Mediated Identifications: José Esteban Muñoz and Visual Studies
Afterimage, 49 (1):
26-31 (March 2022)DOI: 10.1525/aft.2022.49.1.26
Abstract
The cover image for José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumously published book The Sense of Brown (2020) shows a moment from Nao Bustamante’s 2002 performance piece America the Beautiful. In the photograph, taken by feminist photographer Lorie Novak, Bustamante sits on top of an impossibly tall ladder, her back turned to us, a spotlight reproducing her body and the ladder in the form of a shadow against a white backdrop. In the piece, Bustamante dons various accoutrements of white womanhood, most prominently a blond wig that the artist uses to great effect to illustrate the ways in which minoritarian subjects inevitably fail to meet the demands to assimilate into what Muñoz once called the normatively white “cultural logics that…work to undergird state power.”1 This image can’t help but strikingly recall the cover of Muñoz’s first monograph, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), which features a photograph of multidisciplinary artist Vaginal Davis by the gay Chicano photographer Rick Castro. Although here Davis sits closer to the frame, her body turned toward us while she delicately glances away from our gaze, another blond wig directs our attention, resting on the artist’s head in contrast to her Black skin. As in Bustamante’s piece, the blondness of the wig offers an almost ironic commentary on the ways in which minoritarian subjects (and artists) must constantly negotiate their existence and work within a white majoritarian public (and aesthetic) sphere.