Utopian Pragmatics: Bash Back! and the Temporality of Radical Queer Action

Abstract

Is there anything at all radical about queer sex? I want to use this question to situate the relatively recent antisocial turn in queer theory—exemplified by Lee Edelman’s theorization of sinthom osexuality in No Future, and taken to task by a number of theorists quite compellingly, among them José Esteban Muñoz in the tome Cruising Utopia, whose subtitle provides a hint to the contestatory terrain the work stakes out in relation to Edelman’s work: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Muñoz seems to think we’ve got a future. Edelman thinks we don’t. Edelman seeks to think the negative, destructive force of queerness; Muñoz, rather, is in search of a certain queer positivity, a queer capacity to remake the world. Edelman seems, at first blush, to theorize the act of queer sex as a future-destroying force. Muñoz attempts, alternatively, to consider queer sex acts, and the modes of sociality constructed around and in conjunction with them, as part of a repertoire of practices that work in the service of producing utopic visions that imbue queer collectivities with the sense of having a future. In both of these works, however, the answer to this initial question—is there something radical about queer sex in itself?—seems to be yes. For Edelman, queer sex destroys the future; for Muñoz, it aids in building alternative ones.

When you are a transsexual, you look for your future, and you can’t see it.

—Lea T., the face of Givenchy, New York Times¹

Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes offuturity.

—José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia²