Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity [Paperback ed.] 0814757286, 9780814757284

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Cruising Utopia

SE XU A L C U LT U R E S G eneral E ditors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong o, and Joshua Chambers-Letson Founding Editors: Jose Esteban Munoz and Ann Pellegrini Titles in the series include: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Samuel R. Delany Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture o f Social Relations Phillip Brian Harper In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies Mandy Merck Tropics o f Desire: Interventionsfrom Queer Latino America Jose A. Quiroga Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies o f Gender and Violence in die American Crime Novel Gregory Forter Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest Edited by Lauren Beriant and Lisa A. Duggan Black Gay Man: Essays Robert E Reid-Pharr Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg The Explanation fo r Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity Paul Morrison The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay T heater Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife o f Colonialism Edited by Amaldo Cruz Malav& and Martin F. Manalansan IV Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces Juana Maria Rodriguez Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits o f Religious Tolerance Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization o f American Culture Frances N£gron-Muntaner Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era Marion Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives J. Jack Halberstam Why I Hate Abercrombie and Pitch: Essays on Race and Seocuality Dwight A. McBride God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics o f Religious Violence Michael Cobb Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual Robert Reid-Pharr The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory Ldzaro Lima Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America Dana Luciano Cruising Utopia: The Then and There o f Queer Futurity Jos6 Esteban Munoz Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism Scott Herring Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagjmation Darieck Scott Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen Tongson Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading Martin Joseph Ponce Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled Michael Cobb Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in theAsias Eng-Beng Lim Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations o f the Law Isaac West The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings Juana Maria Rodriguez Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse o f Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosodality, and Posthuman Ecologies Rachel C. Lee Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men Jane Ward Embodied Avatars: Genealogies o f Black Feminist Art and Performance Uri McMillan A Taste fo r Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire Hiram Perez Wedlocked: The Perils o f Marriage Equality Katherine Franke The Color o f Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography Ariane Cruz Archives o f Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique Robert F. Reid-Pharr Black Performance on the Outskirts o f the Left: A History o f the Impossible Malik Gaines A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain Christina Crosby The Life and Death ofLatisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy o f Transphobia Gayle Salamon Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody Melissa M Wilcox After the Party: A Manifesto fo r Queer o f Color Life Joshua Chambers-Letson Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance Amber Jamilla Musser Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama o f Black Life Tavia Nyong o Queer Times, Black Futures Kara Keeling Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition Melissa E. Sanchez For a complete list of books in the series, see wwwjiyupress.org

Cruising Utopia, 1 OTH A N N IV E R S A R Y E D IT IO N The Then a n d There o f Q ueer Futurity

Jose Esteban M unoz With two additional essays by the author a n d a new fo re w o rd by

Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong'o, and Ann Pellegrini

n

NEW YORK New York

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

N EW YORK U N IV ER SITY PRESS Ne w York and London wwwjxynpress.org © 2 0 0 9 by New York University Forew ord and two additional essays © 2 0 1 9 by N ew York University All rights reserved “F or Freddy Fucking A gain” poem b y D iane di Prim a; from Freddie Poem s (P oin t Reyes, CA : Eidolon Editions; 1 9 7 4 ). C ourtesy o f the author. “H aving a Coke w ith Y ou” from The C ollected Poem s o f Frank O 'H ara; by Frank O 'H ara; edited by D onald Allen. Copyright © 1971 b y M aureen Granville- Smith, A dm inistratrix o f The Estate o f Frank O 'H ara. Reprinted by perm ission o f Alfred A . Knopf; a division o f Random H ouse, In c “A photograph” Collected Poem s, by Jam es Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by the Estate o f Jam es Schuyler. R eprinted by perm ission o f Farrar, Straus and G iroux, L L C . “One A rt,” from The Com plete Poem s, 1 9 2 7 -1 9 7 9 , by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1 9 7 9 ,1 9 8 3 b y Alice H elen M ethfessel. Reprinted b y perm ission o f Farrar, Straus and Giroux, L L C . Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication D ata N am es: M unoz, Josd Esteban, author. Title: Cruising u to p ia: the then and there o f queer futurity / Jo se Esteban M unoz; w ith new essays and a foreword by Joshua Cham bers-Letson, Tavia N yongo, and Ann Pellegrini. D escription: 10th Anniversary Edition. |N ew Y ork : N ew York University Press, [2 0 1 9 ] |Series: Sexual cultures |Revised edition o f the author's Cruising utopia, c2 0 0 9 . |Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: L C C N 2018046341| ISBN 9 7 8 1 4 7 9 8 1 3 7 8 0 ( d : alk. paper) |ISBN 9 7 8 1 4 7 9 8 7 4 5 6 9 (p b : alk. paper) |ISBN 9 7 8 1 4 7 9 8 6 8 7 8 0 (elS B N ) |ISBN 9 7 8 1 4 7 9 8 9 6 2 2 6 (elSBN ) Subjects: LC SH : Q ueer theory. |U topias. |H om osexuality and art. |Perform ance art. Classification: L C C H Q 76.25 JVI86 2 0 1 9 |D D C 3 0 6 .7 6 0 1 — d c23 L C record available at h ttp s://lccn lo c.g o v /2 0 1 8 0 4 6 3 4 1 N ew York U niversity Press books are printed on add-free paper, and their binding m aterials are chosen for strength and durability. W e strive to use environm entally responsible suppliers and m aterials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. M anufactured in the U nited States o f A m erica 10987654321

Contents

Foreword: Before and After

ix

CRU ISIN G U TO PIA Acknowledgments Introduction: Feeling Utopia 1.

xix 1

Queemess as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism

19

2.

Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories

33

3.

The Future Is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia

49

Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance

65

Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/A m iri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity

83

6.

Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative

97

7.

Utopias Seating Chart: Ray Johnson,Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System

115

Just Like Heaven: Queer Utopian Art and the Aesthetic Dimension

131

4.

5.

8.

9.

A Jete Out the Window: Fred Herkos Incandescent Illumination 147

10. After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity Conclusion: “Take Ecstasy with M e”

169 185

TW O A D D ITIO N A L ESSAYS Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

193

Hope in the Face of Heartbreak

207

Notes

21S

Bibliography

235

Index

245

About the Author

253

Color illustrations appear as an insert following page 130.

Foreword Before and After By Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyongb, and Ann Pellegrini

One may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner. Every at­ tempt to describe or portray utopia in a simple way i.e., it will be like this, would be an attempt to avoid the antinomy of death and to speak about the elimination of death as if death did not exist. That is perhaps the most profound reason, the metaphysical reason, why one can actu­ ally talk about utopia only in a negative way. . . — Theodor Adorno, in conversation with Ernst Bloch1

TO T H I N K , W RITE , dream, and live in the wake of heartbreak: this is the challenge posed by “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak,* the short essay that is published for the first time in this new edition of Cruising U topia. It is also the charge we are faced with here: how to think and write after Jose Munoz— and also for him— in the painful, temporally out o f joint forever “after* o f this foreword. “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak* was written to be heard and was given as a talk, in September 2013, at the University of Toronto to celebrate the launch of the Women & Gender Studies Institutes PhD Program. The manuscript bears the traces of the live occasion; it also carries the literal traces of the one who wrote and spoke its words aloud. “H opes biggest obstacle is failure,* the manuscript begins, its opening words neatly typed and printed. But, midway through the opening paragraph, the typeface is interrupted by hand-writing. The pivot by hand, to handed-ness, happens at a critical juncture where Munoz is reminding his audience of a distinc­ tion made by Ernst Bloch (key interlocutor o f Cruising U topia), between abstract and concrete or educated hope:

In part we must take on a kind of abstract hope [that] is not much more than merely wishing and instead we need to participate in a more concrete hope, what Ernst Bloch would call an educated hope, the kind that is grounded and consequential, a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of

The words "this hoping9 are crossed o u t The revised sentence reads " . . . a mode o f hoping that is cognizant o f exactly what obstacles present them­ selves in the face of obstacles that so often feel insurmountable.9 So, if the original sentence repeated the word "hoping,9 the revised one doubles down on the “obstacles.9 On the manuscript we can glimpse the hand­ written word "our,9 also crossed out, before he settles on the word "ob­ stacles.9 Hope falters, gives way to more obstacles. "Hope in the Face o f Heartbreak9 is revisiting and also expanding on arguments made in Cruising Utopia. A t this early moment in the talk, it’s as if Munoz needs to stress the “obstacles9 as a wedge against overly hopeful or romanticizing readings of Cruising Utopia. In our conversations with our late friend and comrade, he occasionally expressed disappointment that his defense of utopia was enthusiastically read by some as uncritical optimism. His work testifies to the contrary. Hope is work; we are disappointed; whats more, we repeatedly disappoint each other. But the crossing out of "this hoping9 is neither the cancellation of grounds for hope, nor a dis­ charge of the responsibility to work to change present reality. It is rather a call to describe the obstacle without being undone by that very effort. A sentence later, still in the hand-written addition, there is another crossing out; obstacle is not a hard stop, it is a challenge: " . . . I have cho­ sen to focus on two texts, one scholarly [Robyn Wiegmans O bject L es­ sons] and one cultural [Anna Margarita Albelo’s film Who's A fraid o f Va­ gina W olf?], that offer snapshots at of some of the obstacle challenge [s] we need to not only survive but surpass to achieve hope in the free of an often heart breaking reality9 The first page of the short manuscript ends with these hand-written words: “in the face of an often heart breaking re­ ality9 W e who survive are left to free this challenge without him. We are also charged by him to do so. A common sight during his lifetime: Before giving a paper, he’s sit­ ting on a panel, hunched over, crunching on ice, and listening intently to the person speaking. Multi-tasking, he simultaneously flips through the pages he’s set on the table in front of him, and takes his pen and scribbles

something across the page: a revision in the text. Back to listening, pulling his right foot across his left knee, a glance out over the room to see who is there, before glancing down at another page and posing the pen for an­ other revision. One can only imagine what revisions he might have made for this edi­ tion of Cruising U topia. The challenge we faced in writing this foreword is that a foreword or introduction assumes an anterior stance, with the au­ thors and readers positioned before the text. But as we stand in the authors stead, introducing the text by meditating on revisions that Munoz cannot make, we do so because we introduce him in the time after his death. If we have never been queer, as Munoz famously asserts throughout the text, then there is a degree to which we are always standing before queer loss. This is the nature of queer grief. It is informed by life lived a fter the historical accumulation of queer deaths: a collection of losses that have taught us to know (because our survival depends upon this knowledge) that we are also standing before losses that have yet to come. Queer grief is characterized by the simultaneity o f grieving those we have loved and lost, alongside mourning for a queemess and the forms of queer life that we have not yet known and are still yet to lose. Linger­ ing on Munozs handwritten notes and imagining the types of revisions he m ight have m ade is a way of inhabiting the incommensurable simulta­ neity of before and after. It is to perform within the reparative m atrix of queer temporality proposed by Munoz s teacher, Eve Sedgwick: "Because the [reparative] reader has room to realize that the future m aybe different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”2 Throughout Cruising U topia, Munoz mines the past for glimmers of uto­ pian potential that are rich with the possibility of a past that "could have happened differently from the way that it actually did.” H e invites us to put these glimmers to work, both as we cast a negative or critical picture of the insufficiencies of the present, but also as we undertake the work of hoping for, rehearsing, dreaming, and charting news paths toward differ­ ent and queerer futures. Alexandra T. Vazquez, Munoz's student, writes that "our teachers leave behind care instructions for any and all kinds of arrivals and departures.”3 The students of Cruising U topia (past, present, and future) might thus ap­ proach the text as an instruction manual for how to have hope both be­ fo re and after the death of the teacher. To read the text in the time after

Munoz’s death is to be reminded, once more, that queer of color life oc­ curs within this out-of-joint temporality such that queer of color death is not a negating after to Cruising U topia. Rather, the negation that is queer death presupposes the text’s entire critical enterprise (and was crucial to the opening of his first book, D isidentifications, with its extended critical account o f racial melancholia).4 To approach the text from this vantage is to be confronted with the question that animates Munoz’s address: How are we to have hope while living simultaneously in the before and after of queer heartbreak? The answer, far from veering away from the discourse of negation, requires a counter-intuitive turn toward the negative. For utopia, though it bears many positive qualities, also bears negation, as originating from the Greek for “no place" or “not place.” Utopia is not the antithesis of negation in this sense, so much as it is a critical means of working with and through negation. Queer utopia is the impossible performance of the negation of the negation. Since its publication ten years ago, Cruising U topia has had a wide im­ pact across and beyond a range of academic fields. Appearing at the height of the controversy regarding the anti-relational thesis in queer studies, the book invited the field to turn the page on a somewhat stalled debate by rearticulating the critical negativity associated with anti-relationality in a new way. W ithout acceding to the assimilationist vision of queer futures that underpinned homonormativity, it performed a negative dialectic that nevertheless expressed a politics of hope: “Here the negative becomes the resource for a certain mode o f queer utopianism."5 The audacious opening move of the book, to declare that we are “not yet" queer, drew on the criti­ cal utopianism of the M arxist philosopher Ernst Bloch as much as it was in dialogue with a still-expanding literature on queer temporality, whose interlocutors included Sedgwick, Carolyn Dinshaw, Jack Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman.6 Throughout Cruising U topia, Munoz presumes and builds upon the queer of color critique pioneered in his first book, D isidentifications. And, as with D isidentificationsj a key reason for Cruising U topia’s wide influ­ ence has been its astounding archive. The book moves promiscuously and enthusiastically across its sources in order to braid together the “nolonger-conscious" of queer world-making with the “not-yet-here" o f criti­ cal utopianism No doubts the richly described worlds of the text stand in some tension with the tradition of negative utopianism he draws upon. For Bloch, and especially his interlocutor Adorno, utopian thought is first and foremost a negation; Bloch even characterizes the hope that inspirits

utopian thinking as “the determined negation o f that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible.”7 It is through draw­ ing out this almost apophatic concept o f hope and o f utopia that Munoz is able ingeniously to reframe queer cruising. As one alert reviewer o f the first edition noticed, cruising is a way o f moving with “no specific desti­ nation ; the ultimate goal is “to get lost [ . . . ] in webs o f relationality and queer sociality”8 Cruising, that is to say, is as much the method of the book as is critical utopianism. After Munozs death, his friend and colleague Barbara Browning issued a call for people to inscribe the following passage from the books opening paragraph in a paradigmatic location o f queer cruising, the bathroom stall: “Some will say that all we have are the pleasures o f this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways o f being in the word, and ultimately new worlds.”9 People sporadically performed the act in bathrooms or other public spaces (including a bathroom in the department where Mu­ noz taught), sometimes posting a photo o f the transgression (or o f the en­ counter with its written trace) to social media. It circulated in other ways as well: a group of queer activists designed and distributed stickers with the passage printed across Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (an installation of balloons discussed in the books eighth chapter). And in a statement to the Windy City Times discussing her gender transition, the film director Lilly Wachowski wrote: "I have a quote in my office . . . by Jose Munoz given to me by a good friend. I stare at it in contemplation sometimes try­ ing to decipher its meaning but the last sentence resonates: ‘Queemess is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on po­ tentiality for another world.’”10 The popularity and circulation of this sentiment— which pits futurity against the present— is reflective of the general reception of Cruising Uto­ p ia since its publication, which draws upon and emphasizes the text’s pos­ itive elaborations on queemess, hope, and futurity by positioning them against the (negating) poverty of the present As Munoz insists through­ out the book, “The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and 'rational’ expectations.”11 But along these very lines, an overemphasis on futurity, a flat rejection of the present, and an over-romanticization o f the past risk eliding Munoz’s nuanced insis­ tence on the political (if not revolutionary) dimension of a queer utopian imaginary as a negative dialectic.

Munoz warned us against disappearing wholly into futurity since “one cannot afford“ to simply “turn away from the present“ The present demands our ethical consideration and the task at hand is not to refuse the present altogether, but rather to maneuver from the presents vantage point at the crossroads of life that is lived after catastrophe (as m aybe die case with queer, black, and brown life) and simultaneously before i t The utopian impulse yields the idealist power o f the utopian imaginary to offer a negative critique of the present and past (framing the insufficiencies of both) while opening up different avenues through which we might con­ struct alternative possibilities for queemesss future beyond the limited options that are presently before us. That we are standing before the possi­ bility, even likelihood, of hopes disappointment does not so much negate the principle of hope as confirm i t Throughout Cruising Utopia, Munoz insists that “hope and disappoint­ ment operate within a dialectical tension in this notion of queer utopia.“12 The utopian imaginary is understood to be an act of failure in the free of a stultifying regime of pragmatism and normativity: “Utopias rejection of pragmatism is often associated with failure. A n d . . . utopianism represents a failure to be normal.“13 Queemess, blackness, brownness, minoritarian becoming, and the utopian imaginary thus resonate with each other as they all cohere around a certain “failure to be normal,” unwilling or un­ able to submit to the pragmatic dictates of majoritarian being. This failure, which is situated both after and before defeat does not counter-intuitively confirm the totality of defeat, however, so much as it opens up queer av­ enues for other potentials to flicker in (and out) of being. Bloch described hopes failure as the ontological grounds on which hope is defined: "It too can be, and will be, disappointed; indeed, it must be so, as a matter of honor, or äse it would not be hope." That hope will be disappointed, and fail us, is not its negation but its condition of pos­ sibility. W hen the acute failures and dangers of the present (o f “normal”, “straight,” “white,” or “capitalist” tim e) threaten us, we turn to the utopian imaginary in order to activate queer and minoritarian ways of being in the world and being-together. W e do so to survive the shattering experience of living within an impossible present^ while charting the course for a new and different future. The frequent and even necessary disappointment o f hope is due to an incommensurability: things do not line up; loved objects (whether persons, theories, or social movements) let us down. Theories about identities and politics frequently miss actually existing subjects in their

complexity, messiness, and plurality. To paraphrase M unozs powerful concluding paragraph in “Hope in the Face of H eartbreak/ however, this missed encounter, this incommensurability, far from disqualifying queer of color critique or cultural production, is instead the very condition— however blasted and painful it can sometimes feel— o f our being-with others. Hope may not be commensurate to reality; our hopeful actions m ay not produce— may not ever produce once and for all— the hoped-for end. But this prizing of the incommensurate over the equivalent is a queer angle of vision, a queer ethics for living through the gaps between what we need and what we get, what we allow ourselves to want and what we can survive and transform in the now. The value and the challenge o f the incommensurable are the focus of another essay published in this expanded edition of Cruising Utopia, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” In this essay too, we can see Munoz clarifying arguments he first made in Cruising U topia. The focus o f this essay, which was first published in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, edited by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis, proleptically figures this foreword: Munoz is writing about the collaboration between Fisher and Sedgwick. Fisher, like Munoz, was one o f Sedgwicks graduate students (Fisher at Berkeley, Munoz at Duke). W hen Fisher died in 1994, too young and “ahead of his tim e/ as the saying goes, Sedgwick took on the task of editing and publishing a collection of his short stories and po­ ems, G ary in Your P ocket (1996) . Munoz is interested in the difficult recep­ tion of this text, and what it can tell us about “a kind o f queer politics of the incommensurable”— an incommensurability characterized by differen­ tial power dynamics (advisor and student), race (Fishers blackness and Sedgwick’s whiteness), and gender. But he is equally referring to Fisher’s and Sedgwick’s collaboration and a communism begun in life, continued after the death of one of them, living on in their readers— known, antici­ pated, never imagined— after the death of all. This mode of communism was anticipatory, but also material. Munoz understood it as manifest, or performed, within the lived experiences of queers of color and in the brown commons. In “Race, Sex, and the Incom ­ mensurate,” he illustrates this mode o f communism (as he did in Cruis­ ing U topia) through stories about relationships between incommensurably different types of beings (here, Sedgwick and Fisher) as well as the aesthetic example (Fisher's short story “Arabesque”). This commons was an experience of, in Munoz’s words, “a dynamic that partially transpires

under the sign of queer of color/ that is routinely misread by die lens of a politics of equivalence, but that becomes newly accessible as a sharing (out) of a nonequivalent, incommensurable, and incalculable sense of queemess.” This theorization of the queer o f color commons anticipates the turn in his final works toward describing a brown commons. There, he was attending to the way certain radalized people (primarily Latinx, but not solely) are made to be brown through "global and local forces [that] constantly attempt to degrade their value and diminish their verve. But they are also brown insofar as they smolder with a life and persistence; they are brown because brown is a common color shared by a commons that is of and for the multitude.”14 This brown commons, like the mode of queer of color communism depicted in the essay on Sedgwick and Fisher, is "an example of collectivity with and through the incommensurable.” As editors, we find ourselves incommensurate to the task of completing his work, even as we recognize that this form of adjacency was precisely what he sought to theorize in some of his very last writings on the con­ cept of being singular plural. Some interpret this concept as a pretty but vague synonym for something like "community/1 but community was a normative, even hegemonic term, of which Munoz remained consistently skeptical. More than any actually existing collectivity in the here and now, his reconsideration of the ethics of Sedgwicks being with Fisher leads to a proposal that we think of queer relationality as incommensurate with itself His work, and our work on his work, point us to a spacing out in time— futures, pasts, and presents— in which we may not yet be queer, but can nonetheless orient ourselves to queemesss horizon.

C R U ISIN G U T O P IA

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK HAS been in the works for over ten years. I cannot hope to properly acknowledge all the people who have been supportive of the writing and research that went into these pages. I have presented the writing that became these chapters at seemingly countless universities, museums, performance spaces, and conferences. A t these various institu­ tions many audiences listened to this work and engaged in beneficial ways. Queer friendship has proven to be the condition of possibility for imagin­ ing what queemess can and should mean. The actual relational circuits I am lucky enough to find myself belonging to whet my desire for future collectivity. I have had the gift of extraordinary research assistance. Joshua Chambers-Letson has invested so much of his own energy and intelligence in this book. Sujay Pandit has been indispensable in my completing this project The manuscript benefited from the attention of Julia Steinmetz and Chelsea Adewunmi. So many excellent students have proven to be such great interlocutors for this book as it emerged. This list will be woe­ fully incomplete: Hypatia Vourloumis, Jeanne Vacarro, Frank Leon Rob­ erts, Sandra Ruiz, Katie Brewer-Ball, Eser Selen, Tina Majkowski, Karen Jaim e, Ellen Cleghom e, Beth Stinson, Alex Pittman, Lydia Brawner, Roy Perez, Albert Laguna, Andre Carrington, Leticia Alvardo, Anna Fischer, Jonathan Mullins, Ronak Kapadia, Stephanie Weiss, and Justin Leroy. One of the greatest rewards in teaching is when your former students become your colleagues and friends: there are no better examples of this in my life than Christine Balance, Ricardo Montez, and Alexandra Vazquez. Also in that category is Shane Vogel, who also gave me great feedback on this vol­ ume. I teach in a relatively small department that 1 have chaired for the past few years, and I am grateful for the climate of mutual support and respect achieved in the Department o f Performance Studies, Tisch School o f the Arts at NYU. Colleagues like Barbara Browning, Karen Shimakawa, Richard Scheduler, Andrg Lepedd, Diana Taylor, Barbara KirshenblattGimblet, Allen Weiss, Anna Deavere Smith, Deborah Kapchan, Tavia

Nyong'o, and Ann Pellegrini make institutional life rewarding Ann has been a coeditor of the series this book appears in, and I could never have anticipated enjoying such a fun and harmonious working relationship. I cannot begin to express properly m y gratitude to the staff at Performance Studies who enable my work as a chair, a faculty member, and a scholar. Thank you N oel Rodriguez, Patty Jan g and Laura Elena Fortes for your extreme competence and good humor, Many friends outside of Perfor­ mance Studies at N YU need to be thanked for their contributions to the texture of my life and thinking The first to be mentioned is Lisa Dug­ gan, who has been a staunch ally, loving friend, and brilliant interlocutor. Other friends include Anna McCarthy, Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Gayatri Gopinath, Ana Dopico, Phillip Brian Harper, and Carolyn Dinshaw. The three scholars who have read this book for the press in different drafts offered me welcomed engagement Elizabeth Freeman and I m et each other as precocious graduate students on the conference circuit, and I see in her work some of the best thinking of m y second-generation queer theory cohort. Judith Halberstam has simply been an ideal colleague and reader. She is also an amazing friend. I feel privileged to have the bril­ liant Fred M oten as a friend, comrade, and interlocutor. M y editor, Eric Zinner, read this book with great care and skill Ciara M cLaughlin and Em ily Park have been also been extremely helpful. A grant from the Tisch Deans Faculty Development Award has helped me include color images in this book. I am especially grateful to M arvin Taylor and Ann Butler at the Fales Library, New York University. John Andrews showed up in the middle of this writing project He has responded to my work with equal parts enthusiasm and skepticism. He has been a perfect reader and the very best company I could have asked for. My other great companions during the writing of this book have been my princess bulldogs. The late great Lady Bully showed me the grandeur of companion-species utopias, and Dulce Maria is herself the sturdy embodiment of the good life. My family are amazingly support­ ive. My brother Alex s support is very touching My cousin Albert strolled into my everyday life quite unexpectedly and has becom e a lovely pres­ ence, helping me watch the Northern F ro n t Sam Green is m y kindred utopian spirit; his work and our bond inspire me. I am fortunate to know Jennifer Doyle, who has responded to my life and work with so much love, generosity, and intelligence. I owe a great debt to Kevin M cCarty for helping me glimpse utopia. Luke Dowd has been my friend forever, and I continue to learn from his work and find beauty there. Tony Justs

images have also provided necessary aesthetic pleasure. Nao Bustamante is simply awesome. H er friendship and art mean the world to me. Time spent over the years with Jonathan Hatley has been extremely rewarding. N ick Terrys friendship is treasured. I have enjoyed getting to know and write about My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alex Segade), Kalup Linzy, and Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron). An incomplete list of scholars, artists, and collaborators who have read this work, pushed these ideas, or generally engaged me include Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Ricardo Ortiz, Carla Freccero, Lida Fiol-Mata, Rebecca Schnei­ der, Henry Abelove, Michael M oon, Jos& Quiroga, Jorge Ignado Cortinas, Alina Troyano/Carm elita Tropicana, Ela Troyano, Ana Margaret Sanchez, Karen Tongson, Carlos Carujo, David Roman, Anjali Arondekar, Patrida Clough, Jasbir Puar, Michael Cobb, Josh Run, Heather Lukes, Molly M cGarry, George Haggerty, Gavin Butt, Dominic Johnson, Vaginal Davis, Ja­ net Jacobsen, Kathleen McHugh, Chon Noriega, Eric Lott, Cindy Katz, Donald Pease, Michael Wang, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Rebecca Sumner Burgos, Coco Fusco, Abe Weintraub, and Shari F rilo t My foundational friendship with Antonio Viego makes this work and so much m ore possi­ ble. Guinevere Turner has kept things real in the m ost hallucinatory ways. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick passed as I finished this book. She has been my great friend and mentor. Her gentle touch and luminous inspiration is ev­ erywhere for me.

Introduction Feeling Utopia

A map of the world that does not indude utopia is notworth glancing a t — Oscar Wilde

QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queemess is an ideality. Put another way we are not yet queer. We may never touch queemess, but we can feel it as the wann illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queemess exists for us as an ideality that can be dis­ tilled from the past and used to imagine a future. T he future is queemess s domain. Queemess is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that al­ lows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present T h e here and nowis a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and nows total­ izing 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. Queemess is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present Queemess is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queemess in the realm of the aesthetic. The aes­ thetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and sche­ mata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queemess. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queemess is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queemess is also a performa­ tive because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queemess is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insis­ tence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.

That is the argument I make in Cruising Utopia, significantly influenced by the thinking and language of the German idealist tradition emanating horn the work of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegeL An aspect o f that line o f thought is concretized in the critical philosophy as­ sociated with the FranWurt School, m ost notably in the work o f Theodor Adorno, W alter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. Those three thinkers within the Marxist tradition have all grappled with the complexities o f the utopian. Yet the voice and logic that m ost touches me, m ost animates my thinking, is that of the philosopher Ernst Bloch. M ore loosely associated with the Frankfurt School than the aforemen­ tioned philosophers, Blochs work was taken up by both liberation theol­ ogy and the Parisian student movements o f 1968. He was bom in 1885 to an assimilated Jewish railway employee in Ludwigshafen, Germany. During World W ar n , Bloch fled Nazi Germany, eventually settling for a time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the war Bloch returned to East Germany; where his Marxian philosophy was seen as too revisionary. At the same time he was derided for his various defenses o f Stalinism by left commentators throughout Europe and the United States. He partici­ pated in the intellectual circles o f Georg Simmel and, later, M ax Weber. His friendship and sometime rivalries with Adomo, Benjamin, and Georg Lukäcs are noted in European left intellectual history.1 Blochs political in­ consistencies and style, which has been described as both elliptical and lyrical, have led Bloch to an odd and uneven reception. Using Bloch for a project that understands itself as part of queer critique is also a risky move because it has been rumored that Bloch did not hold very progres­ sive opinions on issues of gender and sexuality.2 These biographical facts are beside the point because I am using Blochs theory not as orthodoxy but instead to create an opening in queer thought I am using the occasion and example of Blochs thought, along with that of Adomo, M arcuse, and other philosophers, as a portal to another mode of queer critique that de­ viates from dominant practices of thought existing within queer critique today. In my estimation a turn to a certain critical idealism can be an espe­ cially useful herm eneutic For some time now I have been working with Blochs three-volume philosophical treatise The Principle o f H ope? In his exhaustive book Bloch considers an expanded idea of the utopian that surpasses Thomas M ores formulation o f utopias based in fantasy. The Principle o f H ope offers an encyclopedic approach to the phenomenon of utopia. In that text he dis­ cusses all manner of utopia including, but not limited to, social, literary

technological, medical, and geographic utopias. Bloch has had a shakier reception in the U.S. academy than have some of his friends and acquain­ tances— such as Benjamin. For me, Blochs utility has much to do with the way he theorizes utopia. He makes a critical distinction between ab­ stract utopias and concrete utopias, valuing abstract utopias only insofar as they pose a critique function that fuels a critical and potentially trans­ formative political imagination.4 Abstract utopias falter for Bloch because they are untethered from any historical consciousness. Concrete utopias are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actual­ ized or potential In our everyday life abstract utopias are akin to banal optim ism . (Recent calls for gay or queer optimism seem too dose to elite homosexual evasion of politics.) Concrete utopias can also be daydream­ like, but they are the hopes o f a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many. Concrete utopias are the realm of educated hope. In a 1961 lecture titled “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” Bloch describes different aspects o f educated hope: “Not only hope’s affect (with its pendant, fear) but even more so, hopes meth­ odology (with its pendant, m em ory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an endur­ ing indeterminacy/’5 This idea of indeterminacy in both affect and m eth­ odology speaks to a critical process that is attuned to what Italian phi­ losopher Giorgio Agamben describes as potentiality.6 Hope along with its other, fear, are affective structures that can be described as anticipatory. Cruising U topias first move is to describe a modality o f queer utopia­ nism that I locate within a historically specific nexus of cultural produc­ tion before, around, and slightly after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. A Blochian approach to aesthetic theory is invested in describing the an­ ticipatory illumination o f art, which can be characterized as the process of identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious 7 This not-yet-conscious is knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling. W hen Bloch describes the anticipatory illumination of art, one can understand this illumination as a surplus of both affect and meaning within the aesthetic. I track uto­ pian feelings throughout the work o f that Stonewall period. I attempt to counteract the logic of the historical case study by following an associative mode of analysis that leaps between one historical site and the present. To that end m y writing brings in my own personal experience as another way to ground historical queer sites with lived queer experience. My intention in this aspect of the writing is not simply to wax anecdotally but, instead,

to reach for other modes of associative argumentation and evidencing. Thus, when considering the work of a contemporary club performer such as Kevin Aviance, I engage a poem by Elizabeth Bishop and a personal recollection about movement and gender identity. W hen looking at Kevin M cC artys photographs of contemporary queer and punk bars, I consider accounts about pre-Stonewall gay bars in Ohio and my personal story about growing up queer and punk in suburban Miami. M ost of this book is fixated on a cluster of sites in the New York City of the fifties and sixties that indude the New York School of poetry, the Judson Memorial Church’s dance theater, and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Cruising U topia looks to figures from those temporal maps that have been less attended to than O’Hara and Warhol have been. Yet it seems useful to open this book by briefly discussing moments in the work of both the poet and the pop artist for the purposes of illustrating the project’s primary approach to the cultural and theoretical material it traverses. At the center of Cruising U topia there is the idea of hope, which is both a critical affect and a methodology. Bloch offers us hope as a hermeneutic, and from the point of view of political struggles today, such a critical optic is nothing short of necessary in order to com bat the force of political pessimism. It is certainly difficult to argue for hope or critical utopianism at a moment when cultural analy­ sis is dominated by an antiutopianism often functioning as a poor substi­ tute for actual critical intervention. But before addressing the question of antiutopianism, it is worthwhile to sketch a portrait of a critical mode of hope that represents the concrete utopianism discussed here. Jill Dolan offers her own partially Blochian-derived mode of perfor­ mance studies critique in U topia in P erform ance: Finding H ope a t the The­ a ter} Dolan’s admirable book focuses on live theater as a site for “finding hope.” My approach to hope as a critical methodology can be best de­ scribed as a backward glance that enacts a future vision. I see my proj­ ect as resonating alongside a group o f recent texts that have strategically displaced the live object of performance. Some texts that represent this aspect of the performance studies project include Gavin Butt’s excellent analysis of the queer performative force o f gossip in the prewar New York art world,9Jennifer Doyle’s powerful treatise on the formative and deform­ ing force of “sex objects” in performance and visual studies,10 and Fred M otens beautiful In the B reak, with its emphasis on providing a soaring description of the resistance of the ob ject111 invoke those three texts in an effort to locate my own analysis in relation to the larger interdisciplin­ ary project of performance studies.

The m odem world is a thing of wonder for Bloch, who considers aston­ ishment to be an important philosophical mode of contemplation.12 In a way, we can see this sense of astonishment in the work of both Warhol and O’Hara. Warhol was fond o f making speech acts such as “wow" and “gee.” Although this aspect of Warhol’s performance of self is often described as an insincere performance of naivete, I instead argue that it is a manifesta­ tion of the utopian feeling that is integral to much of W arhols art, speech, and writing. O’Hara, as even his casual readers know, was irrepressibly up­ b eat W hat if we think of these modes of being in the world— Warhol’s liking of things, his “wows” and “gees,” and O’Haras poetry being satu­ rated with feelings of fiin and appreciation— as a mode o f utopian feeling but also as hope’s methodology? This methodology is manifest in what Bloch described as a form of “astonished contemplation.”19 Perhaps we can understand the campy fascination that both men had with celebrity as being akin to this sense of astonishm ent Warhol’s blue Liz Taylors or O’Hara’s perfect tribute to another starlet, in the poem “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” offer, through glamour and astonishment, a kind o f transport or a reprieve from what Bloch called the “darkness of the lived instant.”14 Astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and place. Much o f each art­ ist’s work performs this astonishment in the world. O’Hara is constantly astonished by the city. He celebrates the city’s beauty and vastness, and in his work one often finds this sense of astonishment in quotidian things. O’Hara’s poems display urban landscapes of astonishm ent The quotidian object has this same affective charge in Warhol’s visual work. Bloch theo­ rized that one could detect wish-landscapes in painting and poetry.15 Such landscapes extend into the territory of futurity. Let us begin by considering Warhol’s C oke Bottle alongside O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You”: Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Inin, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Tiavesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when Im with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and 1 would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it16 This poem tells us of a quotidian act, having a Coke with somebody, that signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality and a utopian potentiality. The quotidian act of sharing a Coke, consuming a common commodity with a beloved with whom one shares secret smiles, trumps fantastic moments in the history of art. Though the poem is clearly about the present, it is a present that is now squarely the past and in its queer relationality promises a future. The fun of having a Coke is a mode

of exhilaration in which one views a restructured sociality. The poem tells us that mere beauty is insufficient for the aesthete speaker, which echoes Blochs own aesthetic theories concerning the utopian function of art. If art’s limit were beauty— according to Bloch— it is simply not enough.17 The utopian function is enacted by a certain surplus in the work that promises a futurity, something that is not quite here. O’Hara first men­ tions being wowed by a high-art object before he describes being wowed by the lover with whom he shares a Coke. Here, through queer-aesthete art consumption and queer relationality the writer describes moments im­ bued with a feeling of forward-dawning futurity. Ih e anticipatory illumination of certain objects is a kind of potential­ ity that is open, indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself. This illumination seems to radiate from Warhols own depiction of Coke bottles. Those silk screens, which I discuss in chapter 7, emphasize the products stylish design line. Potentiality for Bloch is often located in the ornamental. Ih e ornament can be seen as a proto-pop phenomenon. Bloch warns us that mechanical reproduction, at first glance, voids the or­ namental. But he then suggests that the ornamental and the potentiality he associates with it cannot be seen as directly oppositional to technology or mass production.18 Ih e philosopher proposes the example of a m odem bathroom as this age’s exemplary site to see a utopian potentiality the site where nonfunctionality and total functionality merge.19 Part of what War­ hol’s study of the Coke bottle and other mass-produced objects helps one to see is this particular tension between functionality and nonfunction­ ality the promise and potentiality of the ornament. In the Philosophy o f Andy W arhol the artist muses on the radically democratic potentiality he detects in Coca-Cola. What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on die comer is drink­ ing. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.20 This is the point where Warhol’s particular version o f the queer utopian impulse crosses over with O’Haras. The Coke bottle is the everyday

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Fred H erko s resum e. Image courtesy o f Judson M em orial Church Archives, Fales Library, N YU .

understand what Warhol m eant If one recalls early Warhol’s interest in cinematically capturing the downtown demimonde and its weirdest deni­ zens, at least before Valerie Solanas made her indelible mark in his life, the desire to preserve m ore of Herko’s flickering incandescence— especially at the point of its physical and psychic transformation— strangely makes sense. Heikos nervousness and resistance to traditional movement cer­ tainly qualify as failure by Paxtons standards, yet by a different criterion, one better attuned to utopian aesthetics and their linkage with failure, we can begin to feel the dead artists incandescence. Carmines, with whom Herko also worked at the Judson Poets Theater, explained that Herko “always included humor and pathos and high class camp. He was an unusual actor and audiences adored him. He learned to be totally accessible to an audience.”18 We can see how the work affected other spectators in Johnstons rapt attention to Herko s Suzie-Q_ dance move (which Sally Banes compares to “the tw ist”) and Hughes’s paren­ thetical invocation of Erik Satie’s loving Herko, which is certainly as much about Hughes loving Herko. Herko was Warhol’s dropout^ and even his best friend, Diane di Prima, had some seemingly nasty things to say about him in her collection dedi­ cated to the dancer, Freddie Poem s: For Freddy, Fucking Again I think its disgusting To be offcourse, in love Midwinter afternoons is excusable Especially if it rains But how is it you are always off course these days & not that much in love will you never grow up at least if you’d gone off to gather those blue flowers (are they called periwinkles?) or mussels, from the seaweed but no, you’re off for adventures in grimy bars and the props not finished and the show is in four hours I think its pretty bad19 Di Prima worries about her friend and his “off-course” nature, but for those who read the entirety of her Freddie Poem s it is also dear that, despite a

FredH erko. Image courtesy o f Judson M em orial Church Archives, Fales Library, N YU.

sometimes maternal fretting, di Prima loves him for his queer way of be­ ing in the world. Her mention of “off-course” behavior again speaks to the ways in which Herkos movement through the world and the performance space was always disruptive, always linked to the force of failure, the aes­ thetics of excess with minimalism, temporal disjointedness, madness, and a utopian surplus. In the poem di Prima worries about Herkos slutty be­ havior. Stephen Koch, in his account of Herkos penis-flashing star turn in W arhols H aircut, describes the artist as resembling a lurid Times Square hustler.20 He seems to mean this in a bad way. The connection here be­ tween controversial sexual comportment and aesthetic experimentation, both linked to a poetics of failure ("I think its pretty bad”), underlines the categorical entwining of slut and postmodern dancer/superstar. This con­ nection is most compelling in Herko s Warhol collaborations. Andy Warhol was in the audience in May 1963 when Herko did his one-skate performance, Bingham ton Birdie. The dance was named after one o f Herko s friends, part of the amphetamine-propelled coterie of gay boys who would listen to opera and shoot speed in the back of the Factory. Herko came onstage with one roller skate and a superhero-like tee-shirt with a made-up insignia that spelled out “Judson.” The Judson M em o­ rial Churchs performances, as I indicated earlier, ushered in postmodern dance by making quotidian movement something worthy of staging, and Herko s appearance deconstructed the divide between art and real life— or maybe, better put, between art, life, and play. Herko was often accused of being temporarily out of joint, of being childish or infantile. Susan Fos­ ter points to moments when Herko was called childish, the m ost stinging perhaps being the choreographer Maxine Munt, who put it this way: “Fred Herko is indeed the enfant terrible, and his Little Gym D an ce. . . shouted look at me, look at m e; he has yet to prove he belongs with this group.”21 The accusation of childishness reverberates alongside many dismissals of queemess as childish, disrupting straight comportment and temporality. Herkos deliberate childishness interrupted the protocols of straight time. It also challenged a conservative version of minimalism. But certainly Herko was not just excessive. At times his movements were minor and not at all the “energetic” ballet that Paxton expected. Like Rayjohnson, Herko was a collagist whose source material was, on one level, spare and, on an­ other, deeply layered. Following Bingham ton Birdie, Warhol and Herko made a m ovie in which Herko skated around Manhattan on one skate. Like the concert, the movement in the film was dynamically “off course.” That film, like a lot of

Warhol's earliest work, is lost and exists only as lore or, more nearly, queer evidence. The story indicates that Warhol filmed Herko for days, and at the end of the filming Herko's bare feet were bleeding. Herko’s sacrifice both for art and for Andy anticipates the blood work of queer performers Ron Athey and Franko B. Warhol then cast Herko in another early film, H aircut (1 9 6 3 ), along with Billy Linich— a Judson artist and Factory regular who was later known as Billy Name— choreographer James Waring and John Daley. The group participated in gay male theatrics. The film reinforced Judson Dance Theaters project of making art from the quotidian while making queer bonds and sociality into a rt It should go without saying that the film was extremely radical in 1963. But also the film is worth considering as an example of queer relationality, a precursor of a modality of queer ontology that had not-yet-arrived. Linich cuts the other man's hair. Herko performs a series of everyday movements, walking toward the camera and then turning around and walking away, disappearing into the shadows of Waring's apartment. He then reappears, presents a pipe to the camera, and then packs the pipe with marijuana and smokes. In the film’s final se­ quence Herko strips for the camera, briefly exposing his penis. Throughout the film the gay men flirt with one another and rehearse a mode of queer belonging that had yet to be screened. Their comportment, though not "overtly” sexual, is sexy and signals a queer hind of becoming. Herko's per­ formance was his own because Warhol's directing consisted mostly of set­ ting up a scenario and letting the camera record the action. Herko bridges the Judson style with postmodern film. His insistence on public drug con­ sumption and flagrant^ ludic nudity surpasses the strictures of typical Jud­ son minimalism Or, again, more nearly, it keeps that modality of minimal­ ism from being swept under a larger modernist rug. I identify this queer move as having a utopian impetus that imagined another time and place that was not yet conscious. At this historical moment, when queer politics constantly defers to the pragmatic struggles o f the present, the bold and utopian experimentation of H aircut seems especially poignant Herko starred in another Warhol film, Thirteen M ost Beautiful Boys. In that film, W arhol collects som e screen tests, including Herko's. A majority of the screen-test subjects blankly stare at the screen, transforming their frees into stationary portraits. N ot so with Herko, whose minor move­ ments transform the screen test into a choreography. In Thirteen M ost Beautiful Boys we see Herko resisting Warhol's protocols and performing instead his own drugged-out agency. A year later Herko ended his own life

Fred Herko. Image courtesy o f Judson M em orial Church Archives, Fales Lib rary N YU .

But in this screen test our eyes should not be content to see a drugged-out homosexual who made some underground films and danced at the Judson. W hat I see in this film is the artist in all his embodied cultural sur­ plus. Twitching and moving in ways that tell us that this time and place is not enough, Herko enacts a critical impatience with the present, a dissat­ isfaction with the here and now. Furtheim ore, I see desire. Herko cruises

the cam era and the spectator; he flirts with it, not able to sit, wanting to display himself beyond the limits of W arhols portraiture. Herko wants us, his future— a future he will choose not to meet— to see him as a desir­ ing subject, in all his uneasy embodiment Callie Angell, in her impressive catalog of Thirteen M ost Beautiful Boys} agrees with James Stoller, who sees something tragic in Herko’s performance. Stoller recalls his reaction to the portrait: it became “excruciatingly moving as I uncontrollably invested in Herko’s glowering expression with meanings brought from outside the film.”22 This reading is difficult to discount, but I am arguing that there is something else available to the spectator who looks at the dancer1s twitchy com portm ent as something m ore than negativity. In H aircut Herko is clearly and laughingly flirting with the camera. Sometimes Herko’s perfor­ mance in Thirteen M ost Beautiful Boys seems just dark, and then sometimes I see it as a dark, drug-tinged cruise, purposely brooding and deliberately conveying a certain intensity that probably served Herko well in countless bars and shadowy public spaces. Giorgio Agamben privileges gesture as a modality of movement that re­ sists modernity’s totalizing political scripts insofar as it promises a politics of a “means with out end’123 Herko’s dancing, as it exists for us in written accounts, oral histories, and films, is that o f the suggestive, imperfect ges­ ture. The gesture is utopian in that it resists the goal-oriented tautological present The gesture is a cultural supplement that, in its incompleteness, promises another time and place. Thus, through Herko’s twitch we see the gesture as the choreography of the not-yet-conscious. Randy M artin has succinctly argued for the importance of “critical moves" in a politicized dance studies. M artin makes words such as “movement” and “mobiliza­ tion” do double duty as his research links theatrical dance movement with the politics of collective social movements.24 This metaphorical link pro­ vides dance studies with a powerful materialist approach. I look at Herko’s choreography of gesture and see it working alongside Martin’s analysis to a point, then diverging. The divergence has to do with a politics that may not have the overarching coherency of a movement yet but may nonethe­ less represent a valuable interruption in the coercive choreography o f a here and now that is scored to naturalize and validate dominant cultural logics such as capitalism and heterosexuality. A gesture is not a full-fledged resistance, but it is a m om ent when that overwhelming frame of a here and now, a spatial and temporal order that is calibrated against one, is resisted. Herko’s camp surplus, what I am calling his ornamentation, is not quite the garden-variety camp of pink flamingos or feather boas. Camp, as I have

suggested elsewhere, resituates the past in the service of politics and aes­ thetics that often critique the present25 The past on which Herko called was often a distant, magical past like that of fairy tales. Di Prima meditates in her autobiography on “Freddie's groping for the allegory, the ultimate fairytale that could tell his story, could maybe save him.”26 Today we can see the allegorical utopian function of Herko s work and imagine that the fairy tale was intended to do m ore than simply save himself, that it was in fact interested in saving di Prima and the collectivity that she and all their friends represented. It is therefore worthwhile to consider Herkos last dance, Palace o f the Dragon Prince— a failure according to Warhol— as Herko s invocation of a mythical past or fairy tala Here, turning to Bloch on the utopic work of the fairy tale can help us understand Herko s performance. Of course the fairy tale world, especially the magical one, no longer belongs to the present How can it mirror our wish-projections against a background that has long since disappeared? Or, to put it a better way: How can the fairy tale mirror our wish projections other than in a totally obsolete way? Real Kings no longer exists. The atavistically feudal and transcendental world from which the fairy tale stems and to which it seems to be tied has most certainly vanished. However, the mirror of the fairy tale has not become opaque, and the manner of wish-fulfillment which peers forth from it is wish-fulfillment which is not entirely without a home. It adds up to this: the fairy tale nar­ rates a wish-fulfillment which is not bound by its own time and the apparel of its contents. In contrast to the folktale, which is always tied to a particular locale, the fairy tale remains unbound. Not only does the fairy tale remain as fresh as longing and love, but the evil demons that abound in fairy tales are still at work in the present, and the hap­ piness of “once upon a time/* which is even more abundant in the fairy tale, still affects our visions of the future.27 Before addressing Bloch's thesis, I want to consider the best source cur­ rently available to gather an impression of The P alace o f the Dragon Prince, Herkos last major public performance at the church. Di Prima recounts that the performance was based on “some Russian fairy tale he'd found somewhere. It was to be huge, an epic.”28 Aesthetically it included “lots of rom antic music,” “flowing costumes, sh m o ttasan d “what somebody called the “junk store aesthetic.” M any people did not seem to get it, and

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D ragon Prince poster. Image courtesy o f Judson M em orial Church Archives, Fales lib rary , N YU .

di Prima recalls Rem y Chadip, one of Herkos frequent collaborators, tell­ ing her that he thought it was “appalling." But she describes it with much greater critical generosity: A full-out work— I thought it was extraordinary. Oh, I could see as well as anyone the flaws, the places it needed to be cut, the techni­ cal mistakes. Or the places it got corny: too much emotion and you had to say no in self-defense. I could see all this, ’cause these were the kinds of things I'd come to recognize as necessary risks___ I saw the dance as extraordinarily brave.29 Di Prima believed in Herkos performance despite its excess, its com iness. She never hesitated to describe the artists work as rom antic vec­ toring on the magical. A t another point, she refers to a performance me­ morializing the life of Sergio, an Italian friend of Herko s and di Prim as husband (and H erkos ex-boyfriend), Alan Marlowe, explaining, “W hen Freddie danced F or Sergio at the New Bowery, he made a dance that was also a ritual. He magically ‘did’ something. Transformed something. It seems so simple now. But at that point m any of us were groping our way backward to art as m agick”30 This “magically doing" speaks not only to the performative force of Herko s perform ance but also to how it was calibrated to provide an idea of another way of being in the world that was not allowed within an antiutopian herm eneutic H erkos perfor­ m ance practice, like Bloch’s fairy tale, “narrates a wish-fulfillment which is not bound by its own tim e and the apparel of its contents," and this “unboundness" interrupts what I have described, after Halberstam, as straight time, a naturalized tem porality that is calibrated to make queer potentiality not only unrealized but also unthinkable. Indeed the pres­ ent is replete with beasts that need to be vanquished, which is to say that investing in a fairy tale need not be a retreat from reality but can be a certain way of facing i t To that end, the allegorical nature that utopian critique employs in vari­ ous m odes of artistic production is im portant to consider. Bloch preferred ballet to American jazz dance, and as in Adornos pronouncements on jazz music, Bloch betrays a discomfort with N orth American vernacular art, especiallyAfncan Am erican expression. Bloch scholar Vincent Geoghegan suggests that the philosopher s investment in ballet betrays his allegiance to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless Blochs description of ballets performativity, what it does, speaks of the form s utopian force:

The dance allows us to move in a completely different way than e way we move in the day at least in the everyday it imitates some which the latter has lost or never even possessed. It paces out the wish for more beautifully moved being, fixes in the eye, ear, the whole bo y, just as if it already existed now.31 Perhaps Bloch would have been less approving of minimalist danc prac­ tices that rehearsed quotidian movement, but his interest in fairy tal s and ballet seems to be aligned with the romantic experimentation and cess that characterized Herko s work. Herko is interested in pacing out more beautifully moved being. Movement in this passage from Bloch 'sts at an allegorical juncture between aesthetics and political movemen . An­ other scholar associated with the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcu e, of­ fered the following formulation: The analysis of cognitive function of phantasy is thus led to aesthetics as the “science of beauty*: behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason— the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination, the critique of the per­ formance principle.32 The pairing of sensuousness and reason is relevant as we consider the al­ legorical nature of queer utopian expression. The performance principle is the cultural logic that is a manifestation of a capitalist ethos. For utopian philosophers such as Bloch and Marcuse, dance and its sensuousness exist alongside a political impulse. Movement is thus always already doubly valenced because it enables a mode of cognition that can potentially disattach itself horn the performance principle and all the negation it represents. I do not know how many steps separate my apartment from 5 Corne­ lia Street, the address of John Dodds apartment, where Fred Herko took his own life I am not patient enough to count, but let us say it is about five hundred, a few short city blocks. A s I neared finishing writing this chapter, I walked to 5 Cornelia Street This was a morbid little homage, a private performance fueled by a minor and abstract necrophilic attach­ ment. This stroll made me think about the abstraction of writing about a suicide “as performance” and how that misses something. I did not expect to feel much, but m y expectations proved wrong. I thought about a young friend who tried to take his own life and, luckily for himself and all the people who adore him, failed. I thought about another beloved person in

my life and remember the shattering sadness he felt when he lost an ex­ lover, who ended his life a few years ago with a leap from a bridge. But mostly I thought about my best friend from graduate school He took his own life several years ago. I recall all the dreams I have had about him, still have about him, in which he is mysteriously still alive and living in the walls of my apartm ent I discover his lingering presence in this recurring dream, and I somehow know that it is my job to get him out, to save him. I never do. I always fail. W hen reading all o f Herko’s friends’ responses to his death, even Andy’s wish to have filmed it, I get the impression that they too felt like they failed. In chapter 4 1 discussed Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem "One A rt” As Bishop wrote, "The art of losing is not hard to master.” As much as I like the sound of that line I realize that there is something artless and brutal about losing. Bishop’s lover of many years, after their eventual breakup, took her own life. Was Bishop’s poem about Lata? Was Bishop trying to describe the art of "losing” her lover, or was she giving her Brazilian lover instructions so she would be able to let the poet go? Was it the poet’s way o f reconciling that terrible loss, or a document of her failure to rec­ oncile? Queemess and that particular modality of loss known as suicide seem linked. And to write or conjecture about suicide as a queer act, a performance of radical negativity, utopian in its negation of death as ulti­ mate uncontrollable finitude, and not think about what it symbolizes for a larger collectivity would be remiss. Suicide is often the end of hope, and indeed a critical and strategic no­ tion of hope is often snuffed out for a collectivity. I have risked romanti­ cizing Herko’s loss in discussing the transhistorical relevance of his queer incandescence.33 As I stood on the sidewalk where he ended his life I no­ ticed a small record store in the building’s bottom floor. It was cramped and seemed to be temporally “offtrack” Subterranean Records would be easy for my everyday eye to miss. I walked inside and said hello to a store clerk, who fidgeted as he sort of rocked on the stool on which he was only partially sitting. There was another potential customer in the very small store. I looked around and quickly noticed a lot of Patti Smith CDs and records, and a vinyl album I cherished when I was seventeen, The Gun Club’s amazing Fire o f Love. It was priced at fifty dollars. Then I imagined how Herko would have enjoyed punk if he had stayed around for another fifteen years. Along the same line of thought, I wondered how gay libera­ tion would have affected his life. Would being gay have made his utopian and vexed queemess any easier or m ore painful?

After Jack Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity

J A C K SMITH IS tie progenitor of queer utopian aesthetics. His influ­ ence washes over this book and its desire to conjure a queer utopian sphere of potentiality. In MaryJordans documentary Ja ck Smith and the Destruction o f Atlantis several of Smith’s friends and collaborators explain that invoking the fabled lost continent of Atlantis was Smiths way of invoking the utopian. The aesthetic practice that I have previously described as disidentification focuses on the way in which dominant signs and symbols, often ones that are toxic to minoritarian subjects, can be reimagined through an engaged and animated mode of performance or spectatorship.1Disidentification can be a world-making project in which the limits of the here and now are tra­ versed and transgressed. JackSm ith’s version of Atlantis, glimpsed in m uch of his film and performance work, disidentified with the constraining and phobic limit of the present On a material level that meant that dime-store glitter became diamond dust, and cheap polyester was transformed into silken veils. In jack Smith’s world dumpster divingbecame treasure hunting. Throughout this book I have attempted a sort of calculus in which queer art from the past is evoked for the purpose of better understanding work made today. Thus, the way contemporary work lines up with the historical archive helps us engage Smith’s utopianism in relation to queer performance today. In this chapter the work of New York-based lesbian performance artist Dy­ nasty Handbag and performance collective My Barbarian perform a mode of utopianism that I associate with Jack Smith’s strange legacy and afterlife. I then briefly describe similarities thatthese two acts have with the work of drag conceptual/vocal artist Kalup Linzy. In looking at the work of all three contemporary acts, I draw on two aspects of what I describe as a queer uto­ pian aesthetic practice: failure and virtuosity. The version of utopia to which this book has subscribed exits some­ where between the figure of the freakish and often solitary outsider, the madwoman street preacher, and the politically engaged collectivity, ! have

insisted that there has always been something queer about utopia and uto­ pian thinkers. Smith is the exemplary figure of the queer utopian artist and thinker who seeks solitariness yet calls for a queer collectivity. Dynasty Handbag, a primarily solo artist who stages acts that resemble psychotic episodes made humorous, is a dear inheritor o f a performance practice that is akin to Smiths solitary loft performances. My Barbarian, a group with three primary members that sometimes expands to indude friends who are musicians and performers, is reminiscent o f the ragtag queer collective hysteria that Smith staged in his legendary experimental films Flam ing C reatures and N orm al Love. Both the lone lunatic and the crazed collective stage a desire that I have called queer utopia. Both modes of performance ask important questions of aesthetic practice, questions that attempt to visualize that which is not yet here. To understand this desire better it is useful to return one of the sources of queer utopian longing from which I draw in this book. In Smiths wellknown manifesto "Capitalism of Lotusland” he begins with a stirring meditation on art and the artist: Could art be useful? Ever since the glitter drifted over the bumtout mins of Plaster Lagoon thousands of artists have pondered and dreamed of such a thing, yet, art must not be used anymore as another elaborate means of fleeing from thinking because of the multiplying amount of information each person needs to process in order to come to any kind of decision about what kind of planet one wants to live on before business, religion, and government succeed in blowing it out of the solar system.2 Here Smith delineates just what is at stake in artistic production. The 1978 manifesto keenly anticipates capitalisms permutations in the age of globalization, because there are indeed "multiplying amounts [s] o f infor­ m ation [that] each person needs to process.” Smiths critiques o f capital­ ism, or what he alternately calls "landlordism,” should not be dismissed as just campy fun. Smiths virulent aversion to private property saturated his work. Through his strange and moldy mode of address Smith speaks of an economic system that is innately flawed, violently asymmetrical, and es­ sentially exploitative. Smiths manifesto was utopian, not so much because he dreamed of Xanadu but, more nearly, because he performed alternate realities. These realities were loosely based on fantasies of glimmering lost cityscapes like Atlantis.

Queer restaging of the past helps us imagine new temporalities that interrupt straight time.3 Smiths investment in other cultures initially ap­ pears to be nothing but Orientalist fantasy, but those renderings of the East should be considered simulacra of simulacra because they are not based on those cultures but on cheesy Hollywood fantasies of “over there” or a “not here.” Smith animated these queer fairy-tale worlds not as a form of wish-fulfillment but, instead, as a challenge to the limitations of the po­ litical and aesthetic imagination. The critical work that utopian thought does, in its most concise and lucid formulation, allows us to see different worlds and realities. And this conjured reality instructs us that the “here and now” is simply not enough. As Smith’s manifesto continues he renders ideas of what a socially rel­ evant mode of art production would look like: Let art continue to be entertaining, escapist, stunning, glamorous, and naturalistic—but let it be loaded with information worked into the va­ pid plots of, for instance, movies. Each one would be a more or less complete exposition of one subject or another. Thus you would have Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh busily making yogurt; Humphrey Bogart struggling to introduce a basic civil law course into public schools; infants being given to the old in homes for the aged by Ginger Rog­ ers; donut-shaped dwellings with sunlight pouring into central patios for all, designed by Gary Cooper; soff, clear plastic bubble cars with hooks that attach to monorails built by Charlton Heston that pass over the Free Paradise of abandoned objects in the center of the dty near where the community movie sets would also be; and where Maria Montez and Johnny Weissmuller would labour to dissolve all national boundaries and release the prisoners of Uranus. But the stairway to socialism is blocked by the Yvonne De Carlo Tabernacle Choir waving bloody palm branches and waiting to sing the “Hymn to the Sun” by Irving Berlin. This is the rented moment of the exotic landlordism of prehistoric capitialsim of tabu.4 This quotation needs some unpacking in relation to Smiths artistic ver­ nacular and the unique cosmology to which he adhered. Smith imagines vapid Hollywood plots injected with redeemable social values. He looks to the Hollywood star system as a potential site o f transformative poten­ tiality. But his celebration of Hollywood is not pure festivity— he also un­ derstands obstacles in the culture industry. In Smiths universe the m ost

hallowed saint was B-movie star Maria Montez. Montez's main competi­ tor, Yvonne De Carlo, became the antithesis of Smith's beloved Montez. Smith described De Carlo m ost succinctly as a “walking career”5 This description was meant to tag the actress with the title of a vulgar profes­ sionalist Those of us who attempt to dream utopia within the sphere of our quotidian life must constantly overcome the disabling inertia gener­ ated by such agents of antiutopianism De Carlo's brand of careerism was viewed by Smith as an ethos that limited the possibility of imagining a dif­ ferent time and place that was not organized by capitalisms injunctive to reproduce and be productive. If we apply some of Smiths irreverence to the current problem of gay and lesbian neoliberalism, we understand that the problem with groups such as the Human Rights Campaign and others that advocate the “mainstream" of queer politics is not unlike the prob­ lem of walking careerism, which is to say, then, that Yvonne De C arlo-ism dominates contemporary LGBT activism In this book I suggest we need an idealism that is perhaps as sparkling as the hallowed iconicity o f Maria Montez. Queer idealism may be the only way to usher in a new mode of radicalism that can perhaps release queer politics from its current death griPSmith's dream of a planet not destroyed by a savage market economy, religious fundamentalism, and mad govemmentality was directly con­ nected to his fecund fantasies of B movies that potentially offered a cri­ tique of the “here and now” in favor of a transformative “then and there.” The politics of Smith's utopianism can be linked to current aesthetic proj­ ects that also imagine alternative universes that eschew the dominance of the here and now for the force and potentiality of a conjured world of fantasy and magic that is not simply a mode o f fantastical escapism but, instead, a blueprint for alternative modes o f being in the world. This project does not need to draw a stark distinction between escapism and radical politics. In this book I have strived to illustrate the importance of rekindling a political imagination. Furtherm ore, escape itself need not be a surrender but, instead, may be more like a refusal of a dominant order and its systemic violence. Queer fantasy is linked to utopian longing, and together the two can become contributing conditions of possibility for political transformation. Utopia's rejection of pragmatism is often associated with failure. And, indeed, m ost profoundly, utopianism represents a failure to be normal. Throughout this book I have offered historical examples of queer aesthetic practices imbued with utopian potentiality. I have often aligned these

readings of work from the past (or in Blochs terms, the no-longer-conscious) with more contemporary queer work that displays how the radical promise of that work was part of a larger political impulse that actually exists in the present In conclusion I turn to two examples of the aesthetic work that follows this Smithian thread, Los Angeles’s My Barbarian and New York-based lesbian performer Dynasty Handbag. These artists offer a Smithian transport ignited by the force of queer utopianism Utopia can never be prescriptive and is always destined to fail Despite this seeming negativity, a generative politics can be potentially distilled from the aes­ thetics of queer failure. W ithin failure we can locate a kernel of potential­ ity. I align queer failure with a certain mode of virtuosity that helps the spectator exit from the stale and static lifeworld dominated by the alien­ ation, exploitation, and drudgery associated with capitalism or landlord­ ism W hen I describe the ways in which Jack Smith, Dynasty Handbag and My Barbarian perform failure, I am not claiming that they are not suc­ cessful or accomplished as performers or that the performances are not stron g fulfilling or interesting; indeed my opinion is just the opposite, as I revel in the aesthetic and political stimulation the work provides. In­ stead I mean to explicate the ways in which these artists thematize failure as being something like the alw ays already status of queers and other minoritarian subjects in the dominant social order within which they to il Queer failure, as I argue, is more nearly about escape and a certain kind of virtuosity.

Dynasty Handbag and the Strange Itinerant Beauty of Queer Failure Queer failure is often deemed or understood as failure because it rejects normative ideas of value. In speech act theory it is the failure central to speech itself. It is blatantly and irrevocably antinormative. N orm al was a despised term for Smith, and it referred to much more than sexual ob­ ject choice. The normativity against which Smith argued is not Michael W arners idea of heteronormativity, a particular mode of normativity, but, instead, a more expansive understanding of the problem of the normal.6 This expansive understanding of the normal can tentatively be understood as the antiutopian. Smiths use of the term norm al spoke against straight time, which is laden with temporal obstacles and challenges that ensure a certain kind of queer failure as axiomatic for the queer subject and col­ lectivity. W ithin straight tim e the queer can only fail; thus, an aesthetic of

failure can be productively occupied by the queer artist for the purpose of delineating the bias that underlies straight tim e s measure. The politics of failure are about doing something else, that is, doing something else in relation to a something that is missing in straight tim es always already flawed temporal mapping practice. Thus, we think about how Smith is leg­ endary for "failing" to start his loft performances on time and keeping au­ diences waiting for him to emerge.7 The work of Jibz Cam erons art persona, Dynasty Handbag, illustrates the efficacy of a certain m ode of queer failure. A musician and performer, Cameron created the character of Dynasty Handbag in 2002. Dynasty Handbag can perhaps best be described as a sort of quixotic bag lady dressed in an outfit that appears to be something of an eighties fringe­ laden aerobics costume. Always prepared to negotiate a threat, both real but m ostly imagined, she wears a rumpled backpack filled with energy snacks. H er constant nemeses are the voices in her head. N one o f the Dynasty Handbag performances I have watched has been an actual fail­ ure. Indeed, they have all been far from failures inasmuch as they have left audiences of alternative music, culture, and sexuality applauding and even seemingly edified. M y own experience as a spectator at those perfor­ mances has been valuable precisely because of the mimetic performance of a person, a spoiled subjectivity, who is considered a loser, or rubbish, who refuses to live by an outside rule, a system of categorization that cel­ ebrates the normal, and instead insists on her own value as a countercul­ tural heroine. Dynasty Handbag is the utopian oddball par excellence. In the 2006 performance H ell in a H andbag, the character/persona Dy­ nasty Handbag restages Dantes Inferno. But in this inferno the different levels of hell represent different aspects of the characters life that she finds difficult to negptiate. A t one level she is confronted with visions of cook­ ies, and she responds with a m usical/ dance number that is certainly satu­ rated with a punk ethos that celebrates a certain kind of nonmastery that is failure. Dynasty Handbags performance represents a deliberate failure to achieve melodic or choreographic conformity. Instead, on the level of movement and sound, we see a brilliant offness. This is a modality of being off script, off page, which is not so much a failure to succeed as it is a fail­ ure to participate in a system of valuation that is predicated on exploitation and conformity. The queer failure of Dynasty Handbag and countless other queer performers is a failure that is more nearly a refusal or an escape. In BagSj a performance commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop in January 2009, the voices in Dynasty Handbags head get the best of hen The

D ynasty Handbag. Photographs copyright Jibz Cam eron; photographer Ves Pitts.

black stage is empty except for five small bags seemingly scattered around i t The different discarded bags begin to talk to Dynasty Handbag and dic­ tate her movements and emotional positionality onstage. Each bag speaks to the frazzled protagonist and the various voices play over the theater s sound system. Ih e artist herself voices the various monologues of seduction. A

brown paper bag that initially comes on sweet becomes an increasingly whiney and demanding bottom After first seducing her, it demands more and more hand-bag penetration. She moves horn that object relationship to a darker one with a black plastic bag. That entanglement starts off on a very sado-masochistic note. In the frenzy of their hand-bag intercourse a subtle boundary is crossed and die black bag violently rejects die hapless Dynasty Handbag. She is then comforted by a blue plastic bag with a cheesy fake British accent This bag at first comforts her but then attempts to drag her into a quagmire of self-pity and nihilism She turns away from the negative blue bag to a demanding white plastic bag that asks her to become various figures embodied in dance. Dynasty becomes a turnip, a toilet, and Mick Jagger with a dagger, and she dances her becoming in her particular style of nonmastery. She is spasmatic and slightly ridiculous in her exaggerated movements, but the audience seems to sense that she is quaking with a transformative potentiality. Being and performativity momentarily merge as die character becomes other, becoming herself embracing her status as quixotic madwoman, oddball, and utopian. The dear plastic bag rewards her with a bite of die peanut butter sandwich that it contains. The bag tells her that it insists on preserving the davor of the thing it surrounds, mak­ ing it more natural. We see that Dynasty Handbag is now enveloped with the enabling aura of the plastic bag so that her utopian imagination is newly energized and made new. In this moment a certain kind of hopelessness and failure break momentarily and open into a new reparative m om ent Failure and hopelessness seem strange topics for a book about utopia and hope. Yet I want to see the failure and bad sentiments in Dynasty Handbag's work as active political refusal To make this point I turn to particular moment in philosopher Paolo Vim o's A G ram m ar o f the M ul­ titudes, which speaks of the emotional situation of the post-Fordist mo­ ment as characterized by a certain mode of ambivalence. This ambiva­ lence leads to "bad sentiments." As Vimo puts it, the emotional situation of the multitude today is that of these bad sentiments, which include "op­ portunism, cynicism, social integration, inexhaustible recanting, cheerful resignation.”8 Vimo imagines the ways in which the laborer may call on re­ structured opportunism and cynicism as a sort of escape or exit from late capitalisms mandate to work and be productive. Negative sentiments such as cynicism, opportunism, depression, and bitchiness are often seen as solipsistic, individualistic, and anticommunal affective stances associated with an emotional tonality of hopelessness. Yet these bad sentiments can signal the capacity to transcend hopelessness. These sentiments associated

with despondence contain the potentiality for new modes o f collectivity belonging in difference and dissent The worker can potentially redirect cynicism, which may lead to a criticality that does collapse into a postFordist standard mode of alienation. Vimo, like other writers associated with the Italian proponents of O peraism o (workerism) and the Autonomia movement, makes an argument against work itself. O peraistas understand that capitalism is a problem not simply because workers are exploited but also because work has become the dominating condition of human life.9 O peraistas do not want to take over the means of production; instead they plan on reducing it. W hat would it mean, on an emotional level, to make work not the defining fea­ ture of our lives? How could such a procedure be carried out? The strategy at the center of O peraism o is described as exodus— a strat­ egy o f refusal or defection. This mode o f resistance as refusal or escape resonates with many patterns of minoritarian resistance to structures of social command. Examples could include the trope of escapology that Daphne Brooks has recently described in her book B odies in Dissent10 or various acts of illegal border crossing. Real or symbolic “escapes” from chattel slavery and xenophobic immigration laws are examples of a certain mode of exodus, which is political action that does not automatically vec­ tor into a fixed counterdiscourse of resistance. Cynicism, opportunism, and other bad sentiments can be responses to the current emotional situation, which many of us interested in the project of radical politics understand as hopelessness. Vimo s reimagining of bad sentiments helps us understand them as something the worker can use to escape. “Bad sentiments” can be critically redeployed and function as re­ fusals of social control mandates that become transformative behaviors. Dynasty Handbags queer failure is not an aesthetic failure but, instead, a political refusal. It is a going off script, and the script in this instance is the mandate that makes queer and other minoritarian cultural performers work not for themselves but for distorted cultural hierarchy.

The Anticipatory Illumination of Queer Virtuosity The other side o f the performance of failure is queer virtuosity. Failure and virtuosity are both equally important aspects of queer utopia or queer­ ness as utopian. Queer utopia is a not just a failure to achieve normative

virtuosity; it is also a virtuosity that is b om in the face of failure within straight tim es measure. In A G ram m ar o f the M ultitude Vimo speaks of the potential transformation offered by virtuosity. A certain modality o f virtu­ osity offers an escape from a systemic mandate within capitalism to labor in order to produce a product.11 Although virtuosity can now be commod­ ified like a traditional commodity, it nonetheless offers the potential for a certain escape or, as Vimo puts it, an e x it V im o explains how virtuosity offers a certain defection from our current system. It, too, is a going off script. Virtuosity debunks production-based systems of value that make work and even cultural production drudgery and alienated debasement. This modality of queer virtuosity seems especially salient in the “showcore” harmonization of My Barbarian. The spirit of Smith can be seen as an animating presence in the elaborate costumes and design of My Bar­ barian. The woodland frolicking of Pagan Rights can perhaps be seen as a contemporary version of Jack Smiths Flam ing Creatures done as a musi­ cal. My Barbarian’s interest in a mythic past, that of Arthurian legend, not unlike Jack Smith’s investment in Atlantis, creates utopian deployments of the past in the service of critiquing the present for die ultimate purpose of imagining a future that is unimaginable in normative or straight time. In the musical video Pagan Rights (2 0 0 6 ) three young people are mys­ teriously summoned to the woods by some great mystery. After a cut, the collective emerges as naked mythological beasts. Wearing nothing but plushy masks of red, yellow, and blue synthetic fur, the group is nude from the shoulders down, conveying an almost comical vaudeville-like version of the philosophical category o f the bare life. Their nude dance is a delib­ erate performance of studied awkwardness, the stretch, wobble, and pirou­ ette performing an aesthetic of simultaneous failure and virtuosity. Three different bodies, two mixed-race men and one white woman, play three mythical and seemingly primal beasts. The video morphs again, with the collective turning into funky queer neohippies who literally dance around a maypole and hug trees. The interracial queer hippie collective engages in a woodland sing-along as they puff on what seems to be a marijuana ciga­ rette. Soon there is another shift, and the larger collective marches through a tunnel holding signs that read “Our Goddess Gave Birth to Your God” and “W itch Freedom” (a phrase that sounds like “which freedom,” a lin­ guistic move that asks us to consider the various abuses of the term freedom in current U.S. domestic and foreign policy). As they march in this musical movement they voice a list of pagan demands that today announce a queer utopianism that counters the dead-end temporality o f straight time:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Defy the Christians Dance in a circle Sacrifice with dignity Anoint your body Tell the future Respect your mother Followyour spirit

This performance imagines a time and place outside the stultifying hold of the present by calling on a mythical past where we can indeed imagine the defying of Christian totalitarianism, where we spin in concentric cir­ cles that defy linear logic, where ones own ego is sacrificed for a collective dignity, where queer bodies receive divine anointment, where the future is actively imagined, where our dying natural world can be revived, and once again, where collectively we follow our spirits. The G olden A ge is a performance by My Barbarian that the group de­ scribes as a postcolonial musical, dwelling on the history o f the slave and drug trades. The past revisited in one particular musical number is devoted to the atrocity of chattel slavery. Asking the musical question "W ho put the gold in the golden age?” My Barbarian illuminates the historical atrocity of the slave trade by inquiring into the economic underpinning of European imperialism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch were extremely active in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, and for a time in the seventeenth century they dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Although some people might see the performance as making light o f slav­ ery, what is actually happening is a revisitation of the past. This, too, reso­ nates with Smiths exploration of past lifeworlds. The crucial difference at this m om ent is the way in which Smith revisits his mythical past with his­ torical resonances and My Barbarian addresses an elided imperial history. To state boldly through virtuosic harmony that slavery is a foundational source of New World and European wealth is to point to the violence of imperialisms very underpinnings. Finally, to ask the audience to do the slave dance, as My Barbarian does, is to call on them to put themselves in the abjected shoes of the slave. The three core members of My Barbarian each try out virtuoso dance moves that include different old-school breakdance numbers, spinning and some locking and popping. The solos are meant to beckon the members of the Amsterdam audience to join them onstage. The performance attempts to interrupt a particular quotidian script in the imperial history of the Dutch slave trade that is often elided.

As the audience members attempt to move like the performers they are asked to join in a mimetic practice that at first might simply seem to be playful but actually demands an embodied occupation of historical mem­ ory that has been elided by the Dutch postcolonial condition.

Kalup Is Waiting I have been charting two lines o f Smithian influence through a reading of contemporary performance. A certain kind of queer failure that thematizes queer temporality has been provisionally assigned to Dynasty Handbag, and I have heuristically tagged My Barbarian with the tag of queer virtu­ osity. I could certainly switch the terms of analysis and describe My Bar­ barians Smithian failure and Dynasty Handbags weird Smithian utopian virtuosity. In the work of artist Kalup Linzy we can see both of these lines clearly intertwining Linzy wears a fresh minimalist drag that often does not amount to much more than a dancers leotard, an occasional baby doll

M y Barbarian, from its perform ance Golden A ge (2 0 0 7 ). Copyright M y Barbarian. C ourtesy Steve Turner Contem porary, Los Angeles, and the artists.

Kalup Linzy’s M embers Only perform ance at Sweet Lorraine's, N ew Orleans. C ourtesy o f A rt Production Fund, N ew York. © 2 0 0 8 .

dress, a wig, and a flower in her hair. The Florida-born Linzy is a tall and formidable presence but nonetheless performs a certain feminine small­ ness and vulnerability that is reminiscent of drag luminaries such as Vagi­ nal Davis. Like Davis, Linzy performs the vulnerable and sometimes sassy little lady. The failure in Linzy s video and performance work is evident on the level of narrative. So much of it is about tricks gone bad and lovers who treat her badly. And the virtuosity is dearly evident on the level of her powerful vocal performances. She is an excellent singer, and her mu­ sic resonates beyond the register of parody. After her performances and screenings I am often left thinking, “Wow, she can really sing.” A particu­ larly stirring show stopper is her song “Asshole,” in which she calls out a suitor who has done her wrong. On a lyrical level she perfectly describes a state of affective renunciation, but on the sonic level the song also achieves a degree of mastery that we associate with virtuosity. Tavia Nyong o recently presented an excellent paper that considers Lin­ zy s song cyde Sweetberry Sonnet (2 0 0 8 ).12 In that paper Nyong o suggests

that we locate Linzys work in the realm of Deleuzean masochism. Using Deleuze he describes Linzys "constellation of masochism” as foreground­ ing waiting, lingering, and backwardness. The song cycle features the char­ acter of Taiwan, who has rejected a marriage proposal by her boyfriend. After this rejection she pines and moans for a sort of fulfillment that she never achieves. This wanting and waiting in Linzy is a good example of the power of longing that I have been attempting to describe throughout this book. Yes, on one level Taiwan just wants a good fuck, but when we look at this longing projected out on a screen or enacted on a stage, we see it as more; we see it collectively as a desire for the good life that we have been denied in straight time s choke hold. We are left waiting bu t vigilant in our desire for another tim e th at is not y et here. Linzy shoots m ost of his videos in his Brooklyn apartment, and this setting certainly reminds us of the world created by Smith in his SoHo loft: There is a transformative force in Kalup Linzys work that is so reso­ nant with Smiths work. In both cases, individual interior dwelling opens up and becomes a space of queer possibility and reenaction. And there is a lot of waiting in Kalup s space, just as there was waiting in Smith’s loft. Waiting here means being out of time, or at least out of a linear mapping that is straight time. Smith is more the sadist who makes his audience wait, asking them to feel what waiting is like, what it is like not to have time at ones disposal One resource for surviving waiting in jack s loft was lighting up a joint Drugs have often offered queers resources for negoti­ ating our out-of-timeliness. But Linzys waiting is definitely a masochist waiting, as Nyong o has argued. And it also is the idealist’s waiting; it is expectant and anticipatory, and here is where we might find some of the Smithian force of the work. Near the end of N yongos paper he asks a really important question that I want to take up here. He wonders, “Is there something black about waiting?” He partially answers by saying that there is certainly something familiar about waiting for black people. But from my lens I would an­ swer my colleagues question with a resounding yes. There is something black about waiting. And there is something queer, Latino, and transgen­ der about waiting. Furthermore, there is something disabled, Indigenous, Asian, poor, and so forth about waiting. Those who wait are those of us who are out of time in at least two ways. W e have been cast out of straight tim es rhythm, and we have made worlds in our temporal and spatial con­ figurations. Certainly this would be the time o f postcoloniality, but it is also crip tim e or, like the old joke we still use, C PT (colored people tim e).

It seems like the other s time is always off. Often we are the first ones there and the last to leave. The essential point here is that our temporalities are different and outside. They are practiced failure and virtuosic. In one re­ cent video Kalup Linzy riffs on Otis Redding's “Dock of the Bay” by sing­ ing about sitting on the edge of the couch. She is sitting and waiting, but her pose is expectant, desiring, and anticipatory in the queerest utopian of ways. The shadow of Jack Smiths hopeless hopefulness touches queer per­ formance and performativity today. Smith was a virtuoso and a failure in the m ost poignant and sublime ways. Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, and Kalup Linzy are three queer acts that flourish at this particular histori­ cal moment of hopelessness, letting us imagine, in much the way Smith did, an escape from this world that is an insistence on another time and place that is simultaneously not yet here but able to be glimpsed in our horizon.

Conclusion "Take Ecstasy with Me"

WE MUST V A C A T E the here and now for a then and there. Indi­ vidual transports are insufficient We need to engage in a collective tem­ poral distortion. W e need to step out o f the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present In this book I have argued that queemess is not yet here; thus, we must always be future bound in our desires and designs. The future is a spatial and temporal destination. It is also another place, if we believe Heidegger, who argued that the temporal is prior to the spatial W hat we need to know is that queemess is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion, its status as a destination. Willingly we let ourselves feel queemess s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel We must take ecstasy. The tide of this conclusion is M ed from indie pop stars the Magnetic Fields. Sung by the wonderfully languid Stephen M erritt, the bands leader, the song and its titular request could certainly be heard as a call to submit to pleasures both pharmaceutical and carnal. And let us hope that they cer­ tainly mean at least both those things. But when I listen to this song I hear something else, or more nearly, I feel something else. A wave of lush emo­ tions washes over me, and other meanings for the word ecstasy are keyed. The gender-neutral songs address resonates queerly and performs a certain kind of longing for a something else. Might it be a call for a certain kind of transcendence? Or is it in fact something more? The Magnetic Fields are asking us to perform a certain “stepping out" with them. That “stepping out" would hopefully include a night on the town, but it could and maybe should be something more. Going back through religion and philosophy we might think of a stepping out o f time and place, leaving the here and now of straight time for a then and a there that might be queer futurity. Saint Theresas ecstasy, most memorably signaled in Lorenzo Ber­ ninis marble sculpture, has served as the visual sign of ecstasy for many

Christians. The affective transport chiseled in her face connotes a kind o f rapture that has enthralled countless spectators. It represents a leaving o f self for something larger in th e form of divinity. Plotinus described this form of ecstasy as Gods help to reach God and possess him. In Plotinus, God reaches man beyond all reason and gives him a kind of happiness that is ecstasy.1 In seminar X X , Lacan looks to Berninis sculpture as the m ost compelling example of what he calls the Other or feminine jouissance.2 Ecstasy and puissance thus both represent an individualistic move outside of the self These usages resonates with the life of the term ecstasy in the history of philosophy. Ekstasis, in die ancient Greek (exstare in the Latin), means "to stand” or "to be out outside o f oneself)” ex meaning "out” and stasis meaning "stand.” Generally the term has meant a m ode of contemplation or consciousness that is not self-enclosed, particularly in regard to being conscious o f the other: By the time we get to phenomenol­ ogy, especially Heidegger, we encounter a version o f being outside of one­ self in time. In Being and Tim e Heidegger reflects on the activity o f timeli­ ness and its relation to ekstatisch.3 Knowing ecstasy is having a sense of timeliness s m otion, comprehending a temporal unity, which includes the past (having-been), the future (the not-yet), and the present (the makingpresent). This temporally calibrated idea of ecstasy contains the potential to help us encounter a queer temporality, a thing that is not the linear­ ity that many of us have been calling straight time. W hile discussing the Montreal-based band Lesbians on Ecstasy, Halberstam points to their mo­ bilization of queer tem porality through their thought experiment of imag­ ining lesbian history as if it were on ecstasy. Here they certainly mean the drug MDMA, but they also mean an ecstatic temporality. As Halberstam explicates, their electronic covers of earnest lesbian anthems remake the past to reimagine a new temporality.4 The “stepping out” that the Magnetic Fields songs tide requests, this plaintive “Take Ecstasy with Me,” is a request to step out of the here and now o f straight time. Let us briefly consider the song’s invitation, located in its lyrics. It begins with a having-been: "You used to slide down the car­ peted stairs / Or down the banister / You stuttered like a Kaleidoscope / ’Cause you knew too many words / You used to make ginger bread houses / W e used to have taffy pulls.” After this having-been in the form of fecund romanticized childhood is rendered, we hear the song’s cho­ rus, which contains this invitation to step out of time with the speaker/ singer: "Take ecstasy with me, baby / Take ecstasy with me.” W hen we

first hear this invitation it seems like it is merely a beckoning to go back to this idealized having-been. But then the present (the making-present) is invoked in the songs next few lines, lines that first seem to be about fur­ ther describing the mythic past but on closer listening telegraph a painful instant from the present: “You had a black snow mobile / W e drove out under the northern lights / A vodka bottle gave you those raccoon eyes / We got beat up just for holding hands.” Did the vodka give the songs ad­ dressee raccoon eyes? Or was it the bottle deployed in an act of violence? Certainly we know that the present being described in the song is one in which we are “beat up just for holding hands.” At this point we hear the lyrical refrain differently “Take ecstasy with me, baby / Take ecstasy with me.” The weird, quirky pop song takes on the affective cadence of a stirring queer anthem. (A cover of this song by the electronic dance act chk chk chk did briefly becom e a dance-floor anthem.) Take ecstasy with me thus becom es a request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional, a time that is not queemess. Queemesss time is the time of ecstasy. Ecstasy is queemess s way. W e know tim e through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality. But let us take ecstasy together, as the Magnetic Fields request. That means going beyond the singular shattering that a version o f jouissance suggests or the transport of Christian rapture. Taking ecstasy with one another, in as many ways as possible, can perhaps be our best way of enacting a queer time that is not yet here but nonetheless always potentially dawning. Taking ecstasy with one another is an invitation, a call, to a then-andthere, a not-yet-here. Following this books rhythm of cross-temporal com ­ parison, I offer lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishops invitation to her staunch spinster mentor Marianne M oore to “come flying”: Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying In a doud of fiery pale chemicals, please come flying to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water, please come fiying.s

Ih e next few lines describe the river that the two poets would traverse, the multitude of dags they would behold on ships. Bishop refers to M oores signature three-cornered Paul Revere hat and her pointy black shoes, mak­ ing the address all the more personal and highlighting M oores own queer extravagance. They would “m ount” the magical sky with what Bishop calls a natural heroism. Our queer dynamic duo would then fly over “the ac­ cidents, above the malignant movies, the taxicabs and injustices at large.” This flight is a spectacle of queer transport made lyric. Each stanza closes with the invitation to come flying. The last two stanzas are especially poi­ gnant for my thesis: With dynasties of negative constructions darkening and dying around you, with g ra m m a r that suddenly turns and shines like flocks of sandpipers flying, please come flying. Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come frying.6 It is important to note that the poems last few lines announce the flight s destination as not determinedly spatial but instead as temporal: “this fine morning.” Kathryn R Kent has written carefully about the complicated cross-generational bond between the two women that eventually led to a sort of disappointment when M oores mother (with whom she lived) became an overarching influence in her life and overwhelmed the identificatory erotics between the two great poets.7 (As I have maintained, dis­ appointment is a big part of utopian longing.) Kent explains the ways in which Bishop s work signaled a queer discourse of invitation that did not subsume the other but was instead additive. Two other queer ghosts who float over the bridge are W alt W hitman and Hart Crane, both of whom wrote monumental poems about the bridge and what it represented. Bishop and M oore were both conversant about that work and the queer intertext that was being rendered. One can perhaps also decipher the liv­ ing presence of writer Samuel K Delany hovering. He is the author of “At­ lantis: A Model 1924,” a haunting story that meditates on his own family

history as it is interlaced with Cranes biography and his relationship with the Brooklyn Bridge.8 The point is that the poem itself is poised at a dense connective site in the North American queer imagination. The Brooklyn Bridge and crossing the river, arguably both ways, represents the possibil­ ity of queer transport, leaving the here and now for a then and there. Thus, I look at Bishop’s poem as being illustrative of a queer utopianism that is by its very nature additive, like the convergence of past, present, and future that I have discussed throughout this book. This convergence is the very meaning of the ecstatic. The poem, like the pop song, is also a unique example of the concrete utopianism for which I am calling. Bishop does not overly sugarcoat the invitation; she clearly states that there are "dynasties of negative construc­ tions / darkening and dying around you.” But this invitation, this plea, is made despite the crushing force of the dynasty of the here and now. It is an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better. Cruising U topia can ultimately be read as an invitation, a performative provocation. Manifesto-like and ardent, it is a call to think about our lives and times differently, to look beyond a narrow version of the here and now on which so m any around us who are bent on the normative coun t Utopia in this book has been about an insistence on something else, some­ thing better, something dawning. I offer this book as a resource for the po­ litical imagination. This text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective political becoming. These pages have described aesthetic and political practices that need to be seen as necessary modes of step­ ping out of this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter. From shared critical dissatisfaction we arrive at collective potentiality.

TW O A D D IT IO N A L ESSAYS

Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate C a ry Fisher with Eve Kosofeky Sedgwick

IN MY BOOK Cruising U topia: The Then and There o f Queer Futurity (2 0 0 9 ); I argue that queemess does not yet exist I instead offer the prop­ osition that queemess is an ideality or a figuration of a mode of being in the world that is not yet here. But I also argue on behalf o f a revivification of queer politics. A question that follows both these aspects of my larger thesis is something like this: if queemess does not exist, how can we have queer politics? In this chapter, I take the opportunity to revisit this ques­ tion of what the relationship between queemess and politics might be. I begin by reconsidering the role of politics and its relation to the lived ex­ perience of social inequality and economic asymmetry that people who understand their sexuality as marked by sexual alterity often share. In an effort to reevaluate these questions around the (im possible poli­ tics of queemess, I turn to the strange and compelling collaboration be­ tween Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her friend Gary Fisher. Gary Fisher was a graduate student in literature and a writer whose work Sedgwick sup­ ported and championed. Fisher died an unpublished writer in 1994 due to complications related to AIDS. Sedgwick took on the project of editing a collection of Fishers short stories and poems after his death. This paper works through Fisher and Sedgwick’s collaboration and the project’s re­ ception as an example of what I will describe as a queer politics of the in­ commensurable. The publication of G ary in Your P ocket (1 9 9 6 ) was met with what we perhaps can call some political unease in both queer studies and critical race studies. Robert Reid-Pharr sums up the reception of the book by explaining that "responses have ranged from righteous indigna­ tion toward the text and its editor, Eve Sedgwick, to a rather maddening T his essay w as first published in Q ueer Futures: R econsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Po­ litical, ed ited b y E lah e H aschem i Yekani, Eveline K ilian, and B eatrice M ichaelis (F a m bam , U K : A shgate Publishers, 2 0 1 3 ).

inarticulateness, a sort of collective shrug . . To understand the prob­ lems around the reception of Gary in Your Pocket, we should turn to the question o f a queer politics of life. The call for rights and the concerns about personal and collective value and devaluation that are articulated under the sign of LG BT activism in N orth America have been critiqued by queer theorists like Jasbir Puar2 as often displaying homonationalist ten­ dencies. The inefficacy, or even impossibility, of these politics has every­ thing to do with the way they are moored to a notion of value as equiva­ lence. But queemess, or at least what I am calling queemess today in rela­ tion to my readings of Sedgwick and my own lived experience of the term, is about the incommensurable and is most graspable to us as a sense rather than as a politic. Jean-Luc Nancy also suggests that there is something that exceeds politics, what he describes as nonequivalence, something incalcu­ lable that needs to be “shared (out).”3 Nancy defines this unquantifiable in­ teger as “the element in which the incalculable can be shared (out) [and which] goes by the names of art or love, friendship or thought, knowledge or emotion, but not politics.”4 Indeed, for Nancy, politics is that thing that allows for the exercise of this other mode, which is a sharing (out). In place of gay politics, I wish to propose an understanding of queemess as a sense o f the incalculable and, simultaneously the incalculable sense o f queem ess. I con­ sider work produced by Fisher and shepherded by Sedgwick as a sharing (out) that helps us grasp a rich, complicated, and sometimes troubling col­ laborative scene. I am interested in Sedgwick’s editing of and “Afterword” to Fishers posthumously published notebooks, fiction, and poetry, pub­ lished as Gary in Your Pocket, and I also wish to consider Fisher on his own terms, paying attention to the challenge that his work presents today to cal­ cified understandings of terms like “queemess” or, m ore specifically “queer of color.” It is worthwhile to consider the erotics of racial humiliation and other pleasure-giving forms of sexual debasement that both Fisher and Sedgwick engage as productive sites of theorization. (As an aside I should mention that it has taken me years to begin to “get” Gary Fisher and Eves interest in his work. I found his highly stylized rendering of scenes of voli­ tional and solicited racialized sexual debasement hard to attach myself to as a reader. W hile I identified interesting stylistic innovation, my own politi­ cal mixed emotions made me shrug too. Sedgwick’s relationship to Fisher was only slightly clearer to me. But I knew her investment in this work went beyond politics or even friendship. There was something else there that escaped me. In this chapter I hope to describe that incommensurable something else that eluded m e.) This task presents me with an opportunity

to also describe a dynamic that partially transpires under the sign of “queer of color” that is routinely misread by the lens of a politics of equivalence^ but that becomes newly accessible as a sharing (out) of a nonequivalent, incommensurable, and incalculable sense of queemess. Gary Fishers work articulated a mode of desire that exemplified anti­ equivalence. His work, and the mode of relationality and desire it depicted, most certainly did not line up with his interest as a creative writer, who saw himself as, at least in part, a participant in a black literary tradition and an anti-racist scholar of literature. Fishers politics did not align with his com­ plicated and often unsettling relationship to his mode of desiring and being desired in the world. Our most antidpatable notions of “queer” and “queer of color” politics almost automatically register Fishers “official” and “pri­ vate” takes on the resonant linkage between race and sexuality as inconsis­ tent, incoherent, and ultimately problematic The critique of systemic racial subordination in collusion with the “fact” of a felt and, in the case of Fisher, vibrantly rendered account of actual erotics cohering around volitional ra­ cial humiliation and submission are generally understood as a problem. This problem is not simply due to a seeming contradiction between life and poli­ tics, or sex and sexual identity, or race and racism, but because of the actual framing of queer and queer of color politics. Let me set up a context for understanding the difficulty o f Gary Fish­ er s writing and Eve Sedgwick’s sponsorship, editing, and dissemination of his work. The word sponsorship is deliberate in this last sentence and is meant to index a history of African American cultural production that was not possible without a certain level of white patronage. Fisher and Sedgwick were always painstakingly aware o f their place in a trajectory o f American letters that arguably commenced with Phyllis Wheatley. ReidPharr asks: “How can we read Gary Fisher as a black man?” Given my argument that Fisher repeatedly takes up the particularly shocking notion of a Negro racial identity not only produced in direct relation to white hostility but produced in a manner that takes sublime pleasure in the white s domination, it taxes the imagination to place him neatly along­ side Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, James Baldwin, or even the s

I take Reid-Pharr’s question, “How can we read Gary Fisher as a black man?” as a provocation for a reconsideration of this shrug-inducing te x t

Our knowing of Fisher and his startling and powerful authorial effect through Sedgwick can benefit from some brief biographical contextualization. Fisher m et Sedgwick when he took a course with her at the Univer­ sity of California, Berkeley. Sedgwick’s afterword to Gary in Your P ocket devoted quite a bit of time to narrating the movement from teacher and student to friendship. Before Berkeley he received a degree in English at the University of N orth Carolina, Chapel Hill. His journals talk about his years of study there in the W ilson Library. Ih is coincided with something of a flashpoint in early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The library was an almost legendary cruising and public sex site on campus. In his journals, Fisher suggests that this library is the place where he contracted the virus that would lead to his eventual passing in 1 9 9 4 . The library is narrated in his journals as the space where his sexuality took a certain form, and the young, smallish, black man began to understand his own sexual desire as the impulse to be m astered by older, larger, dominant, white men. It is not only the identitarian contours of his object choices that make Fishers writing hard to take within the parameters of gay black male writing prac­ tices, which are predominantly associated with tropes o f redemption and nobility; it is also, as I have mentioned, his careful description of explicit sexual acts of voluntary sexual submission and degradation. All of Fishers sex writing highlights the fantasy of his small frame being overwhelmed by larger, white bodies, about his oral servicing of a white master who would be fully in control in a sexual scenario, and, beyond that dominant trope, his submission to any and all sexual acts that the man topping him would demand, no m atter how much or how little direct sexual pleasure specific acts would generate for him. Indeed, his desire was for the scene of submission, and this scene was often played out before an imaginary backdrop that reflected the scene of North American chattel slavery. His voluminous writing was intricately linked to this experience o f the self as a racialized sexual object. Sedgwick wrote that Fisher did not represent sex but instead wrote sex in a fashion that pushed representation itself, “stretching every boundary of what sex can represent.”6 A non-equivalent yet nonetheless relational dynamic animates Gary Fishers writing and Sedgwick employed the tools of the adept literary scholar to make a kind of sense of the sense that Fisher made in the world: Like others gone before him, he forged a concrete, robust bodily desire in the image of historical dispossession, humiliation, compul­ sion, and denigration, among other things. Probably any sexuality is a

matter of sorting; displacing, reassigning singleness or plurality, literality or figurativeness to a very limited number of sites and signifiers. Tenderness (here, brief, contingent, illuminating); a small repertoire of organs, orifices, and bodily products; holding, guiding, forcing; “your” pleasure and “myj* different and often nonsynchronous, plea­ sure . . . the galvanized, the paralyzed; the hungry, impartial, desiring regard in which ugliness may be held as intimately as beauty, and age as youth: these are among the elements here splayed through the crys­ tal of anonymity.7 There are many things that strike me when considering this account of Sedgwick's reading of Fisher, which is conterminously Sedgwick's reading of the choreography or “literality or figurativeness” that we know as sex. Sedgwick's ability to render a phenomenologically salient account of what sex feels like in relation to an “image of historical dispossession” that can be understood as undergirding any account of racialization we can access is, I want to suggest, an important move to hold on to when we consider the actual performative force or lack thereof that concepts like “queer” or “queer of color” may hold. Reading Gary Fisher is a challenge for those of us who toil in the archives of collective historical dispossession. In the long passage from Sedgwick, we find a certain choreography of sex and race that aligns itself with questions of the literal and the figurative, the singular and the plural, that help track just how we might read and know Gary Fisher. I contend that Gary Fisher's writing leads to an understand­ ing of queerness as incalculable. A reconsideration of Fisher today, fifteen years after the publication of G ary in Your Pocket, might produce something more than a shrug. Let's think of Fisher, and Sedgwick's reading of his works, in relation to JeanLuc Nancy's mapping of “sense” as a useful philosophical concept that potentially helps to know queerness in a way that moves beyond some familiar stumbling points in queer politics. Nancy imagines a philosophi­ cal practice that dispels a fundamental and foundational “ontology of the Other and the Same” and instead highlights an understanding of ontology as a world that is unmediated multiplicities of singular “ones,”8 a collectiv­ ity of others co-appearing in irreducible plurality. This is essentially Nan­ cy’s notion of “being singular plural.”9 It is a call for an interruption of a familiar Hegelian formulation of the Other/Same dichotomy. Standing in its place would be a consideration of crisscrossing and intersecting vectors of singularity. A t times, Nancy formulates this as a finite thinking of the

infinite. Nancy’s point is that we have exceeded the politics o f equivalence that is so at die center of the foundational conflict between the Other and the Same. I could not keep Hegel out of these proceedings if I wanted to. Fisher of course cannot escape die them atic of M aster/Slave either, and his sexualized prose is haunted by the specter of this m ost poignant moment from Hegel. In his journal Fisher fantasizes about the knowledge that reading Hegel might bring him: I haven’t read Hegel yet. Why haven’t I read Hegel when I’ m some­ what in love with this? I’m afraid to know. Half of this is the wander­ ing, the obscurity, the possibility of surprise (and yet the other half is a fixed equation, inevitable)— when I get there I’ll be able to say I’ve always known this would happen to me—but 111 come to that admis­ sion as through a dream, still half unbelieving.10 Fisher envisions a Hegelian Master/Slave dynamic that he anticipates to have always known in advance. He feels that he will inevitably arrive at a certain understanding of this famous formulation in philosophy in a way that he describes as both “inevitable” and “unbelieving.” In his book H egel: The Restlessness o f the N egative (2 0 0 2 ), Nancy reads Hegel as a source of understanding for a being singular plural that we experience as a sharing (out). Nancy offers us a Hegel that diverges from the way in which he is often cast in surveys of the history of Western philosophy: Hegel has often been read as if he exhibited the auto-development of an anonymous Subject or Reason, foreign to us, the big Other of an au­ tistic self that, moreover, would only be the fentasmatic correlate of the subject of a proprietary and securitary individualism: two subjects each the mirror for the other, each one as stupid and wretched as the other.11 In Nancy’s account o f this important Hegelian formation, the scene o f recognition does n o t conclude with individualism but instead the “truth of a self-knowing that must be the knowing of manifestation, of the desire of the other, and of decision [which] cannot be a truth that simply returns to itself”12 So we no longer look for an autistic self in the Other but instead find the truth of our being singular plural. Truth is not about transcen­ dence or totality. It is not about possession or incorporation. It is more nearly about die proximity of different senses of the world. W e know the

world through our sense of i t W hile sense is always about singularity) this singularity is thinkable and fanowable as plurality, which gets us back to what Fisher “knows” about Hegel, or what Eve “knows” about Gary, and what Gary “knows” about Eve. This knowing is akin to a sense of the world that isn’t about the dyad of Same and Other, M aster and Slave, Lord and Bondsman. N or is it about an antidpatable calculus of equivalence ending in some recognition of the self in the other. Instead, it is about the incom ­ mensurable. It is about trajectories and intersections between our senses of the world that make the world. This is to suggest that what Sedgwick sees in Fisher is not herself but instead a sort of sharing (out) of the unshareable that she too participates in. In Epistem ology o f the C loset (1 9 9 0 ) Sedgwick writes about her own motivation for writing ‘A Poem is Being W ritten” as being a fantasy that “readers or hearers would be variously— in anger, identification, pleasure, envy 'permission/ exclusion— stimulated to write accounts ‘like’ this one (whatever that means) of their own and share.”13 N ancys somewhat dramatic formulation, “the sharing (out) of the unshareable,”14 sounds a lot like a translation of Eves statement in the lexicon of classic deconstruction. Sedgwick’s editing of Fishers writing as­ sured that his unshareable sense of the world would be shared. Ellis Hanson published an essay on Fisher and Sedgwick titled “The Futures Eve: Reparative Readings After Sedgwick” (2 0 1 1 ). One o f the immediate goals of my essay is that Sedgwick’s work on Fisher and race be taken up again, that the Gary Fisher volume be considered as a weighty and dense moment in Sedgwick’s oeuvre. In this most general sense I welcome Hanson’s work. Furthermore, the essay contains evidence of thoughtful archival work. Hanson spent time in the San Francisco public library and read all of Fisher’s unpublished papers. He clearly holds the work in great esteem and does not seem to be as hesitant about engaging it as I am. Certainly Fisher’s work is important on its own terms, with in the context of black gay male writing practices in the AIDS epidemic. But I am clearly more interested in the ways in which Sedgwick and Fisher looked at the world through the strange optic allowed by their commu­ nion with each other. To this end, I take issue with the way in which Hanson describes their connection. W hen characterizing the different eu­ logizing moments in Sedgwick’s work where she discusses deceased gay men, he writes: “W hile her elegies for Lynch and Owens celebrate the bond between feminists and queer men, her elegy for Fisher, her editorial monument to him, celebrates the connection between not only a black gay man and a married woman but a submissive gay man and the white

woman who agreed to dominate him.”15 This sentence gives me pause. The descriptive language deployed in order to render an image of the relation­ ship between the two writers seems reductive: a "married white woman” and a "black gay man.” In his writing, Fisher became a self-abjected black object, renouncing "manhood” or "personhood” for the sustaining sexual fantasy of being a chattel slave or another historically disposed character. And while Sedgwick would refer to herself as a married woman, it was often in an effort to show how conventtonal language failed to grasp her own fundamental sense o f queemess. Interestingly Fisher is not always exactly black in his writing. A notable example would be the short story ‘Arabesque” where he narrates a sexual scenario in which he is made to play the role of a sexually abused "Arab boy” who describes himself as a captive o f a champion of Israel. I will return to that story. The tricki­ est part of Hansons line is the sentence's second descriptive movement, where he describes the relationship as one in which Sedgwick "agrees” to dominate the submissive Fisher. Suddenly Sedgwick becomes one of the cruel white daddies that Fisher craves in his fiction and sexual roleplaying. This strikes me as an imprecise description. Yes, Sedgwick agreed to publish Fishers work posthumously, and in this way we can perhaps see him "submitting” his writing to her editorial control. But that reading seems especially forced and Sedgwick's gender seems to be the integer that suddenly falls out of Hansons formula. Perhaps Hanson is referring to some kind of structural domination that was implicit in the relationship between a teacher and a former student But as a lucky recipient of Sedg­ wick's pedagogy, I can testify that the word domination seems to have no descriptive force in rendering our relationship. W hat is lost in Hanson's description is the actual stuff* of their deep communion, which is about the ways in which they actually shared more of what Nancy would call a literary communism between a woman who famously wrote about the co­ terminous pleasures of poetic enjambment and being spanked in “A Poem is Being W ritten” and a younger black man who is also deeply interested in the convergences of bodily mortification and literary style. In Hanson's formulation, submission stands in for identification and the impression of the substitution begs commentary. The sentence leads Hanson to one o f the main points of his argument. He explains that with Gary in Your Pocket, "Sedgwick engages in her most elaborate reparative project— the one that has attracted the harshest criticism.”16 The elaboration of Melanie Klein's notion of the reparative was one of Sedgwick's great later contributions. Sedgwick famously outlined the

reparative as a way out of the rote dominance of paranoid readings that traded in a hermeneutics of suspicion. The reparative was meant to help us consider something other than the unveiling of that thing we kind of already knew anyway. The reparative is a theoretical stance where we use our own psychic and imaginative resources to reconstruct partial or dangerously incomplete objects that structure our reality into a workable sense of wholeness. The reconstructed sense of an object offers us a kind of sustenance and com fort. One cannot dismiss Hansons idea that Gary in Your P ocket is a reparative project tout cou rt In his essay on Fisher, he calls on Tim Dean in Unlimited Intim acy (20 0 9 ) to suggest that there is no sex or race without fetishism. H e quotes Dean’s argument that fetish­ ism need not be dehumanizing but is, instead, just impersonalizing. I cer­ tainly agree that sexual rhetorics of impersonalization can be highly erotic for all sorts of people. But, of course, impersonalization as a process does not then preclude different individuals or groups from a very real sense of dehumanization in relation to systemic cultural and political logics like racism. Certain shared or collaborative projects of impersonalization are not automatically wounding and are often sexually generative, but these scenarios, for the most part, include a shared and volitional scrip t I think of this aspect of queer sex, or just sex, as a kind of communism o f the incommensurate. Hanson correctly identifies Fisher as a racialized subject who enjoyed being sexually dominated and fetishized by older and larger white men. He argues that "most academic writing on racial fetishism” has “calcified in to a defensive fetishistic ritual in its own right.”*17 He suggests that an understanding of Sedgwick’s reparative beside Fisher’s writing on sexual fetishism might offer us some cues on how to move beyond the im­ passe in thinking about sexual fetishism that he perceives. In a footnote, he refers to two other writers and me as being among the few queer of color writers who employ the reparative. Indeed, I do find the reparative to be a productive theoretical stance. For me, it is a resource to imagine * Hanson presented work at University of Michigans Q ueer Sham e conference (2005). During a talk on Plato and pedagogy he played gay Latino pom. The pom was not ad­ dressed in the paper and merely served to achieve a spectacular effect, according to Hi­ ram Perez who wrote a description of Hanson’s performance. Lawrence La Fo untainStokes has also cited this incident in another critique of the conference (2011). Finally J. Jack Halberstam (2005) wrote a critique of the entire conference, mentioning Han­ sons performance. When considering the controversy that hung over Hanson’s per­ formance at the Michigan Q ueer Sham e conference one cannot help hut wonder if his reading of Fisher is somehow meant to address the kind of moralizing that he relates to critiques of racial fetishism that automatically equate it with racial oppression.18

something else that might follow social stigma or even ruination. W hile I am interested in the work that the reparative might offer groups who have experienced some version of social violence or death, I would cer­ tainly agree that the reparative is not automatically about the integrity or sense of wholeness a collective or group may long for. It may indeed be about the individual imagining some sort of personal redress, or the carv­ ing out of what Hanson calls “a sustainable life."19 Fisher s writing does tell a moving story about submitting to and even flourishing within a force field of racial fetishism But the example of Fisher in Hansons article does not telescope out to consider the world outside the page; it fails to con­ sider the damage that racial fetishism does within the social or the ways in which racial fetishism can easily be a byproduct of racial oppression. To the contrary, his reading o f the text attempts to hold this knowledge at bay. Using Fisher as an example of a more complex understanding of a racial fetishism that is not racist does not acknowledge the moments where the author admits his volitional involvement in a script that we might initially consider “impersonalizing” but not necessarily “dehumanizing” In the story “Arabesque” that I mentioned above, the narrator endures a scene in which he is being suffocated by his imaginary role-playing slave masters prick As the top in the scene orders the narrator to “Choke! Choke! ” the bottom cognitively steps bade and reflects: He drove with desperation that actually amused me more than it frightened me, but then I was outside myself and somewhat embar­ rassed with myself and needed to laugh at it to keep from blacking ou t Td laugh for a moment more, then politely mention my need to breathe— didn’t knowhow I would do either, but at the time this didn’t seem to bother me— it all seemed so funny, my fucked-up pri­ orities, especially the need to laugh at this man’s desperation before I took another breath.20 Fisher’s narrator is certainly submissive: he craves and relishes the “impersonalization” the scene engenders. But something else is happening here beyond pure submission or domination. Hanson’s reading of Fisher tells us that racial fetishism can be erotic and not be a symptom of racial bias. I partly agree insofar as racial difference can be and often is erotic But these fetishistic erotics don’t exist in a vacuum or unmoor themselves from the fact of systemic racism In white male culture, the erotic value be­ stowed on men of color is often linked to devaluing them in other aspects

of their being. This is a problem n ot because people of color demand to be desired as a whole person in some naive fashion. The ways they are devalued matter in a much more socially damaging manner. Working through trauma and finding real pleasure in that process, as Fisher does, is worth considering not because it enacts a complicating of the fetishism’s relationship to systemic racism. Racial bias can and does coexist with the erotics of racial fetishism, as irreconcilable integers. Furthermore, their in­ commensurability is a ground level feet in so many people’s erotic imaginaries, sexual lives, and broader life practices. Fisher imposes a structure (a script) within the structurelessness of sex itself, not because he is at­ tempting to delink sexual fetishism and sex oppression. The scene from “Arabesque" that I describe above features a literalizing of incommensu­ rability, a refusal of reciprocity or equivalence that becomes a commu­ nism of the incommensurate. In Fishers work we glimpse a commons of the incommensurate that signals something that goes beyond a politics of equivalence. Fishers relationship with his sexual partners and Sedg­ wick was not about equivalence, but there is a powerful idea of a com­ mons in these relational lines. This commons, this experience of being-incommon-in-difference, offers readers a map of life where singularities flow into the common, enacting a necessary communism. I use the term “communism" to help us think a certain communing of incommensurable singularities that can be enacted through even imper­ sonal sex. But I also mean just plain communism. But let m e be m ore exact: by “just plain communism” I do not mean to invoke the commu­ nism of a mythical society of equals, but, instead, the communism of liv­ ing within a sense of the commons, a living in common. Michael Hardt describes this idea of the common in communism as “the affirmation of open autonomous biopolitical production, the self governed continu­ ous creation of humanity"21 In the work of N ancy we encounter a com ­ munism that is m ost immediately summarized as a being singular plural. Nancy explains that communism “means the common condition of all the singularities of subjects, that is, of all the exceptions, all the uncommon points whose network makes a world (a possibility of sense) "22 H e goes on to suggest that this notion of communism does not belong solely to the political, but precedes i t It is important to emphasize that “not be­ longing"23 to politics in Nancy’s sense is not an escape or refusal of the political It is just the opposite. H ere, I return to the auto-examination of m y book that I began this chapter with. How are queer politics possible? W hen I call for a reinvigoration of the queer political imagination, I am

turning to Communism, or, maybe better put, naming something that I failed to name with enough force in my book. Communism is an idea that is almost as old as Utopia. Communism is first and foremost about the precondition for emancipation. But emancipation from what, we might ask? Here we come to understand emancipation as freedom from histori­ cal forces that dull or diminish our sense of the world. Nancy points out that M arx himself argued that the commune was the antithesis of em­ pire.24 Communism would therefore be antithetical to our inner and outer colonialism, those blockages that disallow our arrival at an actual sense of the world, which is the world as a plurality of senses. This sense can be im­ personal or even structured around the figurations of dehumanization and submission that Fisher longed for. Indeed, as Sedgwick has pointed out, so much can be “splayed through the crystal of anonymity”25 and includes impulses that can be equally tender and destructive, and indeed they are simultaneously both. I am interested in thinking about both Fisher and Fisher with Sedgwick as offering us the option to think beyond the reg­ ister of the individual subject. Implicit in this line of argumentation is the idea that ideologies that enable empire are shored up by a reification of the individual sovereign subject who can think of itself as differentiated from a larger sense of the commons. Thinking of the self as purely singular enables a mode of imagining the self as not imbricated in a larger circuit of belonging, what I call an actual sense of the world where we grasp the plurality of the senses, which is not ones own senses but instead the mul­ tiple senses of plural singularities. Such a logic of the singular that eschews plurality is able to self-authorize oneself to dispossess those outside any particular logic of the singular. Sedgwick and Fisher perform and map a relational schema that is not based on commensurable singularities but, instead, on a vaster commons of the incommensurable. Thinking about incommensurability is not meant to cleanse or make Fishers sex, desire, or writing antiseptic. The crisscrossing trajectories of singular being are certainly full of violent collision, especially when we think about the history o f dispossessed people, and we must n o t fail to understand these crashes as being traumatic or violent I don t want to simply suggest that the incommensurable is a ludic mode where our de­ sire and ethics can be easily worked o u t Indeed, the incommensurable can lead to annihilating violence like that which in the last two years took the lives of Lindon Barrett, a talented theorist of race and value who was killed by a man the police described as an acquaintance, and the writer Don Belton, who wrote a beautiful introduction to Gary in Your P o cket

D on was murdered by a young man who, when tried for the murder, used a sexual panic defense, not unlike those analyzed and described by Sedgwick in Between M m (1 9 8 5 ). Yet, without denying the implicit and explicit violence of certain scenes and acts, we can nevertheless see some­ thing else in Fishers insistence on the incommensurable over equivalence, which may be a certain kind of freedom. In this instance, we can revisit Sedgwick’s sentence one last tim e: "Probably any sexuality is a matter of sorting, displacing, reassigning singleness or plurality, literality or figura­ tiveness to a very limited number of sites and signifiers.”26 Sex and sexual­ ity in this passage are "a matter of sorting, displacing reassigning single­ ness or plurality” and it is this somewhat structural account of the struc­ turelessness of sex that resonates with the larger ontological mapping of a world that exceeds equivalence. Nancy remarks that it was M arx who best understood that man produces himself and that this production is worth infinitely m ore than any measurable evaluation. I haven’t forgotten Robert Reid-Pharr’s query, "How can we read Gary Fisher as a black man?” I cannot be certain that my response will be sat­ isfactory, but I think we can read Gary Fisher as a gay black man whose sense of self was incommensurable with an immediately available notion of black male identity. Instead, let us think of Gary Fisher and die writ­ ing he has left behind as a testament to the very limits of understanding his life as a black gay man solely through politics. The layering of acts of mastery and submission he narrates doesn’t make sense within the logic of recognition, equivalence, and value. Instead I suggest that there is some­ thing else to be gleaned through incommensurability. At the heart of Fisher’s w riting we encounter a quality that was meant to m irror die sex through which he so often came to know and describe himself. Fisher and Sedgwick’s project, the book we know as G ary in Your Pocket, is the shar­ ing of die unshareable, which is for some the shock of Gary Fisher and hopefully, for a growing number of others, the sense of Gary Fisher.

Hope in the Face of Heartbreak

HOPE'S B IG G E S T O B S T A C L E is failure. Hope falters, we lose hope, but we need hope to think otherwise in the face of odds that are stacked against us. In part we must take on a kind of abstract hope [that] is not m uch m ore than merely wishing, and instead we need to participate in a more concrete hope, what Ernst Bloch would call an educated hope, the kind that is grounded and consequential, a mode of hoping that is cogni­ zant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of obstacles that so often feel insurmountable. On the occasion of the founding of this PhD, I have chosen to focus on two texts, one scholarly and one cultural, that offer snapshots of some of the challenges we need to not only survive but surpass to achieve hope in the face of an often heartbreaking reality. Robyn Wiegmans O bject Lessons astutely unpacks the complexities and even perils of what she describes as the “political desires" that undergird the production of “identity knowledges" in fields that simultaneously in­ terrogate such knowledges as well as constitute them as their very objects o f study. Wiegman explains that identity knowledges work as “sites of so­ cial, political, and intellectual engagement because they emphasize the needs they exist to represent, making treasures out o f the insights, anal­ yses, and theories that have been crafted to describe and ameliorate the general incapacity for difference to register on the scale of social value."1 Certainly almost all modes o f knowledge production, from the m ost inter­ disciplinary to traditional, love to make litde treasures or glimmering idols of the methods, insights, and procedures that becom e formatted within their own protocols of knowledge production. But we will put this point aside to follow the thread of Wiegmans timely intervention. In her analy­ sis, theories and modes of analysis that make cases for the ways in which difference is systemically devalued are the things that womens, ethnic, and queer studies run into as a problem, or at least as a site of disquiet This essay was originally given as a public lecture on a panel, *On the Politics of Hope,* at the University of Toronto on 13 Sept 2013. The occasion for the lecture was the launch of the Women & Gender Studies Institute PhD. Program.

Wiegman asks what happens when “the need is too great for the theory to sufficiently feed it, or if the object that represents the need becomes diminished by the worldly limits in which it is forced to live” There is a tonal fluctuation in the next questions she puts forth as she wonders what “happens when what you once loved no longer satisfies your belief that it can give you what you want”2 This anxiety goes beyond the worry that the loved object, be it another human organism or a field of knowledge that we have dedicated ourselves to, w ont be there, to the anxiety that, per­ haps, the very desire for the object won’t be there for you either. Indeed what if there is no credible hope that the object can replenish us? Wiegman states that her main concern is to differentiate “social move­ ments from the institutionalized projects founded in their names in order to appreciate their incommensurabilities as political projects, social phe­ nomena, interpellative forms, and historical entities.”3 Wiegman detects a fantasy or perhaps a willfiil unknowing at the center of fields like womens, ethnic, or queer studies. She declares that she is committed to “interrupt­ ing projects that not only fantasize the subjects liberation into autonomy and coherent self production but imagine the possibility of doing so as the singular goal of interpretative practice as a whole”4 W hile she at one point asserts that her project is to study a field’s imaginary, its fair to say that she is understating her project’s aim. The author assures her readers that the point of her analysis is not an argument with critique “as much as an encounter with its excessive reach.”5 Indeed, critique has come to “haunt” Wiegman because it promises us too much. It seems fair to say that critique is more than a specter looming over these fields of identity knowledge production. Critique— gender, queer, and race critique— is that thing that thrives on an incommensurability, a false symmetry, be­ tween itself and the social movements it purports to mirror. Wiegmans identity-based knowledge fields are the loved objects that dissatisfy, that break hearts, and they must therefore he interrupted, shut down, and proven to be promise breaking false objects. The above sketch of O bject L esson s thesis may sound like gear-up for a counter argum ent It might seem like I am staking a different claim, whole­ heartedly discounting the validity of her points. The move I want to make is a different one. Acknowledging that sometimes, but not always, incom ­ mensurability between social justice movements and scholarly knowledge production is an actual fact, I want to make an argument for the “excessive reach” of critique that concerns Wiegman. I want to meditate on this ex­ cessive reach as a politics of incommensurability. To this end, I will take

a different route than Wiegmans institutional critique and consider the realm of culture, in this case actually existing Latina lesbian culture, in the form of Anna Margarita Albelo s feature film W hos A fraid o f Vagina W olf As a cultural theorist, I insistently make the case that aesthetics not only point to incommensurability but also describe the ways in which we thrive within its parameters. Wiegman writes beautifully about a personal desire to share in a “we” that she is also suspicious o f This mistrust is rooted in the incommensurability between fields of knowledge production and the real social contests they call upon and count as their galvanizing objects. How can we inhabit the politics of incommensurability, contestation, chal­ lenge, the not-lining-up of meaning, the persistence of inconsistency, and the melee at the center of our tumultuous being-with in the world and in thought, as something other than a ruse, a faulty foundation, willful bad faith, or a set of illusory traps? W hat if we instead think about hope, the necessity of hope, in the face of identity knowledges, including but not limited to feminism, queer studies, and ethnic studies and their various infelicities, breakdowns, and falterings as a need to achieve that “we,” that essential being-with, the commitment to a making common that is a ne­ cessity in the face of all the troubling parsing out of life that obstructs the necessary being-with in difference that allows us to know the potentiality of our commons? Who's A fraid o f Vagina W olf Albelos 20 1 3 film, as the title may suggest to some, is a partial reteDing of Edward Albees 1962 play, which was later made famous by a 1966 film adaption staring Elizabeth Taylor and Rich­ ard Burton. The role garnered Taylor her second Academy Award. In the original film, a frustrated associate professor returns to his New England college town at 2 am . after a faculty party in the company of his drunk and vicious wife, who happens to be the college president s daughter, and another couple, a newly minted assistant professor, played by George Se­ gal, and his wife, played by Sandy Dennis (who also received an Oscar for her portrayal). The films drama revolves around George and M arthas ver­ bal war, her onslaught directed at George, and his cruel retaliation. Dur­ ing the course o f the film and play, M artha takes revenge on George by seducing his younger colleague. The primary couple, George and Martha, play a sick game throughout the evening where they narrate the existence o f an imaginary son as much for each other as for their guests. I know from experience that the film and play have an extensive gay male fanbase who, generation after generation, revel in the film's blistering wit and reg­ ularly reference it as a central camp text, if not a life text, m ostly for its

unapologetic excessiveness, but maybe for a host o f reasons. Certainly it is no surprise that this film about heterosexuality as a shaky and violent construct would appeal to many queers whose experience of traditional domesticity is anything but soothing. Albelos film evidences the existence of an equally devoted lesbian fan following for Albee s story. Her film commences with its protagonist, also named Anna, at her fortieth birthday party, where she is obsessing over her failures to meet her three life goals: ( l ) To finish her feature film (which she is constantly writing grant applications for); (2 ) find a girl­ friend; and (3 ) lose twenty pounds. H er two best friends from college, Penelope (played by Guinevere Turner) and Chloe (Carrie Preston), both also lesbians, have staged the party so Anna, who is a Cuban-American, can finally m eet that right girl. The women she meets at the party drive her to drink too much, and the evening sends her crawling back to her “woman cave,3* the funky garage she has been living in at her friend Char­ lies house over the last nine months, a situation that was supposed to not be permanent. The next day Anna gets one of her only paying jobs, do­ ing artistic gigs, which entails showing up to a gallery in a vagina outfit and playing her obtuse short experimental films to the delight of hipsters. There she meets and falls for Katya, a pretentious but beautiful younger graduate student who shows interest in her work. Katya, played by the South Asian actress Jania Gavankar, misquotes Goddard, speaks preten­ tiously about post-post feminism, and is generally a parody of the aca­ demic. It is dear from the film that Annas attraction is one sided but she nonetheless begins hanging out with the young woman and dreams up a feminist adaption of Who's A fraid o f Virginia W oolfP, Who's A fraid o f Va­ gina W olf so she can cast her object of desire, this confused feminist ob­ ject of desire, who represents a muddled, queer, vaguely racial (there is not language about Katya’s actual ethnicity) feminist presence. Katya jumps at doing the film because, as she puts it, after three years of graduate school, she is sick of theory and yearns for practice. Indeed, it is fair to say that Katya is exhausted by the language of the work of identity production and longs for some promised practice that will complete her as a queer, ethnic, feminist actant. Katya, who plays the younger professor in the film within the film, is simply renamed Stud for the purposes of the film. The cast is rounded off by best friends Penelope— playing Martha— and Chloe, who plays the Sandy Dennis character Honey, renamed “Sugar Tits.” The production commences at Charlies house without her consent, and Anna meets and hires an attractive director of photography, a recent

transplant from Austin named Julia, a white girl with multi-colored hair, whose only experience is lensing lesbian pom . Julia is clearly into Anna but Anna can only see Katya, the raison d'etre for the entire film. The film within the film includes black and white adaptions of Albee's play and Mike Nichols's film that serve as com ic gems. Anna is swayed by Katya's pretentious feedback. It increasingly becomes dear that Katya is simply not into Anna, even as the director gathers her courage to ask her out. W hen she finally asks the younger woman out, the production ends in disaster, culminating in violence: Katya calls out Anna for using her, and Anna responds with various insults, Anna slaps Katya in the face and Katya returns the favor by hauling off and punching her squarely in the face. The film within the film ends when the entire volunteer crew realizes that all their labor has been an elaborate set-up so the director could be doser to her object of desire, this object that has disappointed and failed to replenish the love that Anna has wanted from her. In many ways, this situation is the dynamic that O bject Lessons narrates so brilliantly, the scene of desire’s fall, the moment when identity knowl­ edge's reach is “so excessive” it fails to grasp the object that it has both crafted and failed to properly hold. This is the moment, when incommen­ surability punches one in the face. The asymmetry of desire offers a vio­ lent feedback loop. If the film stopped at this moment, its correlation with the problem so expertly delineated in Wiegman’s text would be complete. But it does not end there. Certainly, at the very end, a reparative salve fi­ nally brings Anna and Julia together in the tradition of romantic comedy as Anna's friends cheer them on. She makes peace with her disgruntled crew and even manages to save her film as a hybrid live action animation (a technique she has been using throughout her feature non-diegetically). But that ending is not nearly as important as what happens shortly before the film's narrative denouement^ its happy shiny redemptive closure. The scene I have in mind starts with the narrative’s climax (no pun in­ tended) and the sequence that follows it.6 It gets “zany:* In her book Our A esthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Sianne Ngai continues her re­ search on affects, particularly on those that are minor and not cathartic.7 In her example, cuteness is the representative form par excellence of to­ day's domesticated and often feminized commodity and dominant mode of consumption. The zany on the other hand, represents another aspect o f Post-Fordist capitalism. The zany is about non-stop performance; it is about constant movement and incessant “doing.” As such, it represents the mandate to constantly participate in a mode of immaterial labor. Anna is

zany in her vagina costume. After the collapse of her film and her hopes for Katya, a defeated Anna walks the street in her embroidered vagina outfit with a beer in her hand and a cigarette in her mouth. Her gait is exhausted, she has been working in the zaniest of fashions, constantly doing, in this attempt to find this loved object that cannot return the fa­ vor. Lucille Ball is one of Ngai’s icons of the Zany, and we can view An­ nas scheme to make a movie just to hit on a girl as a plot dreamed up by a queer feminist Latina Lucy and E th el Even after the frenetic plan crumbles, Anna cannot stop walking in a depressed deindustrialized Los Angles that serves as the perfect backdrop to this post-Fordist m om ent The movement finally stops as she sits in a bathtub, in full vagina rega­ lia, smoking as her make-up leaks down her free, planning to end her life. She doesn't. The next day she is saved by her Latina mother who shows up and manifests Anna s greatest fear: failing so miserably that she would have to go home, a defeated forty-year-old, to live with her aging parents. This “going hom e” and living with ones parents is a salient fear for many people in this new savage economy. It is such a chilling thought for Anna that she picks up her pace by once again putting the vagina outfit to work as she holds a sign on an LA street, clad in genital ware, advertising for a Brazilian waxing salon. The drum beat of zaniness is fully picked up again as Anna gets a second wind and decides to recomm it herself to the zany and stave off the nightmare of losing her illusionary independence and go­ ing home to m other and ethnos. W hos A fraid o f Vagina W olf is not the antidote to the problematic sketched out in O bject Lessons. If anything, they are interesting points of comparison. On one hand, the description of the negation that booby traps and surrounds minoritarian knowledge production projects (I pre­ fer “minoritarian” to "identity” knowledge) leads to one big shrug in the case ofW iegman, who declares that she is unwilling to offer any proposi­ tions or prescription to the problematics she has outlined. On the other, the character of Anna responds with a recommitment to the zany that, she hopes, will help her find the love object that is so misaligned from her lived reality. Its enough to say that neither is an ideal response. O bject Lessons refuses hope and hopelessness, and Who's A fraid o f Vagina W olf launches into a kind of mad— and abstract— hopefulness, a groundless hope in the face of a structuring incommensurability. It s difficult to count on hope in the face of the heartbreak that often shadows the incommensurable. After all, we want things to line up, to be true to each other. Lies and self-delusion are usually met with scorn.

O bject Lessons and Who's A fraid o f Vagina W olf despite their different af­ fective frequencies, are pretty heartbroken tales. The commensurate is tethered to the equivalent. If activist politics and knowledge fail to touch in legible and knowable ways, they not only fail the test of equivalence, they in feet represent a certain bad faith. More narratively, if your beloved does not replenish the love you direct at her, you are betrayed and your zany quest for love loses the momentum that Post-Fordism mandates, and you slowly unravel to the point where you find yourself sitting in a bath tub in a vagina outfit holding a laptop over your head. If there is a tentative way out of this conundrum, we must see equiva­ lence for what it is and challenge its mandate; this is not to say that every­ thing equivalent goes, but to say that the hopeful, incommensurable proj­ ect of being-with is a complex and flawed one that is nonetheless utterly necessary. Jacques Rändere tells us that politics is essentially dissensus or disagreement. But these disagreements are based on a more profound un­ derstanding that beyond disagreement there is a deeper accordance. In the work o f Jean-Luc Nancy, it is dear that our being-in-common, our shared struggles, cannot simply be rooted in equivalence. Indeed, the myth of equivalence only leads to not just disappointment but often violence that is political, institutional, and knowledge-based. W hile Wiegman might wince at the easy fashion in which I string those words together in my last sentences, as though they were automatically equivalent^ I know that they are differently weighted and their connectivity is marked by unevenness that is nonetheless a commonness. It seems that we must partidpate in a shared act of commoning to embrace the resonances implidt in the vari­ ous ways that knowledge production and social movements, like lovers and loved objects, are bound to miscomprehend each other, be at odds, and even be disgruntled but, nonetheless, must find their replenishing commonness. Perhaps the fantasy that needs to be debunked is that things must line up, that commensurability is the exclusive way in which theory and practice must encounter each other. I have often quoted Ernst Blochs point that hope must be disappointed. This seems no truer today than ever. Objects, loved objects, objects of knowledge, objects we hope to form invincible bonds with, disappoint us, but that is all the more reason to understand the nature of the incommensurabilty that structures our being-with, and in doing so, we can begin to understand all the things we can learn once the fantasy of equivalence is put to bed. W e can practice an indispensable excessive reach. Then, and perhaps only then, can the project of concrete hope commence.

Notes

Notes to the Foreword 1. Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, "Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing," in I he Utopian Function o f Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cam­ bridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988), 17. 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect^ Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 146. 3. Alexandra T. Vazquez, “Parts of a World," Social Text, 121 (2014): 46. 4. Josd Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers o f C olor and the Perfor­ mance o f Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 57-74. 5. Josd Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There o f Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2019; first published 2009), 4. 6. See Sedgwick; Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting M edieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Judith [Jack] Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," Social Text 84/5 (2005). 7. Bloch and Adorno, 17. 8. Sara Warner, “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There o f Queer Futurity (re­ view)," Modem Drama, 54, no. 2 (2011): 255-257. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (ac­ cessed August 28, 2018). 9. Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 10. Wachowski, Lilly. “Statement to the Windy City Times," March 8,2016. http ://www.windydtymediagroup.com/lgbt/Second-Wachowski-filmmakersibling-comes-out-as-trans-/54509.html (accessed September 26,2018). 11. Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 27. 12. Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 155. 13. Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 172. 14. These quotations are drawn from Munozs unfinished manuscript The Sense o f Brown, which is in preparation for posthumous publication.

Notes to the Introduction 1. This brief biographical sketch of Bloch draws heavily on Vincent Geoghegans excellent Ernst Bloch (New York: Routledge, 1996). Although Cruising Utopia employs some of Bloch’s critical thinking! it nonethe­ less does not pretend to anything like a comprehensive introduction to Blochian theory. Indeed that book has already been written, and it is Geoghegans. 2. Ernst Bloch, I he Principle o f Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1995). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 1:146. 5. Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays, trans. AndrewJoron and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 341. 6. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7. Ibid., 178-181. 8. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 9. Gavin Butt, Just between You and M e: Queer Disclosures in the New York A rt World, 1948-1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 10. Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: A rt and the Dialectics o f Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 11. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics o f the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 12. See Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function o f A rt and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988), esp. 18-70. 13. Ibid. 14. Bloch, Literary Essays, 340. 15. Bloch, Utopian Function o f Art, 71-77. 16. Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke with You,” in The Collected Poems o f Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1995), 360. 17. Bloch, Principle o f Hope, 339. 18. Bloch, Utopian Function o f Art, 78-102. 19. Ibid. 20. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy o f Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 100. 21. Agamben, Potentialities, 178-181. 22. Bloch, Literary Essays, 339-344. 23. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1962).

24. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 25. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 26. Lee Edelman, N o Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 27. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994). 28. Bloch, Principle o f Hope, 144-178. 29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Paolo Vdmo, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Irans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008), esp. 9-66. 33. Ibid., 18. 34. Shoshana Felman, The Scandal o f the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 104. 35. Eileen Myles, Chdsea Girls (New York: Black Sparrow, 1994), 274. 36. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies o f the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005). 37. Here I am thinking of Delanys novel I he M ad Man (New York: Kasak Books/Masquerade Books, 1994). 38. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Delaney’s paradigm is carefully interrogated by Ricardo Montez, in “‘Trade’ Marks: LA2, Keith Haring, and a Queer Economy of Collaboration,” GLQ: A Journal o f Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 425-440. 39. Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 15-50. Although Foucault’s innova­ tion is undeniable, the work of many historians of sexuality who have written in his wake has become rote. 40. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcul­ tural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Carla Freccero, Queer/ Early/M odem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(Er)Ing Generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727-744; Elizabeth Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography,” Social Text 84-85 (2005): 57-68; Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Com­ munities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Dolan, Utopia in Performance.

4L For an example of this queer-of-color critique, see the special issue of the journal Social Text that I edited with David and Judith Halberstam: "What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 84-85 (2005). 42. Lauren Berlant, “’68 or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 124-155. Notable publications by Berlant that followed this earlier essay include The Queen o f America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business o f Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 43. Along with Berlants work, some other work that exemplifies the Public Feelings project includes Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive o f Feelings: Trauma, Sexual­ ity, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 44. Seethe group’s website, wwwieeltankchicago.net. 45. See Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­ sity Pres, 2008).

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Third World Gay Revolution, “Manifesto of the Third World Gay Revolu­ tion,” in Out o f the Closets: Voices o f Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 367. 2. Evan Wolfson, “All Together Now (A Blueprint for the Movement),” Advo­ cate, September 11, 2001; available online at http://www.fieedomtomarry.org/ evan_wolfson/by/all_together_now.php (accessed February 6,2009). 3. See Lisa Duggan, “Holy Matrimony!” Nation, March 15,2004, available online at http://www.thenation.eom/doc/20040315/duggan; and Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim, “Beyond Gay Marriage,” Nation, July 18, 2005, available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050718/kim. 4. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 5. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005). 6. Ernst Bloch, The Principle o f Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1995). 7. Here I draw from Judith Halberstam’s notion of time and normativity that she mines from a critique of David Harvey. I see her alerting us to a normative straight temporality that underscores heterosexual and heteronormative life and constructs straight space. My notion of time or critique of a certain modality of time is interested in the way in which a queer utopian hermeneutic wishes to interrupt the linear temporal ordering of past, present, and future. See Judith Hal­ berstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

8. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 9. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenom­ enological Philosophy, trans. R. Rojcewicz (New York: Springer, 1991). 10. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 23. 11. James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 186-187. 12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996), 329. 13. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies o f the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 10. 14. J. L. Austin, How to Do I hings with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1962). 15. FredricJameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 16. Bloch, Principle o f Hope, 1:141. 17. Ibid. 18. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories o f Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 19. Terrence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New Yorks Gay Libera­ tion Front, 1969-1971,” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 104-135. 20. This economical summary is drawn horn Michael Inwood’s useful book: Michael hrwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 121. 21. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology o f Ad­ vanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 17. 22. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight o f Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003). 23. David Harvey, A B riefHistory o f Neo-Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2005). 24. Ibid, 46-47. 25. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place. 26. This chapter benefited from Fred Motens thoughtful suggestions and generous attention. I am also grateful for excellent feedback from Joshua Chambers-Letson, Lisa Duggan, Anna McCarthy, Tavia Nyong’o, Shane Vogel, an audience at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and this volume’s edi­ tors. John Andrews offered me the gift of extremely generative conversations during the writing of this essay. I only partially acknowledge my gratitude by dedicating it to him.

Notes to Chapter 2 1. The talk was later published in October, a publication then under the edito­ rial influence of Crimp, in which queer theory’ in its modem incarnations began to flourish. The essay was ultimately published in an anthology of Crimp’s writ­ ings: Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Poli­ tics (Cambridge, MA: MET Press, 2002). 2. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1988): 11. 3. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Ac­ tivism, ed. Douglas Crimp and Leo Bersani (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988). 4. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 5. The “us” and “we” I use in this chapter are meant, in the first instance, to speak to gay men in the pandemic. But beyond that, they are intended to address people who have also been caught in the HIV/AIDS pandemic— people who have been affected by the pandemic in ways that are both direct and relational, subjects who might be women or men, queer or straight. The unifying thread of this essay’s “us” and “we” is a node of commonality within a moment and space of chaos and immeasurable loss. 6. See the recent work of Lauren Berlant for a compelling reading of the politi­ cal straggle currently being staged in the public sphere between “live sex acts” and “the dead citizenship of heterosexuality” Lauren Berlant, “Live Sex Acts: Pa­ rental Advisory: Explicit Material,” Feminist Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 379-404. 7. These myths include ‘Andy was asexual” or ‘Andy only liked to watch.” For more on the degaying of Warhol, see the introduction to my coedited volume Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and Jose Esteban Munoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 8. John Giomo, You Got to Bum to Shine (New York: High RiskBooks/Serpent s Tail, 1994), 68-69. 9. Ibid., 71. 10. Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in I he Utopian Function o f Art and Literature: Sdected Essays (Cam­ bridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988). 11. Ibid., 12. 12. Ibid. 13. Giomo, You Got to Bum to Shine, 72-73. 14. Ibid., 73. 15. Bloch and Adomo, “Something’s Missing,” 12. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133.

19. Jacques Derrida, Specters o f Marx: The State cfthe Debt, the Work o f Mourn­ ing, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51. 20. Ibid., 63. 2 1 .1 wish to assert that Adornos version of dialectics, and especially his emphasis on the determined aspect of the negative, complicates deconstructive protocols. Adorno s formulations show a great resistance to deconstructive chal­ lenges to dialectical materialism. 22. Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 2006), 1. 23. Mandy Merck, “Figuring Out Warhol,” in Pop Out Queer Warhol, ed. Jen­ nifer Doyle, Jonathan Hatley, and Jose Esteban Mun oz (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 1996). See also Patricia White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991). 24. Walt Odets, I n the Shadow o f the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age o f AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 25. Many of the ideas in this chapter were first formulated and “tried out” in a graduate seminar, “Sex in Public,” that I taught in the Performance Studies pro­ gram at New York University in the fäll of 1995. The experience of working with those students on this topic enabled my thinking in many important ways.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Lauren Beriant, “Live Sex Acts: Parental Advisory: Explicit Material,” Femi­ nist Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 379-404. 2. C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present Selected Writings (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977). 3. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion o f Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writ­ ing in the East Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 179. 4. See, for example, essays by Michael Kirby, Allan Kaprow, and Richard Scheduler in Mariellen R. Sandford, ed., Happenings and Other Acts (London: Routledge, 1995). 5. Delany, Motion o f Light in Water, 183. 6. Ibid., 179. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 202. 9. Ibid., 183. 10. Ibid., 267. 11. Joan Wallach Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993).

12. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight o f Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003). 13. Delany, Motion o f Light in Water, 266. 14. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times SquareBlue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 111. 15. Duggan, Twilight o f Equality? 16. Examples of this right-wing impulse in current gay culture include Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York: Poseidon, 1993); and Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Vintage, 1996). Along with Duggan’s text, two other important responses to the new gay conservatism are Phillip Brian Harper, Pri­ vate Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture o f Social Relations (New York: New York University Press, 1999); and Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and theEthics o f Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). 17. Theodor W. Adorno, "Sexual Taboos and Law Today/ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickfiord (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 72. 18. C. L. R . James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick, 1974), 137. 19. Ibid. 20. Quoted in Kent Worcester, C. L .R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 141. 21. This paragraph is adapted from the last chapter of my book Disidentifications: Queers o f Color and the Performance o f Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 22. Jose Esteban Munoz, “Dead White: Notes on the Whiteness of the Queer Screen," GLQ: A Journal o f Gay and Lesbian Studies 4, no. 1 (1998): 127-138. 23. For an example of such Internet sex-consumer posting, see the ATKOL Video website, http://wwwatkol.com. 24. Swallow Your Pride: A Hands-On Toolfo r Do-It-YourselfActivism, indepen­ dently produced activist zine, no pagination. The zine includes a return address: AnandaLaVita, 184 East 2nd Street #5F, NewYork, NY 10009. The zine itselfis partiallywritten as a how-to manual that gives instructions to would-be activists on how to make their ownstickers and develop their own guerrilla activist projects. 2 5 .1 am grateful to Arin Mason, who participated in these stickering cam­ paigns and who, in an excellent seminar paper, suggested the stickers’ status as performative objects. 26. For these statistics and more recent ones on antigay violence, see the LAMBDA Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project website at http://www. lambda.org/glnvahhtm. 27. See Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something s Missing: A Dis­ cussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of

Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function o f A rt and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988), 12.

Notes to Chapter 4 L i a m grateful to Carol Martin and Jane Desmond for advice on this chapter. Aviance has been helpful and generally divine. I appreciate Ari Gold’s introducing him to me. 2. For more on the trace, see Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 24-65. 3. Jane G Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Ih e contributions to that volume that I directly engage are Paul B. Franklin, “The Terpsichorean Tramp: Unmanyly Movement in the Early Films of Charlie Chaplin”; Paul Siegel, "Ihe Right to Boogie: Ih e First Amendment on the Dance Floor”; and Jonathan Bollen, “Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on ihe Dance Floor.” 4. For more on the Giuliani cabaret-license laws in relation to queer perfor­ mance, see Shane Vogel, “Where Are We Now? Queer World Making and Cabaret Performance,” GLQ: A Journal o f Gay and Lesbian Studies 6, no. 1 (2000): 29-60. 5. By “historically dense queer gesture,” I mean a gesture whose significance and connotative queer force is dense with antinormative meanings. 6. See Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997). 7. Ihat Kiki would be in her late sixties seems a bit unlikely because, according to the oral biography that Kiki and Herb recite during their performances, they began performing during the Great Depression. When I asked Bond about Kikis age, she explained that her “official age” is sixty-six. 8. Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art,” in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). 9. In some ways this idea echoes Peggy Phelan, who has famously argued that disappearance is the very ontology of something that is performed. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics o f Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). 10. Ih e word cunty is black gay slang that describes a certain performed mode of femininity. Although its misogynist implications cannot be underemphasized, it should be understood that the term cunty\unlike cunt, is not meant to be de­ rogatory. A good queen strives to achieve a high level of “cuntiness.” 11. For more on the process I describe at length as disidentification, see my book Disidentifications: Queers o f Color and the Performance o f Politics (Minneapo­ lis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1999). 12. Ih e members of LaBelle were Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendrix, and Sarah Dash.

13.1 take this opportunity to refer readers to Judith Halberstams Female Mas­ culinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 14.1 argue for the notion o f resistance through dance/nightlife culture in the introduction that Celeste Fraser Delgado and I wrote for our edited volume, Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 1997). 15. Marx articulates the theory of the commodity fetish in Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). 16. See Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1995). 17. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls o f Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), 179-180. 18. Marcia Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972).

Notes to Chapter 5 1. Imamu Amiri Baraka, The Toilet (New York: Sterling Lord Agency, 1964); hereafter cited in the text as T. 2. Ernst Bloch, The Principle o f Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1995). 3 .1 am covering some territory that Moten has already tread quite expertly, and I am hoping to build on his formidable analysis. See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics o f the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 4 . Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effer­ vescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 5. Moten, In the Break, 169. 6. Whatever currency the term alternative might have at this historical mo­ ment is certainly up for grabs. Minoritized here is meant to connote radalization in relationship to a scene dominated by whiteness, but it is also relational to the term minoritarian, which I often use to talk about sexual and racial minorities. 7. Gloria Anzaldüa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999). 8. Diane di Prima, Recollections o f My Life as a Woman: The New York Years: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 2001). 9. Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 57. 10. Jerry Gafio Watts, A m iriBaraka: The Politics and Art o f a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 11. Ibid., 336. 12.1 do not wish simply to posit “identitarian” as always already bad. It is

important to resist a knee-jerk denouncement of anything that might connote identity. Historically, identity’s effects are at times both and alternatively stultify­ ing and generative. In this project I am interested in considering moments before identity takes hold of what I describe as queer animating forces that can be deci­ phered at different temporal junctures. 13. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the D eath Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 14. Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” in Litera­ ture and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Fehnan, 457-505 (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins University Press, 1977), 45. 15. Watts, Amiri Baraka, 129. 16. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 17. Ernst Bloch, 7h e Utopian Function o f A rt and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988), 1-17. 18. Edelman, No Future, 3. 19. At first glance it might seem that there are significant convergences be­ tween Agamben s privileging of a “means” at the expense of the end and Edel­ man s investment in the present over the future. Such an analogy would not hold because Agamben owns an investment in politics that Edelman eschews. The means when unyoked from an end can be viewed as a utopian formulation that contests the hegemony of straight time and its presentism. 20. Edelman, No Future, 3. 21. Watts, Amiri Baraka. 22. Judith Butler, “Longing for Recognition,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 131-151. 23. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology o f Spirit, ed. J. N. Findlay, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1977). 24. Butler, “Longing for Recognition,” 149. 25. My invocation ofwoundedness is not aligned with the work of Wendy Brown and her take on “wounded attachments,” with which I generally take issue, but is instead aligned with Moten’s riff on fiction writer Nathaniel MacKey’s no­ tion of wounded kinship. See Wendy Brown, States o f Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1995); Moten, In the Break; and Nathaniel MacKey, Bedouin Hornbook (Lexington, KY: Callaloo Fiction Series, 1986). 26. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Ac­ tivism , ed. Douglas Crimp and Leo Bersani (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988). 27. Cornel West and Sylvia Ann Hewitt, *A Parents Bill of Rights,” Boston Globe, September 18,1998.

28. Afrofuturism is a term taken up by several African American writers. See the special issue edited by Alondra Nelson: ‘Afrofuturism,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002).

Notes to Chapter 6 1. Jim Jocoy, Thurston Moore, and Exene Cervenka, Were Desperate: The Punk Photography o f Jim Jocoy (New York: Power House Books, 2002), 270. 2. Ernst Bloch, “The Artistic Illusion and the Visible Anticipatory Illumina­ tion,” in The Utopian Function o f Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988); Ernst Bloch, The Principle o f Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, 1995). 3. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).. 4 .1 am grateful to Kevin McCarty for his friendship andpictures. His project is beautifully continued on the artist s current website: imnotlikeyoula. That site documents a youth-culture scene in LA inhabited by Latino punks. In this aspect of the artist’s project, race and ethnicity are examined with the same attentiveness and care as sexuality in the Chameleon Club series. 5. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics o f Performance (London: Roudedge, 1993). 6. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance o f Community (Minneapolis: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press, 2002), 64. 7. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 8. Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function o f A rt and Literature: Selected Essays (Cam­ bridge, MA: M IT Press, 1988), 12. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 10. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion o f Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 267. See also chapter 3 for further discussion of this moment in Delany’s memoir. 11. Kevin McCarty, “Autobiographical Artist Statement,” GLQ: A Journal o f Gay and Lesbian Studies 11, no. 3 (2005): 427-428. 12. John Kelsey, “The Cleveland Bar Scene in the F o rtiesin Lavender Culture, ed. KarlaJay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 146. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 148-149. 15. Ibid., 149. 16. J. L. Austin, How to Do Thing with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1962).

17. Shane Vogel discusses Davis and Bricktop’s life and performance practices. See Shane Vogel, The Scene o f Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and Ike Dialectics o f Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 18. Oscar Wilde and Linda C. Dowling, The Soul o f Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (London: Penguin, 2001), 141. 19. Brendan Mullen, Don Bolles, and Adam Parfrey, Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life o f Darby Crash and the Germs (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002), 47.

Notes to Chapter 7 1. See Dick Higgins, Horizons: Intermedia: The Poetics and Theory o f Ike Inter­ media (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). 2. See the exhibition catalog: RayJohnson, Donna M. De Salvo, and Cath­ erine Gudis, Ray Johnson: Correspondences (Columbus, OH: Werner Center for the Arts, 1999). 3. For mention ofboth RayJohnsons and JillJohnstons involvement in that scene, see Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Dur­ ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 4. The classic text on the “happening” is Michael Kirby and Jim Dine, Happen­ ings (New York: Dutton, 1965). 5. Although the documentary is certainly a resource because it offers valuable footage ofJohnson, his friends, and his work, it is disappointing because of the filmmaker s inability to deal with the queemess ofJohnsons art and life. If this film heralds a certain canonization of the artist, then it is one that is content to keep his queerness as unknowable as possible. 6. For more on reparative criticism, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feel­ ing: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NG Duke University Press, 2003). 7. Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me, rev. and exp. ed. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 8. Deborah Jowitt, introduction to Marmalade Me, byJillJohnston, 12. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 6. 13. Johnson, De Salvo, and Gudis, Ray Johnson: Correspondences, 132. 14. Michel Foucault and Sylverer Lotringer, Foucault Live: (Interviews, 196684) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 204. 15. Johnson, De Salvo, and Gudis, Ray Johnson: Correspondences, 132. 16. Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something9s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian

Longing,” in The Utopian Function o f A rt and Literature: Selected Essays (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 116-117. 17. Jowitt, introduction to Marmalade Me, 6. 18. Richard Bernstein, “RayJohnsons World,” Andy WarhoVs Interview, August 1972,40.

Notes to Chapter 8 L “You Ornament the Earth: A Dialogue with Jim Hodges and Ian Berry” in Ian Berry and Ron Platt, Jim Hodges (Saratoga Springs, NY: Prances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2003), 15. 2. Gerald Henderson Thayer, Concealing— Coloration in die Animal Kingdom: An Exposition o f the Laws o f Disguise through Color andPattem ; Being a Summary o f Abhott H. Thayers Discoveries (New York: Macmillan, 1909). 3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1955), 162. 4. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 171. 5. Ibid., 171. 6. Ibid., 45. 7. Ibid., 161. 8. Ibid., 164. 9. Ibid., 165. 10. Ernst Bloch, “Better Castles in the Skyf in The Utopian Function o f A rt and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 283. 11. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 166. 12. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture o f Letters in South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 13. Oscar Wilde and Linda C. Dowling, The Soul o f Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (London: Penguin, 2001), 141. 14. Quoted in Julie Ault, ed., Felix Gonzdlez-Torres (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2006), 161. 15. Jos6 Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers o f Color and die Performance o f Politics (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1999), 37-56.

Notes to Chapter 9 L Antonio Negri, Marx beyond M arx: Lessons on die Grundrisse (New York: Autonomedia, 1989). 2. Andre Lepedd, Exhausting Dance (London: Routledge, 2006). 3 .1 have run into various accounts of Herko s death while researching this

chapter. The version from which I am drawing is a composite of various authors' work, including that of Sally Banes, David Bourdon, Ramsay Burt, Diane Di Prima, Andy Warhol, and Pat Hackett I want to lake this opportunity to state that I do not have the definitive account of Herko's death. Indeed, no one who was not there has any such account and the only person who was there, Johnny Dodd, died quite a few years ago. I am working with something like the legend of Fred Herkos death. We know he died after jumping out a window and we know he had spoken to various friends about planning a suicide performance. Thus we «an assume that this was, at least on some level, his suicide performance. The details I'm employing here might be frets or muddled rememberances or perhaps even the elaborate projections of various parties. It is, nonetheless, the story I am working with. I cannot testify to its ultimate truth. Perhaps one day a careful, empiricially minded biographer can offer us a better account But that is not the work Im doing in this interpretive and theoretically oriented analysis. 4. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The W arhol'60s (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990, a reprint of the 1980 edition). 5. See Watson, Factory Made. 6. To this date the greatest contribution in dance studies to remember­ ing Herko is Sally Banes's important Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). More recently Susan Leigh Foster has written an excellent essay on the question of improvisation and historiography: “Improvising/Historyj" in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, ed. W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Ramsay Burt has written the most thoughtful and detailed dance-histor­ ical study of Herko: Judson Dance Theater (London: Routledge, 2006). In queer studies Jennifer Doyle has also written a beautiful essay on friendship between gay men and women that reflects on di Prima and Herko's queer friendship, and Dominic Johnson has produced engaging work that compares Herko's work with that of the legendary Jack Smith. Jennifer Doyle, “Between Friends," in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 325-340 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); Dominic Johnson, “Jack Smith's Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic' Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone," Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (2009): 164-180. 7. Quoted in Banes, Democracy's Body, 44. 8. Ernst Bloch, The Principle o f Hope, tran&Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 9. Quoted in Banes, Democracy's Body, 43. 10. Quoted in ibid., 43. 11. Quoted in ibid., 44. 12. Donald McDonagh, “The Incandescent Innocent," Film Culture 45 (1968) 55-60.

13. Dominic Johnsons work elegantly compares the powerful aesthetic reso­ nances between Smiths andHerkos work. 14. Ibid. 15. Shoshana Felman, The Scandal o f the Speaking Body: Don Juan with /. L. Austinj or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 57. 16. Diane di Prima, Recollections o f My L ife as a Woman: The New York Years: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 2001). 17. Quoted in Foster, “Improvising/History^ 202. 18. Quote in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 44. 19. Diane di Prima, “For Freddy, Fucking Again,” in Freddie Poems (Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1974), 35. 20. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhols World and His Füms, 2nd ed. (New York: M. Boyars; distributed in the U.S. by Scribner, 1985), 53. 21. Quoted in Foster, “Improvising/History" 203. 22. Quoted in Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films o f Andy War­ hol: Catalogue Raisonnäe (New York: H. N. Abrams/Whitney Museum of Ameri­ can Art, 2006), 93. 23. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 24. Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Dur­ ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 25. Jos6 Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers o f Color and tit e Performance o f Politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 26. Di Prima, Recollections o f My Life as a Woman, 280. 27. Ernst Bloch, “The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time,* in Literary Es­ says, trans. Andrew Joron and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 167. 28. Di Prima, Recollections o f My Life as a Woman, 193. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 389. 31. Bloch, Principle o f Hope, 1:394. 32. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 144. 33. Ramsay Burt has specifically urged us not to make much of Herkos death or his drug use and instead consider his place in dance history. Although I respect Burts scholarship, I have taken the path he warns against I have done so to un­ derstand the difficult dialectic of failure and utopia that I see as essential if we are to counter a gay and lesbian pragmatism that currently dilutes that queer political imagination. See Burt, Judson Dance Theater.

Notes to Chapter 10 1. Jos£ Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers o f Color and th e Performance o f Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2. Jack Smith, "Capitalism of Lotusland,” in Waitfo r Me at the Bottom o f 1ke Pooh The Writings o f Jack Smith, ed. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell (New York: Serpents Tail, 1997), 11. 3. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Sub­ cultural Live (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4 -7 . 4. Smith, “Capitalism of Lotusland,* 11. 5. Ibid. 6. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics o f Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). 7. For an excellent account of Smiths performances, see Stefan Brechts classic Queer Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1986). 8. Paolo Vimo, A Grammar o f die Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 84. 9. Ibid., 12. 10. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances o f Race and Freedom, 18S0-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 11. Vimo, Grammar o f the Multitude, 61-62. 12. Tavia Nyongb, “Sitting on the Edge of My Couch: Kalup Linzys Black Queer Sublime,“ paper presented at the annual American Studies Association convention, Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 2008.

Notes to the Conclusion 1. Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatisesfrom theEnneads, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1975). 2. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits o f Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973: The Seminar o f Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Bmce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999). 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Tinte, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996), 329. 4. Judith Halberstam, “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy,“ Women and Music: A Journal o f Gender and Culture 11 (2007): 51-58. 5. Elizabeth Bishop, "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” in The Complete Po­ ems, 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 82. 6. Ibid. 7. Kathryn R. Kent, Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and die Rise o f Lesbian Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 187-189.

8. Samuel R. Delany, Atlantis: Three Tales (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995).

Notes to "Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate'1 1. R. Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 149. 2. J. K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 3. J.-L. Nancy, The Truth o f Democracy, trans. P.-A Brault and M. Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 17 4. The Truth o f Democracy, 17. 5. Black Gay Man, 139. 6. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, afterword to Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Note­ books o f Gary Fisher (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 282. 7. Afterword, 284. 8. J.-L. Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53. 9. Being Singular Plural. 10. G. Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks o f Gary Fisher (Dur­ ham: Duke University Press, 1996), 203. 11. J.-L. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness o f the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 76. 12. Hegel, 76. 13. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology o f die Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 137. 14. J-L. Nancy, "Communism, the Word,” in The Idea o f Communism, ed. C. Douzinas and S. 2izek (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 145-53. 15. E. Hanson, “The Future's Eve: Reparative Readings after Sedgwick,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011): 101-19. 16. “The Future's Eve,” 109. 17. “The Future's Eve,” 114. 18. H. Perez, "You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Social Text, 23, no. 3 -4 /8 4 -8 5 (2005): 171-91. L. La Fountain-Stokes, “Gay Shame, Latino/a Style: A Critique ofWhite Queer Performatroty” in Gay Male Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by M Hames-Garcia and E. J. Martinez (Durham: Duke University Press: 2011), 55-80. J. Halberstam, “Shame and White Gay Masculin­ ity” Social Text 23, no. 3 -4 /8 4 -8 5 (2005), 219-34. 19. "The Future's Eve? 102. 20. Gary in Your Pocket, 66. 21. M. Hardt, “The Common in Communism,” in The Idea o f Communism, ed. C. Douzinas and S. Zizek (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 144.

22. “Communism, the Word,* 149. 23. The Truth o f Democracy, 17. 24. “Communism, the Word,* 146. 25. Afterword, 284. 26. Afterword, 284.

Notes to "Hope in the Face of Heartbreak" 1. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012),

10. 2. Object Lessons, 10. 3. Object Lessons, 27. 4. Object Lessons, 24. 5. Object Lessons, 34. 6. At this point in the talk, Munoz showed a clip from the film. 7. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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Index

ACT-UP, 61 Adorno, Theodor, ix, 2 ,3 7 -3 9 ,4 2 ,5 4 , 64,9 9 ,1 2 5 ,1 6 5 ; “casting of pic­ tures," 3 8 -3 9 ,4 2 ,7 3 ,1 2 5 aesthetic dimension. See queer affective, methodology, 3 ,4 Agamben, Giorgio, 3 ,9 ,2 1 ,9 0 ,9 9 -1 0 0 , 162 Albee, Edward, 209-11 Albelo, Anna Margarita, 208-13 Albers, Joseph, 119 anti-equivalence, 195 antiutopianism, 4 ,1 0 ,1 2 ,1 4 ,1 8 ,2 1 , 2 6 ,3 1 ,1 6 5 ,1 7 3 Anzaldüa, Gloria, 84 “Arabesque* (Fisher), 200,202-3 Aristotle, 9 ,9 9 Athey, Ron, 160 Austin, J. L., 9 ,1 5 ,2 6 Aviance, Kevin, 4 ,5 7 ,6 5 -6 7 ,7 3 -8 1 B, Franko, 160 Badiou, Alain, 21 Banes, Sally, 84,148,157 Baraka, Amina, 95 Baraka, Shani, 94 Barrett, Lindon, 204 Barthes, Roland, 22 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 145 Bawer, Bruce, 54,64 becoming, 15,26; queer, 72,112,123 being, 159,176; horizons of, 22; in the world, 5 ,121,209

“belonging-in-difference,” 20 Belton, Don, 204-5 Benjamin, Walter, 2 ,3 ,1 5 Berlant, Lauren, 17,49 Bernstein, Richard, 126 Bersani, Leo, 1 1 ,3 4 -3 5 ,9 4 Between Men (Sedgwick), 205 binary oppositions: absence/presence, 9 ,1 5 ,4 6 ,1 0 0 ; future/past, xiv, 49; future/present, xii-xiv; HIV­ positive/negative, 46-47; ideality/ actuality, 43; Master/Slave, 198-99; Other/Same, 197-99; pleasure/ pain, 74; positive/negative, xi-xii; potentiality/actuality, xi, 9; singular/ plural, 197-99,204-5; truth/falsity, 9; utopianism/pragmatism, 20 Bishop, Elizabeth, 4 ,7 0 -7 2 ,1 6 7 , 187-89 Black Mountain, 119 blackness: aesthetic practices, 83-84; critiques of hyper-masculinity, 73, 7 7 ,7 9 ,8 5 -8 6 ; radical tradition, 8788, 91; vernacular tradition, 61,165 Blake, Nayland, 118 Bloch, Ernest, 2 -4 ,7 ,9 ,1 2 ,1 9 ,2 1 ,2 5 , 2 7 -3 1 ,3 7 ,4 0 ,4 3 ,8 3 ,8 7 ,9 0 -9 1 , 9 3 ,9 7 ,9 9 ,1 0 4 ,1 1 6 ,1 2 5 -2 6 ,1 2 8 , 132,135,140,143,147,149-50, 152,154,163,165-66,173; abstract hope, ix-x, 213; anticipatory illumi­ nation, 3 ,7 ,1 5 ,1 8 ,2 2 ,2 8 ,4 9 ,6 4 , 8 7 ,9 1 ,9 9 ,1 0 4 ,1 0 9 ,1 5 3 ,1 7 7 ;

Bloch, Ernest (cont.) astonishment, 5; aura-of-art, 116; negation, xii-xiv; “no-longerconscious,” 1 2 ,1 9 -2 1 ,2 4 ,2 6 -3 1 , 8 3 -8 4 ,8 7 ,1 3 5 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 3 ,1 6 0 ,1 7 3 ; not-yet-here, 1 2 ,4 6 ,8 3 ,8 6 -9 0 ,9 6 , 183,187; ornamental, 1,7,10 4 ,1 2 8 , 132,143-44,150,162; “preappearance,” 147; utopian function-of-art, 7, 37, 99; “wish landscape," 5,140, 142,152,171 Bloomberg, Michael, 53-55 Bollen, Jonathan, 6 6 ,7 6 -7 7 Bond, Justin, 69 Bowery, Leigh, 76 Brecht, George, 150 Brookes, Daphne, 177 brown commons, xvi Browning, Barbara, xiii Burroughs, William, 85-86 Burt, Ramsay, 78,148 Butler, Judith, 92-93 Butt, Gavin, 4 Cage, John, 119,135 Cage, Xenia, 123 camouflage, 131-32,137-42,146 camp, 7 0 ,148,150,170 Carmines, Al, 150-51,157 Carroll, Lewis, 143 Castle, Terry, 46 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 56 Cervenka, Exene, 97,103,112 Chadip, Remy, 165 Chicago Feel Tank, 17 Coetzee, J.M ., 141 color, xi-xii, 194—95 communism, xv-xvi, 200,203-4, 215nl4 community, xvi concrete hope, ix-x Cornell, Joseph, 118

Cortinas, Jorge, 119 Crane, Hart, 188-89 Crimp, Douglas, 33-34, 37,48 critique, 208 Cunningham, Merce, 119,135,137, 141 Daley, John, 160 Davis, Vaginal, 101,110,181 Dean, Dorothy, 84 Dean, Tim, 201 De Carlo, Yvonne, 171,172 Delaney, Samuel, 1 3 ,1 8 ,4 9 -5 5 ,5 7 ,6 4 , 84,104,188 Deleuze, Giles, 182 Denby, Edwin, 125 Derrida, Jacques, 2 8 ,6 5 ,9 9 desire, 3 8 ,9 6 ,2 1 0 -1 1 ; erotic economy or “d o m in a n t imprint,” 57,59,144; political, 3 1 ,3 5 ,4 8 Dewey, John, 21 dialectical, 3 7 -3 8 ,4 3 ,8 7 ,1 5 5 ; Hege­ lian, 55; utopian, 56 Diamond, Elin, 67 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 17 di Prima, Diane, 8 5 -8 6 ,8 8 ,1 2 5 ,1 4 9 5 0 ,1 5 3 -5 5 ,1 5 7 ,1 5 9 ,1 6 3 ,1 6 5 disagreement, 213 disidentiflcation, 75,145,169 Disidentifications, xii Dodd, Johnny, 148,166 Dolan, Jill, 4 ,1 7 Dowd, John, 117 Dowd, Luke, 1 17-18,123,128-30 Dowd, Nancy, 123,127 Doyle, Jennifer, 4 drag, 180; Kiki and Herb, 69-70; tem­ poral, 17 Du Bois, W. E. B., 79-80 Duggan, Lisa, 2 0 ,3 0 ,5 2 ,5 4 Dunayevskaya, Raya, 56 Dunn, Robert, 117,120

ecstasy, 2 4 ,185-87; Heidegger, 25, 186. See also temporality Edelman, Lee, 1 1 ,2 2 ,8 8 ,9 0 -9 5 Elliot, Missy, 76 emotional situation, 97,176 Epistemology o f the Closet (Sedgwick), 199 equivalence, 213 evidence, ephemeral, 6 5 -6 7 ,7 1 ,8 1 , 115,118,121,127,149; queer, 27, 7 0 ,7 4 ,8 1 ,1 6 0

18,19-23, 26, 3 0 ,8 7 -8 8 ,9 1 ,9 3 , 127; as trace, 4 2 ,4 5 ,6 5 ,7 0 -7 2 ,9 9

Gary in Your Pocket (Fisher), 193-94, 196-97,200-201,205 gay and lesbian politics: coming out narrative, 72; decolonization, 29; identity politic^ 20; neoliberalism, 30, 32,126,145,172; pragmatism, 1 9 ,2 6 ,3 0 ,3 2 ; same-sex marriage, 20, 30,121; sex-negativity, 34, 54-55 failure: politics of, 1 7 -1 8 ,2 7 ,1 5 3 ,1 5 7 ; gender: butching-up, 68-69; femmephobia, 77; identity, 76 queer, xiv, 154-55,169,172-74, 177,180; of speech act theory, 9-10, Genet, Jean, 92 Geoghegan, Vincent, 165 15,154,173 gesture, 6 5 -6 7 ,7 4 -8 1 ,9 0 -9 1 ,1 4 1 , Fanon, Franz, 93 162; denaturalized, 151; vogueing, Felman, Shoshana, 13,15,154 80 fetishism, 201-2 ghosts: Derridian hauntology, 42-43; Fields, Magentic, 185-87 of public sex, 40-42; theory, 46 Fisher, Gary, xv; Gary in Your Pocket, 193 _ 94, 196-97,200-201,205. See Ginsberg, Allen, 92 also “Race, Sex, and the Incommen­ Giomo, John, 1 8 ,3 5 -4 0 ,4 7 surate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosof- Giuliani, Rudolph, 5 3 -5 5 ,6 0 ,6 2 -6 3 , 66 sky Sedgwick” globalization, 29 Fluxus, 119,150 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 102, 111, 141Fonda, Peter, 123 43,145 Forde, Gerard, 153 Foster, Susan Leigh, 148,150,152,159 Gopinafh, Gayatri, 17 Gordon, David, 151 Foucault, Michel, 15,123 gossip, 4 Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence La, 201 Gunn, Sakia, 94-95 Francine, Frances, 153 Franklin, Paul, 67,78 Hackett,Pat, 149 Freccero, Carla, 17 Halberstam, J. Jack, 201 Freeman, Elizabeth, 17 HaLberstam, Judith, 17,31,165,186 Freud, Sigmund, 33,136-37 Handbag, Dynasty (a.k.a. Jibz Cam­ Fuss, Diana, 46 eron), 1 6 9 -70,173-76,180 “The Future's Eve: Reparative Readings Hardt, Michael, 203 After Sedgwick” (Hanson), 199-200 Futurity: afro-futurism, 94-96; antire- Haring, Keith, 36 Harvey, David, 30-31 productive, 91,94; Heidegger, 16; in the present, 4 9 ,5 5 -5 6 ,6 2 ; queer, Harvey, P.J., 69

Hay, Deborah, 154 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2,55, 92-93,198-99 Hegel: The Restlessness o f the Negative (Nancy), 198 hegemony, 39 Heidegger, Martin, 1 5 -17,29,32, 185-86 Herko, Fred, 8 6 ,125,147-67 heteronormativity, 1 2 ,2 2 ,2 8 ,3 0 ,3 4 35, 39, 7 2 -7 4 ,9 1 ,9 6 , 111, 118,154, 173,209 Hewitt, Sylvia Ann, 94 historical dispossession, 196-97 HIV/AIDS, 3 3 -3 5 ,3 8 -4 0 ,6 1 ,7 9 ,1 1 7 , 196; false binary of negative/posi­ tive anti-body status, 4 6 -4 7 Hodges, Jim, 132-33,136,138-43,145 Holmes, Rayshon, 94 homononnativity, 2 0 -2 1 ,2 6 ,3 0 ,5 4 , 154 hope, 9 ,2 5 ,2 8 ,8 3 ; “a principle of,” 92, 97,99; critical methodology of, 3 -5 “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak,” xv; ALbelo, 209-13; challenge, x-xi; climax, 2 1 1 -1 2 ,233n6; educated hope, ix-x, 207; equivalence, 213; handed-ness, ix-x; identity, 210; knowledge production, 207-9, 212; Ngai, 211-12; obstacles, x; PostFordism, 211-13; presentation, ix; revisions, x—xi; Wiegman, 207-13 Hottentot, Venus, 75 How to Draw a Bunny, 118 Hughes, Allen, 152 Husserl, Edmund, 22 identity, xiv-xv, 25,210; minoritarian, 56; politics, 115; pre-identitarian, 115-16 identity knowledges, 207,209,211 incandescence, 153,157,167

incommensurability, xiv-xvi, 208-9, 211-13 “intermedia,” 115-16,125-27 James, C. L. R., 4 9 ,5 5 -5 6 James, William, 21 Jameson, Frederic, 1 4 ,2 6 -2 7 ,2 9 Jay, Karla, 105 Johns, Jasper, 135 Johnson, Dominic, 153 Johnson, Ray, 8 6 ,115-28,159 Johnston, Jill, 115-17,1 2 0 -2 3 ,1 2 5 -2 7 , 152; Lesbian Nation, 122; Marma­ lade Me, 120-22 Jones, Bill T., 73 Jones, Grace, 76 Jones, LeRoi (aJca. Amiri Baraka), 8 3 89,125,149 Jordan, Mary, 169 Joseph, Miranda, 98-99 joteria, 84 Jowitt, Deborah, 120 Judson Memorial Church, 4, 85,117, 120,147-61 Julien, Issac, 101 Just, Tony, i-ii, 3 5 ,4 0 -4 5 ,4 7 Kant, Immanuel, 2 ,3 0 ,1 3 8 Kaprow, Allan, 50-52,55,118; “Eigh­ teen Happenings in Six Parts,” 50-52 Kennedy Jackie, 137 Kent, Katie, 72,188 Kim, Richard, 20 kinesthesia, 66, 140-41,147,153 Klein, Melanie, 200-201 Klein, Yves, 148 knowledge production, 207-9 ,2 1 2 Koch, Stephen, 159 LaBelle, 76 Lacan, Jacques, 186 landscape, 141

negation, 43,55, 9 1 ,1 25-26,162; af­ fective, 12,97; critical deployment of, 12-13; radical, 13,167 Negri, Antonio, 147 New York Correspondence School, 116-20,12 2 -2 3 ,1 2 5 -2 8 ,1 3 0 Ngai, Sianne, 211-12 Nightlife: Bricktop, 110; cabaret-license laws, 59,66; Catch One, 101-4,112; Cats Cradle, 109; The Gaiety, 57-59; La Plaza, 107-8; The Magic Touch, 56-59; Nueva Escuelita, 78; Parlor Marcuse, Herbert, 2 ,1 5 -1 6 ,3 0 -3 1 , Chib, 110; Red and Blue Party, 74; 9 9 ,1 3 2 -3 6 ,1 4 2 -4 3 ,1 6 6 ; Great Re­ Roxy, 77; as salvation, 108; Silver Lake fusal, 1 7 ,1 3 3 -3 5 ,1 4 3 -4 4 ; “perfor­ Lounge, 108; The Sound Factory 76; mance principle,* 133-35,137-39, Spaceland, 101,104,109,112 143-44,166 Nomi, Klaus, 76 Martin, Biddy, 21 Nyong o, Tavia, 181-82 Martin, Randy, 162 Nyro, Laura, 132,143 Marx, Karl, 16,27-28,31,42^ 13,56, 78, 92,138,204; commodity fetish, Object Lessons (Wiegman), 207-13 77-78 obstacles, x McCarty, Kevin, iii-vi, 4 ,9 8 ,1 0 0 -1 0 3 O’Hara, Frank, 4 ,5 ,1 4 ,2 5 ,8 3 ,8 5 -8 6 , McDonagh, Donald, 153 90 ,9 2 ,1 2 5 ,1 5 3 ,1 5 5 Mellman, Kenny, 69 Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Merck, Mandy, 46 Interesting (Ngai), 211-12 Merritt, Stephen, 185 Montez, Maria, 84,172 Paris Is Burning, 75 Moore, Marianne, 118,187-88 Pasha, Wanda, 94 More, Sir Thomas, 29,99 Paxton, Bill, 153, 155, 157,159 Morris, Mark, 73 Peirce, Charles, 21 Moten, Fred, 4 ,8 3 -8 4 ,8 6 -8 8 performance: activism, 6 0-62; happen­ Munt, Maxine, 159 ings, 50-52, 55,118; of masculinity, My Barbarian, 169-70,173,178-80 69; minoriarian citizenship, 56,99; Myles, Eileen, 13-15 ontology of liveness, 7 1 ,9 8 -9 9 Performance Studies, 4 ,1 4 9 Name, Billy (a.La. Billy Linich), 123, performativity 19,28,32,106,117,127, 160 149,183,189; “doing in futurity” 26; Nancy, Jean-Luc, 213; “being singular writing, 38,101. See also queer plural,“ 1 0 -11,15; in “Race, Sex, Phelan, Peggy, 98 and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick/ phenomenology, 15-16,22,186 Pierson, Jade, 111 194,197-200,203-5 Latino, 5 8 ,78,182,212; queer sexual­ ity, 107 Lepecki, Andre, 147 lesbians, 210-12 Lesbians On Ecstasy, 186 LeSueur, Joe, 8 5 -8 6 ,8 8 Linzy, Kalup, 169,180-83 Lisanby, Charles, 144 Livingston, Jennie, 75 Lukacs, Georg, 2

“A Poem is Being Written” (Fisher), 199-200 politics. See “Race, Sex, and the Incom­ mensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick” Pollack, Jackson, 119 Ponty, Maurice-Merleau, 66 Post-Fordism, 211-13 postmodemity, 30-31 present, xiii Psychoanalysis, 10,21; death drive, 88; jouissance, 1 0 ,9 1 -9 2 ,1 8 6 -8 7 Puar, Jasbir, 194 Public Feelings Group, 17 public sex, 49,53,57,119; Christopher Street Pier, 51-52,54, 95; Prince Street Toilets, 36,38-40; safe sex, 34; St. Marks Baths, 51-52,104,119 Punk, 76, 97,100,1 0 5 ,1 1 0 -1 1 ; Aes­ thetics, 106; Chameleon Club, 1045; Club Fire and Ice, 100; Flynns on the Beach, 100; The Germs, 100, 113; Gun Club, 100,167; Hide-Out Club, 106; X , 100; Yesterday and Today Records, 100 queer: abjection, 34,91; aesthetic di­ mension, 131-32,135,138,140, 145-46,169; of color, xi-xii, 19495; genealogies, 121; grief, xi-xii; lifeworld, 34; loss, 72-7 3 ,1 6 7 ; performattvity, 1 ,6 6 ,7 6 ,8 4 ,8 7 ,1 5 4 ; relationality,xvi, 6 -7 ,1 0 ,2 5 ,2 7 -2 8 , 119,160; shame, 68; survival, 75; utopian memory, 26, 35, 37; worldmakng, 37,40 ,5 6 ,1 1 8 Queer Nation, 61 Queer Shame conference, 201 queer theory 194; anti-relational, xii, 1 0 -1 5 ,1 7 -1 8 ,3 4 ,9 1 -9 4 ; method­ ology 27, 65,84,115; and race, 11, 17,31, 3 4 -3 5 ,7 3

“Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedg­ wick,” 193; anti-equivalence in, 195; “Arabesque,” 200,202-3; binary op­ positions, 197-99,204-5; commu­ nism, xv—xvi, 200, 203-4, 215nl4; Hanson, 199-202; Hegel, 198-99; historical dispossession, 196-97; Nancy 194,197-200,203-5; racial fetishism, 201-3; rarial humiliation, 195-96; reductivism, 199-200; ReidPharr, 195,205; reparative, 200-202; sense, 197-99; sexual debasement, 194,196-97,200; sexual fetishism, 201-2; “sharing (out),” 194,199, 205; truth, 198-99 racial fetishism, 201-3 racial humiliation, 195-96 Radicalesbians, 29 Rainer, Yvonne, 119-21,150-51 Rändere, Jacques, 213 Reed, Lou, 152 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 195,205 reparative, 200-202 Rivers, Larry 90,125 Robinson, Cedric, 86 Rosen, Andrea, 143 Rotello, Gabriel, 64 Satie, Erik, 152,157 Schuyler, James, 13 -1 5 ,2 3 -2 6 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky xi, xv-xvi, 12. See also “Race, Sex, and the Incom­ mensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick” sense, 197-99 The Sense o f Brown, 215nl4 Sex Panic, 5 2 ,5 5 ,6 0 sexual debasement, 194,196-97,200 sexual fetishism, 201-2 Shepard, Matthew, 62-63 Siegel, Marcia, 80

Siegel, Paul, 66 Simmel, Georg, 2 simulacra, 171 Smith, Jack, 118,124,153-54,169-74, 179,182-83 Smith, Patti, 167 Solanas, Valerie, 157 Stein, Gertrude, 118 Stoller, James, 162 Stonewall Rebellion, 3 ,5 3 -5 4 ,1 1 5 ,1 1 9 structures of feeling, 3 5 ,4 1 -4 2 ,4 7 ,7 0 , 115 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 101 suicide, 148-49,166-67 Sullivan, Andrew, 54, 64 Summers, Elaine, 148,151 superheroes, 129-30,138 surplus: aesthetic, 7 ,4 3 ,1 3 5 ,1 5 0 ,1 5 9 ; affective, 14 ,2 3 ,2 8 ,1 5 4 -5 5 ; camp, 162; choreography, 147; value, 147

35,45,48; methodology, 27; negativ­ ity, 12-13,43; performativity, 9 8 100,103,106,113,151; quotidian, 9, 22,25; as rehearsal, 111 Vaccaro, John, 153 Vazquez, Alexandra T., xi Vincent, Norah, 126 Vimo, Paolo, 12,176-78 virtuosity 17,173,177-78,180 vogueing, 7 4 ,7 5 ,8 0

Wachowski, Lilly, xiii Warhol, Andy, 4 -5 ,7 -8 ,1 4 ,3 6 ,8 4 , 1 1 9,123,126,129,131-33,135-39, 155,157,159,162,167; Coke Bottle, 5; Haircut, 159-60; Interview, 126; Self-Portrait, viii; Silver Clouds, vii, xiii, 135,142,144 Waring, James, 151,160 Warner, Michael, 173 Watts, Jerry Gafio, 86,88 Taylor, Cedi, 84,149,152 Weber, Max, 2 temporality: “a future in the present,* 4 9,55; ecstatic time, 32; as horizon, West, Cornel, 94 White, Patricia, 46 25,29, 32, 73, 90,97,99; “not yet queer,* 22; performative, 19; queer Whitman, Walt, 188 Whitney Museum of Art, 116,118 time, 25; straight time, 1 7 ,2 2 ,2 4 2 6 ,2 8 ,3 1 -3 2 ,8 3 ,9 1 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 4 -5 5 , Who's Afraid o f Vagina W df (Wiegman), 207-13 159,165, 171,173,178,182,186; suburban, 105; “then to here,* 116; Who's Afraid o f Virginia Wodf? (Albee), 209-11 waiting, 182 Wiegman, Robyn, 207-13 Thayer, Abbott, 132 Wilde, Oscar, 1,18,40, 111, 142 Third World Gay Revolution, 19-20, Williams, Raymond, 41 26,29 Wilson, May, 119 transgender, 5 7 ,6 9 ,9 4 ,1 8 2 Wilson, William, 117,119 Tropicana, Carmelita, 101 Wolfson, Evan, 20-21 truth, 9 ,1 9 8 -9 9 ,2 1 3 workerism, 55-56,177 Unlimited Intimacy (Dean), 201 utopia: affective structure, 9; bad object, Young, Allen, 105 39; belonging, 20,28; critical meth­ odology, 2,12; impulse, 26; longing, zany, 211-12

About the Author

JO SE ESTEBAN MUISIOZ (1 9 6 7 -2 0 1 3 ) was Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at New York University. His works include D isidentifications: Queers o f C olor and die Perform ance o f Politics (1 9 9 9 ), Cruising U topia: The Then and There o f Queer Futurity (2 0 0 9 ), and the forthcoming The Sense o f Brown. He was co-editor of P op Out: Q ueer W arhol (1 9 9 6 ) and Everynight L ife: Culture and D ance in L a tin /o A m erica (1 9 9 7 ), and founding co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at N YU Press.

J O S H U A C H A M B E R S - L E T S O N is Associate Professor of Perfor­ mance Studies at Northwestern University and author of A fter the Party: A M anifesto fo r Queer o f C olor L ife (2 0 1 8 ).

TAVIA N Y O N G ' O is Professor of African-American Studies, Amer­ ican Studies, and Theatre Studies at Yale University and author of A froFabulations: The Queer D ram a o f B lack L ife (2 0 1 8 ).

ANN P ELL EG R IN I is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at N YU and author o f P erform ance A nxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging R ace (1 9 9 7 ).