research

Revolting Indolence: Slacking Off, Lounging, and Daydreaming in Queer and Trans Latinx Culture examines how styles of queer and trans Latinx indolence challenge the cisheteronormative white supremacist capitalist logics organizing the U.S. nation-state. Through a series of case studies analyzing literature, photography, television, film, and installation art, the queer and trans Latinx cultural producers profiled in Revolting Indolence vitalize indolence as a radically resourceful refutation of the norms of aspirational citizenship tied to cisheteronormative patriarchy, bourgeois respectability, assimilationist drives, and minoritarian uplift. The indolent styles I track operate in a two-pronged manner: 1) flagrant refusals of work and capitalist productivism by nonwhite, queer and trans subjects that critique existing capitalist work paradigms; 2) the inventing of alternative aesthetic strategies, sensoriums, and world-making practices that imagine elsewhere from anti-queer/trans violence and racial capitalism. Revolting Indolence importantly expands the parameters of Latinx studies and literature, queer and trans studies, visual studies, film and television studies, labor studies, and negative affect theory through reclaiming indolence as a category, and revaluating how indolence generates liberatory practices that challenge oppressive, exploitative regimes of thought and valuation tied to capitalist work ethics, productivism, and respectability politics.

An article deriving from this research is published in the peer-reviewed journal, Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Fantasies of Valentina: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Performance of Queer/Trans of Color Spectacular Obfuscation,” and in the peer-reviewed journal, Camera Obscura, "Glimpsing Angie Xtravaganza: The Trans Latinx Imaginary of Paris Is Burning.” This research has been generously supported by a 2023 Career Enhancement 12-month Fellow for Junior Faculty from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, a Mellon Foundation program.