Cruising Utopia and New Queer Cinema

I am only halfway through Cruising Utopia, but I already have quite a few perplexing thoughts about it.

First, a thought left over from last week: I’m not sure that Go Fish fits anywhere into Munoz’s idea of a staged utopia. Go Fish, to me, fits into so many of the lesbian stereotypes that I’ve seen on The L Word. The women freak out when a "lesbian" sleeps with a man – there isn’t much room for fluid sexuality. Contrived conversations about pressing lesbian issues also seem to prescribe too much to mainstream culture rather than suggest any kind of queer futurity. For example, Max complains that cutting her hair would make it seem as if she’s trying too hard to be a lesbian, but not cutting her hair means that she isn’t doing what she wants to do because she’s afraid of being stereotyped. Where’s the glimpse of queer futurity in that dilemma? I wonder how Munoz would analyze this film, which is supposed to be an example of the New Queer Cinema movement.

Second, I’m interested in two of the comments that Munoz makes at the beginning of Chapter 6 (“Stages”). He mentions that queer people, especially when they choose to not have biological children, do not have a future in the eyes of the dominant culture (98). I feel that there are many heterosexual people who “do not have a future” because they cannot biologically reproduce. Also, I wonder if there are other possible definitions of straight futurity.

The second concept in “Stages” that stood out to me was that “the real force of performance is its ability to generate a modality of knowing and recognition among audiences and groups that facilitates modes of belonging, especially minoritarian belonging” (99). This comment seems to be much closer to the characteristics that Michele Aaron lists in her introduction to New Queer Cinema. Although Munoz writes an entire book about how queer art points toward utopic queer futurity, I am not entirely convinced. I wish that I knew more about the artists that he discusses at great length, but I’m not sure how many of the queer artists we have studied in class are consciously calling for the queer, pacifistic, communal utopia that Munoz describes. I think, overall, that Cruising Utopia is far too theoretical for my liking. I prefer the characteristics of NQC that Aaron listed:

- NQC gives voice to the sub-groups contained within the lesbian and gay community.
- “[T]he films are unapologetic about their characters’ faults… they eschew positive imagery.”
- They “defy the sanctity of the past” by portraying queerness in historical settings.
- They “defy cinematic convention in terms of form, content and genre.”
- These films sometimes “defy death” (5).

This criterion for what makes a film “queer” are much more conservative than Munoz’s theories about queer futurity, but I think I have found most of Aaron’s criteria in every book/film we read/watched for class.