Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

ISSN: 0740-770X (Print) 1748-5819 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20

Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies of

Latino Cultural Production

Eddie Gamboa

To cite this article: Eddie Gamboa (2018): Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies
of Latino Cultural Production, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, DOI:
10.1080/0740770X.2018.1524622

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2018.1524622

Published online: 04 Oct 2018.

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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2018

BOOK REVIEW

Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies of Latino Cultural Production, by Leticia

Alvarado, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2018, 232pp., 69 images, USD $94.95
(cloth), ISBN: 9780822370635, $24.95 (paper), ISBN: 9780822370789

Leticia Alvarado begins Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Pro-
duction with two figures prominently featured in US immigration discourse: the promising
student and the abject mother. Whereas the former serves as a nexus for political narratives
predicated on inclusivity vis-à-vis assimilative potential, the latter manifests through a defi-
nition of citizenship simultaneously dependent on and fearful of the abject mother’s biologi-
cal, social, and symbolic reproduction. Through the latter Alvarado posits an aesthetic of
abjection capable of inciting alternative forms of collectivity, political strategy, and knowl-
edge production through consistent, but unsustainable refusals of respectable legibility.
Abject Performances seeks possibilities that extend beyond the limited conventions of
Latino cultural production invested in representations of coherent subjects that enable regu-
lated access to citizenship. Abjection functions as a response to such strategies, “a fissure
capable of reorienting our aesthetic engagement and therefore the politicized subjects we
can imagine, relevant both within and beyond Latino studies” (7).
Undergirding Alvarado’s project is a deep engagement with feminist psychoanalyst
Julia Kristeva’s theories of abjection, linking subject formation through continuous acts
of identification and exclusion to the aesthetic strategies developed by Latino/Chicano
nationalist movements. Invoking a queer genealogy that charts the affective contours of
abjection—particularly Sianne Ngai’s (2007) Ugly Feelings, Antino Viego’s (2007)
Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, and the writings of Jose
Esteban Muñoz—Abject Performances departs from aesthetic conventions invested in
recuperative identity formation. Instead, Alvarado favors cultural producers who fail or
refuse to acquiesce to dominant logics, producing an abject figure that calls forth alternative
means of organization, expression, and “being-with” one another.
In the first chapter, Alvarado delves into the oeuvre of Cuban-American artist Ana
Mendieta to reframe the artist through the abject aesthetics that materialize in her
early practice and later-in-life curatorial work. Acknowledging the ways in which exist-
ing scholarship on Mendieta’s work frequently conscript her into Euro-American art tra-
jectories or essentialist feminist narratives, Alvarado instead focuses on performances in
which Mendieta plays with uncertain difference through her physical presence. For
example, in Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints) (1972), Mendieta presses her face
against a plane of glass in a distortion of her features, which subsequently elide
simple or satisfactory racial categorization. Yet when juxtaposed against Mendieta’s
movement across borders, from Cuba to the United States and later to Mexico, and
the racial hierarchies she carries with her in her travels, Alvarado identifies a complex
trace that structures Latinidad: “a sense of otherness and also shifting terrains of privi-
lege, as well as the promise of a strategically antiessentialist heuristic that offers an
2 Book Review

approach to the field alive to tension but also possibility” (51). Alvarado uses this analy-
sis to expand readings of Mendieta’s well known Silueta Series, reading the earth-body
works as a form of “subjectless critique” that brings Mendieta’s work into the fold of
women of color feminism and queer of color critique. In this way, Alvarado understands
Mendieta as a problematic, complex figure whose collective body of work moves away
from visibility not in the service of universalism, but abjection.
Chapter Two follows the work and organizational structure of art collective Asco,
figured here as an emblematic example of “uncivic participation” as a method of cultural
production and national belonging. Revisiting Asco’s history, Alvarado highlights the elas-
ticity of the group’s roster and the abstract nature of their work. Confusion, disenchantment,
and antagonism function as affective vectors in the coincidental moments and fractured
interpersonal relationships that brought Asco together. Former Ascota Daniel J. Martinez
tells Alvarado that Asco was more “consensual hallucination” than art collective with a
stable politic—leaving the author to theorize on the contingency of the group as a model
for an abject aesthetic. Interpersonal histories of works such as Spray Paint LACMA
(1972) showcase the contentious relationship amongst the group members as foundational
to an aesthetic that was only realized in its loss—in the case of Spray Paint LACMA, its
literal erasure. Such cultural productions, Alvarado argues, frustrate the notion of commu-
nity central to the aesthetic commitments of a broadly construed Chicano movement with its
appropriation of indigenous mythic pasts, privileging of heteronormativity, and a dedication
to “permanence” through mediums such as corridos and murals. The contingency of Asco’s
collectivity signals an opportunity to imagine communities that are porous, difficult to
sustain, and full of possibility.
The second half of Abject Performances shifts to contemporary cultural producers and
the complicated negotiations produced through abjection in formulating Latino subjectivity
in the neoliberal present. Alvarado uses Chapter Three to juxtapose the popular television
series Ugly Betty (2006–2010) with the performance work of Nao Bustamante, particularly
her appearance on the reality show competition, Work of Art (2010). Alvarado reads Ugly
Betty as a prototypical narrative of inclusion through celebrated, regulated difference. Series
protagonist Betty Suarez is coded as “ugly” through a racialized aesthetic within the show
—excessive use of color, stylization, and home decor. The development of the series tracks
Suarez’s transformation into an acceptable Latina subject whose muted tones and minimal
decorum enable racial uplift. Alvarado identifies this transformation as a drive toward
“mimetic minority beauty,” highlighting how Suarez’s Latina aesthetics become filtered
through diversity structured by white affluence. Bustamante, on the other hand, reproduces
the excess of her Latinidad, acknowledging its failure to incorporate successfully into a
more polished, and by extension more legible, expression. Alvarado understands Busta-
mante as signaling an alternative to the neoliberal script for inclusion provided in Ugly
Betty, one that refuses subjectivity or artistic genius in favor of an abjection that critiques
the desire for inclusion.
The final chapter excavates the quotidian visual cultural and public testimonies of
Latino members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), whose abjection
manifests through the racial schema produced in the church’s teachings, and provides a
blueprint for the possibilities and limitations of embracing abject identities. Filtered
through her own experience as a former member of the church, Alvarado breaks down
 Book Review 3

the history of LDS whose foundational mythos includes the Lamanites, or the indigenous
people of the Americas cursed with darker skin for their violence against the fairer-skinned
Nephites. Embracing the Lamanite as an expression of divinity, Latinos within LDS lever-
age the abject identity in order to critique the church’s colonial past and present racism.
Alvarado provides a deep reading of Bishop Orlando A. Rivera’s 1978 speech “Mormon-
ism and the Chicano,” which connects the Mormon vision of the Lamanite with the contem-
porary Chicano movement, reframing the church’s missionary work into a call to embrace
Latino members and question oppressive systems. Other members of the church rely on
scripture to critique conservative immigration positions held by political leaders who
court LDS constituents. Yet the embrace of a Lamanite identity by Latino members of
the church is coupled with religious teachings that promise a lightening of the skin for
adhering to dogmatic practice. Alvarado presents testimonies of LDS members who
center the longing for whiteness as a parallel to the progressive critiques of colonization
that Lamanite identification makes possible. The complexity of this racial scheme leaves
Alvarado to speculate on apostasy as an alternative form of abjection, one that abandons
the desire for subjectivity.
Throughout the text, Alvarado focuses on the negative affects and aesthetic strategies
that compose the abject performances that she centers: the disgusting, the disorganized,
and the disillusioned. In doing so, Abject Performances contributes to a strand of racial lit-
erary/performance studies that focuses on abject aesthetics, such as Darieck Scott (2010) in
Extravagant Abjection and Karen Shimakawa 2010 in National Abjection. These scholars
of color have emphasized the performative contours of abjection that cohere gender and
racial identities. Alvarado follows these authors in her attempt to suspend the liminal tra-
jectory of an abjection that resolves through identity formation. In focusing on an aesthetics
of abjection, Alvarado highlights artists who embrace negativity in both the construction
and execution of their art, and in doing so enables a space to consider abjection as an “affec-
tive terrain capable of reorienting our quotidian commitments, toward willful otherness,
displaced phantoms, queer failure, and apostasy that guide us … to [politicized subjectiv-
ities] we don’t yet fully know but around which we might build across communities
toward a dismantling of the present” (166). In writing this, I am thinking of contemporary
figures of abjection—the asylum seeker, the victim of domestic abuse and gang violence,
the parent and child violently separated at the US border. Abject Performances does not
make such figures more legible, but rather encourages readers towards being with illegibil-
ity so as to create a condition for thinking through alternatives to citizenship, to accept the
unknown and unknowable as a viable, yet confounding aesthetic, and a necessary, though
unsustainable politic.

References
Ngai, Sianne. 2007. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scott, Darieck. 2010. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power and Sexuality in the African
American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press.
Shimakawa, Karen. 2010. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Viego, Antonio. 2007. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Durham: Duke
University Press.
4 Book Review

Eddie Gamboa
Northwestern University
Eddiegamboa2018@u.northwestern.edu
© 2018, Eddie Gamboa
https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2018.1524622