A Light for a Light: Minoritarian Aesthetics and the Politics of Grief-Work

How does loss tear a hole in the world and produce a collective remaking of a new social order in which grief-work is not contained singularly but is a process done in feminist, queer, and Black and Brown ensemble? Interested in how we deliberately incorporate loss into collective grief-work, this article pulls from feminist and queer theorists of color who move across social and psychical constructions of sorrow. Highlighting contemporary art by minoritarian artists such as Eva Margarita Reyes and Pedro Lopez, who embrace loss, the author argues that grief-work is a communal labor we undergo together in acts of intimate meditation, suffering, spillage, and transformation. Happening in feminist and queer ensemble, grief-work is a deliberate decision to assemble in nonlinear feelings and attachments; it is an intention to work together to defend not only the dead but also the living, tending to immaterial energies that shift the fecund terrain of both life and death.