Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics by Ramón Rivera-Servera (review)

Ethnographic representation has been soundly criticized for making conditions of colonialism and imperialism more possible, and for recreating Others as static and objectified bodies, even as ethnographers attempt to work against this very problem. Historically, representations by Western ethnographers have authoritatively created people of color, women, queers, and the colonized as decidedly less human, or at the very least, less historically situated than themselves. Edward Said, in a 1989 essay, critiques ethnographers for precisely this point, as they attempt to represent cultures previously unfamiliar to them (205–25). He writes that one of the strategies that Western ethnographers have employed was to “focus more or less exclusively on practice, as if practice were a domain of actuality unencumbered by agents, interests, and contentions, political as well as philosophical” (Said 1989, 211). For Said, this focus on practice has merely obscured relationships of power and politics. Said’s critique of the field of anthropology has both haunted and propelled the way I engage with the ethnography of moving bodies, most recently as I read Ramón Rivera-Servera’s Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance Sexuality, Politics.

This book is relevant to dance and performance studies, Latina/o studies, and LGBT studies as it intertwines themes crucial to each discipline through an analysis of queer latinidad’s “theories in practice.” Throughout the book, Rivera-Servera dwells deeply in practice, not to obscure relationships of power and politics, but to highlight them as he historically situates queer Latinos in global cityscapes. Rivera-Servera weaves together the micropractices of queer latinidad with the macropolitics that target queer Latinos in the urban spaces of Chicago, New York City, San Antonio, Austin, and Phoenix. He conceives of queer latinidad as a counterpublic, an action, “a model of social engagement” not necessarily defined through identity, but “more open to improvisational, at times accidental, routes to the formation of community and home” (69). Notably, Rivera-Servera situates his lens of practice in both dance studies and Latina/o studies, fields that he purposefully tangles throughout the book, citing both Susan Foster’s conceptualization of choreographies of protest and Cherríe Moraga’s understanding of “theories in the flesh” (18) as he “proposes a model that privileges the body and its actions and conduits of knowledge about the world. It is in the acts of performance that I situate both theory and the potential interventions queer latinidad can make in the public sphere at large” (18). For Rivera-Servera, practice is active, enmeshed in the interactions of everyday life, convivencia diaria, he writes, in reference to its usage by anthropologists Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta (38–9).

Rivera-Servera’s theorization of convivencia diaria is most profound in his depiction of homophobia along his walk on the way to a queer nightclub in Brooklyn in 1999. The young Latinos outside the neighborhood bodega hail Rivera-Servera as queer, taunting his “effeminate straddle,” while at the same time recognizing his privilege as a blanquito, a light-skinned Puerto Rican man from the neighborhood. “My neighbors often perform these piropos or spoken flirtations with tilts of the head to the side, backs slanted with concave chests, forward thrusts of the hips, and slow but firm rocking of the torso with arm extensions to the side” (138). They “playfully flirt” with Rivera-Servera, who remains “relatively comfortable” (138) with these neighbors. As he writes them into the ethnography, he neither flattens nor demonizes but rather humanizes them as they push Rivera-Servera away and pull him toward them in their mockery. Farther into his walk, Rivera-Servera contrasts these young men with others who accuse him of being a “faggot” or a “gringo,” not at all playfully or flirtatiously. Knowing when to engage with his Latino neighbors and knowing when to quickly pass the less familiar bodies that hurl insults require what Rivera-Servera calls a “dancerly strategy that pays attention to...