Que(r)er : aesthetic politics of race, space, and affect
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In Que(r)er: Aesthetic Politics of Race, Space, and Affect, I identify a corpus of cultural productions by queer Latin@ writers and artists who, I contend, are using an array of expressive practices to conceptualize an aesthetic politic that I call que(r)er. Drawing from affect theory, I posit that que(r)er functions in one sense as a theoretical hermeneutic for analyzing contemporary queer Latin@ cultural production and in another sense as an emergent cultural movement that interrogates a set of systematic relations between race, spatiotemporal politics, and affective experience. Specifically, I suggest that que(r)er encodes the search for queer Latin@ history within political upheavals about race and space, but not without complicating these conflicts as dramas about the sensorial experience of spatiality. That sensorial experience, I assert, is felt as querer, the Spanish verb, which evokes multiple affective resonances. I chiefly argue that queer Latin@ cultural producers are formulating que(r)er as an aesthetic politic that centers enigmatic feelings as theoretical and historical sites for documenting ways of unknowing. In other words, I speculate that we are witnessing an emergent queer Latin@ affective identity rooted in our collective experiences in which we try to answer for ourselves what queer Latin@ history is and feels like. Classic texts in affect theory, however, often posit that affect exists outside the social. Such arguments present problems for integrating affect with research on race, gender, and sexuality. Que(r)er reasserts affect theory's place in examining the social by analyzing aesthetics as abstractions of social relations in three sets of cultural texts: (1) Horacio N. Roque Rámirez's short story "El Sereno, " (2) Club Chico's nightclub flyers, and (3) Laura Aguilar's diaries. Ultimately, this project thinks through affect as a means for recovering queer Latin@ community histories.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Estrella, James Matthew III |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Sohn, Stephen Hong |
| Primary advisor | Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne |
| Thesis advisor | Sohn, Stephen Hong |
| Thesis advisor | Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | James Matthew Estrella, III. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by James Matthew Estrella
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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