Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjls20 Journal of Lesbian Studies ISSN: 1089-4160 (Print) 1540-3548 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls20 Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community Aimee Carrillo Rowe & Francesca T. Royster To cite this article: Aimee Carrillo Rowe & Francesca T. Royster (2017) Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 21:3, 243-253, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 Published online: 12 Sep 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 2496 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjls20 https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls20 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=wjls20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=wjls20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-09-12 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-09-12 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976#tabModule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976#tabModule INTRODUCTION Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community Aimee Carrillo Rowea and Francesca T. Roysterb aCommunication Studies, California State University, Northridge, CA; bDepartment of English, DePaul University, Chicago, IL ABSTRACT This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of color make to the field of affect studies are often overlooked. Our introduction and this special issue more broadly examine how this solipsism shapes projects invested in critical knowledge production, as well as the stakes of centering a queer woman of color genealogy. For instance, we argue for the importance of retaining U.S. third-world feminist concepts—like interpellation, oppositional consciousness, and the generative force of negative affects—even as they fall out of favor within affect studies. Centering theory that emerges from the vexed spaces of queer women of color lived experiences generates a vital interdisciplinary conversation that contributes to the ongoing political task of mobilizing affect for social action as a critical praxis. In the articles that follow we see this critical praxis at work in the form of community organizing, music, poetry, and performance art. KEYWORDS Affect theory; queer theory; women of color feminism; resistance; embodiment; community Within the context of U.S. settler colonial culture, queer women of color bear the bur- den of affect, saturated by the colonial gaze with emotional excess: angry, hyper-sexual, depressed, dysfunctional. If, as Sara Ahmed has so persuasively argued, “happiness involves a way of being aligned with others,”1 queers and women of color are neoliber- alism’s party poopers—what she describes as “feminist killjoy,” “unhappy queer,” and “melancholic migrant.” Indeed, the fate of Sandra Bland, pulled over July 10, 2015 for failing to signal a lane change, and found hanging in a Texas jail cell, an alleged “sui- cide,” gives us pause in thinking about the ways that the image of women of color as excessively emotional has been conveniently used by state forces as a mask for its own operations of power. Sheriffs’ reports promptly picked up and amplified by the national CONTACT Aimee Carrillo Rowe aimee.carrillo@csun.edu 1811 Nordhoff St., Manzanita Hall, Room 220, Northridge, CA 91330-8257, USA. © 2017 Taylor & Francis JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES 2017, VOL. 21, NO. 3, 243–253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156976 media, emphasized Bland’s past struggles with depression, helping to frame her unex- plained death in the custody of the police as a suicide. This “evidence” of Bland’s exces- sive affect positions her as always-already guilty—as misaligned with the law’s juridical morality. “Because the law is presumed to be both ethical and irreproachable,” writes Lisa Marie Cacho, “the act of law-breaking reflects poorly on a person’s moral charac- ter. If following the law (legitimate or not) determines whether a person is moral or immoral, it is all but impossible for people assigned to certain status categories to repre- sent themselves as moral and deserving.”2 So Bland was guilty and thus killable prior to her arrest as the evidence of her immorality was marked on her body and assigned to her emotional status. This might be why coroner’s reports corroborated the claim that Bland was “depressed,” while the family disputed this claim. The answers to Bland’s death remain inconclusive, at this printing. But as many acti- vists of color have pointed out, this depiction of her psychic as well as physical death deflects our attention away from unanswered questions about her treatment (as well as the justice of her arrest in the first place), and also casts a pall on her political activism and outrage at the very police brutality to which she was subjected. Moreover, it con- firms the ongoing idea of the Black body as already dead, socially, psychically, and phys- ically/materially. In this way, Bland’s life and death are inherently queer, and deeply tied to her identity as a Black woman. As Jeffrey McCune has written in his essay on Fergus- son, “to be a ‘death-bound subject’ is to be a queer subject, always in danger of being destroyed. Psychically. Spiritually. Representationally.”3 At the same time, naming Sandra Bland’s death as an example of police violence has helped refocus movements against police brutality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, and to make more visible the bodies of Black women, as well as other women of color, at the hands of police. In many ways, the emotional responses of outrage, sadness and grief unleashed by this case, as well as others, might be seen as example of the productive use of feeling as a form of activism and reflection central to this special issue of JLS. For a poignant example of this pro- ductive use of feeling, see Janelle Monae and Wondaland’s powerful performance of the song “Hell you Talmbout” (https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell- you-talmbout), first performed at a Philadelphia Black Lives Matter rally, then on the Today Show, naming and honoring the loss of Black lives, including Bland, Eric Garner, Treyvon Martin, Emmet Till, and others. “Say his name, Shawn Bell, won’t you say his name … Ayana Jones, say her name, won’t you say her name!” Men’s and women’s voices chant commands, their voices laden with a sense of urgency, as if their own lives were on the line. The chants repeat and resound to the beats of the drum marching giving the feeling that guerrilla warriors are taking over the street. Militant beats are overlaid with gospel voices raising the souls of the fallen to the heavens, resounding sacred sounds, chants, and rituals of a long history of African American survival and reverberating the chants with a sense of possibility—like god herself might just raise up the fallen innocent and touch survi- vors with the healing vibration of their own souls. As we listen, we are transformed by its righteousness, its outrage and, yes, its room still for creativity and even joy. 244 A. C. ROWE AND F. T. ROYSTER https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell-you-talmbout https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell-you-talmbout The song’s powerfully vital concoction of booming bass, drums and the shout-sing is a direct counter against death and other forms of inaction. What if we held on to our critique of the use of Bland’s emotions as smoke screen while also recasting depression (Bland’s as well as our own) as a legitimate and understandable response to injustice? Here, we might draw from Ann Cvetko- vich’s work on depression as a public feeling, when she writes: What makes it possible for people to vote for Bush or to assent to war, and how do these political decisions operate within the context of daily lives that are pervaded by a combi- nation of anxiety and numbness? How can we, as intellectuals and activists, acknowledge our own political disappointments and failures in a way that can be enabling? Where might hope be possible?4 To address questions like those posed by Cvetkovich, we seek to generate in this spe- cial issue a mindful conjecture between the turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences and queer women of color theory. As it is generally conceived in queer theory, the concept of affect derives from the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi, emphasizing bodily intensities related to feelings like joy, pain, love hate, hope, fear, envy, and desire. Affect studies and the turn to affect has been inspired by interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and the sciences, including psychoanalysis, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralism, political theory, and queer theorizations of melancholy and trauma. Affects are “bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act … such that autoaffection is linked to the self- feeling of being alive—that is, aliveness or vitality.”5 This special issue considers the multiple ways in which the “affective turn” provides opportunities for queer women of color to claim the authority earned through this asso- ciation with affective excess. Indeed, U.S. Third World Feminisms have long been theo- rizing our complex affective lives, excavating through poetry, theory, and criticism, such feelings as anger, shame, loss, and the erotic produced through the ongoing coloniza- tion and multiple displacements that shape queer women of color’s lives.6 We follow the lead of Jose Mu~noz, who acknowledges the importance of Third World Feminism in theorizing disidentification, noting “identities-in-difference emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant public sphere.”7 This conjuncture might entail a sustained attention to the competing and converging forces of affect and interpellation, even as the latter seems to be out of fashion within affect studies,8 displaced by the “pre- conscious” intensities of our affective lives. Yet for queer women of color, organizing and leveraging what Chela Sandoval refers to as an “oppositional consciousness” remains vital to our survival and indeed vitality. The task of mobilizing affect for social action remains a critical praxis. In this special issue we explore the stakes for thinking and feeling our way through the messy affects of political living by (re)grounding affect studies within a queer women of color genealogy. For instance, Audre Lorde’s still powerful, still poignant thinking on the uses of the erotic and anger as well as other foundational JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES 245 women of color feminisms that we see modeled an embrace of difficult and often uncomfortable truths, the intelligence of pleasure, the theoretically possibilities of collective creativity. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang argue in their reading of Lorde, “freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt.”9 For Lorde feelings—especially what Ahmed would call “bad feelings”10—are a tremendous political resource. For instance, her pairing of “uses of” with bad feelings like “anger” and “the erotic” signal how these ugly emotions become a means to action. Or better said, bad or taboo feelings are the fire that fuel the flames of just and righteous response to the various dehumanizations that U.S. women of color navigate on a daily basis. Indeed, for Chela Sandoval, it is the mul- tiple displacements that U.S. women of color navigate across contexts—always on the margins of social movements—that enable the tactical shifting across forms of consciousness (and we would add, feeling and belonging) that is captured in her concept of the differential. Let us consider the stakes of “uses” in relation to affect, then, as a political resource. In her essay, “Uses of Anger: Woman Responding to Racism,” Lorde uses aggressive, active, even militaristic metaphors to describe anger: “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”11 Emotions like anger might be used like a weapon, especially one that is “focused with precision,” for naming and challeng- ing “personal and institutional” oppressions. Language is not merely a means of com- municating, but a tool for social change, fueled by a “well-stocked” arsenal of bad feelings, here recast as the very tools we might use to fight for freedom. She quips, “If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street…”12 signaling the rightness of anger wielded with intention. Lorde underscores the danger of moving too quickly to good feelings, noting that the point of using anger is not simply to “switch of positions” or temporarily lessen “tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good.”13 She cautions about emotions that deflect and defer action, like guilt (not a response to anger, but rather “to one’s own actions or lack of action”)14 and defensiveness (“a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness”).15 When she likens uses of anger to “the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees,” Lorde anticipates the turn to inhumanisms16 in queer theory. Dana Luciano and Mel Chen bring together “Queer Inhumanisms,” not so much to “declare an identity” as to stage “an encounter … expands the term queer past its conventional resonance as a container for human sexual nonnormativities.”17 We might read Lorde, Anzald�ua, Moraga, and other queer U.S. third world feminist theorists through and against the emerging theories within affect studies, to generate a more reflexive genealogy that accounts for vari- ous forms of settlement and colonialism. Jodi Byrd points out the stakes of unre- flexively appropriating the poststructuralist genealogy of affect studies: “As Derrida and Deleuze are evoked within affect theories, the ‘Indian’ and ‘tattooed 246 A. C. ROWE AND F. T. ROYSTER savages’ remain as traces. Any assemblage that arises from such horizons becomes a colonialist one, and it is the work of indigenous critical theory both to rearticulate indigenous phenomenologies and to provide (alter) native interpretative strategies through which to apprehend the colonialist nostalgias that continue to shape affec- tive liberal democracy’s investment in state sovereignty as a source of violence, remedy, memory, and grievability.”18 We see and feel the grief of the state apparatus in Monae and Wondaland’s recursive chant, “Hell you Talmbout” as the savageness assigned to Blackness is mobilized through the sacred reclamation of the Philadelphia Black Lives Matter rally, then actively interrupting the daily lives of American viewers of the Today Show. Such defi- ant acts recast violence, memory, and grief as the rightful inheritance of Black lives, enacting a reparative gesture in line with queer theory’s “reclaiming and repairing lost histories and ongoing practices of delegitimization.”19 We can also read this moment of Grace Cho’s notion of “transgenerational haunting” as “the secretive, spectral nature of that conflict, particularly in the paradoxically hypervisible and invisible yang- gongju20—the ‘Western princess,’ [and which] broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans.” Cho argues that the yanggongju is “an embodi- ment of the losses of Korea’s colonial and post-colonial history—the deracination from indigenous language and culture under Japanese imperialism, the loss of autonomy under U.S. military dominance since 1945, the decimation of the peninsula and its peo- ple during the Korean War, and the deferral of the war’s resolution—the yanggongju is the embodiment of the accumulation of often unacknowledged grief from these events.”21 She reads the 1992 murder of Yun Geum-I, a Korean sex worker, who was murdered by a U.S. service man/client, as “unleash[ing] the traumatic effects of coloni- zation and war that had been accumulating in the Korean diasporic unconscious for 50 years. The surfacing of ghosts yielded an intensification of haunting in which the yanggongju became overinvested with conflicting feelings of grief, hope shame and rage.”22 In a similar vein, Sharon Holland describes her memory of an experience of everyday racism in an Oakland, California Safeway parking lot, as a kind of haunting. When Holland and a niece refuse to interrupt an intimate conversa- tion about the death of Tupac to help a White woman carrying her groceries, the woman interjects, “And to think I marched for you.” Holland’s answers the woman, “You marched for yourself,” but still feels rattled by the exchange. She muses, “In my mind, we hover there touching one another with the lie of dif- ference and nonrelation balancing precariously between us … The psychic vio- lation of that moment in the parking lot haunts me still; but it is the intimacy of that moment that arrests me. That woman expected something from me—one usually does not expect anything from strangers.”23 She suggests that racism, in its intimacy and in its ordinariness, is used as a way of protecting boundaries of home, memory, and belonging. “Racism,” she says, “is the emotional life- blood of race; it is the ‘feeling’ that articulates and keeps the flawed logic of race in its place.”24 She calls for an antiracist analysis and practice informed by JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES 247 “the call by queer theory to take care of the feeling that escapes or releases when bodies collide in pleasure and in pain.”25 In this special issue we seek to tease the tensions between utopic possibilities and dystopic conditions of “debility”26 and what Lauren Berlant has so provocatively called “slow death.”27 These tensions are necessary to a queer U.S. women of color theory of affect: we want to acknowledge and delve into the incredible losses and depths of the traumas that shape our experiences, both in this life and in those we inherit, while also answering the urgent call to survive, and perhaps even thrive as we leverage emotion to shape a future. For theorists like Jos�e Esteban Mu~noz, an ongoing investment in the “not yet” of a queer and antiracist vision is a commit- ment to collectivity, relationality, and the possibilities of the imagination: “Queer- ness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”28 For Tuck and Yang, this entails the messy work of “relinquishing settler futurity” by enacting an ethic of “incommen- surability,” a radical displacement of settler innocence. The futurity we envision does not necessarily feel good. And the path we travel as we move forward may even feel “unfriendly.”29 As we stand on the shoulders of poet warriors, we reach, sometimes painfully, for futures in which freedom is indeed felt. Summary of articles The articles in this journal generate multiple points of entry that point to such felt futu- rities. Each author begins with her own location and set of relations, orienting readers to the various affective lives through which we might apprehend through their grounded approaches to the politics of emotion. They thoughtfully disrupt the some- times disembodied theoretical conversations about affect, offering direct and embodied activisms of the imagination: performance, poetry, music and community engagement. We open with Claudia Garcia-Rojas’ article, “(Un)Disciplined Futures: Women of Color Feminism as a Disruptive to White Affect Studies.” Garcia-Rojas offers a criti- cal reading of the “structure of feeling” that underwrites “White affect studies.” For Gar- cia-Rojas this structure of feeling, “formalized through the enslavement and genocide of Black peoples and native indigenous populations,” becomes institutionalized through White affect studies, perpetuating the ongoing eradication of queer women of color. In this way, White affect studies erases “the wide body of US women of color literature on the politics of emotion like anger, mourning, and the erotic.” Building an alternate genealogy, Garcia-Rojas excavates the methods of queer women of color theorists to identify a “language of the self” that “reorients our understanding of affective econo- mies” to “institute new concepts about the complex interactions between bodies, geog- raphies, and structures.” This embodied and experiential language of self empowers queer women of color to expose “systems of power and oppression, hegemonic knowl- edge structures, and dominant economies of affect,” providing a powerful resource for “an ethics of survival.” 248 A. C. ROWE AND F. T. ROYSTER In her article, “Building a Translengua in Latina Lesbian Organizing,” Lourdes Torres explores the gap between the possibilities for community and the lived experience of lin- guistic difference among differently located Latina lesbians. She points to the “highly fraught issue” of English-, Spanish-, and bilingual speakers coming together in activist settings “across nationalities, generations, classes, and other differences.” Torres argues for the importance of a “translengua,” or multiple and translating tongue, to acknowl- edge power differentials among Latina lesbians and commit “to translating meaning, strategies, identities, and power across geographic and contextual spaces.” Yet her close reading of flyers, minutes, and newsletters from two Chicago-based Latina lesbian organizations, as well as interviews with members from those organizations, points to the intensive and often conflicting affects surrounding linguistic identity. It turns out that the labor of translation involves tremendous—and unseen—affective labor, as those capable of translation feel exhausted, worn out, and otherwise over- whelmed by the act of translation. Indeed Torres argues that Spanish is an “important marker of national or ethnic” identity for first generation, migrant Latina lesbians, even as the inability to speak Spanish can become a pointof shame for second-generation Lat- inas.Further,whileSpanglishcanbeasourceofprideorsolidarityforsecond-generation Latina lesbians, the mestiza language can come across as improper. These vexed affects pileontotheactoftranslation,freightingitwiththeweightofculture,identity,andpower. Torres parses out how these affects are mapped onto larger cultural, geopolitical, and national formations within the context of the hegemony of linguistic terrorism of the U.S. English-only movement, on the one hand, and a desire for “prestigious” Castellano Spanish on the other. These wider forces, as well as the confrontation with otherness within the context of Latina lesbian organizing, place such a burden on the act of translation that group cohesion is undermined. Further, linguistic subtleties do not always translate, so meanings are lost and shared experiences are stifled. As Torres writes, “First generation Spanish speakers were hurt when con- versations turned to English and no one was translating. Second generation Lat- inas/os were often embarrassed and ashamed of not speaking Spanish or of not speaking it fluently. Attempts at providing translations did not satisfy everyone.” In Ann Russo’s article, “Brokenheartedness and Accountability,” she writes as a White thinker, teacher, and activist working against the “Anesthetic aesthetic” of Whiteness. Russo deepens Garcia-Rojas’ “structure of feeling” of White affect stud- ies, drawing on her own lived experience to demonstrate how the anesthetic aes- thetic “avoids, minimizes, distances, and evades pain and suffering in order to maintain its domination and entitlement,” revealing how “such avoidance of feel- ing works as a tool to realign even progressive activism with white heteronormative power systems.” Russo explores the particular examples of disciplining of feeling as a means of undercutting the lived realities of queer people of color, taking as exam- ples, the “‘It Gets Better’ campaign,” and the politics of Whiteness studies and women’s studies in academic settings, and in the language of “ally” versus “co-sur- vivor” in grassroots activism. A manifesto of feeling as activist praxis and feeling, Russo suggests an embrace of “brokenheartedness,” a position that combines JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES 249 emotional vulnerability and the willingness to be changed, as a critical tool against White privilege: “Resisting the gravitational pull (Chris Crass) of the hegemonic mandate toward glossing over differences between, turning away from harm, evad- ing deeply considering what is in front of me—and on my own oppression and innocence in relation to the ways it is connected to the harm against others (Razazck), a praxis of accountability and brokenheartedness asks for a deep recog- nition of how we are actively related to the ongoing production of power differen- ces between myself and women and trans/queer people of color.” Francesca T. Royster’s article, “Black Edens, Country Eves: Listening, Perfor- mance and Black Queer Longing in Country Music,” explores the power of musical performance and fandom, here, Black queer country music listening, performance and fandom, as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining and contin- ued racial and economic segregation. For many Black country music listeners and performers, the experience of being a closeted fan also fosters an experience of ideological hailing, as well as queer world-making. Royster suggests that through Black queer country music fandom and performance, “we see at work performative interventions and negotiations of the constraints of history and identity in African American culture that’s creative, risky and inherently ‘soulful.’” Using Tina Turn- er’s solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! (1974) as a flashpoint, she complicates the idea of musical performance as inherently emotionally transparent, and con- siders the example of country music’s history as an example of “hidden regimes of racial, sexual, gendered and class disciplining,” as well as resistance. Conjuring the creative, Misty De Berry’s performance poem, little sister: an Afro- Temporal Solo-Play, offers a mythobiography and memory-scape that explores the pos- sibilities of spiritual, psychological, and collective healing of the structural and affective violence against queer women of color. In the poem, little sister, a time-traveling ghost- girl from the slave era, haunts and inhabits the very real body of a contemporary queer Black woman performance and demands audience: And then this spirit voice start showing me things-/just image after image-/aint none of them be a single memory of mine-/yet I recalled them clear as day./spirit be… little girl-/ somebody’s twin…/baby- baby girl-/four, five… uh-huh— /maybe six./Heart be woman though./Like she done seen the comings and goings of things/well past me and you- and her and him- them and everybody in between and beyond. Evocative of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, little sister brings her host pleasure, knowl- edge as well as pain. Here, DeBerry explores the potential of a historically and spiritually informed embodied performance to negotiate the difficult histories of enslavement, rac- ism, and erasure. Using the tools of the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic, Deberry brings together lyrical poetry-prose, gesture, breath, and movement “in order to make plain the notion of simultaneous truths and possibilities, which the aesthetic centers.” 250 A. C. ROWE AND F. T. ROYSTER We close this special issue with a special treat. We invite you to engage with queer Xicana-Ind�ıgena, two-spirit multi-genre activist artist, writer, performer, director, and producer, Adelina Anthony within the fluid genre of the interview. Her performances stage “a theory in the flesh,” drawing on the “physical realities of our lives”30 to help audiences feel the stakes of our emotional-political lives. Anthony’s performances stage queer indigenous-identified Xicana theory, expressed through artistic embodiments that are grounded in indigenous spiritual- ity. Her work is situated within a broader queer Xicana archive of plays and staged performance; various art forms; spirit dances and sacred ceremony; novels, mem- oirs, and poetry; blogs, websites, film, and popular culture.31 Anthony’s queer Xicana work reworks cultural intimacies, confounding traditional binaries: good and bad affects, past and present, here and there, sacred and profane. Adelina brings to the stage and more recently to film the lived experiences of queer women of color, so often erased and ignored in our culture. Her portrayals of queer lov- ers, Mexica spirituality, and dysfunctional family life are tender, but not precious, ani- mating marginal subjectivities with subversive and sacred life. Adelina’s work invites us to reclaim our affective and spiritual power by bringing us into our collective wound to embrace the hidden aspects of our affective messiness: our longings, dysfunction, fragil- ity, and intelligence. She invites us to recognize ourselves in her characters, to engage in these buried feelings collectively so that we might feel together, and heal together. Notes 1. Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 2. Lisa Marie Cachao, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York University Press, 2012, 4. 3. Jeffrey McCune, “The Queerness of Blackness,” QED: A Journal of Queer World-Making 2.2 (2015), 174. 4. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, 1. 5. Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction.” In Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 2. 6. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 7. Jos�e Esteban Mu~noz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1999. 8. As Jasbir Puar notes in “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ, 21, 2–3. June 2015, Dana Luciano and Mel Chen, eds., “there is a shift underway, from Althusserian interpellation to an array of diverse switchpoints of the activation of the body.” 9. Eve Tuck and Wayne Young, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization, Indige- neity, Education and Society, 1.1 (2012), 20. 10. Ahmed notes that feminists are accused of “killing joy,” associated with the “origin of bad feeling,” but we might consider how feminist work is doing the uncomfortable work of exposing “the bad feelings” that are erased under “public signs of joy.” Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press 2010, 65. 11. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press Feminist Series, Ten Speed Press. Kindle Edition, 2012, 127. JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES 251 12. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press Feminist Series, Ten Speed Press. Kindle Edition, 2012, 130. 13. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press Feminist Series, Ten Speed Press, Kindle Edition, 2012, 127. 14. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press Feminist Series, Ten Speed Press. Kindle Edition, 2012, 130. 15. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press Feminist Series, Ten Speed Press. Kindle Edition, 2012, 130. 16. Dana Luciano and Mel Chen note this movement as unified by “a conviction that the ‘human’ (at least as traditionally conceived) has unjustly dominated and unduly limited the horizon of critical thought,” “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ, 21, 2–3. June 2015, 188. 17. Dana Luciana and Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, 2–3, June 2015, pp. iv–207, 185. 18. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (First Peoples: New Directions Indigenous). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition, 2011, 21. 19. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, xiii. 20. Grace M. Cho. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 20. 21. Grace M. Cho. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 22. Grace M. Cho. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 7. 23. Sharon Holland, The Emotional Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 2–3. 24. Sharon Holland, The Emotional Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 6. 25. Sharon Holland, The Emotional Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 7. 26. Puar argues that neoliberalism constitutes a dynamic relationship between “Capacity and debility” as “seeming opposites generated by increasingly demanding neoliberal formula- tions of health, agency, and choice—what I call a ‘liberal eugenics of lifestyle program- ming’—that produce, along with biotechnologies and bioinformatics, population aggregates.” Puar notes in “Coda,” 153. 27. Slow death occurs within “a zone of temporality … of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermit- tent, often in phenomena not prone to capture by a consciousness organized by archives of memorable impact.” Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 754–80, 759. 28. Jos�e Esteban Mu~noz, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009, 1. 29. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indige- neity, Education & Society 1 (1), 2012, 1–40. 30. Cherr�ıe Moraga and Gloria Anzald�ua, “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of color, Moraga and Anzald�ua, eds. New York, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1981, 23. 31. See Laura P�erez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007) for a reading of Chicana art. Anthony’s work intersects with a body of plays by Cherr�ıe Moraga, with whom Anthony studied and collaborates (see http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?optionDcom_content&viewDcategory&layout Dblog&idD43&ItemidD69). Sacred ceremony and spirit dances are wide-spread Xicana activity that serves diverse communities. The film La Mission (2010) treats the intersection 252 A. C. ROWE AND F. T. ROYSTER http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=43&Itemid=69 of the political and the sacred, as do a host of novels, including Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Des- ert Blood, Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings, and Reyna Grande’s Dancing with Butterflies. Notes on contributors Aimee Carrillo Rowe is Professor of Communication Studies and Co-Director of the Civil Dis- course and Social Change Initiative at California State University, Northridge. Her teaching and writing focus on human and inhuman processes and performances of becoming as relational, embodied, and fluid across contexts, including U.S. popular culture, Indian workplaces, and U.S. Latino/a performing arts communities. Her books include Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Duke University Press, 2008), Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound (Palgrave, 2013). Carrillo Rowe is currently working on a book entitled Queer Xicana: Performance, Affect, and the Sacred, which examines the vexed politics of healing, longing, and Indigenous erasure in queer Xicana performance. Francesca T. Royster is a Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at DePaul University, where she teaches courses in Critical Race theory, Gender and Queer Theory and African American Literature, Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature. She received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley in 1995 and is the author of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), which honorable mention for the Modern Language Association of America’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Study of African American Literature and Culture. She is also the author of Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Pal- grave/MacMillan in 2003). Her creative and scholarly work has been published in Biography, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, Performance Research International, Women in Performance, as well as The Huffington Post, Chicago Literati and Windy City Times, among others. She has trained and volunteered as a counselor for the Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline and has served on non-profit boards such as Women and Girls CAN and Beyondmedia Education, a past organization focusing on grassroots media activism for women and youth. Her other interests include activism through writing, performance and other forms of art, and learning to play jazz on the upright bass. JOURNAL OF LESBIAN STUDIES 253 Abstract Summary of articles Notes Notes on contributors