Dissatisfactions: Queer Latinidad and the Politics of Style [Hardcover]

How the queer Chicano punks of post-1960s Los Angeles developed a unique politics of style

In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Javier Guzm?n 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 styleas a cultural form and sensibilitybecomes essential to Latino politics at the moment the utopian impulses of the 1960s begin to fade.

Guzm?n 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.

Dissatisfactionshighlights 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,Dissatisfactionsinsists on the significance of both the politics of style and the different styles politics may take.

Joshua Javier Guzm?nis Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Dissatisfactionsnot only engages an archive: itcreatesone 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 dissal£h