Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Dissident Acts)

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects--shame, disgust, and unbelonging--to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility Other desires : Ana Mendieta's abject imaginings -- Phantom assholes : Asco's affective vortex -- Of Betties decorous and abject : Ugly Betty's America la fea and Nao Bustamante's America la bella -- Arriving at apostasy : performative testimonies of ambivalent belonging Leticia Alvarado explores how Latino artists and cultural producers have developed and deployed an irreverent aesthetics of abjection to resist assimilation and disrupt respectability politics.