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Reviewed by:
  • Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
  • Patricia Ybarra (bio)
Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 272 pages. $75.00 cloth; $32.50 paper.

Ramón H. Rivera-Servera’s Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics is a deftly written and rigorously theorized ethnography of queer Latina/o performance practices from 1996 to 2011. Although not a work of dance scholarship per se, the book pays particular attention to the kinesthetic embodiments of affective belonging. Rivera-Servera incisively reveals how queer artists and everyday actors performatively negotiate their circumstances. Each of Rivera-Servera’s case studies also pays particular attention to the urban politics and globally articulated economic conditions with which his subjects contend, providing a much-needed contribution to the fields of theater and performance studies, Latina/o studies, and queer studies.

Chapter One provides a comprehensive theoretical, historical, and methodological framing for the volume’s rich ethnography of queer Latina/o performance practices. Rivera-Servera surveys the 1990s and 2000s as a time in which queer Latina/os were living under three simultaneous pressures: the intensification of the militarization of the border/immigration hysteria; the emergence of pink capital as a force of the homogenization, gentrification, and commercialization of queer identity; and the widespread economic effects of neoliberalization on larger and mid-sized cities. Rather than seeing these pressures as separate, Rivera-Servera rightly considers how their intersectionality, while often triply oppressive, did not stop artists and everyday actors from enacting queer latinidad and performing community in public spaces.

Chapters Two and Three address the political and social struggles and triumphs of queer-identified and queer-friendly Latina/o arts spaces and artists. Chapter Two chronicles the queer Nuyorican choreographer Arthur Aviles’s dance works staged in the Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. Rivera-Servera’s exploration of Aviles’s work weaves together an alternate cartography [End Page 250] of Hunts Point, an in-depth analysis of the negotiations Aviles and his compatriots made to create an arts center in the Bronx, and an analysis of Aviles’s dance works. Rivera-Servera’s consideration, unlike previous analyses of Aviles’s work, concentrates on his embodied practice and multiple receptions of the work. Taking Aviles’s use of nudity in Arturella (1996) as a point of departure, Rivera-Servera talks about the audiences’ reactions to the piece, offering a set of alternative readings of this moment, ranging from uncomfortable tittering to knowing laughter. Ultimately, Rivera-Servera makes an argument for the politics behind these performances of the Giuliani era (1994-2001), which though not always overt critiques of neoliberal homophobic regimes, nonetheless act politically by creating a sense of home for queer Latina/os in the Bronx. Framing Aviles’s artistic virtuosity within his desires to create a home in Latina/o space, this chapter argues successfully for Aviles’s performances as constituting a queer Latina/o counterpublic.

Chapter Three focuses on the trials that the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center (San Antonio, Texas) endured and staged in response to homophobic and reactionary defunding of the Center in the late 1990s. Newly and freshly theorizing hope as an embodied form of advocacy, Rivera-Servera considers how the Center’s responses to its detractors created a way for queer and Latina activists and artists to work in coalition through performance. First, Rivera-Servera analyzes the rhetorical strategies of those who wished to defund the Center as performative utterances. Second, he thinks through how a mock trial staged by Esperanza members allowed the performers and audience members to rehearse their advocacy for the Center and performatively master the vicissitudes of legal discourse in the public sphere. The acto performed is considered in a similarly dynamic way; rather than simply interpreting the piece as a representation of protest, Rivera-Servera instead argues for how the acto prepared its audiences for the battle ahead in a spirit similar to that of their Teatro Campesino predecessors. Rivera-Servera’s careful performance analyses are placed within the context of the neoliberalization of San Antonio, whose champions sanitized and de-historicized the city’s legacy to garner...

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