Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz

Author:José Esteban Muñoz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004160 Literary Criticism / Lgbt
Publisher: New York University Press

The stage and the parking lot are adjacent in much the same way that there is a phantom door between Catch One and Spaceland in McCarty’s work. On one asphalt stage in Los Angeles, one queer punk watches another hold forth, and across the country, under a different shape of palm tree, but still in a parking lot, my best friend Tony and I sit in his beige Nissan Sentra and we speculate about this band the Germs and the provocative lyrics to such songs as “Sex Boy” and “Richie Dagger’s Crimes.” What can they possibly mean? we asked ourselves, almost already knowing. While we sat in that car, my parents worried about where I was and what I was doing with whom, and I know they must have been trying to comfort themselves by letting themselves think that I was merely at a stage. What we were learning in that parking lot as the Germs song “Forming” played was that there was another stage out there for us, both temporal and spatial, one in which potentiality, hope, and the future could be, should be, and would be enacted. Today I write back from that stage that my mother and father hoped I would quickly vacate. Instead, I dwell on and in this stage because I understand it as one brimming with a utopian performativity that is linked to the ideality that is potentiality. This potentiality is always in the horizon and, like performance, never completely disappears but, instead, lingers and serves as a conduit for knowing and feeling other people.

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