Full Description
How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive.
Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in "productivist" ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices-revolts that in turn are treated as revolting.
Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Liberating Indolence
1. Glimpsing Angie Xtravaganza: The Trans Latinx Imaginary of Paris Is Burning
2. Lounge Lizard Aesthetics: Los Angeles Nightlife Visualities
3. The Poetics of Latin Night: The Literatures of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting
4. Slacking Off on the Mainstage: RuPaul's Drag Race and the Performance of Spectacular Obfuscation
5. The Textures of Our Daydreaming: Justin Torres's We the Animals and the Art of Sarah Zapata
Coda: Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
