Being With: A Special Issue of Social Text on the Work of José Esteban Muñoz

Just came across the "Being With" 2014 special issue of Social Text, which Lisa Duggan mentions in her "He Does Class and Race, She Does Gender and Sexuality (and Class and Race): Heteronormativity in the Left Academy" blogpost on Bully Bloggers. (Thanks for posting on Facebook, William Calvo-Quirós!) It is a very moving and fascinating tribute to leading scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013), full of insightful essays, poems, and performance documentation. Some highlights include Jean-Luc Nancy's "Ode to José Esteban Muñoz" (masterfully translated by Damon R. Young), Joshua Chambers-Letson's reflection on organ transplants and Pedro Almodóvar's classic film All About My Mother ("Compensatory Hypertrophy, or All about My Mother"), Alexandra T. Vazquez's "Parts of a World," Joshua Javier Guzmán's "Notes on the Comedown," Tavia Nyong'o's "In Finitude: Being with José, Being with Pedro" (about Pedro Zamora), José Quiroga's "Unpacking My Files: My Life as a Queer Brigadista," and Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas's "It’s Kinda Cold Out Here: A Poem Assembled from Correspondence, with an Introduction." A beautiful publication!

Social Text (Volume 32, Number 4 121, Winter 2014, Special Issue Editors: The Being With Research Cluster).

Sexing the Borderlands at UT Austin

Sexing the Borderlands: Conference at UT Austin, 12-13 October 2012 

The Brown Commons: The Sense of Wildness 

Keynote by José Esteban Muñoz, NYU

Borders, Portals, and Spatial Reorientations

Moderator and Discussant: Neville Hoade, Department of English

Body Portals: Sexuality and Flows through Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer

Carlos Decena, Rutgers University

Gentrify My Love: On the Borders of Neighborly Desire

Richard Rodriguez, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Shameless Sex: From Porfirian Ruins to the UFW 

Moderator and Discussant: Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, CMAS and Department of American Studies

Desire Among the Ruins: Naked Children and the Politics of Pleasure in American Photographs of Porfirian Mexico

Jason Ruiz, Notre Dame University

“Indiscriminate and Shameless Sex”: The Strategic Use of Sexuality by the United Farm Workers

Ana Minian, Stanford University

Circum-Gulf Pedagogies of the New Borderlands: Sexuality, Blackness, and Queering “The” Nation

Moderator and Discussant: Lyndon Gill, African and African Diaspora Studies 

Vocal Pedagogy: Ruth Fernández and the Role of the ‘Musical’ in Colonial Puerto Rico

Licia Fiol Matta, CUNY Lehman College

Triangulated Racialized Sexualities: Spectatorship and Cross-Border Desires and Anxieties in Mexican Rumbera Cinema, 1940s-1950s

Laura Gutierrez, The University of Arizona