RESEARCH
AREAS OF FOCUS
My work brings trans studies and Chicanx/Latinx studies into conversation through the everyday aesthetics of self-fashioning — from the borderlands to the runway.
Photo by: @darklistedphotography
_____________________
A
TRANS STUDIES
Trans of color critique,
embodiment,
figuration, and loss.
______________________
B
CHICANX / LATINX
Borderlands, masculinities, femininities,
and brownness.
CURRENT PROJECTS
/ Smile Now, Cry Later: An Affective Grammar of Chicano Masculinity — monograph in preparation
Smile Now, Cry Later: An Affective Grammar of Chicano Masculinity makes an argument I have spent years learning how to hear. Chicano masculinity is not a cultural deficit or a repertoire of traits to be catalogued and corrected. It is a grammar, a system of rules for combining feeling into meaning, spoken fluently by men who did not know they were speaking it. I read four affects: ardor, the burn that is also political zeal; orgullo, the dignity that is also endurance; gusto, the appetite that is also a theory of style; and amor, the love that holds what the other three have been through. I follow them across an archive of fashion, dance, political performance, and photography. I read from a trans-analytic, the reading practice of a trans Chicano who was never simply handed this grammar and can therefore taste what the field has processed as power but rarely heard as feeling.