Muñoz was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, shortly before relocating with his parents to the Cuban exile enclave of Hialeah, Florida, the same year.
In 1994, he completed his doctorate from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, where he studied under the tutelage of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
He wrote about artists, performers, and cultural figures including Vaginal Davis, Nao Bustamante, Carmelita Tropicana, Isaac Julien, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Kevin Aviance, James Schuyler, Richard Fung, Basquiat, Pedro Zamora, and Andy Warhol.
[1][9] At the time of his death, Muñoz was working on what would have been his third book, The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance, to be published by Duke University Press.
[14] Following Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, Muñoz is interested in the socially symbolic dimension of certain aesthetic processes that promote political idealism.
"[16] Muñoz proposes the concept of "disidentificatory performances," as acts of transgression and creation, by which racial and sexual minorities, or minoritarian subjects articulate the truth about cultural hegemony.
[16] Queer futurity thus "illuminates a landscape of possibility for minoritarian subjects through the aesthetic-strategies for surviving and imagining utopian modes of being in the world.
[20] Building on Raymond Williams' concept of "structures of feeling",[21] Muñoz claims that the ephemeral, "traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things," is distinctly material, though not always solid.
Framing the performative as both an intellectual and discursive event, he begins by defining queerness as a possibility, a modality, of the social and the relational, a sense of self-knowing.
Muñoz notes how queer people of color, as a result of the effects of colonialism, have been placed outside dominant racial and sexual ideology, namely white normativity[24] and heteronormativity.
In Disidentifications, drawing from Nancy Fraser's notion of "counterpublics," which she states "contest the exclusionary norms of the 'official' bourgeois public sphere, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative forms of speech," Muñoz defines his own invocation of counterpublics as "communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere.
[29] Examples of counterpublics includes visual performances like Xandra Ibarra "La Chica Boom" spictacles,[30] Vaginal Davis, and Cuban activist and The Real World: San Francisco cast-member Pedro Zamora.
Chusmeria is "a form of behavior that refuses bourgeois comportment and suggests Latinos should not be too black, too poor, or too sexual, among other characteristics that exceed normativity.
"[11] In the piece "Feeling Brown", Muñoz discussed the notion of racial performativity as a form of political doing based on the recognition of the effects of race.
"[11] With Latinidad as an affective difference, "José gave us a road map or toolkit to point us in the direction of the gap, wound, or hole of displacement as a necessary condition for interpretation to take place.
[40] It is not tied to a specific ethnicity or a fixed identity but instead reflects a collective space where those who experience racialization or marginalization find belonging through shared struggles, desires, and expressions of being.
[41] Although Aztlantis pays homage to a lost Chicano homeland, the club is not codified as strictly Latino, as other people of color are frequently in attendance.
[42] The term “undercommons” refers to spaces of subversion and fugitivity, where marginalized individuals- particularly Black and Brown people- create new forms of solidarity and collective existence that is inherently contradictory to the normative organization, culture, and values of the dominant society.
[44] The “logistics” of dominant organizing forces in the society- such as debt, education, work/professionalization- are structured to isolate the individual from the collective, so that each of these spaces becomes more privatized and hyper-individualized.
To this extent, Moten and Harney argue that these shared experiences of marginalization and dispossession foster a radical sense of belonging outside the structures of institutionalized power.
The undercommons becomes a site of “fugitive planning,” where individuals work collaboratively and in improvised, non-official manners- like in the kitchens, back porches, basements, halls, park benches, parties[44]- in ways that reject capitalist productivity and the commodification and professionalization of knowledge.
Muñoz explains that the concept of “brownness” often leads to a condition described as “feeling like a problem”, stemming from societal norms that marginalize those identified with this term.
The journal featured pieces from various scholars influenced by Muñoz including Juana María Rodríguez, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, and Ann Cvetkovich.
After Muñoz's death, various art, literary,[49] and academic institutions,[50] artists,[51] and periodicals,[52] commemorated his legacy and contributions through a series of online[53][54][55][56][57] and journal based obituaries[58][59] and memorial lectures and annual events.
[60][61] In the special edition of Boundary 2, Ann Cvetkovich credits Muñoz for the explosion and morphing of the field of affect theory as a result of Jose's work.
Deborah Paredez describes Muñoz as key to the practice of a critical and ethical attentiveness to a wide range of performances by Latina/o artists and for helping scholars listen to the melody of what is like to feel brown.
Moreover, disidentification theory has been used by an array of scholars to apply a queer of color critique to various themes such as identity politics, temporality, homonationalism, and diaspora and native studies.
Begun in 1989, the annual event is meant to commemorate the AIDS crisis and give artists a platform to display work that reflects and responds to the history of HIV/AIDS.
[8] In the embodied performance, the three artists recreate scenes from The Real World: San Francisco in an exaggerated manner, critically examining the politics of reality television.
[38] Muñoz has seminal influence on many American scholars and artists, among them Robert McRuer, Roderick Ferguson, Daphne Brooks, Nadia Ellis, Juana María Rodríguez, Deborah Paredez, and Ann Cvetkovich.