Reading for Opacity in Queer Latinidad Open Access
Leon, Christina Angie (2014)
Abstract
My dissertation, Reading Opacity in Queer Latinidad, conceptualizes a queer, Latina/o ethics of reading in literature, art, and theory. Many Latina/o scholars have thoroughly analyzed the increasing media focus on Latina/os at the level of politics, but less so at the level of ethics. I contend that ethics is a necessary addition to political urgencies of cultural difference, because a critical focus on ethics allows Latina/o aesthetic productions to be carefully considered in all of their complexity. To that effect, I first articulate opacity as an ethical approach--traced through feminist, queer and Latina/o theories of difference--that thwarts the representative logic of visibility and identity. Second, I show how Latina/o writers and artists work through what I call an opaque aesthetic that resists restrictive notions of latinidad. María Irene Fornés, as a figure, shows how sociopolitical context and aesthetics can be held in productive tension in order to nuance the politics of identity. Manuel Ramos Otero employs queer camp to blur the boundaries between autobiography and fiction by a process of translation. Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera figure the decimated indigenous peoples of Cuba through performance, in order to forge a relation between colonial violence and the political present. Finally, I look to the artwork of Andre Keichian in order to see how my readings of opacity relate to a contemporary figure of queer latinidad. Ultimately, I argue that the literary and aesthetic are modes of ethical relation for queer and Latina/o studies because they offer a way to approach figures of difference without anticipating what that difference might make.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1
Invoking a Fornesian Accent
Chapter 1………………………………………………………………………………....20
Opaque Resistance:
Thinking Ethically at the Interstices of Feminist, Queer, and Latina/o Studies
Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………………60
Dispersed Desire:
The Autobiographical Translation of Manuel Ramos Otero
Chapter 3………………………………………………………………………………....99
Cuban Abyssal Origins:
Figures of the Taíno in Mendieta and Bruguera
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...139
Queer and Latina/o, Here and Now
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………148
About this Dissertation
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