Overview

Proposes a queer way to be in the world and with others Invoking queer aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Bottoms Up explores a sexual way to be with others while living with loss. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez demonstrates how aesthetic representations of sex—namely, bottoming—function as allegorical paradigms, revealing the assemblages of violence that have constituted the social, cultural, and political shifts of Mexico and US Latinx culture from 1950 to the present. With playful, theoretically nuanced prose, Cervantes-Gómez builds upon queer of color theory and continental philosophy to present the “bottom” as a form of relational performance, which she terms “pasivo ethics.” The argument develops through a series of compelling case studies, including a series of novels by Octavio Paz and Luis Zapata that trace the position of the bottom in Mexican nationalist literature; the forms of exposure, risk, and proximity in the performance work of artist Lechedevirgen Trimegisto; a reading of violence and the erotic in the work of artist Bruno Ramri; and reading artists such as Yosimar Reyes, Yanina Orellana, and Carlos Martiel as they build a framework of sexual inheritance that carries the traumas of Mexicanness into the diaspora. Through a broad archive rooted in hemispheric Latinx performance, Bottoms Up considers how sexual and political power are bound up with each other in the shaping of Mexicanness. Placing particular emphasis on questions of queer and trans Mexican embodiment, the book explains how Mexicanness is constituted through discourses of exposure.

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9781479829118

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Reviews

This jewel radiates a dazzling intellect that is equal parts luminous and raunchy; unafraid of spreading open the glory holes of sexual subjectivity. With México as its fleshy and perverse center, this text demands scholarly attention to the ways sex permeates the visceral core of Latin/x América. Bottoms Up rethinks life, death, solidarity and ethics from the bottom, fucking with our ideas of politics and performance in the best ways. Go ahead, consent to be undone. * Juana María Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings * Ambitious and field-shifting. By engaging diverse genealogies of scholarly, critical, and theoretical work across queer, trans, race, Latin(x) American, and performance studies, Bottoms Up makes critical and needed interventions into the business as usual of hetero-patriarchal national projects and their imperial and diasporic extensions. Xiomara Cervantes-Gomez’s book makes groundbreaking core claims about the creative and representational uses of ‘bottom’ sex in queer and trans of color practices of performance, and of art more generally, and her close readings of artistic, performance, and literary archives are remarkably insightful, acute, and granular. * Ricardo Ortiz, Georgetown University *

Author Information

Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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