Customer Reviews:
 love this book and its author! May 22, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
For those of us who have been starving since finishing Mercer's 'Welcome to the Jungle' or Fusco's 'English Is Broken Here', this is an excellent book to add to your reading list. Through complex theory and deep analysis, Munoz effectively articulates what many of us know but have difficulty proving to others: lesbian and gay artists of color are producing some of the nation's and the world's most revolutionary and counterhegemonic work. I am especially impressed that he examines work by Black, Latino, and Asian gays. This is a much-needed book for anyone who would like to see people of color come together in coalition. You will be impressed with Munoz's creation. This is not Hemphill's 'Brother to Brother' or Moraga's 'This Bridge Called My Back.' Some readers will be put off by the semiotic language Munoz uses. However, for those who can get through it, you will enjoy this book.
 Unimpressive February 15, 2004
14 out of 25 found this review helpful
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.
 Hack Job February 12, 2001
15 out of 35 found this review helpful
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.
Certain to Become a Seminal Influence September 16, 1999
22 out of 31 found this review helpful
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. Munoz'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 Munoz 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 Munoz 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 Munoz 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.
Ground-breaking Scholarship in Queer Studies June 29, 1999
10 out of 19 found this review helpful
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.
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