Category: José Esteban Muñoz

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.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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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.
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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.
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by Elizabeth Freeman, University of California Davis

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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.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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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.”
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by Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas at Austin

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In the wake of José’s death, many people have invoked passages from Cruising Utopia in order to express the significance of his work and what he meant to them. His call to “hear something else” and “feel something else” in the “then and there of queer futurity” has been a form of solace, as though we might be able to feel him while “cruising utopia.” Although I too feel that call, my thoughts have turned more to the book he hadn’t yet published, which was once called Feeling Brown but which morphed over time to become The Sense of Brown. I’ve been waiting for the book at least as far back as the essay called “Feeling Brown,” about Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover, which was published in 2000. It is an article to which I returned again and again to ponder José’s ambitious aim of “describing how race and ethnicity are to be understood as “affective difference.” By affective difference I mean the ways in which different historically coherent groups “feel” differently and navigate the material world on a different emotional register” (70). I found these sentences so thrilling for what they meant about the promise of the affective turn.

But it took a while before I was able look back to those old publications. When José first died, I just wanted to think about him as a friend not a colleague. It was too heartbreaking to acknowledge how much I will miss the live encounters with his thinking and how much I have come to depend on learning about his ideas in conversations about work in progress—from queer faculty working groups years ago at NYU, to Public Feelings events, to a salon about the good life in my living room last year. When I was finally able to turn to his writing, one of the first things I reached for was the work that I taught most recently—“Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” his essay about Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan and Melanie Klein’s depressive position. I had assigned it for my spring 2013 graduate seminar on “Queer Affect, Queer Archives,” and the students wanted to return to it at the end of the semester because we hadn’t had enough time to cover it the first time around. My files thus contain two sets of notes, which makes it easier to see which points seemed most important. What follows are some of the things that stood out then and that I find myself wanting to remember and pass on now.

First and foremost is this more recent essay’s articulation of the turn away from identity and towards affect in order to describe brown as a “feeling,” including the brilliant rephrasing of Gayatri Spivak to yield the compelling question, “How does the subaltern feel?” I quote at some length in order to provide the context:

My endeavor, more descriptively, is intended to enable a project that imagines a position or narrative of being and becoming that can resist the pull of identitarian models of relationality. Affect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for identity in my work. Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt. This leaves us to amend Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous quotation, “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988, 1999) to ask How does the subaltern feel? How might subalterns feel each other? (677)

I love the modification of Spivak’s question because the original has been crucial to my own intellectual formation, and the revised version echoes a question that has driven my research, “How does capitalism feel?” José’s questions not only signal the affective turn but affirm the use of the vernacular word “feel” as a theoretical term. Even as he is gearing up to explain how Kleinian object-relations theory and the depressive position have something to offer, he signals the value of ordinary feelings and lived experience as a foundation for thinking, as in: “Describing the depressive position in relation to what I am calling “brown feeling” chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right [my emphasis] within the protocols of normative affect and comportment” (676). For those who often “don’t feel quite right,” this is profoundly enabling work.

Also apparent in the longer passage quoted above is the conceptual challenge of the turn from identity to affect, evident in the rhetorical gestures that underscore this move–the insistence that affect is not a mere “placeholder” and the stated desire that it “be something altogether different.” As a reader, I lean in closely for the next sentence where José mentions the “receptors” and “frequencies” that allow us (or “certain subalterns”) to hear and feel each other. I love this sense of “tuning in” to something that can’t fully be felt, and I want to hear more about the notion of “racialized attentiveness” (680), which constitutes not only a method but a way of living or a structure of feeling. A close reading of this vocabulary of attention helps explain why José might have moved from “feeling” to “sense” as a keyword or critical concept, as he developed a language for tracking the subtle mechanisms by which queers of color or “minoritarian subjects” find and connect with one another.

José’s distinctive mix of high and low archives, including his range of theoretical sources, constitutes a queer method or, as he puts it, “the stitching I am doing between critical race theories, queer critique, and psychological object-relations theory” in order to produce a “weak” and/or reparative theory. Here as elsewhere, his work is also distinguished by his commitment to a canon of white Marxist and European theory and his ability, often through disidentification, to put what might seem like unlikely sources to service in thinking about queers of color. Through “stitching” together somewhat unlikely companions, and a willingness to let the seams show, he avoids the “cryptouniversalism” (688) of those who are too faithful or narrow in their theoretical allegiances. One of the reasons I am so upset to lose him is because we need “brown feelings” if affect theory, including its queer versions, is not to become too white. His insistence that the affective turn be about race needs to be carried forward.

José also staged encounters between different bodies of theory by working closely with queer of color artists, who produce theory in a different register. In “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” he turns to Nao Bustamante, one of the fellow travelers with whom he had a long connection and through whose work and friendship his projects were conceived. In his analysis of Nao’s tears and her literal use of stitching in Neapolitan’s crocheted video installation, he offers an account of “the depressive position” as a historically specific form of racialized affect. He invites us to hear the “sound of brown feelings” in the work’s soundtrack and to appreciate the outlandishness of the “sad crow of depression” perched on top of the TV monitor that features Nao’s crying face. And he gently but firmly admonishes those who would mistake this particularity for something either stereotypically Mexican or universally human. It is poignant to read this account now in retrospect and to hope for the reparative potential of tears.

As I turned reluctantly to the necessity of now meeting with José through writing rather than in person, one of the things my archive yielded was the original book proposal for Feeling Brown. I have one version that we discussed in the NYU Queer Faculty Working Group, likely sometime in 1999-2000, and another version that I read for Duke UP in 2000 so that he could get an advance contract. I was surprised to remember how long ago the proposal had been written; José had just barely published Disidentifications, and he already had a robust second book project. I think it was useful for him to publish Cruising Utopia first; because The Sense of Brown was so ambitious, it benefited from continuing to evolve over time. In the interim, affect theory exploded and morphed in no small part as a result of José’s own work, including the Women and Performance special issue he edited, which stakes out the relations between affect theory and psychoanalysis, the essay on Ana Mendieta in which he more directly addresses sense over feeling, or the talk he had been giving over the last year on Wu Tsang’s documentary film Wildness, in which he was developing his notion of a “brown commons.”

But even in this early version of the project, the key point that race is experienced as a feeling is already present. In both versions, I circled the sentences (quoted in my initial paragraph) that also appear in the Ricardo Bracho essay. My notes show excited questions that would prove generative for me and so many others — about national affect, about the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis, and about the use of Williams and DuBois as sources for affect theory. Queer affect theory was still emerging at that point, and although we would come to fuller set of tools, José, who had a head start as Eve Sedgwick’s student, was inventing something very rich in order to make good on his vision of “a radical reconceptualization of ethnicity as affective specificity.” I will continue to tune in to his work to “feel something else” — including “the sense of brown.”¹

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. The phrases “hear something else” and “feel something else” are underscored in Kay Turner’s song “Cruising Utopia,” the lyrics for which are taken from José’s book and originally performed at “Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song,” Dixon Place, April 4, 2013 and subsequently at memorials for him in New York.
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Works Cited
José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs).” Theatre Journal 52:1 (2000): 67-79.
—–, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” Signs 31:3 (2006): 675-688.

by Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University

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I would like to share a minor tale from yesterday as a way to continue thinking about the world of the what-might-be with which José Muñoz gifted us and which our ensemble of voices are keeping alive today.

Last March, I showed up at NYU for a panel I had organized on the “musician as urban planner”—inspired by and featuring Fred Moten. It was a session that also included Alexandra Vazquez, Gayle Wald and Greg Tate, and in the audience sat our friend José. The paper that I read that day was hardly even that at the time. I called it “Midnight Fever Dreams for Diana Ross,” or something like that. But what moved me so, what ultimately spurred me on to finish the piece, was that José had said such kind things to me about it. It wasn’t until he moved on last December that I found out that we were a year apart in age—which seemed impossible to me because I had looked up to him for so long as a colleague and friend who had generously created opportunities for me and welcomed me into his vast, roving, electric network of thinkers and artists and rebels and outsiders. Age is important in the case of this short tale I’m telling about yesterday because I can better understand today why my meditation on the Lady Di of our childhood would have perhaps hailed my beloved fellow Gen-Xer José in a particular way.

If my thoughts about her were shaped so wholly and deeply by José Muñoz, the pioneering, field-altering theorist, world-making mentor, institutional-builder and undercommons cartographer, if my thoughts about her could not have taken flight without his insistence on pointing us towards a then-and-there, they were also, unbeknownst to me at the time, holding the kernel of yet another revolutionary manifesto that José was radically improvising already, one that I would hear about the last time I saw him at the American Studies Association: that of “brown theory,” an embrace of the here and now and the beauty and power of what we already are.

So humbly and very briefly, then, I share these words and sounds for José as I read them last year.

When I grow up/will I be pretty/Will you be big and strong?/Will I wear dresses that show off my knees?/Will you wear your trousers long?/Well I don’t care if I’m pretty at all/And I don’t care if you never get tall/I like what I look like, and you’re nice small/We don’t have to change at all…

Free to be you and me, sang our own groovy Miss Ross, part of the Marlo Thomas ensemble of voices who re-ordered our universe while we sat on shag carpets and swapped Evil Knievel action figures and Ezra Jack Keats urban collages. My own Gen X earliest memory of Miss Ross consists of her re-ordering my playground with those light-as-feather vocals—to me always gender-ambiguous because they, of course, resembled that other voice coming out of my sister’s stereo speakers all day long, the voice of a then-teen Jackson 5 lead singer who, confusingly and yet perfectly and fittingly (because how else could it ever be?) sang “When I Grow Up” with “quiet fire” soul earth mother Roberta Flack on the Free to Be Television special that my friends and I watched, re-played in our heads and re-enacted on the playground for most of that first grade school year.

The hyper-femme “womanly” and yet “childlike” delicacy of her voice was its own kind of powerful statement of extremes, a queer gateway and an invitation to go with her “Somewhere” else (pace José), just as she and Mary and Cindy sang to us so triumphantly on national TV in the face of unspeakable and yet oh-so-familiar horror and trauma on April 5th, 1968.

She was always, then, in my childhood, the voice insisting that we were as “normative” as we already were. So that even though, yes, Berry Gordy, my 10-year-old People-Magazine-reading self saw the crass ways in which you re-structured The Wiz, turning Dorothy into a mid-20s school teacher and ousting virtuosic teen ingénue Stephanie Mills so that your “Endless Love” could “ease on down the road,” I was willing “to go to there” with her because she already sounded out fanciful, limitless possibility, safety in playing. She was a songbird often lambasted for her aesthetic “plasticity”, accused of failing the dreaded “A” word, but that putative “IN-authenticity,” that Courtney “fake-it-so-real I’m beyond fake” ethereal register was a reminder that if we did change at all, it could and should be a glorious “act”—one that we could work “fiercely” at Studio 54 or as oddly-as-we-wanna-be as a black New Wave nerd sporting pink hightops in Shallow Alto, California.

She was the soundtrack for our childhood civic universe, “a land” as the oh-so-crunchy New Seekers sing in the Free to Be theme—where “the children are free… where the rivers run free,” in a land of the “green country… a land bright and clear/the time’s a comin’ near… take my hand and we’ll live…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_26FOHoaC78

Today, let’s all hold hands and move towards the place that José saw coming….

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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A previous version of these remarks was delivered at the MLA 2014 session entitled “Drama Divisions: Envisioning Tomorrow for Jose Munoz.” Portions of this material appear in Daphne A. Brooks, “Let’s Talk About Diana Ross,” ed. Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste (NY: Bloomsbury, 2014).

by Barbara Browning, New York University

~

when push came to shove, you were all talk,
all action. that’s because you knew to hear
how portentous a speech act was: the “wow”
and “gee” of it all, the fun of the yack over coke
– let’s blow this hamburger stand – better late
than never – you were always late, but somehow
way, like way, ahead of the curve. put jelly
on your shoulder, baby. let us do what
you fear most. it was you who let us feel
this world was not enough, that something was
missing. then you blew the hamburger stand.
hm. thanks a lot. no really. thanks a lot.
no, really. i don’t know how to thank you. i think
i may be trying to do it for the rest of my life.

~

Author’s note:

After José passed, I wrote a couple of things for memorial or tribute events or publications, reflections that mixed the personal, the professional and the political, each time noting that he really didn’t differentiate between these things, which was the point … Anyway, as I approached this task one more time, with the prompt to consider a particular keyword or concept of significance to him, I began to write about the role that poetry played in his work – especially his later work. But then I just wanted to write a poem for him, and so I did.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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