The cover image for José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumously published book The Sense of Brown (2020) shows a moment from Nao Bustamante’s 2002 performance piece America the Beautiful. In the photograph, taken by feminist photographer Lorie Novak, Bustamante sits on top of an impossibly tall ladder, her back turned to us, a spotlight reproducing her body and the ladder in the form of a shadow against a white backdrop. In the piece, Bustamante dons various accoutrements of white womanhood, most prominently a blond wig that the artist uses to great effect to illustrate the ways in which minoritarian subjects inevitably fail to meet the demands to assimilate into what Muñoz once called the normatively white “cultural logics that…work to undergird state power.”1 This image can’t help but strikingly recall the cover of Muñoz’s first monograph, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), which features a photograph...
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March 2022
Research Article|
March 01 2022
Mediated Identifications: José Esteban Muñoz and Visual Studies
Joshua Javier Guzman,
Joshua Javier Guzman
Joshua Javier Guzman is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA, and the author of Dissatisfactions: Queer Latinidad and the Politics of Style, forthcoming from New York University Press.
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Iván A. Ramos
Iván A. Ramos
Iván A. Ramos is an assistant professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and author of Sonic Negations: Unbelonging Subjects, Inauthentic Objects, and Sound between Mexico and the United States, forthcoming from New York University Press.
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Afterimage (2022) 49 (1): 26–31.
Citation
Joshua Javier Guzman, Iván A. Ramos; Mediated Identifications: José Esteban Muñoz and Visual Studies. Afterimage 1 March 2022; 49 (1): 26–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.1.26
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