José Esteban Muñoz

José Esteban Muñoz (August 9, 1967 – December 3, 2013) was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory.

His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. In 2020, the book that Muñoz was working on at the time of his death, The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance, was published by Duke University after Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o finished the manuscript Muñoz left behind. In this book, Muñoz describes the term “Brownness”, used to describe experiences and cultural practices of Brown people. He not only explains this term, but he also relates it back to the queer community, expanding on his past work on queer theory. He relates these topics together, advocating for a mode of resistance against the negative experiences presented by societal norms.

Muñoz was Professor in, and former chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Muñoz was the recipient of the Duke Endowment Fellowship (1989) and the Penn State University Fellowship (1997). He was also affiliated with the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, and the College Art Association.