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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.
"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."
"For those of us who teach cultural production by or about minoritarian subjects, one line of questioning feels inevitable with each new batch of students: Is this representation of identity good or bad? Joshua Javier Guzmán productively needles this provocation by revealing (and reveling in) 'the internal contradictions' of identity politics and representation."
"Joshua Guzmán’s Dissatisfactions will positively shape the field of Latinx literary studies for the foreseeable future. Through this scalar modulation, Guzmán provides sharp analyses that do not dissolve or smooth out differences between styles, performances, and texts; instead, Dissatisfactions theorizes difference by offering connection and disconnection as varied forms of relationality that inform style, attitude, and politics."
"The relevance of Dissatisfactions is an unanticipated gift. As a whole, Dissatisfactions will find its most ardent readers among those who are familiar with performance studies, queer studies, and Latino studies. Its lessons from the past inspire possibilities for the future, even if such potentiality is powered in part by continued disappointment."