From Munoz:

The mark of the utopian is the qoutadian
Barthes

Memory is most certainly constructed and, more importyant, always political. The case I make in the chapter posits our rembrances and their ritualized tellings--through film, video, peformandce, writin and visial culture--as having world making potentialities...these queer memories of utopia and the longing that structures them, esp. as they are empodied in work that I identiy as public-sex-mimetic-cultural production help us carve out a space for actual, living, sexual citizenship. (35)

The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and travese categorical distinctions , seems especialyl useful for a queer criticism that attempts to understand communal mourning, group pyschologies, and the need for a poltiics that "carries our ded" with us into battles for the present and future.

The state understands the need to keep us from knowing ourselves, knowing our masses. (64)

I was a spy in the house of gender normativcity, and like any spy I was extremely careful and worried that my cover would be blown. (68)

Lee Edleman, in his powerful polemic: No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive, wishes to alert his readers to the fact that "the structuring optimism of poltiics of which the order of meaning commits us, installing as it does the perptual ope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would arguea negation of the primal, costituive and negative act. Poltiical hope fails queers because, like significaiton, it was not orginally made for us. It resonates only on the level of reproductive futirity, abandoing politics and hope, is a certain jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Edelman's pschoanytic optic reveals that the social is inoperable for the always already shattered queer subject. (90)


Utopian and willfully idealistic practices of thought are in order if we are to resist the perils of heteronoramtivce pragmistim and Anglo-normative pessism. Imagining a queer subject who is abstracted from the sensous intersectianlitis that mark our experience is an ineffectual way out. (96)

The utopian performative charge of this image allows one to see the past, the moment before an actual performace, the moment of potentiality, and the veiwer gains access to the affective patrucarity of that moment of hope and potenrial transformation that is alos the temporality of performance. (101)

Queer cultural production is both an acknlowegent of the lack that is endemic to any heteronormative rendering of the world and a building, a "world making" in the face of the lack. A nothing is a utopian act insofar as it acknowledges a lack that is normalized as a reality and attempts to work with and through nothingness and empheramity. It is both a critique and an additive or reprative gesture. (118)