Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic

This essay considers lo sucio—a Latino vernacular for dirty, nasty, and filthy—as a Latino queer analytic. I situate lo sucio in relation to contemporary neoliberal projects that disappear the most vulnerable and disenfranchised by cleaning up spaces and populations deemed dirty and wasteful. Moreover, my initial ruminations of lo sucio, as a queer analytic, is invested in contributing to conversations that explore Latina queer genders and sexualities as sensate. Accordingly, lo sucio smells, acts, and tastes like the collateral genders of a world invested in the fiscal benefits of normative sexual intimacies. In this essay, lo sucio is in conversation with three racialized discourses of difference: first, lewd, obscene, offensive hypersexual undisciplined bodies; second, darkened, suspect citizens perpetually untrustworthy, impure, and disloyal to the state; and third, diseased “cultures of poverty” subjects overdetermined to fail to arrive to normative gender and sexuality.