This essay is a tribute to José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013). It explores Muñoz’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory and affective difference as they play out in queer theory’s “antisocial thesis.” I suggest that Muñoz’s conception of racial identity as a performative cluster of common affects, of “feeling brown,” inveighs against the ways in which queers of color are continually made to bear the burden of psychic negativity, with performance as a field of acts and relations engaging with its social and political effects, and with affective communion and community as a source for its redress.
