The book reads these practices through a utopian, dialectical lens that will be familiar to readers of Mediations.
#Marcuse the end of utopia pdf archive#
In the course of an introduction, a conclusion, and the ten lush chapters in between, Cruising Utopia elaborates an archive of queer aesthetic practices from the present and the recent past - the book reaches back as far as the fifties - practices we can certainly characterize as socially “marginal,” but which the identitarian, privatizing, and spatial logics of neoliberalism have made more so. That potential is abundantly evident in José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, a book one could argue is most centrally about potentiality as such. Such exceptions are important: sustained engagements with the Marxist tradition within the domain of queer studies carry a potential to invigorate and extend Marxian analysis itself. Occasional, scattered exceptions have appeared in journals like Science and Society and Rethinking Marxism, and this review is another.
#Marcuse the end of utopia pdf series#
To the extent that Marxist intellectuals remain unaware of the way in which capital has become one of queer studies’ fundamental interpretive horizons, and Marxism one of its increasingly apparent touchstones, this is surely because in order to be aware of this development, one would have to follow journals like GLQ, the special queer studies issues of journals like Social Text, and book series like Duke’s “Series Q” and NYU’s “Sexual Cultures.” 1 And so if what looks like a kind of ongoing intellectual convergence also seems one-sided, if it also throws into relief a simultaneous and persistent divergence, this is a divergence operating much more clearly, today, at the level of academic marketing than at the level of ideas. If you listen closely, you can hear queer studies bearing witness to Marxism’s continuing vitality and, indeed, contributing to it.
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