José Esteban Muñoz (August 9, 1967 – December 3, 2013) was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory.
His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. In 2020, the book that Muñoz was working on at the time of his death, The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance, was published by Duke University after Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o finished the manuscript Muñoz left behind. In this book, Muñoz describes the term “Brownness”, used to describe experiences and cultural practices of Brown people. He not only explains this term, but he also relates it back to the queer community, expanding on his past work on queer theory. He relates these topics together, advocating for a mode of resistance against the negative experiences presented by societal norms.
Muñoz was Professor in, and former chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Muñoz was the recipient of the Duke Endowment Fellowship (1989) and the Penn State University Fellowship (1997). He was also affiliated with the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, and the College Art Association.
Biography Muñoz was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, shortly before relocating with his parents to the Cuban exile enclave of Hialeah, Florida, the same year. He earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College in 1989. In 1994, he earned a doctorate from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, where he studied under queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
He wrote about artists, performers, and cultural figures including Vaginal Davis, Nao Bustamante, Carmelita Tropicana, Isaac Julien, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Kevin Aviance, James Schuyler, Richard Fung, Basquiat, Pedro Zamora, and Andy Warhol. His work is indebted to the work of Chicana feminists: Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Chela Sandoval, and Norma Alarcón, members of the Frankfurt School of critical thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Muñoz died in New York City in December 2013 of apparent heart failure.
Books At the time of his death, Muñoz was working on what would have been his third book, The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance, to be published by Duke University Press. In addition to his two single authored books, Muñoz co-edited the books Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) with Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997) with Celeste Fraser Delgado.
Along with Ann Pellegrini, José Muñoz was the founding series editor for NYU Press's influential Sexual Cultures book series, which premiered in 1998. Grounded in women of color feminism, the series specializes in titles "that offer alternative mappings of queer life in which questions of race, class, gender, temporality, religion, and region are as central as sexuality" and was foundational to the establishment of queer of color critique."Sexual Cultures." NYU Press. Accessed May 17, 2016. http://nyupress.org/series/sexual-cultures/
Muñoz also worked on the initial Crossing Borders Conference in 1996, which focused on Latin America and Latino queer sexualities. He was a board member of CUNY's CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and editor of the Journal Social Text and Women and Performance.
Legacy Shortly after his death, CLAGS instituted an award in his honor, given to LGBTQ activists who integrate Queer studies into their work. The inaugural recipient of the award was Janet Mock in 2015.
In the Spring of 2016, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University inaugurated the distinguished José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture; speakers have included Fred Moten, José Quiroga, and Judith Butler.
Research and areas of interest Muñoz challenges and questions contemporary mainstream gay and lesbian politics. He argues that present gay and lesbian politics, whose political goal is gay rights, same-sex marriage, and gays in the military, are trapped within the limiting normative time and present. Following Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, Muñoz is interested in the socially symbolic dimension of certain aesthetic processes that promote political idealism. Muñoz re-articulates queerness as something "not yet here." Queerness "is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough." Muñoz reconceptualizes queerness from identity politics and brings it into the field of aesthetics. For Muñoz, queer aesthetics, such as the visual artwork of Vaginal Davis, offer a blueprint to map future social relations. Queerness, in Muñoz's conceptualization, is a rejection of "straight time", the "here and now" and an insistence on the "then and there." Muñoz proposes the concept of "disidentificatory performances," as acts of transgression and creation, by which racial and sexual minorities, or minoritarian subjects articulate the truth about cultural hegemony. Muñoz critiques Lee Edelman's book "No Future" and the concept of queer death drive that results in Muñoz theorization of queer futurity or queer sociality. Queer futurity thus "illuminates a landscape of possibility for minoritarian subjects through the aesthetic-strategies for surviving and imagining utopian modes of being in the world."
Ephemera as evidence Muñoz first introduced his concept of ephemera as evidence in the 1996 issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. The idea that performance is ephemeral is essential to the field of performance studies. In this essay, Muñoz claims that ephemera does not disappear. Ephemera in the Muñozian sense, is a modality of "anti-rigor" and "anti-evidence" that reformulates understandings of materiality. Building on Raymond Williams' concept of "structures of feeling", Muñoz claims that the ephemeral, "traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things," is distinctly material, though not always solid. Framing the performative as both an intellectual and discursive event, he begins by defining queerness as a possibility, a modality of the social and the relational, a sense of self-knowing. He argues that queerness is passed on surreptitiously due to the fact that the trace of queerness often leaves the queer subject vulnerable to attack. Muñoz's definition of ephemera is influenced by Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic "as part of the exchange of ephemera that connects and makes concert a community." As a result, Muñoz states, queerness has not been able to exist as "visible evidence" rather it has had to exist in fleeting moments. Thus, queer performances stand as evidence of queer possibilities and queer worldmaking. Muñoz understands Marlon Riggs' documentary films Tongues Untied and Black Is, Black Ain't as examples of an ephemeral witnessing of Black queer identity. In 2013, Muñoz was a collaborator on the exhibit, An Unhappy Archive at Les Complices in Zurich. The goal of the exhibit was to question the normative definition of happiness through the use of texts, posters, books, and drawings. The title of the project is a reference to Sara Ahmed's concept of the "unhappy archive." According to Ahmed, the unhappy archive is a collective project rooted in feminist-queer and anti-racist politics. Other collaborators include Ann Cvetkovich, Karin Michalski, Sabian Baumann, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Muñoz departs from Peggy Phelan's argument that the ontology of performance lies in its disappearance. Muñoz parts from this view as it is confined to a narrow view of time. He suggests live performance exists ephemerally, then without completely disappearing after it vanishes.
Disidentification Muñoz's theory of disidentification builds on Michel Pêcheux's understanding of disidentification and subject formation by examining how minoritarian subjects whose identities render them a minority (e.g. queer people of color), negotiate identity in a majoritarian world that punishes and attempts to erase the existence of those who do not fit the normative subject (i.e. heterosexual, cisgender, white, middle class, male). Muñoz notes how queer people of color, as a result of the effects of colonialism, have been placed outside dominant racial and sexual ideology, namely white normativity and heteronormativity. In his own words, "disidentification is about managing and negotiating historical trauma and systemic violence." The disidentificatory subject does not assimilate (identify) nor reject (counter identify) dominant ideology. Rather, the disidentificatory subject employs a third strategy, and, "tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form." Aside from being a process of identification, disidentification is also a survival strategy. Through disidentification, the disidentifying subject is able to rework the cultural codes of the mainstream to read themselves into the mainstream, a simultaneous insertion and subversion. By the mode of disidentification, queer subjects are directed towards the future. Through the use of shame and "misrecognition through failed interpellation, queer collectivity neither assimilates nor strictly opposes the dominant regime," but works on strategies that result in queer counterpublics.
Thinking alongside Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson and other Queer of Color Critique scholars took up the methods offered in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics to posit more complex modes of relation between majoritarian and minoritarian culture. Disidentification encapsulates an array of ideas surrounding the strategic performance of minoritarian identity that may not always appear to be in simple opposition to majoritarian culture. Described by Muñoz, “Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”Muñoz, José Esteban. "Introduction," Disidentifications : Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 4 Disidentifications uses a performance studies approach to analyzing queer of color social formation that resists state power. In the context of a performance, the performer employs the dominant narrative's construction of minoritized identity in order to reconstruct and transform dominant logics tied to the subjugated identity, in order to produce the self as liberated from the confines of marginalization.Muñoz, José Esteban. "Introduction," Disidentifications : Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 31 Muñoz's disidentification theory set the groundwork for subsequent queer of color critique, especially in the realm of performance studies.
His theory of disidentification is foundational to understandings of queer of color performance art and has proved indispensable across a wide variety of disciplines. Muñoz's argument is in conversation with Stefan Brecht's theory of "queer theater." Brecht argues that queer theater inevitably turns into humor and passive repetition, ultimately falling apart. Muñoz is wary of Brecht's theory, as it doesn't seem to consider the work of artists of color and also ignores the use of humor as a didactic and political project. Muñoz argues that the work of queer artists of color is political and will remain political as long as the logic of dominant ideology exists.
Counterpublics