by Deborah Paredez, University of Texas-Austin

~

It was the blue hour.

That time when bodies turn silhouette against the vast azure.

When you stumble home from the bar towards bed—yours, anyone’s—to, as Joni Mitchell sings, “lay down an impression and your loneliness.”¹

When, at last, the baby sleeps and you can now prepare for your morning class.

The blue hour.

Which actually lasts less than an hour, the blue burned to dawn after about 20 minutes.

But what’s an hour, really, when you measure your days against straight time?

It was the blue hour on the last class day of the semester. I was writing up my final notes for my lecture course, “Performing America.” How to end it? How to convey to my students a model for performing (against) America? I turned to José Feliciano’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” letting it play over and over as I stared out the window towards the cerulean horizon.

It was José Muñoz who, years ago, first introduced me to Feliciano’s minor key take on the anthem. It was José who taught me how to practice a critical and ethical attentiveness to a wide range of performances by Latina/o artists. José who helped so many of us identify “all sorts of antinormative feelings that correspond to minoritarian becoming.”² José who helped us hear in Feliciano’s song the tentative strumming of those first measures, the plaintive “Ohhhhh,” the steady murmur of the melody and the languorous voice refusing to keep the time. The lag. The longing the longing the longing. This, José instructed us, is what it sounds like to feel brown.

For those of us invested in and, indeed, in love with Latina/o performance (studies), José’s work was the light of the blue hour: the source of illumination against which we positioned our own bodies of work in the hopes of being made to seem more luminous, more clearly defined. The distinct shape of our work was impossible to achieve in any other light. He named our feelings and their relationship to our (lack of) access to citizenship; he chronicled the disidentificatory practices so central to our identificatory pursuits; he legitimated our strivings for that sparklingly sapphire queer beyond.

Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light?

It was the blue hour on 4 December 2013, a moment of passage.

It was the blue hour and Feliciano’s voice shirred the silence and the dawn broke the blue and I taught my class, playing Feliciano’s song under my lecture for the whole hour, and I returned to my office and received word of the news.

It was the blue hour and it passed too soon and I was left feeling brown.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

Notes
1. Joni Mitchell, “Down to You,” Court and Spark, CD, Asylum, 1974.
Back to essay

2. José E. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31.1 (Spring 2006): 679.
Back to essay

by Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley

~

José was a ghost even before he ever left us. He refused “the burden of liveness” demanded of a young genius, delivering instead a performance haunted by party boy, theorist, punk, hipster, mentor, nerd, sissy, and chusma par excellence (Disidentifications, 189). (Chusma: loud, bitchy, hysterical, snarky, demanding and unapologetically colored, a hot, messy “occasion to speak queer and beyond” [195].) Into the hallowed spaces of erudite scholarship, he dragged the remains of his working-class immigrant upbringing like the gaudy train of a second-hand wedding dress ready to take over the room, sullied and storied. These were the unruly ghosts he conjured and enlisted to do the dirty work of making institutions accountable to those they had excluded. Muñoz translated class shame into the high theory spectacle of chusmería to refuse the beige decorum of whiteness and middle-class respectability and revel in the colored excesses of feminized drama and gossip, crying, a moco tendido, into a sea of left-over Latino feeling.

The future queerness of José’s intellectual imagination has always been peopled with the still beating hearts of the ghosts of his chusma past, those far away from the limelight of the academic stages he graced so ungracefully. Carrying the memory of dreams deferred, and the promise of raucous outrage, he demanded a new formulation of time that could encompass both. Refusing the burden of liveness is about rejecting the restrictive temporality of minoritarian subjects to dwell in the contained chambers of our singular relevance, to call out the ways we precede and exceed the stages of our signification. To name the haunts of our hurts is to envision the pressures and potentialities of being social subjects capable of envisioning future worlds together.

Refusing liveness, and forever animated, the performance of Muñozity that erupted whenever José arrived (late of course) was always a happening that he had helped to create and defile before his entrance. Like a street kid, passing out flyers to the latest club opening, Muñoz invited everyone to the party, ready to crowd the dance floor of his utopian world-making. The air would change with the rumor of his presence; it became perfumed with the sticky possibility that there might be enough breathing room for others who were never imagined as belonging, let alone worth inhaling. But once on the dance floor, José made you work for your place in the soul train line. Like the oracle that he was, he had the ability to read all the possibilities of your intended academic attire, and pluck out the precise theoretical accessories that would turn your shit out. A ghost that could send you back to start, armed with a new shade of fabulous to make your own. The dark emotions of José’s open windows were also there in the teary blue light of city mornings stumbling home alone to contemplate a lifetime of losses.

I like to imagine José as a queer child in his Hialeah home, the imprint of clear hard plastic still pressed onto the tender flesh of his moist thighs, pondering the performance of the color green, theorizing the scent of his tias’ heavy bosoms, and feeling brown. It is these twists of queer time that float through his work—the ghosts of other horizons. Chusmería is about honoring the imprint of plastic, of La Lupe whining to Heidegger, of stepping out of and into the ecstasy that exists in another temporal register where José is about to walk into the room (or was that him who just left?). Even and especially in the stillness of death, he asks us to refuse the burden of liveness, insisting instead that we make the most of chusma gestures of ephemera, the trace in the text, the question in the quote, the promise in the queerness yet to come. Having joined the ghosts in the wings throwing shade and brilliance, he invites us—even now—to come out and make a queer production of our broken hearts.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

by Kathryn R. Kent, Williams College

Please Come Flying¹

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying…

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears…
…please come flying.

On the second-to-last page of Cruising Utopia, José cites my analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s encomium-as-inducement-as-enticement, “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” He summarizes the heart of my reading: “Kent explains the ways in which Bishop’s work signaled a queer discourse of invitation that did not subsume the other but instead was additive” (188). Not “subsum[ing] the other” but inviting, inciting them–this might just as well describe José’s presence, his understanding of friendship, his sometimes fierce teasing, which pushed me to recognize and own my weaknesses as a critic, an activist, a writer, a co-conspirator, as well as my strengths. I don’t think I could have fathomed the dynamics of this poem if I hadn’t spent six years in graduate school with José as my constant, loving, demanding interlocutor. As he writes of the Bishop poem, “[t]his invitation, this plea, is made despite the crushing force of the dynasty of the here and now. It is an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better” (189). How many times did so many of us find José’s work, and his way of being—itself, in his words, a form of “performative provocation”—calling us to “collective political becoming,” to a “stepping out of this place and time to something, fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter” (ibid.)? In that somewhere, someplace, not yet here, I like to imagine José is waiting, not always so patiently, for the rest of us to, in Bishop’s words, “please come flying.”

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

1. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1987), 82-83.
Back to essay

by Jack Halberstam, University of Southern California

~

Some will say that José Ésteban Muñoz died an untimely death – he died too young with too much still to do. However, like his formulation of queerness as a state of being that is present in its absence, available as a lost past, unreachable as a beckoning future, I would rather say that Muñoz died as he lived, in a queer time that he may not have chosen but that insistently chose him. Like many of the exotic queer art world natives about whom he wrote, Muñoz sacrificed everything within the here and now for a then and there that had not yet and could not yet arrive. Like Jack Smith arriving late to a performance that he would then abort, or like Fred Herko meeting death early by making his last performance “a perfect jeté” out of a friend’s apartment window (Cruising Utopia, 148), Muñoz left us all shocked and surprised by his sudden exit, saddened and bereft by his final decline. Muñoz’s departure was not quite a jeté, nor was it a failure to show; it was rather an abrupt cessation of a life that had spun quickly around a chain of precious moments offering brief glimpses of another world while losing energy in the present for the here and now.

How might we understand Muñoz’s early death through his own work as a gesture of refusal, a refusal of timeliness itself? In “A Jeté Out the Window” in Cruising Utopia, Jose writes about the staging of Fred Herko’s suicide as his final performance. Using the concept of surplus value to frame acts, work, modes of being which exceed capitalist flows, José uses Herko’s leap into the void as an example of an excessive gesture – one that could be read as useless, childish, wasteful, nonsensical – but that literally refuses all that capitalism, and capitalist notions of time, offer. Instead, it signals the way in which, within queer aesthetic production, escape and refusal are juxtaposed in an altered temporality that does not respect the markers of “late” and “early” at all.

In the context of queer worlds, furthermore, excess and loss sit side by side as potent evidence of the utopian imagination. For the queer utopian, the ideal world cannot be reached through the here and now; it must be conjured by crazy, risky, wild leaps into the void. This notion of the utopian situates art as a guide to future terrains that may or may not ever surface. Muñoz reminded us of this other function for art through his bravura readings of Ernst Bloch. Bloch, Muñoz tells us, understands art as “enacting a pre-appearance in the world of another mode of being that is not yet here” (147). The “not yet here,” like the “already gone,” represent non-straight temporalities within which other possibilities appear fleetingly, like ghosts from the past, glimmers of the future, markers of the anticipated and the lost.

In Fred Herko’s death-embracing leap out of the window of a friend’s apartment, Muñoz finds a performance that defies explication, understanding or rationality; it defies capitalist logics of sense and accumulation. It sheds what it should embrace and embraces what it should fear. It is perfect in its unknowability and absolute vulnerability. The controlled leap into the void performed by Herko makes art out of what is otherwise an uncontrollable descent into death. And Herko’s last dance places queer art in an oblique relation to life itself. If vulnerability is proximity to harm, to unbecoming, then queerness seeks to rewrite the conditions of pain, harm and fear not as identity formations, but as routes to wild embodiment.

Accordingly, I do not come to mourn José Esteban Muñoz; I come to celebrate his wild sense of time, possibility, potentiality. “Queerness is not yet here,” he writes in Cruising Utopia. “Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). José, in death as in life, brings us a step closer to “the warm illumination of the horizon” that he possessed the unique ability to see, to describe and to touch. The fact that this horizon is as often death as it is art should not dissuade us from basking in its glow.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

by Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

~

In one of the opening moments of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz describes a scene from a performance by Marga Gomez in which she recalls her childhood fascination with some “lady homosexuals” she saw on TV.¹ Exploring the apparent paradox of Gomez’s identification with these “‘very depressed, very gloomy’” women (cited in Muñoz, 3), Muñoz writes, “Gomez luxuriates in the seemingly homophobic image of the truck-driving closeted diesel dykes,” describing how she transforms these damaging images into “powerful and seductive sites of self-creation” (4). For many of us “lady homosexuals,” Muñoz’s deep appreciation for the folkways of lesbians—and his willingness to take the bad with the good— was a source of delight. In this passage, Muñoz wasn’t only defining the concept of disidentification or introducing me to a style of performance; he was also showing me a way of being in the world, and a world I wanted to be in.

Disidentification is a complex concept for Muñoz, routed through divergent traditions in performance studies, ethnic studies, psychoanalysis, black studies, queer theory, Marxist social thought, and, as always, through the “ground-level” (110) theorizing and politics of the artists whose work he discusses. It is, in Muñoz’s words, “a hermeneutic, a process of production, and a mode of performance” (25). Rather than try to address disidentification in its fullness, I will focus on what has been most influential for me in the concept, namely, Muñoz’s claim that the damaging elements of subject-formation in a culture of violent normativity cannot ever be fully overcome; rather than triumphing over such elements, minority subjects continually rework them in their projects of self-making and world-making. He writes, “To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject. It is not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components within an identificatory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ or contradictory components of any identity” (12).

My work in Feeling Backward, deeply indebted to Disidentifications, focused on these “harmful or contradictory” components of identity. My more recent work has focused on Erving Goffman’s work on social stigma, in particular on the strategies for the “management of spoiled identity” that he discusses and that Muñoz cites in relation to the stigmatized Latina identity of the chusma.² This approach acknowledges how the structures of ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, and nation are worked into our identities, such that, as Muñoz writes, “our prescribed ‘public’ scripts of identification and our private and motivating desires, are not exactly indistinguishable but blurred” (15). Given these conditions, our politics and our survival depend on our ability to manage, reckon with, and remake the damage of a world that was not made for us.

Politics and survival—of the two, survival is the more contested term, since it tends to imply accommodation to the normative world rather than transformation of it. Although Muñoz defines disidentification early on in the book as “descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere” (4), by the book’s final chapter on “Latina Performance and Queer Worldmaking,” he asserts that the book is about the vision of “performers, cultural workers, and activists who are not content merely to survive” (200). As a performative text, Disidentifications follows the trajectory that it describes, moving from an account of a damaged world to the laying out “a utopian blueprint for a possible future” (200).

I was never fully able to respond to Muñoz in his call to follow the example of these artists and “risk utopianism” (25), a call since amplified and extended in Cruising Utopia. Instead I have lingered in my attachments to the smoky, mysterious world that Gomez conjures in her account of seeing those ladies in the life (“‘short for the hard and painful life’” [cited in Muñoz, 33]) on TV. My doubts about utopia are grounded in the fact that I don’t think it gives enough credit to survival. In the damaged worlds that Muñoz describes, survival should be understood as an achievement and not necessarily an accommodation—and it can’t be taken for granted. Muñoz could be critical of this kind of depressive realism, and recently I have struggled with my inability or refusal to venture the kind of fantastic investments and risks that he wrote about and that he modeled for us, his readers. In a world palpably diminished by his loss, disidentification persists as a name for everyday practices of survival and transformation.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

Notes
1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3.
Back to essay

2. For Muñoz’s discussion of “spoiled identity” in relation to chusmería, see 185. Also see Erving Goffman, Stigma: Or the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963).
Back to essay

by Gustavus Stadler, Haverford College

~

Although he never identified as a music scholar, musicians, musical genres, bands, and songs run across and beneath the surface of José’s writing like a vital circulatory system; indeed, his work as a whole would be unthinkable without the breakthrough acts of listening of his teenage years, instigated when he walked into an independent record store in Miami and encountered the alluring covers of records by L. A. punk bands like X, the Gun Club, and the Germs. I, too, remember that moment of invitation, when punk almost instantly turned from something one was accustomed to seeing mocked in media culture into something magnificent in its promise of an elsewhere, the exhilarating medium of, as José recently put it, “a salient desire for an encounter.” Punk rock and its culture galvanized José’s way of seeing the world, well before he became an accomplished theorist. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that virtually all of it extends directly from the messy business of being a queer Cuban-born kid on the threshold of a subculture so often oblivious to its racism and homophobia.

In particular, that early listening underwrote the theory of “disidentification” and helped to bring us together, in graduate school, in the 1990s. At that point, the main target of our shared, untidy cathexis was the arty straight-boy indie rock of bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth, and the Muppet-y floppiness of their lanky front men, Stephen Malkmus and Thurston Moore. Although the affective range of this music was less forthright and brash than the punk of his earlier fixation, José loved to think about and practice listening as a jarring process that provided breakthroughs—not just as the spark for the originary teenaged moment of quasi-initiation, but as a renewable resource providing energy for one’s intellectual and social engagements. Most of my memories of my first two years of graduate school involve sitting with José in his ever-more broken-down Mazda, its backseat strewn with books and CDs, deep in conversations, whose topics ranged from music to theory to music to seminar papers to music to gossip to music to sex, and so on. It was as though music provided a frame, an orientation, for talking about everything else. I learned so much.

In some way, I think José’s relationship to pop music scholarship was its own act of disidentification. For José, to write about music wasn’t to write “about music” because for him, as with so many things in his queer worldview, the boundaries of where music ended and began were tantalizingly blurry. For José, music facilitated privately staged scenes of self-care—the classic queer teen alone in her bedroom, listening for another world through headphones—but it also meant nightlife and sociality. In other words, it wasn’t an isolable object of study that could be extracted from its context and the social relations surrounding it. He rendered its presence the way it actually exists in the world—in the background, in interstices, and then, at a particular moment of vulnerability or necessity, stunningly forward and available.

He thought of music as slippery and evasive in the same way he thought of queerness as slippery and evasive, as a medium particularly well-suited to failure: “The queer failure . . . that is more nearly a refusal or an escape.” Pop music’s ephemerality was a vital part of its attraction. One would always need more, and one couldn’t know in advance what that “more” would look and sound like, and that was a good thing. Music resonated not primarily as a cultural object or genre but as an event, something that happened and then was gone. This explains, no doubt, his fascination with the ritual of the “Germs burn,” described in his recent Social Text essay on the band, “’Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” This practice, by which one Germs’ fan would burn another’s arm with a cigarette in a chain initiated by the band’s central figure, Darby Crash, was a way of marking a moment of kinship, both preserving the event of the burn and affirming its ephemerality.

Events happen and then they’re gone. In that recent essay, José invoked Alain Badiou’s notion of “fidelity”: “We understand and know the event not so much through the moment itself, but instead through the fidelity we have to a transformative spike in our public or personal histories” (99). I think we can infer that this, too, is what a term like “audio fidelity” meant to him—not a set of fixed principles of sonic quality, but a kind of fidelity to the work the medium of sound offered in helping one carry through on the promise of such a “transformative spike.” Undoubtedly, the reading of the Magnetic Fields’ song “Take Ecstasy with Me” in the coda to Cruising Utopia is his most stirring enactment of these ideas. It’s there that we see, more explicitly than anywhere else in his work, the formative, almost structural way that listening shaped Jose’s sense of queerness as always perched on the promise of the future, as an invitation to a time and place where there would always be another song.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

by Frederick C. Moten, University of California, Riverside

~

At bottom, above all, in the heart of it all, for José queerness is a utopian project whose temporal dimensionality is manifest not only as projection into the future but also as projection of a certain futurity into and onto the present and the past, piercing their previous arrangement and administration. Queerness also has a spatial dimension for José, but only insofar as it is located in displacement, at sites that are both temporary and shifting, in underground, virtual neighborhoods, ephemeral, disappearing clubs and ordinary, everyday venues broken and reconstructed by extraordinary everynight presences whose traces animate his writing with the sound and feel—as well as the principle—of hope. Like Heidegger, but wholly against Heidegger’s grain, José inhabits the convergence of “ecstasy” as spatio-temporal derangement with “existence” as stepping in and out of time. He studies study’s performative appearance in and as the social life of the alternative. He knows that sometimes the alternative is lost. That sometimes it has to get lost. That sometimes the alternative is loss. To be or to get lost might be neither to hide nor to disappear. Similarly: to lose, to relinquish or to veer away from—even if within—a given economy of accumulation—José thinks this in relation to, or as a certain disruption of, property, of propriety, of possession and self-possession, of the modes of subjectivity these engender especially in fucked-up, Locke/d down, America. Inappropriateness such as José’s—which is his, and his alone, because it is not his, because he gave it to us from wherever he was and gives it to us from wherever he is—remains undefined by the interplay of regulation and accumulation that it induces.

Consider (which is to say feel, which is to say dig) Kevin Aviance (deviance and perfume, the trace of another scent and gest and groove) as José approaches (which is to dances with, which is to say grounds with) him—accursed share and shard, cracked vessel of essence-in-motion, counterfetish instantiating the critique of possession that only the dispossessed can make. Such consideration isn’t easy. In their mutual approach, José and Aviance become something else; something else becomes them and we have to try to get beautiful like that. That beauty is hard, brown, black, black brown and beige, tinged with the sadness that attends our, and that keeps us, moving through the ongoing history of brutal enjoyment to get to what survival demands that we enjoy. José says that on the way to that—in the slow, inescapably lowdown path of our escape—we critically rush the impasse of our fetishization, the sociosynaptic (log)jam that keeps us from becoming instruments for one another, which is our destiny. What José knows about Aviance is what we also know about José. If the force of the counterfetish is lost in the Roxy, lost in the all the various pragmatisms whose asses José kicked, lost in Marx though he, at least, as Althusser might say, produces the concept that José came to discover. If the “fetish, in its Marxian dimensions, is about occlusion, displacement, concealment and illusion,” then it can also be said to be about loss or to be the lost.¹ The fetish is a representation of loss or of the lost. The condition of possibility of this necessary representational function is loss. Heidegger might say that the fetish, or the counterfetishistic property of the fetish, tends toward unconcealment, aletheia, truth. He would say that unconcealment has concealment at its heart, which we recognize in the anarepresentational content that is borne, the ephemeral and performative energy that is transmuted and transmitted when Aviance and José dance their queer, spooky pas de deux at a distance. What Marx figures as subjunctive we now know to be actual. This is to say that José neither reads nor interprets the rematerialization of dance; he extends it, becomes part of the ongoing rematerialization that is (its) performance. This is a migrant curve evading straightness and its time. This is the counterfetishistic, redistributive, performative, gesturally perfumative content of José’s writing, which theorizes loss as the instantiation of another condition of possibility: the prefigurative supplement of loss that deconstructs and reconstructs identity, that reproduces a personhood at odds with, or radically lost within, the accumulative-possessional drive; the future lost in the present, fugitive of and in the present; our subterranean movement; the shard of light we share.

José, whose irreplaceability is given in that he was always writing with somebody, and Aviance shed that light. They remain as “queer ephemera, transmutation of the performance energy, that also function as a beacon for queer possibility and survival” so we can see ourselves, both descriptively and prescriptively, as the history of abnormative in(ter)vention (ibid., 74). We have to see our everyday selves like that everynight, until the party becomes The Party; and though we’re not party to this exchange, because we’re not, we feel it, because it moves through us when we feel (for) one another. The ones who don’t see the gravity of this have never been on, let alone under, the ground. Such grounding, such approach was José, flying. The velocity of his escape remains in (f)light. See, if Aviance and José hip us to the notion that ephemera mark the ongoing production of (a) performance whose origin is always before us, then every vanishing point signals the inevitably of a return, even if it’s just the way we get up tomorrow, even if our loss make us not want to get up, because tomorrow we’ll see that the one we lost has left us something that will help us find him. Deeper still, way before the end, the ephemeral counterfetish will either make the bosses beautiful—multiply perspectival, contrapuntally out, in recovery of what’s lost in the stiffness of their stride and minds—or destroy them. Now that José is lost and found, improperly dispersed in us, it’s our job to bear that, to be borne by that, to keep being reborn in that. So let’s play.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

Notes
1. José Esteban Muñoz, “Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance,” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 78.
Back to essay

by Licia Fiol-Matta, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

~

(En Orihuela, su pueblo y el mío, se me ha
muerto como del rayo Ramón Sijé,
con quien tanto quería.)

I turned to the Miguel Hernández poem, “Elegía,” as soon as I received the terrible news of José’s departure. Its words could easily be transposed to December 4th, 2013: “In New York, his city, and mine, out of the blue, José Muñoz has died on me, he with whom I loved so much.” Con quien tanto quería. We loved together queer theory, US latinidad, queer of color artists and, in pride of place, Cuba, José’s beloved homeland and one of my research areas since my undergraduate years.

I have felt terribly sad at the thought that José is not to go back to the land where he was born and with which he held such an intricate and loving relationship. As a scholar, José unfolded and performed his Cubanity by creating an “impersonal self” which animates his writing (Disidentifications, 178).¹ Through eye-opening explorations of Cuban artists—many “private loves,” others “public heroes” (179)—he went beyond simple recovery to theorizing their conceptual interventions. In the process, he reconceptualized Cuban America’s status as an ethnic “success story” of the United States, from queerness. Cubanity sequentially appeared as a “disidentity,” a “feeling brown,” part of a “brown undercommons” and finally as an artistic manifestation of the “sense of brown.” One of José’s final essays, on Ana Mendieta, outlines the stakes of a negative vitalism that, to my mind, he also practiced: a relationship to a land that was no less present because it was evanescent, existing as both intimate and public “connotation” (177) to be read beyond the appropriations of experts and the cognoscenti, in a principled “being singular plural” that includes personal experience without the traps of simplistic biographism.²

Some of my favorite passages in José’s work concern the Cuban artist Félix González-Torres. An artist of evanescence, González-Torres was familiar to me as a Cuban figure who attended high school and university in my hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico. José’s writings on González-Torres exhibit an exemplary distance from identification. It is obvious that González-Torres’s exilic estrangement from Cuba informed all of his work, but José takes an oblique approach to this all-important event—much like he took an oblique approach to representing his personal, familial situation while infusing his entire scholarly oeuvre with his own identity markers. Exilic loss and the devastation wrought by AIDS, and Gonzalez-Torres’s own death from AIDS in 1996, compounded the mercantilistic reception of his artworks as a gay male, ethnic artist who should respond to mainstream art’s coordinates. José demolished this coercive reading in an elegant, graceful weaving together of González-Torres’ billboards, installations, and portraits in jigsaw puzzles and plastic bags, a dazzling interpretation I experienced as a sort of critical sublime precisely because of its emotional austerity.

José did not need to go to Cuba to “complete” himself as a scholar, although, on a personal level, I can only imagine it was important to him. However, “completion” was anathema to his thought. Throughout his works, he crafted an original vision of cubanía inflected by the beautiful suppleness of his radical latinidad. José gave us a road map or toolkit to point us in the direction of the gap, wound, or hole of displacement as a necessary condition for interpretation to take place, a critical move he and I shared. He refused to assimilate into normative channels of ethnic citizenship, particularly available to exiled Cubans in the United States. Instead, he made palpable, reachable, a queer ethnic space of negativity and futurity, taking Félix González-Torres as an early guide to his thinking on “disidentity,” following his own road map to arrive at Ana Mendieta as a Cuban artist-thinker of the “sense of brown.”

José and I came of age together in the academic profession. He was working on Disidentifications while I was researching A Queer Mother for the Nation. We were both thrust into Anglo and heteronormative worlds that made our academic existences difficult as Latin@ queers. We were equally invested in the political aspects of our work and how we could bring our academic research into institutions. Thus we worked on the initial Crossing Borders conference in 1996, which focused on Latin America and Latino queer sexualities, and were Board Members of CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies around the same time. And José recruited me into Social Text in 1997. Beyond our personal itineraries, we shared a methodological approach that concentrated on figures and figurations. While he found hope in the strategies his objects of study enacted in the face of a homicidal society bent on their annihilation, I studied how one such figure did part of the state’s work in reproducing normativity. Disidentifications doesn’t shy away from celebrating these queer artists; Queer Mother sounded a cautionary note against seeing queer artists as resistive. In both our works, melancholy and loss become hermeneutical tools to grasp at, in an “almost articulate” way, “a possibility of freedom” (177, 179).

I never met González-Torres, but as an artist he inspires in me the cariño I feel for José as a scholar-creator of worlds. Returning to González-Torres’ artworks, I’m often visited by a sense of grief at his untimely passing. José writes: “González-Torres refused to limit his grief to a privatized self” (179). I, for one, will follow José’s instruction not to let my grief be limited to a privatized self and continue the work of José Muñoz’s visionary presentness, one he discerned so generously for us in González-Torres’s and Mendieta’s mournful yet hopeful art of counterpoint and fugue, one he embodied in his own “impersonal” writing of his Cuban self, of his Cubanity “lived as brownness.”³

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

Notes
1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Back to essay

2. Jean Luc-Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Back to essay

3. José Esteban Muñoz, “Vitalism’s After-Burn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 21:2 (2011), 192.
Back to essay

by Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

“[T]here is no hope without anxiety and no anxiety without hope, they keep each other hovering in the balance…”

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope¹

José Muñoz gravitated toward Ernst Bloch’s voice and logic for Cruising Utopia. Why? What in those wildly uneven 1400+ pages of The Principle of Hope or Bloch’s other writings compelled him? Several years ago, I read Bloch in part because José told me to, and, despite the weirdness of Bloch’s exilic take on America, I came to feel deeply invested in the method of hope, in the relentless pursuit of micro-details of possibility. It has nevertheless taken me these weeks after José’s death to understand, as it were, the attraction. I think I have come up with a provisional answer, and it is not the familiar one that Cruising Utopia sought to answer the “anti-social thesis” of Lee Edelman and other thinkers of “the negative” with a fierce defense of hope. While that may be true, I think it is also likely, and more Blochian, that, in the imbrication of hope and anxiety, we learn something about the risk that we are and that we take in each other. We learn, moreover, less about anxiety (the less the better!) and more about the critique of what is present.

Queer thinkers I loved keep dying. Eric Clarke died, and Alex Doty died, and José died, none of them of AIDS or of “risk factors” we have discussed much in our queer cultures, but they died nonetheless, before their time. Or they died in an improper time, as Alexander García Düttmann says in his reflections on the time of and beyond AIDS, a split or fractured sense that “foils the constitution of a coherent time and of the coherence of a life.”² It is in fact the contention of At Odds with AIDS that the threat of dying before one’s time makes visible, or renders palpable, a fundamental “being not one” (a German pun on uneins/un-eins, “Un-eins-sein”, with which the translators wrestle) of the subject, an improper or non-identical subjectivity, as well as this fractured time or timeline. And it should not surprise us that sometimes this impropriety both of life and of time, of “lifetime,” is felt precisely as anxiety and its complement, anger, even or especially when the point ought to be to recognize a more fundamental impertinence or primordial non-belonging that alone can measure up to the horizon that is AIDS. Such, I think, was José’s pursuit, too.

The word “anxiety” does not appear a single time in Cruising Utopia, a book that is also not exactly about AIDS, although it certainly situates its flourishing lifeworlds of performance and art in the prehistory of the disease. Anxiety need not attend the conviction, the same one articulated by García Düttmann in what I have just cited, that we need to step out of the “rigid conceptualization that is a straight present” (185). This is the gift of impertinence. Stepping out, however, entails, as José knows, risking the imaginative line of a queer horizon. Whether those risks have the name AIDS or other names (disease, drugs, nightlife, travel, poverty, migration, unsafe sex, police…), whether we ecstatically embrace or resistingly refuse them with all of our energy, they will have enlisted us in our self-definition all the same. Or all the different: the project of Cruising Utopia is to offer us an anatomy of queer utopia as well as disappointment in many different guises, noticing exactly how potentialities become submerged in recollection, reflection, and other sober insistences upon so-called realism.

Cruising Utopia is emblematic of José’s irreverent and improper riposte to such realism not in the anxious disavowal (or avowal, amounting to the same thing) of identity but in the critique of what is, a critique elaborated in an impertinent reading practice. When he cites Bloch in conversation with Theodor Adorno, for example, it is in the service of reading queer performance artist and poet John Giorno’s text about unsafe sex in the Prince Street toilets, understood, rightly and breathtakingly, as a utopian vision of noble transport and social transformation. José enlists Ernst and Teddy, that is, in the vigilant work of negation not to “queer” them but to steer the critical energy that José finds exciting in them toward something else that Giorno, too, discloses. He calls this reading practice an oscillation: it sets something in motion, it repeats, it vibrates, and it touches us. He feels he has to defend it all the time throughout Cruising Utopia: I know I’m taking a risk in citing these together, he says, but, really, look what happens! Feel how you’re learning. Let it shift. Let it happen again. Like a heartbeat. Like this beautiful body of work José left for us that keeps us moving, returning and edging toward something else.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

Notes
1. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One. Trans. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 333.
Back to essay

2. Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus. Translated by Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3.
Back to essay

by Elizabeth Freeman, University of California Davis

~

Sometime during the days when all the Facebook photos of José with his friends flooded in, José looking at once noble and goofy, fiercely handsome and anime-cute, I had a vision of a T-shirt with a black-and-white, high-contrast picture of José’s face. It would echo the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s famous photo of Che Guevara as made over by Andy Warhol–you know the one. The T-shirt would of course disidentify with Che, capturing and redeploying a certain Latino butchness, a certain solidarity with the freaky people, faggot-style. It would come in turquoise, fuschia, tangerine, sweat yellow, and ACT UP white. José’s many friends, so many that we have not all met, would glimpse one another disappearing down subway staircases or turning corners at conferences or lurking at dingy bars. And we’d know we always had more comrades to meet.

What did José teach me about X? Look, we were girls together, kids from fancy liberal arts colleges who arrived at graduate school to do what we did not yet know to call queer theory in about 1990. I can’t say I’ve ever pivoted my own work directly around a particular term or scholarly move of José’s, though rereading him always reminds me that I owe him even more citations even than I thought I did. For example, he understood camp as a memorial practice long before I got there: “like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold onto this object and invest it with new life” (Disidentifications, 12). I’m working on sacramentality now, on the sacramental as a way of imagining a history of sexuality that doesn’t march relentlessly toward the secular, and it turns out Cruising Utopia already knows a lot of what I’m trying to say when I wrote this sentence: “queer culture parts ways with New Historicism by treating [a] fragment as a doorway not just into ‘the past,’ but into a series of complex temporal relations: acknowledgements of contemporary paradoxes and struggles, invocations of a future to come, surrogate relations to the dead, nonlinear models of descent (and dissent).” I think I’ll read José from here on the way so many of us now read Eve Sedgwick, seeing the things I am struggling to come to already there in work dating back to the early 1990s. I can live with that temporal twist, though: he lives in a future I haven’t reached yet.

But the Che/José T-shirt vision recalls me to a moment that José cites in Disidentifications. This vision and this moment don’t fit the academic-legacy, high theory model I’ve been struggling to figure out how to inhabit for this in memoriam (I struggle in part because if he’s dead, we are no longer thinking the same cultural moment together, not in any literal way, and that’s too painful). Anyway, José cites Augie Roble’s 1993 documentary Cholo Joto, where Valentín describes seeing a mural of Che accompanied by a quote: “A true rebel is guided by deep feelings of love” (quoted in Disidentifications, 14). José reads Valentín’s response to this quote—“I’m not going to fight out of anger but because I love myself and I love myself and I love my community”—as a disidentifying rearticulation of masculinist Chicano nationalism in queer terms, a way of reanimating of the lost homoerotic valences of early nationalist thought (15). And that is not wrong. But in 1993, this quote had another future too.

“A true rebel is guided by deep feelings of love.” Yeah, that’s right, as Valentín puts it – that could go on the T-shirt, too. Because what José taught me was less a theory or an argument than a method of being in the world as a researcher, a writer, a teacher, and a denizen of multiple worlds (in his case, underworlds). Here is a thing everyone knows about José: he loved a scene he wasn’t the center of. He liked to set them spinning, step back, and make exquisite fun of them. His scenes were the opposite of the traditional dramatological kind: you never knew when they’d start (except never on time) or finish (though always after hours). They often changed locations. The personnel shifted regularly. They had no goals and they had multiple, multi-tentacled conflicts. José loved drama; pretty much everything lesbians did, for example, was already performance art to him. Yet—and it took insecure me a couple of years to figure this out—all of his social mongering and fomenting, all his screwball choreography, was a practice of love. In other words, it really was all about you, not about him. He made it for you. A friend of mine left his memorial in New York last weekend saying, “What I learned from José was to have more parties.”

That is not not theory. José built the worlds he thought about. In his work, and in any number of concrete spaces from the classroom to the lecture hall to the gallery to the club, he created glorious mash-ups of artists and academics, oddballs and wannabes, the fabulous and the pasty-faced. Though you might wonder sometimes if you were cool enough to keep up, nobody was ever the butt of anything for more than a minute, though he did quip about his life as a matchmaker, mentor, network-tangler, and slut, that everything happened in “This Bridge Called My Crack.”¹ His rebellion—sneaky boy!—was not to leave anyone out, not to limit his conversations with those as well-educated as he, not to read people’s work contemptuously or decide who was smart enough and who wasn’t (at least, not in public—what he said off the record sometimes traveled, but it was always too funny to hurt much). His party could always be bigger.

So a lot of us who knew José Muñoz, thought with him, cruised with him, laughed with him, made fun of ourselves with him, I think a lot of us have taken up his practice of rebelling against the academy’s, the art world’s, the “community’s,” the Queer Mafia’s most banal forms of cruelty, though he left and we will still leave room, please, for a good joke cracked about anyone. Professionally—to narrow the world a bit, just for a moment—this has meant: figure out what someone is saying even if it sounds like crazytalk. Introduce people to one another. Don’t be afraid of people who are smarter than you. Consider everyone’s success a piece of yours, too. Cite down, gossip up, psychoanalyze lushly and lovingly, invite everyone in. Rebel against the idea that we’re narrowing the gates because these gates—the ones you can see, like tenure-track jobs or book awards or art stardom or the velvet ropes at the coolest club—they are not the ones that count. The ones that count are in front of José’s heaven, and they are wide open. So get out that T-shirt. Put it on, it’s the only thing we have to wear.

_____

Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

_____

Notes
1. Muñoz’s essay “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)” (in Theatre Journal 52 [2000]: 67-79) includes a subsection entitled “This Bridge Called My Crack.”
Back to essay