When José Esteban Muñoz is Your Hero, Today’s Pride Marches Have No Bite
June 10, 2025
Editor’s note: Essayist and scholar Marcos Gonsalez found his greatest source of joy when he encountered queer theory in college. As he puts it, “queers and college go together like peanut butter and jelly,” and for him, this was especially true. Seeing himself reflected in the work José Esteban Muñoz was life-changing: Muñoz’s theory of disidentification empowered Gonsalez to reclaim his Latinx and queer identities—and inspired him to push back against the largely-white monolith of queer theory. In this selection from In Theory, Darling: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination, Gonsalez looks back at Muñoz’s enduring influence on him and why corporate-sponsored Pride marches fall short of queer liberation.
***
Chanting, cackling, shouting, and frolicking up Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, flaunting our booty shorts and glittered skin, we marched. It was June 2019, and thousands of us queers were having a grand old gay time at the first Queer Liberation March. The march was held the same day as the yearly Pride parade, in protest against that corporatized, sanitized bigger event. At the Liberation March were anti-capitalists, gender deviants, anarchists, kink-positive folks, Marxists, and all other stripes of queer radicals. This was the parade for me.
People brought all kinds of posters to the march. Short, sweet signs with punchy messaging. Verbose signs that required extensive parsing. Signs that lambasted various local, national, and international political figures for their homophobia, transphobia, racism, classism, and sexism, rightfully so. There were many posters of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, giving them recognition so well-deserved. Karl Marx made cameos among the signs, as did Michel Foucault—the marchers had Photoshopped the faces of these two thinkers into their own unique designs and messages. The posters were a sea—too many to take in, to be honest. Yet, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted him, deified, his head enshrouded in a globe of light, bobbing up and down, his papery two-dimensionality held up in the air by an unseen marcher. I couldn’t believe it! Here was Muñoz on Sixth Avenue, a queer icon among other icons. The marcher had used the photo of the turtlenecked Muñoz, staring seriously ahead, a wall of books behind him. Middle-aged Muñoz, Muñoz the seasoned theorist. I nudged my friend next to me, alerting him of this appearance. My friend—not an academic, not one to read the latest theory churned out by a university press—replied, “Oh cool. But who is he?”
~~~
A year after that first Queer Liberation March, and a mere few months after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Muñoz’s final monograph, The Sense of Brown, was posthumously published. I had first encountered excerpts of Muñoz’s unfinished project—originally titled Feeling Brown—in 2014, during my first semester of doctoral study. We were assigned two Muñoz articles that he’d written as part of this larger project on Latino identity: “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)” (2000) and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position” (2006). The 2000 article was later included in the posthumous publication, while the later one was not. In the articles, Muñoz formulates Latino affect as “off,” a failing of sorts in relation to affective US whiteness that constructs itself as minimal, underwhelming, and unmarked, “revolv[ing] around an understanding of the Latina/o as affective excess.” For Muñoz, the myriad social differences and complexities within Latinidad might be more generatively accounted for through the articulation of a racialized brownness, a “feeling like a problem, in commonality,” that enables a better sense of common struggle against hegemonic forces. Brownness, Muñoz suggests, conceptualized as a diversity of affective and performative utterances deriving from Latinonesss, is a potential unifier of Latino people.
~~~
The Sense of Brown poignantly demonstrates how it is not just the responsibility of the performance or the performer to instantiate what Muñoz calls otherwiseness—“the production and performance of knowledge that does not conform to the mimetic coordinates assigned to both the designations ‘wise’ and ‘other.’” It is also the audience member and the analyst who must co-collaborate brownness into existence through their interpretations. However, this amorphousness of brownness raises questions as to who exactly constitutes and deploys its critical possibilities.
Muñoz emphasizes, and repeatedly reminds us, that brownness is not reducible to Latino identity, and that Latino identity doesn’t automatically align with brownness. Latino, he asserts, is not a steady identity that coheres along lines of race, nationality, or language. Rather, it is, citing Norma Alarcón, an “identity-in-difference,” or how a group’s social difference from the dominant culture is precisely what gives it collective power. Muñoz, following W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 query in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?,” postulates that the category of Latino and the possibility for Latinidades is better understood as a problem. We must not sidestep or alleviate the condition of being a problem, but rather dwell in and amplify it. He explains how “brownness is coexistent, affiliates, and intermeshes with Blackness, Asianness, Indigenousness, and other terms that manifest descriptive force to render the particularities of various modes of striving in the world.”
~~~
In 2020, I received an early review copy of The Sense of Brown from Duke University Press. I read it while quarantined in my cramped apartment, no vaccine yet. Outside, my fellow New Yorkers were dying en masse. Ambulance sirens rang out at all hours of the day. I double-masked everywhere I went, fearful, bleaching down grocery bags because we weren’t yet sure if the virus could spread through surfaces. Death was everywhere, in the air itself. And so I read The Sense of Brown unable to stop thinking of death. Mine, potentially my friends’ and families’, Muñoz’s. This posthumous book was quite literally defined by death in all ways imaginable.
After my review published, I was struck by how many people on social media—academics and lay readers alike—were reading the book, or were planning to. It was on most-anticipated reading lists with other trade nonfiction titles. In hopes of landing a wider audience, the book was being identified as an essay collection, not a scholarly monograph. I thought back to the poster of Muñoz at the Queer Liberation March, how he’d been there next to Foucault, Rivera, Johnson, Marx, and all those other queer icons. People were reading him, idolizing him. His words and ideas were circulating. He was roaming the world in ways that indicated, as he himself had once put it, “we cannot anticipate what comes next. The project of theorizing the queer social text is, by its very nature, unfinished.” He was no longer my unique obsession.
Had Muñoz . . . made it?
~~~
I have only been to the New York City Pride march twice. Once in 2011, when I first arrived in the city as an overeager eighteen-year-old queer, then again as a college senior in 2014. The first time felt like more than enough to get it out of my system, but I went the second time to confirm that I was really over it. I was. I was over the out-of-towners acting rude. The army of cops. The sanitized orderliness of the marching. The many, many corporations there to salute our queerness, to twirl and prance with us in their branded rainbow shirts and lanyards, while behind closed doors they funded anti-LGBTQ politicians and policies. They wanted our dollars but couldn’t care less about how the world treats us. These corporations want us to feel represented while shaking our ass on one of their sponsored floats, or while passing by their rainbow-decaled storefronts in June, but when things get tough, when we actually need them to show up for us, they don’t. Rainbow capitalism at its finest.
The next Pride march I attended was in 2017, in Mexico City. Queers of all ages and types thronged the streets. There was more mayhem, fewer cops, less corporateness. More my style. Still, I realized yet again, all that distance from New York, that Pride marches aren’t for me. Maybe the biggest failing of Pride marches in the twenty-first century is the lack of protest in them. They feel defanged—no bark, no bite. They have no room for concentrated rage at the anti-queer state, no righteous critique of capitalism’s ilk. The only acceptable affect is uncritical, unradical bliss. But queers don’t get liberated by being nice.
In 2015, trans Latina organizer, activist, and overall badass Jennicet Gutiérrez heckled Barack Obama at a Pride reception event at the White House. Obama was pontificating about his continued hope that LGBTQ people would attain full civil rights. It was a speech that now—on the heels of Trump’s presidency, in which he fanned the flames of white supremacy, anti-queerness, and transphobia, revealing all the hatred stewing in the US population and bulldozing the facade of neoliberal feel-goodism that Obama had built a career on—appears cynical and fraught. Gutiérrez shouted for Obama to end all detentions and deportations of LGBTQ immigrants. Obama responded, “You’re in my house,” to overwhelming applause. What most rattled me about the whole scene when I viewed it online was the way that the crowd jeered at Gutiérrez, shushed her aggressively for speaking up on behalf of a group that rarely gets attention in the public sphere. I could hear a resounding lisp in the shushes and knew that it was other queers—more than likely white gay men—who were so forcefully telling Gutiérrez to shut up.
The shushing haunted me. The hostile response from Obama hadn’t been surprising. He was part of the political establishment that favors lip service and pandering over actual care for people’s well-being. But my fellow queers? I was caught off guard by the torrent of voices that were not on Gutiérrez’s side. These queers wanted nothing to do with queer and trans immigrants. They didn’t want to know about how queer life intersects with the militarized border and the booming business of detention centers. They didn’t want to hear about the plights of non-white queers. They wanted respectability, inclusion and tolerance, a seat at the imperial table.
In the aftermath, social media only confirmed how many other queers out there felt the same way: Their posts condemned Gutiérrez, mocked her powerful dissent, praised Obama’s distasteful retort, became one with the audience that had shushed her. And, simultaneously, they were celebrating the Stonewall riots, the bricks in windows and the queers who’d fought back against cops, Sylvia Rivera and her electrifying indictments against the complicity of white cisgays. As long as queer resistance stayed strictly within the confines of history, they seemed to be saying, then it was okay. But disruption in the here and now was unacceptable.
The shushing resounded the disconnect between us. Those shushing were not my people. Gutiérrez was my people. What she stood for, what she’d done. Heckled, protested, demanded, fought back. This was my Pride.
About the Author
Marcos Gonsalez is an author, an essayist, a scholar, and assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. The author of Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land, his research on queer and trans Latinx aesthetics and cultural production has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.