Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics

by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera

Performing Queer Latinidad highlights the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the size and influence of the Latina/o population was increasing alongside a growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. Performances---from concert dance and street protest to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs---served as critical meeting points and practices through which LGBT and other nonnormative sex practitioners of Latin American descent (individuals with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions) encountered each other and forged social, cultural, and political bonds. At a time when latinidad ascended to the national public sphere in mainstream commercial and political venues and Latina/o public space was increasingly threatened by the redevelopment of urban centers and a revived anti-immigrant campaign, queer Latinas/os in places such as the Bronx, San Antonio, Austin, Phoenix, and Rochester, NY, returned to performance to claim spaces and ways of being that allowed their queerness and latinidad to coexist. These social events of performance and their attendant aesthetic communication strategies served as critical sites and tactics for creating and sustaining queer latinidad.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Queer, Sexuality

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2012

Reviews

[Irma Mayorga · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Two years after the release of Calle 13's song, Juan remarks on its enduring influence. He demonstrates how the soundscapes of the club move into peri-club geographies beyond it. In acknowledging that the song plays everywhere and that it plays all the time, he marks the extended time-space endurance of these traveled cultural objects. His use of andan, which means to walk or to be, in "andan sonando," playfully puts sound in motion. I read this simple phrase with my own Latina/o queer intentions. I recognize in this double meaning of walking and being, the very economies of becoming with which I endow Latina/o queer performance. To walk or to set the body in motion is to become what the body does. Queer latinidad relies on the technologies of performance to make the worlds we imagine inhabiting real in their enactment. Pleasure is key to queer latinidad's motivation and doings. It is the desire to be in the pleasure of queer latinidad that motivates the (e)motion of becoming" (197).

[Larry Fountain · Rating 5 out of 5]

An award winning study of queer Latina/o culture in the U.S., with a focus on dance and performance. Also offers insights on community activism.