P
lease join the CSSC-sponsored Queer of Color Working Group for a conversation with Professor Juana María Rodríguez and Bay Area performance and video artist Xandra Ibarra/La Chica Boom on Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, Professor Rodríguez’s new book (NYU Press, July 2014). Discussion will focus on Chapter 4, “Latina Sexual Fantasies, the Remix,” which features Ibarra’s work. For a pdf of the chapter and to join the Queer of Color Working Group mailing list, email Brandon Callender, <brandon.callender@berkeley.edu> or Giancarlo Cornejo, <cornejo@berkeley.edu>. This event is free and open to the public.
Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research interests inclue sexuality studies, queer activism in a transnational American context, critical race theory, technology and media arts, and Latin@ and Caribbean studies. She is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). Her new book, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press, 2014), is described below. She is currently working on a third book project that considers the intersection of age, sexuality, race and visual culture.
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana María Rodríguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm. For more on the book, click here.
photo by Julio Pantoja
Xandra Ibarra/La Chica Boom is an Oakland-based performance and video artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. La Chica Boom is a performance art project that uses hyper-raciality/sexuality/gender as an expericne based mode of inquiry into my relationship coloniality, compulsory whiteness and Mexicanidad. Ibarra uses video, objects, photography and sex acts to evoke comedy and melancholic racial and sexual expectation. Her aim is to amplify gendered and racialized iconography and make such problematic constructions via spectacle more transparent to the spectator‚—what she calls spictacles—spectacles of degeneracy and power that are both against and engaged in the colonial gaze.
