The Future Is Queer Stuff: Critical Utopianism and Its

Discontents

Nishant Shahani

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 19, Number 4, 2013, pp.
545-558 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/521102

[ Access provided at 25 Jul 2020 04:13 GMT from Georgia Institute of Technology ]
The Future Is Queer Stuff
Critical Utopianism and Its Discontents

Nishant Shahani

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Theory

José Esteban Muñoz
New York: New York University Press, 2009. vii + 223 pp.

The Queer Art of Failure

Judith (Jack) Halberstam
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. i + 211 pp.

If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past
Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012. i + 259 pp.

When José Esteban Muñoz begins Cruising Utopia with the polemical provo-
cation that “queerness is not here yet” (1), he offers perhaps the most trenchant
response to current critical inquiries about the end of queer theory. Debates about
critical utopianism and the politics of queer futurity seem particularly apposite
at a moment when a question mark seems to hang over the future of queer theory
itself. (After sex? The end of queer theory? Queer and then? Postqueer?)1 At their
best, these questions are partly motivated by critical self-­reflection and can offer
a useful barometer of intellectual trajectories and academic terrains. For example,
in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, the editors Janet Halley and Andrew
Parker are more interested in the question “what has queer theory become now
that it has a past?” than in declaring a premature end to the field. 2 The collection
is, in fact, framed as a response to the perceived obsoleteness of queer critical
paradigms. In this context, the pastness of queer theory becomes an occasion to
foreground the elasticity of its futurity — a recognition of how it continues to morph

GLQ 19:4
DOI 10.1215/10642684-­­2279915
© 2013 by Duke University Press
 546 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

(or, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s phrase, grow sideways) into different critical para-
digms, under varied theoretical and political rubrics that resist simple synthesis.3
At the same time, narratives of “postness” can also foster a problematic nostal-
gia for queer theory’s good old days. The suggestion of queer theory’s supposed
demise thus ossifies its past while circumscribing the idiosyncratic temporalities
of its potential future. If queerness is not here yet — if it is always already a mode
of critical ideality — then we cannot be postqueer in any simple sense.
In this review, I want to consider recent works by Muñoz, Judith (Jack) Hal-
berstam, Christopher Castiglia, and Christopher Reed, as investments in the poli-
tics of queer futurity. Collectively, these works offer both theoretical mobilizations
of and departures from traditions of critical utopianism. Analyzed together, they
explicitly challenge theories of queer antirelationality and implicitly insist — in
the face of queer theory’s ostensible death — that the future is, and still must be
imagined as, queer stuff. In recent years, theories of antirelationality have inter-
rogated the politics of futurity, the most polemical of course being Lee Edelman’s
No Future. For Edelman, the future is the domain of the Child and is thus impli-
cated in the repronormative and the antiqueer.4 Before Edelman, Leo Bersani’s
Homos laid the theoretical ground for the logic of queer antirelationality when he
insisted on sexuality (mostly gay male) as an anticommunal mode of unbelonging.5
Thus for Edelman and Bersani, queerness is theorized exclusively in relation to
antifuturity and unproductivity. The books under consideration here, in contrast,
insist on the performative and political dimensions of critical futurity. Yet even as
the preoccupation with a certain kind of idealism (what Castiglia and Reed call
“ideality politics” [34]) is mapped onto the present and future, the pull toward
the past in these texts is equally palpable, as a structure of feeling as well as a
critical method, appearing in the form of retrospective returns, activist legacies,
spaces of memory, aesthetic blueprints, backward failings and feelings. Despite
their distinct theoretical interventions, the mobilizations of critical utopianism and
idealism in all three books further the conversations about queer historiography
and temporality in dynamic and compelling ways.
In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz offers a useful antidote to critical utopianisms
in which gender and sexuality are not only inadvertently marginalized but also
considered insufficiently political. For example, while Fredric Jameson challenges
anti-­utopian thinking that obscures alternatives to capitalism, queer politics is
often relegated to the level of the micropolitical within this materialist tradition. In
Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Jameson laments the current state of utopian
thinking as shifting from the muscularity of utopian “imagination” to an effete
utopian “fancy” — a shift informed by a move from “some overarching or struc-
 THE FUTURE IS QUEER STUFF: CRITICAL UTOPIANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 547

tural Utopian vision” to “a swarm of individual Utopian details, which correspond

to the parcellization of life-­style fantasies.”6 Thus Jameson goes to great lengths
to distinguish the notion of utopia from the more apolitical categories of desire
and fantasy: “The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or not-­
being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire
and fantasy.”7 The psychic life of desire is always already individuating in Jame-
son’s framework and thus represents the reification of utopian thinking. Desire, in
this context, is inevitably ahistorical and can thus never be political.
Muñoz rejects the repudiation of sexual politics implicit in Jameson’s criti-
cal utopianism. Queer futurity, argues Muñoz, “does not underplay desire. In fact,
it is all about desire” (30). Thus Muñoz insists on the inextricability of utopian
thinking and queerness — in fact, queerness can be apprehended only through the
utopian: it is an “ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a
future” (1). If, for Jameson, utopian thinking emerged at the end of the nineteenth
century as a response to the claustrophobic pessimisms of literary naturalisms,
for Muñoz, the logic of negativity informing the antirelational turn in queer theory
necessitates the reparative promise of utopia; additionally, the “banal optimism”
(3) and “anemic political agenda” (19) of contemporary North American LGBT
politics warrant the utopian turn.
Works such as Samuel Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water and
John Giorno’s You Got to Burn to Shine function, for Muñoz, as Blochian critiques
of the present in that they point to a utopian transport to another time and place,
both in the past and in the future. Muñoz foregrounds not the romance of com-
munity that antirelational theorists like Bersani would challenge but how Giorno’s
representations of anonymous gay sex in a pre-­HIV/AIDS pandemic milieu bear
witness to utopian possibilities that have yet to materialize. But it is precisely
through this mode of non-­yet-­conscious immateriality that utopia is profoundly
material. Via Adorno, Muñoz suggests that Giorno’s writings constitute not just
a “casting of a picture” (or a cognitive map, to use Jameson’s term) but also a
“will that is different” (39) — an alternative modality that chastises the poverty
of political imagination in the present. Similarly, Delany’s investment in a cul-
ture of cruising and anonymous sex under the material constraints of police raids
and surveillance offers a glimpse of hypothetical futurity — a world that might
be — that preemptively critiques the attacks on public sex cultures of New York
City under the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. Muñoz’s turn to Delany
reveals the “what is” of gay pragmatism as the historical limit beyond which the
utopian whole can be gleaned. Though for Jameson, desire and “fancy” circum-
scribe the ability to cognitively map the whole, Delany’s apprehension of desiring
 548 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

masses fleeing police raids offers a utopian glimpse into social totality in Muñoz’s
analysis. Muñoz, like Jameson, draws explicit connections between allegorical
form and historical process. For Muñoz, the memoir’s occasional turns toward
traditional narrative within its generally more fragmented aesthetic allegorizes
the performance of utopia within the material constraints that “cut up” any sense
of “totality” so that “no one ever got to see its whole.”8 Later, Muñoz connects
Delany’s “apprehension of totality” with his own participation in an uprising on
the streets of New York to protest the beating and murder of Matthew Shepard, in
which the police violently attacked protestors “so that masses would be unable to
see the whole” (63).
Muñoz’s analysis of sexual avant-­gardes offers an important riposte to
critical utopianisms that overlook sex’s world-­making possibilities. However, in
reading a utopian vision of the “whole” through Delany’s experience at the bath-
houses, Muñoz glides over how Delany perversely eroticizes (and politicizes) the
cutting up of collectivities. The Motion of Light in Water is interspersed with sev-
eral moments in which fragmentary experience — despite its traumatic potential to
isolate — functions like Barthesian wounds in which bruising and “pricking” of
cuts become the very occasion for ecstasy. Muñoz rightly distinguishes his analysis
of Delany from Joan Scott’s assertion that the memoir illustrates the problematic
nature of experience as historical evidence.9 But because of his own investment
in distancing queer critique from the depoliticizing negativities of antirelational
critique, Muñoz privileges what Halberstam calls “the fantasy of future whole-
ness” (138) that marks conventional temporalities. My investment in holding on to
the fragment in this context is not to “shout down” Muñoz’s powerful and compel-
ling reading of the utopian promise of Delany’s memoir. Yet the desire for whole-
ness (“no one ever got to see its whole”) that Muñoz privileges is intertwined with
an investment in perverse pleasures that are performed paradoxically through
the “cutting up” of totality. Hope, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us, and as
Delany fully realizes, “is often a fracturing, even traumatic thing to experience.”10
While Muñoz is right to politicize desire within the logic of critical utopianism,
desire is not limited to the affect of pleasure in Delany’s memoir: it is also sub-
tended by experiences conventionally thought of as negative — guilt, censure, and
prohibition. It is precisely through these constraints, through the “cutting up” of
totality, that Delany eroticizes not seeing. Though Muñoz maintains an investment
in making whole the “cutting” that impedes an apprehension of totality, perhaps
the logic of critical utopianism can be more valuably gleaned within the traumatic
fragments — within the very process of cutting up.
Muñoz’s investment in the optimism of future wholeness must, however, be
 THE FUTURE IS QUEER STUFF: CRITICAL UTOPIANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 549

contextualized in relation to his insistence on the need to counter the “romance

of singularity and negativity” (10) informing the logic of antirelationality. Muñoz
offers the most effective interrogation of queer negativity when he highlights its
foreclosure of intersectionality — that is, the “contamination of race, gender, or
other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of dif-
ference” (11). For example, in his response to Edelman’s well-­known rejection of
futurity as “kid stuff,” Muñoz points out that the “future is only the stuff of some
kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (95).
We might apply this indispensible reminder to consider the interlocking vectors of
social location to Muñoz’s own discussion of “Andy Warhol’s Coke Bottles” along-
side Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You.” The gleaning of the utopian
trace in the quotidian is, of course, in keeping with Bloch’s investment in unpack-
ing utopia in the most unsuspecting and ostensibly banal places — it is simultane-
ously covert and omnipresent. In his critique of Bloch, Jameson thus points out:
“To see traces of the Utopian impulse everywhere, as Bloch did, is to naturalize
it and to imply that it is somehow rooted in human nature.”11 Similarly in Cruis-
ing Utopia, this very hermeneutics of reparative exposure — that is, the unveiling
of the repressed hidden secret of utopia — universalizes it to such a degree that
Muñoz occasionally elides the material and historical conditions of (im)possibility
that inform utopia.12
In the case of Coke, the book seems to anticipate this problematic of his-
tory and materiality when Muñoz, mobilizing Bloch, privileges the aesthetic or
the ornamental over the utilitarian. Thus at the level of the quotidian, the Coke
bottle represents conventional use value: “In its everyday manifestation such an
object would represent the alienated production, consumption, and labor” (145).
But through the aesthetic mediations of Warhol and O’Hara, these mass-­produced
objects transcend functionality and are imbued with the glow of “forward-­dawning
futurity” (7). While it is precisely the point of these aesthetic sites to exploit the
contradictions between the utilitarian and the fantastic, Muñoz’s account must
necessarily elide the historical relations that get effaced when the Coke bottle
functions exclusively as ornamental and utopian surplus. In this context, critical
utopianism inadvertently functions as a replacement system for any consideration
of global political economy in which Coca-­Cola is implicated in the marketplace
of water commodification, in the exploitation and threat to local economies, and
in various forms of environmental injustices. In keeping with Muñoz’s own call to
refuse “singular tropes of difference,” the activist writing of Third World feminists
such as Vandana Shiva might seem apposite in this context.13 It is not without sig-
nificance that in the above quote, Muñoz conflates the quotidian manifestations of
 550 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

Coke with alienated consumption, production, and labor. But commodity fetishism
and the extraction of surplus value are hardly “everyday” manifestations of mass-­
produced objects (most of us do not think of Marx or factory workers when drink-
ing Coke). To return back to the “functionality” of the Coke bottle, however, is
not to axiomatically take away from political potential of critical utopianism or to
shout and shut it down. It is, instead, to reveal how Muñoz’s archive of ephemeral
feelings, reparative residues, and ecstatic affects is limited by and emerge within
material and ideological constraints that continue to haunt utopian futurity.
In reading these aesthetic objects as blueprints of hope, Muñoz is care-
ful not to create an overdetermined opposition between negative and optimis-
tic strands of queer theory. In fact, he notes that the negative is an important
“resource for a certain mode of utopianism” (13). Thus utopias are not merely
idyllic projections of future comfort or happiness. If utopias are unrealizable in the
quagmires of the present and can be ontologized only beyond the horizon or the
not-­yet-­conscious, then failure is inbuilt into their very definition.14 Though Cruis-
ing Utopia begins to address negative affect more explicitly toward the end of the
book (in the final chapter, “After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity”), Muñoz
concludes, quite appropriately, with an invitation to participate in the ecstatic and
the collective — in the vacating of “the here and now for a then and there” (185).
If Muñoz gestures toward the chiasmic relation between the negative and
utopian at the end of Cruising Utopia, Halberstam makes negativity the start-
ing point of analysis in The Queer Art of Failure. “What comes after hope?” (1),
asks Halberstam, in a question that could serve as a postscript to Muñoz’s turn
toward the utopian. But reparative hope is not a fait accompli in The Queer Art
of Failure — in fact, reparation is constituted by and enabled through failure. In
her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick challenged
what she called the “unidirectionally future oriented-­vigilance” informing queer
theory’s exposure of the “bad news” of heteronormativity.15 Paradoxically, Halber-
stam’s insistence on failure as a queer kind of practice and aesthetic might allow
for the possibility of reparative thinking, and a move away from what Sedgwick
terms the “hermeneutics of suspicion that subtends queer theory” (125). Rather
than insist on a paranoid hermeneutic of exposure at the end point of analysis,
Halberstam begins with such a moment in order to think beyond its aporias.
Queers already live with and inhabit failure, but in addition to experiencing its
disappointments (which are real and material), Halberstam does not want to reject
negative affect. Instead, the book proposes that a great amount of perverse plea-
sure and cultural work may come by residing in failure’s dark shadows. In this
sense, queer failure functions as a kind of pedagogy that foregrounds the necessity
 THE FUTURE IS QUEER STUFF: CRITICAL UTOPIANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 551

of altering the material conditions and circumstances on which queer futurity is

predicated.
Halberstam’s mobilization of negative affect is informed by an embrace
of failure as a critical practice, a kind of formal aesthetic, and even as a way
of doing the history of homosexuality. But just as Muñoz’s insistence on hopeful
futurity resists jettisoning negativity tout court, similarly, Halberstam’s embrace
of failure is not a nihilistic indulgence in doomed aporias. In mobilizing failure
as queer practice and style, Halberstam is invested in mapping alternatives rather
than merely exposing dominant systems and hegemonic norms. The Queer Art of
Failure is “a book about failing well, failing often, and learning, in the words of
Samuel Beckett, how to fail better” (24). In tarrying with the negative yet investing
in the idiosyncratic and playful, Halberstam’s book illustrates a more politicized
reformulation of queer negativity; in such a critical universe, embracing failure is
not axiomatically a resignation to no future.
Halberstam’s indifference to the normative tyranny of success also mani-
fests in The Queer Art of Failure’s unabashedly odd and hilarious archive, which
runs from Marina Abramović to Dude, Where’s My Car? and Chicken Run to
Jamaica Kincaid. This is not merely a flouting of the high-­low culture stalemate
but a call for a different way of learning, teaching, and circulating knowledge pro-
duction. If Halberstam’s Female Masculinity offered a “scavenger methodology” of
historiography, The Queer Art of Failure employs “low theory” as a way to embrace
the “frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant” (6) in cultural studies. One way to
explain Halberstam’s investment in “low theory” would be to think of The Queer
Art of Failure as employing a methodology of “cruising,” to borrow from Muñoz’s
title. With its connotations of casualness, its proclivity toward the nonserious,
and its embrace of fleeting and ecstatic temporalities, “cruising” becomes an apt
metaphor to capture Halberstam’s style of reading and writing, which Halberstam
describes as an attempt to “push through the divisions between life and art, prac-
tice and theory, thinking and doing, and into a more chaotic realm of knowing and
unknowing” (2). Yet The Queer Art of Failure is not all cartoons and animation,
however much Halberstam eschews the intellectual mandates of seriousness and
rigor. A closer examination of the book reveals a pedagogical investment in disci-
plinary critique, in alternative feminist epistemologies, and in acknowledging the
more nonheroic, even disturbing, dimensions of gay history.
If failure is built into the very structure of utopia, then The Queer Art of
Failure mobilizes the negative to articulate the cultural conditions for queer futu-
rity. Halberstam’s analysis of finitude in Judie Bamber’s seascapes points to the
“thresholds that cannot be crossed . . . the limit of vision, the limit of nature, the
 552 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

limit of color itself, the circumscribed imagination, the lack of futurity, or, in other
words, the expansion and contraction of all our horizons” (116). This emphasis on
limits might appear to be a far cry from Muñoz’s utopian insistence that we not be
limited to the here and now of the present — that we must look for queerness as
an ideality that is always already beyond the horizon. But on closer inspection,
these frameworks are not as incommensurable as they might appear. While at one
level, Halberstam reads the limited horizons of Bamber’s seascapes as critiques of
national expansion and desire for mastery, the paintings could also allegorize the
incapacity of our present to imagine beyond the here and now. Bamber’s seascapes
then, are not representations of anti-­utopian impulses as much as they are aes-
thetic representations of what Jameson would call utopia’s “antinomies.”16 Along
these lines, we might consider Cruising Utopia’s discussion of Kevin McCarty’s
stages alongside The Queer Art of Failure’s analysis of Cabello/Carceller’s bars;
both are emptied-­out heterotopic interiorities that simultaneously draw attention
to the limits and possibilities of thresholds. If McCarty’s images literally become
“stages” for utopia, Cabello’s and Carceller’s bars allow viewers both “to con-
template all that has been lost” and to think through the possibility of all that
“remains to be seen” (113).
An even more explicit engagement with critical utopianism is theorized in
relation to the book’s archive of animation and “Pixarvolt” films, which, accord-
ing to Halberstam, make “overt connections between communitarian revolt and
queer embodiment and thereby articulate . . . the sometimes counterintuitive links
between queerness and socialist struggle” (29). But the most provocative utopian
gesture comes at the outset of the book, when The Queer Art of Failure argues for
a radical transformation of the university and its disciplines, which, according to
Halberstam, are obsolete modes of normalization that funnel knowledge produc-
tion through technologies of power. In their place, Halberstam calls for antidisci-
plinarity and unprofessionalization. Drawing on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s
critique of the university, Halberstam asks:

And what does the undercommons of the university want to be? It wants to
constitute an unprofessional force of fugitive knowers, with a set of intel-
lectual practices not bound by examination systems and test scores. The
goal for this unprofessionalization is not to abolish. . . . Not the elimination
of anything but the founding of a new society. And why not? Why not think
in terms of a different kind of society than the one that first created and
then abolished slavery? (8)
 THE FUTURE IS QUEER STUFF: CRITICAL UTOPIANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 553

The Queer Art of Failure thus calls for a radical transformation of disciplinary
thinking and knowledge production — like Cruising Utopia, it is invested in a
move beyond the here and now of political and intellectual myopias. While both
texts invest in the futurity of critical utopianism, it might be useful to apply heu-
ristic pressure on this characterization of the “here and now” in these critiques.
If utopianism in these frameworks offers alternative possibilities that are avail-
able only in the future, the calls for queer futurity risk not only obscuring “subju-
gated knowledges” in the present but also inadvertently reifying a common sense
of what constitutes that present. For example, Halberstam suggests that “as the
big disciplines crumble like banks,” we might use the university in ruins as an
opportunity to reject their “ragged boundaries” (7) in favor of “unpredictability”
and “unbounded forms of speculation” (10). Yet with the economic collapse and
crumbling banks, the existence of “the big disciplines” (like the 1%) is not, in
fact, where “crisis” is located at present. “Crisis” instead seems to be the occasion
to jettison academic freedoms and shared governance, to terminate the system of
tenure, and to threaten the existence of more vulnerable fields like women’s stud-
ies, ethnic studies, or cultural studies. This is not, of course, to privilege the tired
(and co-­opted) notion of interdisciplinarity as a prescriptive response to Halber-
stam’s refreshing call for disciplinary disloyalty. But rather than crumbling, it is
these very “big disciplines” that seem to “absorb” the “lesser” ones into a man-
ageable interdisciplinarity under conditions of neoliberalism and the university’s
corporatization.
A larger question that emerges then, is whether all failures secure perfor-
mative uptake in Halberstam’s critical universe. Do failures always fail “well” or
fail successfully? And if not, what happens to that queer remainder — the queer
failures that fail to succeed? At times, Halberstam appears to privilege those fail-
ures that stylishly and ironically refashion the lowly margins of failure, such as
Quentin Crisp’s witty bon mots — “If at first you don’t succeed, failure might be
your style” (110). But what of the abject queer remainder that cannot refashion its
failures into a stylish critique or “make a mess” or loudly “fuck shit up”? (110).
In this context, Halberstam appears to place an implicit faith in reverse discourse
and in the power of refashioning that inadvertently fails to grapple with the more
painful effects of “backward feelings.” As Heather Love argues in Feeling Back-
wards, the investment in queer futurity must not come at the cost of shame and
stigma that cannot be critically or politically refunctioned into political success.17
Clearly, Halberstam foregrounds these “failed” failures, for example, through the
analysis of shadow feminisms as well as the connections between fascism and
 554 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

homosexuality. But what causes some failures to be “happy” and others to fail
in their unhappiness (and unstylishness)? While The Queer Art of Failure is not
invested in reifying failure into a monolith or even making political prescriptions,
its politicization of negativity does raise the question of what circumstances sub-
tend the felicity of some failures and the infelicity of others.
While refusing to prescribe failure as a mode of political success, Halber-
stam is still invested in politicizing negative affect (unlike the antipolitics of Edel-
man’s negativity). For example, stupidity becomes a “relaxed relation to knowing”
(63) that allows for alternative knowledge productions, and forgetting performs a
“rupture with the eternally self-­generating present” (70) that challenges the lin-
ear temporalities of generational repetition. Thus Halberstam provocatively asks,
“Can we recognize the new without discarding the old?” (71). A different ver-
sion of this question is posed by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in
If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past: Can we
remember the old in order to recognize the new? If Halberstam encourages a poli-
tics of forgetfulness to move past mother-­daughter models of feminism and oedipal
dynamics, Castiglia and Reed challenge queer theory’s “traumatic turning-­away”
(11) from the past in its insistence on queer futurity.
In addition to offering valuable critiques of queer theory (including Muñoz
and Halberstam), Castiglia and Reed make a case for the political power of mem-
ory to counter what they call “degenerational unremembering” (40) in If Memory
Serves. The authors do not declare the postness or demise of queer theory, but
contextualize how it might have participated in a “prophylactic protection of the
future” (9) exacerbated by the onset of AIDS. Memory and “inventive idealism”
(10) become the reparative antidotes for the collective amnesia that informs the
erasure of pre-­A IDS gay collectivities and revolutionary countercultures. Thus
the authors remark: “Remembering the ‘sexual revolution,’ we suggest, offers
models of critiquing and creating pleasureable alternatives to the normative and
traumatized present” (11). Castiglia and Reed, like Muñoz and Halberstam, are
invested in mapping ameliorative political and intellectual traditions as alter-
natives to queer theories of negation; however, If Memory Serves offers not just
a critique of antirelational logic but an analytically different alternative to the
politics of critical utopianism. In fact, the authors argue that despite the queer
critique that utopian thinkers have made of antirelational thinking, there exists
an implicit relation between the two. Thus Castiglia and Reed point out: “The
dehistoricizing effect of (although not all) psychoanalytical-­based queer theory
was to push out of critical view the hopeful affects and transformative agendas of
an earlier generation, with the result that younger critics began calling for those
 THE FUTURE IS QUEER STUFF: CRITICAL UTOPIANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 555

very social and affective states in the future, making futurity the displaced loca-
tion of the past” (8).
Utopianism, in this context, functions like a permanently deferred replace-
ment system, in which the activism and ideals of the sexual revolution between the
late 1960s and 1970s — for example, the work of Gayle Rubin, the Radical Fair-
ies, Harry Hay, S&M activists, Cherríe Moraga, Gay Liberation, Pat Califia among
others — are not only lost to the trauma of AIDS but also erased in the politics of
unremembering. Castiglia and Reed point to the emphasis on coalitional alliances
that informed the politics of the Gay Liberation Front of Los Angeles in 1969, the
critiques of monogamy and family made by the Third World Gay Revolution in the
early 1970s, and the connections forged between sexual normativity and private
property in the writings of Radically Gay and Fag Rag. But with the turn to pes-
simism that informed what the authors characterize as “first-­wave queer theory”
(155), the political history of the sexual revolution was dismissed “as reductive,
naïve, outdated, [and] tossed out with a discredited identity politics” (173). If
Memory Serves, then, returns to the pastness of the past to cull its memories for
a different “now” — a radically new present enabled by memory’s inventive and
performative potential.
This shift away from promising a deferred future becomes the crucial ana-
lytic difference between critical utopianism and a critical idealism through which
memory is mobilized, invented, revised. These scenes of memory are articulated
and analyzed in the book through cultural and textual sites as varied as AIDS
memorials, chat rooms, sitcoms, art installations, activist pamphlets, interior
designs of houses, and exterior landscapes of gay neighborhoods. Even while the
framework of critical idealism departs from utopian queer theories in significant
ways, Castiglia and Reed, like Muñoz, are committed to “surpassing the binary
between ideality and actuality” (Muñoz, 43) in their theorization of critical ide-
alism. If Memory Serves thus furthers the critical tradition of queer historiogra-
phy that is invested in alternative models of doing the history of homosexuality.
For the authors, memory can never be a recuperative historical tool, but a pro-
foundly creative and inventive one that exploits the productive tensions between
materiality and immateriality. Castiglia and Reed insist that their mobilization of
memory is not invested in the official archive of history; critical idealism does not
merely “re-­create the past exactly and transparently as it was” (154) but produces
hybrid historiographies that fuse imagined and inventive histories in the service of
the present.
One of the book’s most polemical moments comes when the authors sug-
gest that the dismissal of identity politics by queer theorists ignored how iden-
 556 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

tity enabled historically important collectivities. While Castiglia and Reed do not
argue for a return to identity-­based politics, they do valuably challenge some of the
historical amnesias that mark queer theory. More importantly, they provocatively
show how such formulations often lapse into hubris by reworking these past frame-
works into present academic contexts as a way of correcting their flaws. Shorn of
their naive ensconcement in identity in the present, these updated versions are
then cast as utopian (and more radical) versions of the past. Of Muñoz’s investment
in utopianism, for instance, they observe: “In this model, the past is valued mainly
because it requires redemption by the future” (6). At the same time, If Memory
Serves performs its own act of unremembering by effacing the reasons that iden-
tity politics became both theoretically and politically untenable in the first place.
It was not only post-­structuralist interrogations of essentialism, a post-­traumatic
unremembering, or the negative affects of antirelationality that informed the criti-
cal impulse to interrogate identity and rethink community. Castiglia and Reed
are right to trouble the linear and developmental shift from the supposed crude
essentialisms of gay liberation to the apparently sophisticated deconstructions of
queer politics. But to attribute the critique of identity to a generational trauma that
informs queer theory “unremembers” the more historically specific conditions
that subtended this critique: the exclusions performed through an ethnic model
of sexual identity as well as the demand for political alliances and intersectional
coalitions that made singular identities unfeasible.18
Castiglia and Reed, of course, importantly point out that these self-­
critiques emerged from within the very tradition that queer theory would retro-
spectively disavow, and then co-­opt at a later point. But the sequencing of this
critical genealogy into the first wave (traumatically informed by the aftershocks
of AIDS) and second wave (marked by negative affect and unremembering) of
queer theory generates its own developmental universals, obscuring overlap, con-
tinuity, and reconfigurations that are not axiomatically informed by retrospective
arrogance. While queer theory has indeed complicated a reliance on identity cat-
egories, such a critique has also emanated from specific material contexts, and
not necessarily from degenerational unremembering and academic abstractions.19
To set up queer theory in waves, then, downplays the extent to which the material
lives of queers often encompass both a mobilization of identity and a concomitant
refusal of its constricting limits. To subject identity to a queer rethinking does not
necessarily mark its disappearance (nor does it necessarily suggest a return to
strategic essentialism). But “having lost identity politics to an academic critique”
(34), or existing “in the aftermath of identity” (175), Castiglia and Reed must com-
pensate for this loss in the form of “ideality politics” in the final chapter. Ideal-
 THE FUTURE IS QUEER STUFF: CRITICAL UTOPIANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 557

ity politics then becomes the redemption of their own performative declarations
of identity’s demise. Despite their critiques of critical utopianism, it is here that
the authors insist on the promise of queer futurity, albeit via a return to the past.
Memory is placed “at the vanguard of a politics of ideality, a creative and forward-­
looking process that continues the social, political, and sexual idealizations that
make the imaginative innovations of queer world-­making possible” (175). The
authors almost incline here to a Blochian novum, investing in the unexpected and
the new, but mediated by the glow of the old and the forgotten — a memory of
things yet to come.
Collectively, these mobilizations of utopianism and idealism reveal crucial
and at times even vexed differences: the insistence on limning the horizons for
queerness versus the embrace of limits and failure; the idealization of memory
as opposed to the perverse insistence on forgetting; the critique of generational-
ity contrasted by the mourning for its loss; and the investment in queer negativity
challenged by the call for reparative affirmation. But the impossibility of commen-
surability is neither a conceptual impasse nor a cause for dualistic thinking — and
it is certainly not an occasion to declare the end of queer theory. Instead, these
paradoxes point to the utopian possibilities embedded in the antinomies of impos-
sibility itself — a logic that recalls an old but profoundly relevant and deliberately
contradictory slogan of the Situationists in May 1968 that was also mobilized by
Occupy Wall Street protests more recently: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”

Notes

1. Michael Warner, “Queer and Then,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 1, 2012.
2. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, eds., After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.
3. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Cen-
tury (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2.
4. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
5. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
6. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 218.
7. Jameson, Archaeologies, xv – xvi.
8. Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in
the East Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), quoted in
Muñoz, 52.
 558 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES

9. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,
ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David Halperin (New York: Routledge,
1993).
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 146.
11. Jameson, Archaeologies, 10.
12. For Sedgwick, paranoid readings are implicated in the politics of exposure, whereas
reparative readings enable more flexible temporalities (“Paranoid Reading and
Reparative Reading,” 141). I am suggesting that while Muñoz insists on reparative
possibilities, the reading methodologies in Cruising Utopia ironically lapse into a dif-
ferent version of the hermeneutics of exposure that Sedgwick interrogates.
13. See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Profit, and Pollution (Cambridge,
MA: South End, 2002).
14. This is the point that Jameson makes in “Utopia and Its Antinomies” in Archaeologies
of Failure (142). As suggested earlier, Muñoz implicitly mobilizes Jameson’s argu-
ments about utopia but rethinks them in explicitly queer contexts.
15. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 130.
16. Jameson, Archaeologies, 142.
17. Heather Love, Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 19.
18. See Annamarie Jagose, “Limits of Identity,” in Queer Theory: An Introduction (New
York: New York University Press, 1996), 58 – 72.
19. For a critique of organizations such as NOW and HRC that reinstate various modes of
oppression through identitarian exclusions, see Rikki Anne Wilchins, “Why Identity
Politics Really, Really Sucks,” in Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of
Gender (Milford, CT: Firebrand Books, 1997). Drawing on Foucault, Wilchins points
to how “cultural power does not just restrain and oppress various identities, it also
produces them” (84).