHOST
Back to Muñoz and what queer futurity actually argues, because the phrase is more precise than it sounds.
BarksHOST
In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz was writing partly against another influential queer theorist, Lee Edelman, who had argued a few years earlier that queerness should refuse the future altogether, since the future in mainstream politics always gets represented by an idealized image of the child, a rhetorical device used to justify almost any restriction in the name of protecting it.
BarksHOST
Muñoz agreed the child's future was a trap and pushed back hard on something else in Edelman's argument, too: that centering sexuality alone, as Edelman did, erased race, class, and gender from the picture entirely.
BarksHOST
Muñoz built his alternative out of queer and trans artists of color instead, grounding queer futurity in collectivity rather than in one theorist's solitary refusal.