IN THEORY, DARLING: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination, a journey I support and hope to see pay off

IN THEORY, DARLING: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination
MARCOS GONSALEZ
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A love letter to queer of color theory and how it has helped the author to discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work towards liberation

Marcos Gonsalez found his greatest source of joy when he encountered queer theory in college. As they put it, "queers and college go together like peanut butter and jelly," and for them, this was especially true. Seeing himself reflected in the work José Esteban Muñoz was Muñoz's theory of disidentification empowered Gonsalez to reclaim their Latinx and queer identities—and inspired him to push back against the largely-white monolith of queer theory.

In the sophisticated yet intimately disarming prose of In Theory, Darling, Gonsalez takes his copy of Disidentifications to the gay bar, to the classroom, to their childhome and beyond, inviting us to go along with him as he limns the queerness of reality TV, mourns the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre, searches for their uncle in Paris Is Burning, looks for Muñoz's legacy in the streets of New York, and situates themself in the lineage of the queer elders who have come before him.

Conversational yet deeply analytical, intimate yet wide-ranging, youthful yet sophisticated, Gonsalez's essays crackle with intellectual energy—and remind us just how life-giving theory can be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Meditations on a mentor lost to death before his time. A love letter to the queerness of New York. A lament about the dehumanizing obscenity of capitalism.

A man coming to terms with his understanding of the world, no matter where he's sited, is going to sound much thae same: by turns pensive and self-regarding; both thoughtful...what has all thistaught me?...and selfish...I had to skip meals/live with crowds/be abused by The System to get what you got. Because it's all true and it all needs reckoning with.

Muñoz, his mentor, was developing a queer theory that decenters the white experience. Gonsalez is pursuing this monumental project as well. It is a story that needs to be told. I hope to live long enough to experience its flowering. When I was about Gonsalez's age, Martin Bernal did a similar decentering-of-whiteness in Black Athena. It was savaged. The criticisms were intensely personal. The professional-standards ones were couched in personal terms. I hope Gonsalez has learned from and will prepare for the same to happen as he pursues his process of decentering whiteness. It is, though, the fate of the revolutionary thinker to need rigor where evidence does not always exist yet to support it...that missing fifth star thus explained.

I'm ready to follow along behind him because he can say this: "No true utopia can blossom on stolen land whose keepers refuse to return it—who refuse, even, to admit that a violence has taken place, refuse to atone materially or structurally for all the enslaved and exploited who were forced to build a society, brick by brick."

That, I think, came from someone willing to question the entire enterprise of being alive in the 21st century's end-stage capitalism. Courage, Author Gonsalez. Stay on your true course, your course to find, report on, and exact the truth, from a world that's all about lies.