Dissatisfactions

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

"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)