In Theory, Darling: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination

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 life-changing: 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.

Marcos Gonsalez is an author, essayist, scholar, and assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. The author of Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land (2021), his research on queer and trans Latinx aesthetics and cultural production has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. Marcos’s essays, articles, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.