David Tenorio | University of Pittsburgh (original) (raw)

Papers by David Tenorio

Routledge eBooks, Nov 22, 2022

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018

A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, May 18, 2021

La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una prác... more La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una práctica erótica, es decir, una postura crítica y política a través de la que se establece que el conocimiento puede generarse a partir del eros. Así, los imaginarios que imantan la vasta obra literaria de dichos autores apuestan por una reconceptualización de la historia y una formulación de lo erótico como epistemología. El presente artículo aborda la idea de temporalidad del caos conjugando las prácticas carnales y afectivas de la disidencia sexual en tanto manera de leer, teorizar y sentir un ritmo alternativo frente a las narrativas convencionales de desarrollo arraigadas en el discurso teleológico del cambio posrevolucionario. Esta práctica de reinscribir la historia y repensar la utopía desde el erotismo está presente en la colección póstuma El reino de la imagende José Lezama Lima y ​​El mundo alucinantede Reinaldo Arenas, ambas obras que, al combinarse con la plástica del cubano Alexis Álvarez, plantean una aproximación de archivo desde la afectividad y la carnalidad. En resumen, ¿cómo se relacionan el archivo y la producción cultural para dar cuenta de la borradura histórica del placer característica de la disidencia sexual y de la epistemología de la carnalidad?

A Contracorriente, Jan 31, 2014

¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna... more ¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna sexo-disente? ¿cómo se encara la fuerza de la violencia cuando baja el sol en un país como México? La visibiliad que han adquirido las prácticas culturales, afectivas y sensoriales de los colectivos sexo-disidentes de la Ciudad de México ha traido consigo un gran interés por parte de la industria acdémica en categorizar, nomenclaturar y producir una genealogía de la disidencia sexo-genérica. No obstante, la matriz productora de este conocimiento se encuentra ligada a la racionalidad occidental y al elitismo cultural de la institucionalidad académica. El saber de la noche, que gira en torno a la corporalidad, la materialidad y la afectividad, de las colectividades sexo-disidentes, también autollamadas transmarilenchas, se concibe como parte de una praxis más amplia en torno al cariño, al placer y al cuidado. La expansión g-local del neoliberalismo sobre la urbe mexicana se traduce en pro...

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Lat... more In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsiváis, and Severo Sarduy. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. By alluding to popular songs, and literature, I associate drag performance with a repertoire of queer cultural practices that seek to foster a sense of belonging under the economies of queer nightlife. Broken records complicate the linearity of time condensed in a nostalgic nationalism, intermixing temporality, experience, and queer cultural production in the era of neoliberalism, as the practices of consumption turn sexual dissidence into a cultural capital with which queer collectives negotiate everyday life. This sense of brokenness of records metaphorically illustrates historical silences, erasures, violent acts, and misrepresentations sexual dissident cultures endure for social world-making. In this sense, drag performance is a queer cultural form that alters practices of consumption by generating belonging mediated by a sonic affectivity within global queer imaginaries, satirizing a national nostalgia for the masculinization of heroic figures, while ruffling conceptualizations of Mexican popular culture.

Laterality, 2017

This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research projec... more This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research project focused on issues of sexuality among California farmworkers: Sexualidades Campesinas. We note how our process of collaboration in the creation and production of digital stories was shaped by the context and our envisioned storytellers. We then offer a critical analysis of our own unique experience with digital storytelling in this project, focusing on a handful of concepts key to understanding the nature of our collaborative production process: community, affect and collaboration, storytelling, performance, and mediation, with an eye to the problem of ethics.

Latin American Theatre Review

Sexualidades Campesinas is a critical public humanities project, funded by Cal Humanities, the Ca... more Sexualidades Campesinas is a critical public humanities project, funded by Cal Humanities, the California Studies Consortium of the University of California’s Humanities Resource Institute, and the University of California’s Institute for Mexico and the United States (commonly known as UC MEXUS), that focuses on issues of sexual diversity among rural farm workers of California’s Central Valley and Central Coast regions. It aims, through the techniques of digital storytelling, to enable sexually heterodox farmworkers to produce personal stories of their everyday experiences, struggles, and triumphs whose public dissemination they believe would benefit other sexually diverse farmworkers. We used the category of “sexually heterodox” as interchangeable with LGBTQI but we decided to foreground it to recognize the different politics of sexual identities of our collaborators for whom LGBTQI can be an externally imposed category. Our mediation, which required great care, informed our preference for vague terms such as “sexual diversity” or “sexual heterogeneity” rather than more politically charged and reductive terms such as “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer,” or “homosexual.” And although our project did not target a specific nationality, the majority of our storytellers identify as Mexican or Mexican American.

Talks by David Tenorio

Más que incidir en un revisionismo histórico o en una exhumación analítica del pasado, considero ... more Más que incidir en un revisionismo histórico o en una exhumación analítica del pasado, considero lo aquí expuesto como una estrategia que, desde las emociones, los deseos y la corporalidad, profundice, indague y complejice lo que implica que el tiempo deje su ineludible huella tras su paso. Dicho de otro modo, me propongo reflexionar sobre las otras formas de sentir la historia, de ser conscientes de esa huella del tiempo en nuestro tejido afectivo, en nuestra memoria corporal y en las cartografías de nuestro deseo. En específico, busco indagar sobre las maneras de historizar el caos desde lo afectivo y corporal dentro de la llamada disidencia sexual. Y me centro en lo que se ha dado a conocer como “disidencia sexual”, u otredad sexual, puesto que, en esta colectividad, como en muchas otras que no reflejan las valencias hegemónicas de determinada sociedad, la idea de utopía se ha estructurado en sincronía con el orden cronológico del tiempo. Las modalidades en que se piensa el tiempo son, asimismo, constructos sociales que reflejan la ideología dominante de determinada época. Por ejemplo, en el contexto del capitalismo tardío, el individuo habita el tiempo de manera acumulativa en base a la propiedad, la labor y la familia. El “hombre” que perdura deja tras su muerte una herencia, una descendencia; es decir, que su legado se construye en función de los ciclos de producción y reproducción (i.e. trabajar, casarse, formar una unidad familiar, consumir, etc.), mismos que no escapan de las intersecciones entre raza, género, clase social, etc.

Mere days after Irma, one of 2017’s most destructive hurricanes, hit Havana, Latin American youth... more Mere days after Irma, one of 2017’s most destructive hurricanes, hit Havana, Latin American youth converged upon Havana’s Casa de las Américas, seizing it in the spirit of Julio Cortázar’s short-story title, “Casa Tomada,” or seized house. Conference participant David Tenorio reports on this cultural encounter for young artists and intellectuals.

Articles by David Tenorio

Cuban Studies, 2023

As a way of tracing the public encounters shaping queer space, something referred to in here as “... more As a way of tracing the public encounters shaping queer space, something referred to in here as “queer moving,” in this article, I move around media objects—Facebook posts, newspaper articles, Twitter posts, and film—digital stories, and personal interviews related to four distinctly public queer encounters: the 2019 Conga against Homophobia
and its counterpart, the Unauthorized Conga (marcha no autorizada); the
Cenesex-funded trans activist network TransCuba; and the emergence of private spaces in Havana’s nightlife for queer/trans intimacy. Through this transversal approach, I situate the concept of conga as a strategic affective engagement, a queer move, that mediates queer/trans political resistance and everyday survival in Cuba. In thinking with trans women’s everyday engagements and disengagements with the public, the notion
of trans engagements emerge from their stories not only as a trace of queer moving but also as an embodied practice to negotiate and contest a body politics of exposure. Situating the prefix trans as a relationality to trans world making allows me to trace a dynamic social choreography between survival and negotiation while unsettling static
conceptualizations of Cuban sexual dissidence.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, 2022

Borrowing from an anticapitalist feminist critique, this essay traces the affective encounters ta... more Borrowing from an anticapitalist feminist critique, this essay traces the affective encounters taking place during and after nighttime in Maya Goded’s documentary Plaza de la Soledad (Plaza of Solitude, 2016). While attending to how queer encounters shape the formation of underground spaces, I propose the concept of queer nightscapes to name a field of queer sensing that assembles zones of queer contact existing out of touch with the liberal logics of hetero- and homonormativity. By contrasting mainstream media campaigns that render the poor out of sight through the neoliberal networking of a white affect, I attend to how flows of touching enable queer worldmaking within lowly, poor, and dark spaces amidst the rapid neoliberalization, commodification, and erasure of poor queer ways of life in the Americas, and largely the Global South. This essay critically responds to the imperial logics of queer liberalism by offering sensorial, corporeal, and affective tools of analysis to approximate queer movements from below, as they encounter and fondle with a queer sensorium in the shadows.

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2022

“How many of us have to die for you to get involved?” reads a sign showcased in The TransLatin@ C... more “How many of us have to die for you to get involved?” reads a sign showcased in The TransLatin@ Coalition Intro video. This question points to the biopolitical and necropolitical textures shaping trans of color positions, including trans of color activism, representation, and value. At one level, trans of color lives come into being through their own social, material, and symbolic death, while, at another, mainstream queer/trans activist and academic agendas, including their mediatic representation, are predicated upon the immobilization of subaltern lives.[1] This paradoxical conversion of trans of color vitality into “necropolitical value” also fuels the homonormative and transnormative projects of U.S. white neo-imperialism, and by extension, of a sexually diverse Global North.[2] Positioned as sites to produce expert knowledge and technology, U.S. academic institutions are complicit with this necropolitical conversion. Attending to the global complexities of trans of color life, what does digital storytelling offer students as a media tool to understand the power imbalances defining the commodification of trans of color life and death in the U.S. feminist classroom. Considering TransLatin@ Coalition’s call to action, what does trans women activists’ digital stories teach us about coalitional politics? Specifically, how does the incorporation of trans women activists’ digital stories into the feminist classroom challenge trans hypervisibility, as well as trans commodification in the U.S. academy, particularly across Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies programs? What might digital storytelling activate, politically and pedagogically, as a trans media strategy and transfeminist praxis?

Cuadernos del CILHA, 2021

¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna... more ¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna sexo-disente? ¿cómo se encara la fuerza de la violencia cuando baja el sol en un país como México? La visibiliad que han adquirido las prácticas culturales, afectivas y sensoriales de los colectivos sexo-disidentes de la Ciudad de México ha traido consigo un gran interés por parte de la industria acdémica en categorizar, nomenclaturar y producir una genealogía de la disidencia sexo-genérica. No obstante, la matriz productora de este conocimiento se encuentra ligada a la racionalidad occidental y al elitismo cultural de la institucionalidad académica. El saber de la noche, que gira en torno a la corporalidad, la materialidad y la afectividad, de las colectividades sexo-disidentes, también autollamadas transmarilenchas, se concibe como parte de una praxis más amplia en torno al cariño, al placer y al cuidado. La expansión g-local del neoliberalismo sobre la urbe mexicana se traduce en procesos complejos de gentrificazión, privatización y comodificación de los espacios públicos que sostienen la vida nocturna. Asimismo, tales gestos neoliberales se conjugan al triumvirato necropolítico del estado-iglesia-narcocorporación del siglo XXI. En este sentido, ¿cómo se afrenta esta quimera desde la nocturnidad? A pesar de la violencia necroliberal de los últimos años, los colectivos sexo-disidentes han insistido en una descorporalización de la violencia a través del movimiento y la exaltación de los valores de la feminidad, dinamitando así las fronteras andropatriarcales que separan el cuerpo y el afecto de la noche popular. Desde los estudios del performance y del afecto, este artículo se acera a las prácticas culturales de House of Apocalipstick, un colectivo sexo-género-disidente que, compuesto por mujeres y hombres trans, lesbianas, maricas, travestis, drag queens y kings, se congrega bajo la sombra del vogue. Particularmente, se despunta “la ética de la estética” en la noveleta Such is Life in Banana Republic (2014) de su autora Franka Polari, así como en el performance de vogue del corto documental House of Apocalipstick (2015). Más allá de un cuestionamiento de las formas tradicionales de escritura, literalidad y captura, la fusión entre cuerpo, música y movimiento juega con el afecto transtemporal/transregional del voguing, cuyos orígenes se remontan a la contracultura trans/queer del Hárlem de los años 80. House of Apocalipstick expone así una cinestecia femino-afectiva en torno al voguing que, en el cuerpo de la noche, emerge como torcedura que sortea las consecuencias de la violencia cotidiana, reivindicando otras maneras de sentir el placer nocturno desde una praxis feminista, que aquí denomino tecno-kitsch.

A Contracorriente, 2021

La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una prác... more La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una práctica erótica, es decir, una postura crítica y política a través de la que se establece que el conocimiento puede generarse a partir del eros. Así, los imaginarios que imantan la vasta obra literaria de dichos autores apuestan por una reconceptualización de la historia y una formulación de lo erótico como epistemología. El presente artículo aborda la idea de temporalidad del caos conjugando las prácticas carnales y afectivas de la disidencia sexual en tanto manera de leer, teorizar y sentir un ritmo alternativo frente a las narrativas convencionales de desarrollo arraigadas en el discurso teleológico del cambio posrevolucionario. Esta práctica de reinscribir la historia y repensar la utopía desde el erotismo está presente en la colección póstuma El reino de la imagende José Lezama Lima y ​​El mundo alucinantede Reinaldo Arenas, ambas obras que, al combinarse con la plástica del cubano Alexis Álvarez, plantean una aproximación de archivo desde la afectividad y la carnalidad. En resumen, ¿cómo se relacionan el archivo y la producción cultural para dar cuenta de la borradura histórica del placer característica de la disidencia sexual y de la epistemología de la carnalidad?

Revista Conjunto, 2021

Este trabajo forma parte de un repertorio más amplio que aborda el estudio de la cultura nocturna... more Este trabajo forma parte de un repertorio más amplio que aborda el estudio de la cultura nocturna como uno de los vectores en torno a los cuales se articula la jotería. Fusionando el trabajo de Carlos Monsiváis, Deborah Vargas, José Joaquín Blanco, Nancy Cárdenas, Cecilia Sotres, Antonio Marquet y otras artistas, activistas e intelectuales, arguyo que la noche popular es una ecología política.

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2019

In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Lat... more In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsiváis, and Severo Sarduy. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. By alluding to popular songs, and literature, I associate drag performance with a repertoire of queer cultural practices that seek to foster a sense of belonging under the economies of queer nightlife. Broken records complicate the linearity of time condensed in a nostalgic nationalism, intermixing temporality, experience, and queer cultural production in the era of neoliberalism, as the practices of consumption turn sexual dissidence into a cultural capital with which queer collectives negotiate everyday life. This sense of brokenness of records metaphorically illustrates historical silences, erasures, violent acts, and misrepresentations sexual dissident cultures endure for social world-making. In this sense, drag performance is a queer cultural form that alters practices of consumption by generating belonging mediated by a sonic affectivity within global queer imaginaries, satirizing a national nostalgia for the masculinization of heroic figures, while ruffling conceptualizations of Mexican popular culture.

Other texts by David Tenorio

Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2017

This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research projec... more This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research project focused on issues of sexuality among California farmworkers: Sexualidades Campesinas. We note how our process of collaboration in the creation and production of digital stories was shaped by the context and our envisioned storytellers. We then offer a critical analysis of our own unique experience with digital storytelling in this project, focusing on a handful of concepts key to understanding the nature of our collaborative production process: community, affect and collaboration, storytelling, performance, and mediation, with an eye to the problem of ethics.

Routledge eBooks, Nov 22, 2022

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018

A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, May 18, 2021

La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una prác... more La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una práctica erótica, es decir, una postura crítica y política a través de la que se establece que el conocimiento puede generarse a partir del eros. Así, los imaginarios que imantan la vasta obra literaria de dichos autores apuestan por una reconceptualización de la historia y una formulación de lo erótico como epistemología. El presente artículo aborda la idea de temporalidad del caos conjugando las prácticas carnales y afectivas de la disidencia sexual en tanto manera de leer, teorizar y sentir un ritmo alternativo frente a las narrativas convencionales de desarrollo arraigadas en el discurso teleológico del cambio posrevolucionario. Esta práctica de reinscribir la historia y repensar la utopía desde el erotismo está presente en la colección póstuma El reino de la imagende José Lezama Lima y ​​El mundo alucinantede Reinaldo Arenas, ambas obras que, al combinarse con la plástica del cubano Alexis Álvarez, plantean una aproximación de archivo desde la afectividad y la carnalidad. En resumen, ¿cómo se relacionan el archivo y la producción cultural para dar cuenta de la borradura histórica del placer característica de la disidencia sexual y de la epistemología de la carnalidad?

A Contracorriente, Jan 31, 2014

¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna... more ¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna sexo-disente? ¿cómo se encara la fuerza de la violencia cuando baja el sol en un país como México? La visibiliad que han adquirido las prácticas culturales, afectivas y sensoriales de los colectivos sexo-disidentes de la Ciudad de México ha traido consigo un gran interés por parte de la industria acdémica en categorizar, nomenclaturar y producir una genealogía de la disidencia sexo-genérica. No obstante, la matriz productora de este conocimiento se encuentra ligada a la racionalidad occidental y al elitismo cultural de la institucionalidad académica. El saber de la noche, que gira en torno a la corporalidad, la materialidad y la afectividad, de las colectividades sexo-disidentes, también autollamadas transmarilenchas, se concibe como parte de una praxis más amplia en torno al cariño, al placer y al cuidado. La expansión g-local del neoliberalismo sobre la urbe mexicana se traduce en pro...

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Lat... more In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsiváis, and Severo Sarduy. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. By alluding to popular songs, and literature, I associate drag performance with a repertoire of queer cultural practices that seek to foster a sense of belonging under the economies of queer nightlife. Broken records complicate the linearity of time condensed in a nostalgic nationalism, intermixing temporality, experience, and queer cultural production in the era of neoliberalism, as the practices of consumption turn sexual dissidence into a cultural capital with which queer collectives negotiate everyday life. This sense of brokenness of records metaphorically illustrates historical silences, erasures, violent acts, and misrepresentations sexual dissident cultures endure for social world-making. In this sense, drag performance is a queer cultural form that alters practices of consumption by generating belonging mediated by a sonic affectivity within global queer imaginaries, satirizing a national nostalgia for the masculinization of heroic figures, while ruffling conceptualizations of Mexican popular culture.

Laterality, 2017

This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research projec... more This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research project focused on issues of sexuality among California farmworkers: Sexualidades Campesinas. We note how our process of collaboration in the creation and production of digital stories was shaped by the context and our envisioned storytellers. We then offer a critical analysis of our own unique experience with digital storytelling in this project, focusing on a handful of concepts key to understanding the nature of our collaborative production process: community, affect and collaboration, storytelling, performance, and mediation, with an eye to the problem of ethics.

Latin American Theatre Review

Sexualidades Campesinas is a critical public humanities project, funded by Cal Humanities, the Ca... more Sexualidades Campesinas is a critical public humanities project, funded by Cal Humanities, the California Studies Consortium of the University of California’s Humanities Resource Institute, and the University of California’s Institute for Mexico and the United States (commonly known as UC MEXUS), that focuses on issues of sexual diversity among rural farm workers of California’s Central Valley and Central Coast regions. It aims, through the techniques of digital storytelling, to enable sexually heterodox farmworkers to produce personal stories of their everyday experiences, struggles, and triumphs whose public dissemination they believe would benefit other sexually diverse farmworkers. We used the category of “sexually heterodox” as interchangeable with LGBTQI but we decided to foreground it to recognize the different politics of sexual identities of our collaborators for whom LGBTQI can be an externally imposed category. Our mediation, which required great care, informed our preference for vague terms such as “sexual diversity” or “sexual heterogeneity” rather than more politically charged and reductive terms such as “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer,” or “homosexual.” And although our project did not target a specific nationality, the majority of our storytellers identify as Mexican or Mexican American.

Más que incidir en un revisionismo histórico o en una exhumación analítica del pasado, considero ... more Más que incidir en un revisionismo histórico o en una exhumación analítica del pasado, considero lo aquí expuesto como una estrategia que, desde las emociones, los deseos y la corporalidad, profundice, indague y complejice lo que implica que el tiempo deje su ineludible huella tras su paso. Dicho de otro modo, me propongo reflexionar sobre las otras formas de sentir la historia, de ser conscientes de esa huella del tiempo en nuestro tejido afectivo, en nuestra memoria corporal y en las cartografías de nuestro deseo. En específico, busco indagar sobre las maneras de historizar el caos desde lo afectivo y corporal dentro de la llamada disidencia sexual. Y me centro en lo que se ha dado a conocer como “disidencia sexual”, u otredad sexual, puesto que, en esta colectividad, como en muchas otras que no reflejan las valencias hegemónicas de determinada sociedad, la idea de utopía se ha estructurado en sincronía con el orden cronológico del tiempo. Las modalidades en que se piensa el tiempo son, asimismo, constructos sociales que reflejan la ideología dominante de determinada época. Por ejemplo, en el contexto del capitalismo tardío, el individuo habita el tiempo de manera acumulativa en base a la propiedad, la labor y la familia. El “hombre” que perdura deja tras su muerte una herencia, una descendencia; es decir, que su legado se construye en función de los ciclos de producción y reproducción (i.e. trabajar, casarse, formar una unidad familiar, consumir, etc.), mismos que no escapan de las intersecciones entre raza, género, clase social, etc.

Mere days after Irma, one of 2017’s most destructive hurricanes, hit Havana, Latin American youth... more Mere days after Irma, one of 2017’s most destructive hurricanes, hit Havana, Latin American youth converged upon Havana’s Casa de las Américas, seizing it in the spirit of Julio Cortázar’s short-story title, “Casa Tomada,” or seized house. Conference participant David Tenorio reports on this cultural encounter for young artists and intellectuals.

Cuban Studies, 2023

As a way of tracing the public encounters shaping queer space, something referred to in here as “... more As a way of tracing the public encounters shaping queer space, something referred to in here as “queer moving,” in this article, I move around media objects—Facebook posts, newspaper articles, Twitter posts, and film—digital stories, and personal interviews related to four distinctly public queer encounters: the 2019 Conga against Homophobia
and its counterpart, the Unauthorized Conga (marcha no autorizada); the
Cenesex-funded trans activist network TransCuba; and the emergence of private spaces in Havana’s nightlife for queer/trans intimacy. Through this transversal approach, I situate the concept of conga as a strategic affective engagement, a queer move, that mediates queer/trans political resistance and everyday survival in Cuba. In thinking with trans women’s everyday engagements and disengagements with the public, the notion
of trans engagements emerge from their stories not only as a trace of queer moving but also as an embodied practice to negotiate and contest a body politics of exposure. Situating the prefix trans as a relationality to trans world making allows me to trace a dynamic social choreography between survival and negotiation while unsettling static
conceptualizations of Cuban sexual dissidence.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, 2022

Borrowing from an anticapitalist feminist critique, this essay traces the affective encounters ta... more Borrowing from an anticapitalist feminist critique, this essay traces the affective encounters taking place during and after nighttime in Maya Goded’s documentary Plaza de la Soledad (Plaza of Solitude, 2016). While attending to how queer encounters shape the formation of underground spaces, I propose the concept of queer nightscapes to name a field of queer sensing that assembles zones of queer contact existing out of touch with the liberal logics of hetero- and homonormativity. By contrasting mainstream media campaigns that render the poor out of sight through the neoliberal networking of a white affect, I attend to how flows of touching enable queer worldmaking within lowly, poor, and dark spaces amidst the rapid neoliberalization, commodification, and erasure of poor queer ways of life in the Americas, and largely the Global South. This essay critically responds to the imperial logics of queer liberalism by offering sensorial, corporeal, and affective tools of analysis to approximate queer movements from below, as they encounter and fondle with a queer sensorium in the shadows.

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2022

“How many of us have to die for you to get involved?” reads a sign showcased in The TransLatin@ C... more “How many of us have to die for you to get involved?” reads a sign showcased in The TransLatin@ Coalition Intro video. This question points to the biopolitical and necropolitical textures shaping trans of color positions, including trans of color activism, representation, and value. At one level, trans of color lives come into being through their own social, material, and symbolic death, while, at another, mainstream queer/trans activist and academic agendas, including their mediatic representation, are predicated upon the immobilization of subaltern lives.[1] This paradoxical conversion of trans of color vitality into “necropolitical value” also fuels the homonormative and transnormative projects of U.S. white neo-imperialism, and by extension, of a sexually diverse Global North.[2] Positioned as sites to produce expert knowledge and technology, U.S. academic institutions are complicit with this necropolitical conversion. Attending to the global complexities of trans of color life, what does digital storytelling offer students as a media tool to understand the power imbalances defining the commodification of trans of color life and death in the U.S. feminist classroom. Considering TransLatin@ Coalition’s call to action, what does trans women activists’ digital stories teach us about coalitional politics? Specifically, how does the incorporation of trans women activists’ digital stories into the feminist classroom challenge trans hypervisibility, as well as trans commodification in the U.S. academy, particularly across Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies programs? What might digital storytelling activate, politically and pedagogically, as a trans media strategy and transfeminist praxis?

Cuadernos del CILHA, 2021

¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna... more ¿Quiénes pueden ocupar la noche? ¿qué tipo de sensaciones y afectos dan forma a la vida nocturna sexo-disente? ¿cómo se encara la fuerza de la violencia cuando baja el sol en un país como México? La visibiliad que han adquirido las prácticas culturales, afectivas y sensoriales de los colectivos sexo-disidentes de la Ciudad de México ha traido consigo un gran interés por parte de la industria acdémica en categorizar, nomenclaturar y producir una genealogía de la disidencia sexo-genérica. No obstante, la matriz productora de este conocimiento se encuentra ligada a la racionalidad occidental y al elitismo cultural de la institucionalidad académica. El saber de la noche, que gira en torno a la corporalidad, la materialidad y la afectividad, de las colectividades sexo-disidentes, también autollamadas transmarilenchas, se concibe como parte de una praxis más amplia en torno al cariño, al placer y al cuidado. La expansión g-local del neoliberalismo sobre la urbe mexicana se traduce en procesos complejos de gentrificazión, privatización y comodificación de los espacios públicos que sostienen la vida nocturna. Asimismo, tales gestos neoliberales se conjugan al triumvirato necropolítico del estado-iglesia-narcocorporación del siglo XXI. En este sentido, ¿cómo se afrenta esta quimera desde la nocturnidad? A pesar de la violencia necroliberal de los últimos años, los colectivos sexo-disidentes han insistido en una descorporalización de la violencia a través del movimiento y la exaltación de los valores de la feminidad, dinamitando así las fronteras andropatriarcales que separan el cuerpo y el afecto de la noche popular. Desde los estudios del performance y del afecto, este artículo se acera a las prácticas culturales de House of Apocalipstick, un colectivo sexo-género-disidente que, compuesto por mujeres y hombres trans, lesbianas, maricas, travestis, drag queens y kings, se congrega bajo la sombra del vogue. Particularmente, se despunta “la ética de la estética” en la noveleta Such is Life in Banana Republic (2014) de su autora Franka Polari, así como en el performance de vogue del corto documental House of Apocalipstick (2015). Más allá de un cuestionamiento de las formas tradicionales de escritura, literalidad y captura, la fusión entre cuerpo, música y movimiento juega con el afecto transtemporal/transregional del voguing, cuyos orígenes se remontan a la contracultura trans/queer del Hárlem de los años 80. House of Apocalipstick expone así una cinestecia femino-afectiva en torno al voguing que, en el cuerpo de la noche, emerge como torcedura que sortea las consecuencias de la violencia cotidiana, reivindicando otras maneras de sentir el placer nocturno desde una praxis feminista, que aquí denomino tecno-kitsch.

A Contracorriente, 2021

La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una prác... more La obra de los escritores José Lezama Lima y Reinaldo Arenas abordaron la escritura como una práctica erótica, es decir, una postura crítica y política a través de la que se establece que el conocimiento puede generarse a partir del eros. Así, los imaginarios que imantan la vasta obra literaria de dichos autores apuestan por una reconceptualización de la historia y una formulación de lo erótico como epistemología. El presente artículo aborda la idea de temporalidad del caos conjugando las prácticas carnales y afectivas de la disidencia sexual en tanto manera de leer, teorizar y sentir un ritmo alternativo frente a las narrativas convencionales de desarrollo arraigadas en el discurso teleológico del cambio posrevolucionario. Esta práctica de reinscribir la historia y repensar la utopía desde el erotismo está presente en la colección póstuma El reino de la imagende José Lezama Lima y ​​El mundo alucinantede Reinaldo Arenas, ambas obras que, al combinarse con la plástica del cubano Alexis Álvarez, plantean una aproximación de archivo desde la afectividad y la carnalidad. En resumen, ¿cómo se relacionan el archivo y la producción cultural para dar cuenta de la borradura histórica del placer característica de la disidencia sexual y de la epistemología de la carnalidad?

Revista Conjunto, 2021

Este trabajo forma parte de un repertorio más amplio que aborda el estudio de la cultura nocturna... more Este trabajo forma parte de un repertorio más amplio que aborda el estudio de la cultura nocturna como uno de los vectores en torno a los cuales se articula la jotería. Fusionando el trabajo de Carlos Monsiváis, Deborah Vargas, José Joaquín Blanco, Nancy Cárdenas, Cecilia Sotres, Antonio Marquet y otras artistas, activistas e intelectuales, arguyo que la noche popular es una ecología política.

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2019

In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Lat... more In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsiváis, and Severo Sarduy. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. By alluding to popular songs, and literature, I associate drag performance with a repertoire of queer cultural practices that seek to foster a sense of belonging under the economies of queer nightlife. Broken records complicate the linearity of time condensed in a nostalgic nationalism, intermixing temporality, experience, and queer cultural production in the era of neoliberalism, as the practices of consumption turn sexual dissidence into a cultural capital with which queer collectives negotiate everyday life. This sense of brokenness of records metaphorically illustrates historical silences, erasures, violent acts, and misrepresentations sexual dissident cultures endure for social world-making. In this sense, drag performance is a queer cultural form that alters practices of consumption by generating belonging mediated by a sonic affectivity within global queer imaginaries, satirizing a national nostalgia for the masculinization of heroic figures, while ruffling conceptualizations of Mexican popular culture.

Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2017

This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research projec... more This article outlines the digital storytelling methods used for a community based research project focused on issues of sexuality among California farmworkers: Sexualidades Campesinas. We note how our process of collaboration in the creation and production of digital stories was shaped by the context and our envisioned storytellers. We then offer a critical analysis of our own unique experience with digital storytelling in this project, focusing on a handful of concepts key to understanding the nature of our collaborative production process: community, affect and collaboration, storytelling, performance, and mediation, with an eye to the problem of ethics.

Diaphanes, 2023

NO Rhetoric(s) examines a subject intensely debated during the last three decades but rarely a to... more NO Rhetoric(s) examines a subject intensely debated during the last three decades but rarely a topic of its own: art as an agent of resistance, whether as a rhetorical stance or critical strategy. In the face of today’s discourse on revolt and insurrection, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of “negation” still has an emancipatory potential. NO Rhetoric(s) contributes a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and politics. Showcasing a diverse array of voices, this volume presents contributions on topics as varied as sexual dissidence, ecology, and geopolitics in the digital age. Through this interdisciplinary show of force, the collected authors, artists, and scholars shed light on how art approaches the most urgent issues facing today’s society.

There is talk of an unprecedented culture of protest emerging on a global scale, of new forms of ... more There is talk of an unprecedented culture of protest emerging on a global scale, of new forms of disobedience and indignation. This new culture of protest frequently resorts to strategies coming from the field of art (performance, happenings, etc.), which has resulted in a growing interest of political theory in contemporary artistic strategies. At the same time, a surprising re-politicization
of debates in art discourses can be observed, especially as more and more explicitly political functions are assigned to current artistic practice. Beyond a politicization of art and an aesthetization of politics, this event seeks to focus attention and problematize a neuralgic concept highly discussed and addressed in recent decades, but which has rarely become the subject of its own resistance.