07/30/2026
first inking of my limited edition print, “Cruising Utopia”
José Esteban Muñoz (August 9, 1967 – December 3, 2013) was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, q***r theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. After Muñoz died in 2013, his friend and colleague Barbara Browning sent out a call for people to graffiti a portion of the following passage from his book, Cruising Utopia’s, opening paragraphs in a common cruising location, the bathroom stall:
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing 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” José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Q***r Futurity (p. 1)
In this linocut print, I’ve recreated these rebellious acts by carving out Muñoz quote on the walls of a bathroom stall. For me, Muñoz’s work honours the sacred potential of q***r pleasure and reminds us that there was a time when q***r s*x, connection, and pleasure was relegated to hidden and grimy spaces because nowhere else was safe.
***rart
