Berlant is our preeminent contemporary theorist of how intimate practices bleed into and with national formations, and condition specific and powerful fantasies for what a good life or functional society would involve. To read their work is to become attuned to a set of dynamics that can be excavated in any given scene: the attachments being made and unmade, the forms of belonging that flash up and dissolve, the feeling-worlds that mediate everyday life, what remains unfinished.
Pointing out and giving space to the melancholy at the heart of Muñoz’s work may help us rethink what queer scholars of religion, race, gender, and sexuality are doing and what we might want to be doing.