#2014asa

Calls for pleasure in queer theory are energizing, but they can often feel like hounding injunctions: feel hope, make worlds, have sex.  We know that pleasure is not ever-present, waiting for us to know it and activate it.  In fact, much of the doing of pleasure, as our session title invokes, is about reaching endlessly for it and sometimes only approximating it.  With my comments today I want to reify the proximal— the nearby, the outside, the almost, the barely there, and the good enough.

Martin Wong, “Rapture” (1988). Acrylic on canvas. Printed in Scholder, Sweet Oblivion, 15.

In my book on racial proximity in Latino cultural production, I read "Rapture," a painting by Martin Wong, as an allegory for his position in relation to the Lower East Side and to the Nuyorican arts movement. "Rapture" is a painting of a brick wall stretched in a triptych frame comprised of three baroque, floral, highly gilt overlapping ovals.  These carefully rendered, photorealist bricks are ubiquitous in Wong’s urban landscapes, but they usually constitute a part of a fully represented building, or a wall against which graffiti or a figure appears. Here the bricks are the whole work, unless you give critical attention to the frame, whose ornate details in contrast to the dusty bricks plead for attention. 

To experience rapture is to be seized.  It signals flight from mortal coil.  But first and foremost rapture is a sensual experience of seeing, looking up when the sky finally parts one day and bodies float to heaven, triggering rapture’s attendant affects: ecstasy, bliss, euphoria, pleasure.  Wong’s own rapture with the Lower East Side and with Puerto Rican men defines this period of his work, much of which features male figures set against graffiti-covered buildings, on crowded fire escapes, and on moonlit rooftops.  The gilt frame, its gay curls and flourishes in contrast to the gritty geometry of the bricks, brings attention to Wong’s artistic vantage point on the periphery of Nuyorican life as its queer lover. I do not mean to write Wong out of the material history of Nuyorican life by placing him at the periphery, something Latino cultural history has already achieved. More nearly, I want to theorize Wong’s position on the edge of Nuyorico as an aesthetic technology guided by voyeuristic pleasure.  The frame brings attention not only to its contents, but to the way in which we see.  We view the lowbrow through the high, the realist through the fanciful, the geometric through the baroque, the secular through the sacred.  What I call Wong’s queer advances, his erotic proximity to a Nuyorico defined by its hetero-masculinist veneer, is captured here in the formal proximity of typically divergent aesthetic modes. 

Mark Aguhar, “EVEN IF UR STR8 I STILL WANT 2 FUCK U 2” (2010).  Watercolor and ink on paper. 

Anatomists use the term “proximal” to identify those parts of our extremities that are situated nearest to the center of the body or the point of attachment.  I want to square the queer brown body in pleasure, to echo Jennifer Nash’s work, at the center of a field of ambivalent attachments.  Rather than the advent of pleasure itself, I want to examine the joint that keeps desired bodies proximal to the brown subject, for the brown subject’s pleasure.  Much of Mark Aguhar’s work, for example, deals with the treacheries of white desirability.  Much of her writing, painting, and video performances confess, deconstruct, avow and disavow her attraction to white men in the face of their routine abjection of her fat, gender-shifting, Filipina body.  Rather than jumping and resting on anti-racist salvos, Aguhar explores the dimensions of our proximity to whiteness.  The regime of white desirability is learned, but that desire is no less pleasing for being learned; it's renounceable, but no less over-determining for being renounced.

“EVEN IF UR STR8 I STILL WANT 2 FUCK U 2” is an ink and watercolor grid of predominantly white, male-presenting figures arranged in a kind of hound’s-tooth on top of Aguhar’s own recumbent body.  Here the desirable “straight” bodies become proximal extensions of Aguhar’s queer, desiring body, figured larger and gazing upward at a volley of white briefs.  The painting closes the gap between Aguhar and the unreachable.  What happens to these bodies in their proximity to Aguhar’s?  What would it mean to understand the unreachable, idealized other not as a lack but as a prosthetic extension of the desiring brown subject?  Rather than appealing for inclusion, Aguhar’s aesthetics of racial proximity shore up the reciprocal work of desire.  By bringing the “straight” body closer to her own, Aguhar internalizes the white object that wishes for distance; simultaneously, by pulling apart the knots of white desirability and laying them bare, she externalizes the dear, white object that wishes to stay secretly lodged in the brown psyche.  Aguhar doesn’t simply upturn the white gaze, but takes possession of it, like a tractor beam, fixing the white body in a brown matrix of pleasure.  

on the plane, on the way to the american studies association conference, posting posts on subjects i wasn't going to post on and taking selfies, getting the kind of feeling thrills some of us are talking about in our panel on "#feelingthrills in the digital undercommons: tumblr's intimate publics." though surely not the only feeling thrills we'll be talking about.  

last night i went over to barbara's and she tried to convince me that i don't have to stop honeymooning, and i tried to convince her that i need to write a new and different dissertation. this is totally my thing: write a paper, scrap the whole thing the night before it's due, start a new one. there's obviously something i like about (though i hate) this method. we ate dinner, she let me throw unformed ideas at her for an hour, threw some relevant ideas back at me, then sat down, looked at my original proposal and, a page or two in, said "this is still totally compelling" and "i still think you should do this." getting approval--and being told what to do--were feeling thrills, too. 

COMING OUT BLACK & QUEER WITH KID FURY & CRISSLE WEST OF THE READ 

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014

1:00PM TO 2:30PM @ HUB 355

Join media personalities from the The Read Kid Fury and Crissle West in conversation with professors Alisha Gaines, Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University and Dennis Tyler, Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University, for a discussion about what it means to “come out” black and queer.

Often, black communities have been considered to be the most homophobic and most in the way of the rights of the LGBTQ community. For example, with the passing of Prop 8 in California, 2008, The Advocate claimed unabashedly that “gay is the new black,” and that it wasblack people that upheld the proposition. Black people were blamed for the obstruction of justice for queer folks, in other words. In this roundtable discussion, participants will trouble such an easy distinction between black on the one hand and queer on the other. How does one exist as both black and queer, and how do we negotiate such varied identities?

Since first debuting in January 2013, The Read skyrocketed in popularity with a listenership boasting nearly 115,000 weekly subscribers. Now both a podcast and a touring live show, The Read is most often described as “brash” and “unapologetic,” a tone effortlessly cultivated through the unscripted chemistry between Crissle and Kid Fury. We invite them to the conversation with scholar-activists Alisha Gaines and Dennis Tyler to discuss the multiple negotiations black and queer require.

The panel will be moderated by Ashon Crawley, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, UCR. Presented by Ethnic Studies, Queer Lab, & the LGBT Resource Center.

18th St Art Center in Santa Monica is a collection of art galleries, artist studios, plus Highways (a VERY important space for experimental theater, dance and performance), and the Santa Monica Museum of Art—a small, dynamic museum with its own pathfinding history. If you skip over to the west side this weekend, this opening is worth checking out! These kinds of projects, which consider Latin American migratory flows, are very much on the Angelino mind—always, but now for particular reasons: The Getty Center is sponsoring the development of a massive 2017 festival, "Latin America/Los Angeles" (LA/LA)—this is the subject of a Sunday afternoon SRC panel at MOCA. And yes, the Getty folks did name the festival "lala." (!)