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Rating: 
Summary: Ground-breaking Scholarship in Queer Studies
Review: Jose Munoz has written a book which breaks new ground in queer studies. His analysis of queer, colored cultural productions is incisive and unapologetic. A much needed addition to a field which pays lip service but has yet to alter its strong hold on whiteness.
Rating: 
Summary: Unimpressive
Review: Simply put, this contribution to performance studies lacks any theory of the audience. The book is eager to explicate the subversive meanings subtending the work of various artists, but the interpretations require something more than a completely essentialized and abstracted characterization of the audience as a homogeneous unit that can be assumed, without further analysis, to share whatever meanings the author ascribes to the works under consideration. I would have thought that, given the proliferation of interpretive traces available through zine culture, the internet, academic commentary, and other media, it would be virtually irresistible for a cultural critic like Munoz to exploit those centexts when deploying his theoretical tools. Yet it seems not to have occurred to him that there can be no complete, or even adequately informed, analsysis of performance without some effort to particularize and attend to the audience. Lacking such contextualization, the interpretations become nothing more than solitary meditations, floating free of any moorings.
Rating:
Summary: Unimpressive
Review: Simply put, this contribution to performance studies lacks any theory of the audience. The book is eager to explicate the subversive meanings subtending the work of various artists, but the interpretations require something more than a completely essentialized and abstracted characterization of the audience as a homogeneous unit that can be assumed, without further analysis, to share whatever meanings the author ascribes to the works under consideration. I would have thought that, given the proliferation of interpretive traces available through zine culture, the internet, academic commentary, and other media, it would be virtually irresistible for a cultural critic like Munoz to exploit those centexts when deploying his theoretical tools. Yet it seems not to have occurred to him that there can be no complete, or even adequately informed, analsysis of performance without some effort to particularize and attend to the audience. Lacking such contextualization, the interpretations become nothing more than solitary meditations, floating free of any moorings.
Rating: 
Summary: Hack Job
Review: The critique of John Champagne's Ethics of Marginality in the introduction of this book is just plain shoddy and careerist. Munoz states that Champagne accuses Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied of vilifying white people; in fact, Champagne's critique says the film vilifies gay, white, s/m culture. Munoz accuses Champagne of ignorance of Essex Hemphill's poetry--poetry Champagne himself discusses in the very same chapter in which he analyzes Tongues Untied. Apparently, Munoz is so interested in making a name for himself that he doesn't bother to read carefully the sources he cites. Perhaps Champagne's critique of the figure of the privileged marginal just hits too close to home for NYU's Munoz.
Rating: 
Summary: A new perspective on the way outsiders negotiate culture.
Review: There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture-not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process "disidentification," and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism. Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. Whether examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, or television, Muñoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America. Muñoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color-in Carmelita Tropicana's "Camp/Choteo" style politics, Marga Gomez's performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis's "Terrorist Drag," Isaac Julien's critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat's disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's performances of "disidentity," and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serial The Real World. "Taking psychoanalytic theory were it has never been before, Muñoz raises the curtain on queer performance art. Itself a complex act of disidentification, this vibrant and venturesome book unveils queer worldmaking at its passionate best." Diana Fuss, author of Identification Papers "Demonstrating a thoughtful and acutely pushy intellect, Muñoz tops a new generation of identity theorists. Disidentifications beautifully describes transformative performances of sexuality and race in ways that reverberate dramatically, further transforming the conditions of possibility for those who encounter the text, its world of pleasures, images, and analyses. The sheer value of this archive of Queer world-making acts cannot be underestimated: as citation keeps the films, performances, and texts open and animating, queer commentary like this sustains resistance to and optimism against the forces of exhaustion." Lauren Berlant, Professor of English, University of Chicago "Disidentifications is an innovative and ground breaking intervention done with theoretical and critical elegance. Eloquently written, this rich and eclectic text will 'trouble' the intersections of queer, racial, and ethnic studies." Ana M. López, Tulane University
Rating:
Summary: Certain to Become a Seminal Influence
Review: This is a crucial book. It was written by a gay Cuban man who teaches in New York City though he grew up on the suburban lawns that grow on the drained swamp lands of South Florida. The book is all about how artists of color build subjectivities from the suffocating madness of neo-coloniality. We pick up the pieces of a system opposed to us, and we restage it, we push it into having new meanings, and in so doing we disarm, just a little bit, the weight of the world upon us. Muñoz's writings have always been full of beautiful stories. Vaginal Creme Davis, the half-African-American-half-Mexican drag performer who fronts a punk band where she pretends to be a white supremacist militia member because she thinks their look is "really hot". Or Muñoz himself, signing along as a teenager to the racist lyrics of an old X song because he needed their implicit critique of the suffocating conformity of Hialeah's cultural and sexual conservatism. What Muñoz elegantly lays out for us is a strategy for intervening in the public sphere that resists both the deadly paralysis of identification (assimilation with the status quo), or an imagined counter-identification which inevitably only succeeds in reifying the very bifurcating dialectic it seeks to overthrow. What interests Muñoz is what he calls "disidentification", a third way which I can best describe as such: Caliban's strategy of learning the master's language so he may curse him with it, but staged for the Millennium, so that we learn to curse (or desire) with irreverence, humor, rhythm, and while wearing stilettos. Practice theory without this book at your own peril. It is certain to become a seminal influence.
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