Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice

Abstract

This anthology is a symposium on the inchoate debates about queer futurity and queer utopias. Through the empirical work by contemporary queer theorists, this book aims to create a critical dialogue about the emergence of queer spaces and the ways in which these spaces aim to further queer futurity. This cutting-edge volume pushes current debates about the future of queer-identified individuals out of the purely theoretical realm, and demonstrates how queer futurity is currently being shaped by individual behavior in praxis; its focus is the quotidian practices that demonstrate the potential for queer futurity. This book brings academic rigor and empiricism to a field generally dominated by polemics and albeit intriguing but often less than rigorous cultural analysis, which is generally delivered in sesquipedalian loquaciousness that masquerades as academic nuance and complexity.² This book makes a distinct and felicitous methodological contribution to the field; truly interdisciplinary, the chapters compiled in this text utilize archival research and historiography, cultural analysis, discourse analysis, interview methods, ethnography, autoethnography, social cartographies, and reflective topical autobiography to explore the quotidian practices that buttress the promise of hope for queer futurity.

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, 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. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. There here and now is a prison house… we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds… Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.

—José Esteban Muñoz¹