Gossip, the Common Denominator Available to Purchase

One of the many facets of José Esteban Muñoz’s work that has repeatedly proved significant for my writing and thinking is the articulation of an essential yet anti-essentialist communitarian politics underpinning the primary theoretical concepts for which he’s widely known. Whether it’s Muñoz’s appraisal of minoritarian disidentifications with dominant cultural ideologies or the not-yet-here utopian promise of queer futurity, such influential critical frameworks are invariably bolstered by an astute assessment of how subjugated groups, through a range of expressive forms, articulate practices of collectivity that necessarily push against the grain of normative understandings of community and antirelational modes of being. In “The Brown Commons,” the first chapter of his posthumously published book The Sense of Brown (2020), Muñoz extends his earlier desire to put forward a “version of queer social relations” that is at once “critical of the communitarian as an absolute value and of its negation as an alternative...