José Esteban Muñoz > Quotes

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, 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. (p. 1)”
― José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising 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.”
― José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

“As I learned more of Smith's performances, I became partly disturbed by what could be described as the orientalizing and tropicalizing aspects of the work, which is to say the way he played with over-the-top images of "exotic" Third World ethnoscapes. These reservations were significantly diminished when I looked closely at the available documentation of Smith's work. His work with images of Latin spitfires and cheesy Hollywood renditions of Scheherazade deserved more careful consideration. I began to think that Smith had little to do with actual Third World cultures and instead worked through Hollywood's fantasies of the other. The underground genius utilized these fantasies of the other in a reflective fashion. The excess affect of Maria Montez and the gaudy fantasies of harem culture were utilized to destabilize the world of "pasty normals" and help us imagine another time and place. In Smith's cosmology, "exotic" was an antinormative option that resisted the
overdetermination of pastiness. Hollywood's fetishized fantasies of the other were
reenergized by Smith's performance. His performances of the "spitfire" and
Scheherazade were inflected with disidentificatory difference that helped toxic images expand and become much more than quaint racisms. Disidentification is the process
in which the artist reformulates the actual performativity of his glittering B movie
archive, which is to say that the images that Smith cited were imbued with a performativity that surpassed simple fetishization. Glitter transformed hackneyed orientalisms and tropical fantasies, making them rich antinormative treasure-troves of queer possibility.”
― José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics