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"There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons" (Deleuze 1992, 4)
José Esteban Muñoz opens his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by stating that "queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality ... an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future." Queerness, continues Muñoz, "is a longing that propels us onward ... Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now" (2009, 1). He identifies queer utopias with an idea of futurity as an attempt to think of something else that goes beyond the "here and now," an act of resistance: "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 ... The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds" (27). In this article, I aim to show just the opposite. The argument I make here is that queer utopia--transgender--is a futurity of the here and of the now, a virtuality that does not belong to the past nor does it lend itself to projections of the future, but it is totally immersed in the very now of the present.
Let us take a step back and start from the beginning. The term utopia is coined out of two Greek words: ou, which means not, and topos, which means place.1A no place, an imaginary place, nowhere. It also--though incorrectly--refers to the Greek term eu, which means good, thus giving utopia a further connotation: the good place that does not exist.2This term was first used in 1516 by Thomas More (2007) to describe an imaginary island whose sociopolitical systems enjoy utmost perfection and efficiency. From here stems the association of utopia with wishful fantasy. Accordingly, utopianism studies in the last century have for the most part highlighted such a limitation: utopia has been declined in terms of mere expression of fantastical transcendence, unrealistic hope, wishful dreams of "the construction of imaginary worlds, free from the difficulties that beset us in reality" (Levitas 2010, 3).
So what...