UC Riverside

Jose Esteban Munoz encourages us to revisit the past to glean potential for a more hopeful, desirable, and queer future. Attentive to the past, he asks us to reach beyond the suffocating present and to, “Cruise the fields of the visual and not so visual in an effort to see in the anticipatory illumination of the utopian” (Munoz 2009, 18). This idea in the book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity has been at the heart of my research during my time at UC Riverside. I took this idea of revisiting the past to mine my personal history, queer history, cartoons and popular media with a queer lens. This was in an effort to free myself and to encourage others to think differently and critically about the stifling patriarchal and heteronormative narratives that have instilled violence and repression in all individuals from childhood through propaganda. I sought to find the potential of quotidian materials to reconsider the sheets we sleep in, the media we consume, the roles we play in our daily lives, and to reevaluate the way we live, love and labor .