Dissatisfactions: Queer Latinidad and the Politics of Style(Minoritarian Aesthetics)

How the queer Chicano punks of post-1960s Los Angeles developed a unique politics of style In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Javier Guzmán explores the queer punk and Chicano/Latino avant-garde art scenes in post-1968 Los Angeles from the rise of Ronald Reagan to the height of the AIDS epidemic. He demonstrates how style–as a cultural form and sensibility–becomes essential to Latino politics at the moment the utopian impulses of the 1960s begin to fade. Guzmán uncovers how queer Latinos in Los Angeles used performance, underground media, experimental art, and literature to interrogate the limits of Chicano nationalism and the burgeoning politics of gay liberation. These subcultural forms give rise to a theory of what he calls "stylized discontent," expressed as nausea, lo-fi, ambivalence, and malaise. Each chapter of the book is framed by a specific stylized discontent, demonstrating how they were repurposed by queer punk Latinos as responses to the AIDS crisis and the rise of neoliberalisms. Dissatisfactions highlights the middle ranges of political agency strategically utilized by queer racialized historical actors to underscore how negative feelings become instrumental to social change. Revealing new forms of activism and art that continue to structure the way we understand systemic violence and survival, Dissatisfactions insists on the significance of both the politics of style and the different styles politics may take.

About the Author :
Joshua Javier Guzmán is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at University of California, Los Angeles.

Review :
"Dissatisfactions not only engages an archive: it creates one in a transformative way. While others have written about Asco, Alice Bag, Teresa Covarrubias, Gil Cuadro, Ray Navarro and Gregg Araki, very few contextualize the historical and political connections between these works as performative critiques and accounts of activist disappointment, failure, and dissatisfaction. Indeed, the book furnishes a much-needed historical through-line from the longue durée of a Chicanx and Latinx politics forged through rebellion and aesthetic experimentation—into Reagan's 80s and the absorption of the mainstream 'Latino American.' The deftness of this work hinges upon how intricately it captures ambivalent and negative feelings over more uplifting political sentiments, thus forging new affective frameworks for the study of brown and Latinx politics, art, and culture." (Karen Tongson, USC) "Punk, stylish, troubling, Dissatisfactions is the kind of criticism that resists pieties in search of real and uneasy insight. Guzmán is whipsmart, theorizing for us a way out of calcified identitarianism, through a careful focus on negation, unbelonging, and an aesthetics of ambivalence. Some of the most exhilarating writing I've read on the art, literature, and performance of queer Latinidad. This book blew my mind." (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals)