About the Book
This book articulates Jotería Communication Studies as a subdiscipline and as a praxis for resisting multiple forms of oppression by focusing on how everyday performances of identity and culture challenge master narratives of power and control. Although this book is for scholars, artists, and practitioners from communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, cultural studies, or even, Latinx and Chicanx studies in education, sociology, history, literature, media, arts, and humanities, this book speaks to and with those nonheteronormative mestizas/os who perform their sexuality and gender in queer practices and communicative forms--Jotería. As a methodological intervention into the study of marginalized and subaltern communities, this book provides research on Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (GBTQ) Chicano and Latino communities from specific geographic regions of the U.S. Southwest. Utilizing multiple methods, this book provides a cultural map or political snapshot of a particular time and place from a particular point of view or location and generates knowledge that highlights reflexivity, cultural/queer nuances, and decolonial acts of resistance. Specifically, this book locates "theories in the flesh" in the borderlands narratives of Jotería, such as cuentos, pláticas, chismé, testimonio, mitos, and consejos. These theories of power and resistance create knowledge about how Jotería make sense of their own difference, how people interpret their assumed or perceived difference, and ultimately, how difference is managed as an emancipatory tool toward the goal of queer of color world making.
About the Author :
Robert Gutierrez-Perez is an assistant professor of communication and culture at the University of Nevada, Reno in the Department of Communication Studies. He is an author, editor, poet, and performance artist.
Review :
"A stunning trans-intra-disciplinary work, Gutierrez-Perez centers joto survival and thriving. The result is Jotería Communication Studies--a visceral, embodied, critical, and reflexive praxis derived of the myths, histories, and politics of Aztlán that chafe against and refuse academic hegemony. In short, Jotería Communication Studies enfleshes and materializes the performativity of everyday joto life, survival, and thriving." --Lore/tta LeMaster, Assistant Professor, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University
"Robert Gutierrez-Perez provides a generous path for theorizing and living with celebratory resistant praxis, honoring and reaching into historic, cultural, and intellectual ancestral epistemological lineages. Couched in vulnerable and viscerally authentic personal narrative and poetry, and rooted in solid Chicanx and Anzaldúan thought, Jotería Communication Studies debuts a serious methodology for the intersectional intellectual determined to offer thought, pedagogy, and research that does not censor the body or their rich contributions to understanding the complicated and volatile processes of communication. Practice of the interconnected conocimientos invites us to a living locus of liberating disruption and hope, if we dare to embrace epistemology as an enfleshed, interconnected, and brilliantly queer decolonialist path for understanding and living." --Sarah Amira de la Garza, Associate Professor, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University
"At the heart of this necessary book, readers will find a guide to the communicative strategies Jotería, queers, and other people of color use to navigate liminal spaces and difficult conversations in order to survive and thrive. Using a unique, powerful, and illuminating lens, Robert Gutierrez-Perez keenly shows how Jotería borderland narratives function as rebellious forms of resistance and radical acts of love to facilitate queer people of color world-making. This is an essential book for anyone interested in learning about the communicative strategies that marginalized people use for survival. It breaks silences, makes the invisible seen, and honors those who are often forgotten. Ultimately, this book shows how we embody our stories, and why both our bodies and stories matter." --Daniel Enrique Pérez, Author of Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture and Editor of Latina/o Heritage on Stage: Dramatizing Heroes and Legends
"In Jotería Communication Studies, Robert Gutierrez-Perez invites us into a personal, political, and ambitious new story of communications studies for everyday life. Gutierrez-Perez literally writes and works joteria as theory and method for those whose queer marginalization can never be known in totality, giving credence to the lived-experience and felt-experience as rich, epistemological treasure. This poetic and pointed work provides a window into the future of communication studies and theories of communication--covering much-needed ground through storytelling, theory-making, and speaking unapologetic truths." --Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Director, Frederick Douglass Institute of African & African-American Studies
"Jotería Communication Studies: Narrating Theories of Resistance represents the sophistication of a critical, performative approach to Intercultural Communication that examines complex and contradictory intersections among culture, power, and communication. The way Gutierrez-Perez methodologically centers women of color feminism, queer of color criticism, and decoloniality to study the historically saturated and culturally specific nuances of GBTQ Chicanos and Latinos is very noteworthy. Most important, Gutierrez-Perez unapologetically centers his body as a site of knowing to showcase the performative, creative, and radical aspects of academic knowledge productions that disrupts the power and privilege of (social) science. And this book is fun, cutting-edge, and intellectual just like who Gutierrez-Perez is." --Shinsuke Eguchi, Associate Professor, Department of Communication & Journalism, University of New Mexico
