Body Adornment and Care as Creative Strategy in Late State Capital Dystopia

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable joins scholars in Black and Latinx gender, sexuality, and visual culture who study how queer and femme people enact bodily care and adornment to navigate late stage capitalism. From durags and immaculate facebeats to nail art and customized t-shirts, quotidian practices of bodily maintenance and aesthetics have a long tradition of protecting and valorizing bodies made vulnerable by racial capital. As Stuart Hall theorized, the body is a critical resource for the enactment of radical politics.

Straying from an investment in what Leticial Alvarado terms an “aesthetics of respectability,” scholars in this conversation engage the potential of what Jillian Hernandez terms “aesthetics of excess,” modes of self-fashioning that revel in difference and ornamental materiality. We will ask how certain forms of design, consumption, and bodily presentation, when created and enacted by minoritized populations, can queer capital towards ends that support Black and Latinx queer femme life (following Andrea Bolivar’s work on the economies of trans Latina sex work and Roderick Ferguson’s understanding of capital’s reliance on Black queerness).

This roundtable looks to Latina sex workers, queer Black men, femme rappers like JT, Black hairdressers, and paisa fashion designers as artists who embrace suciedád (Deborah Vargas) and craft embodied pleasure in the face of violence, exploitation, and attempted erasure. These cultural contributions mobilized by the adorned body shape wider assertions of Black and Latinx queer/femme worth in a context that systematically works to deny it.

Our conversation will trouble neoliberal valorizations of bodily self-care and think through how Black feminist theorists like Audre Lorde have opened more capacious paths for understanding the resource that care of the self provides for politics and community well-being. The bodily practices we document, analyze, and celebrate extend beyond normative capitalist self-care as they constitute rituals of alternate belonging and cultural production, traversing and troubling the lines between high and low culture, the sacred and the profane (L.H. Stallings).

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Rikki Byrd, The University of Texas at Austin

• Aracely Garcia Gonzalez, Merced College

• Amoni Miriam Thompson, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Jillian Hernandez, University of Florida

• Chaz Antoine Barracks, Syracuse University

• Alex Mireles, University of California Santa Barbara

Biographical Information

Moderator
Name: Leticia Alvarado
Email: leticia_alvarado@brown.edu

Title and Institutional Affiliation: Associate Professor, American Studies, Brown University

Leticia Alvarado is Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian, Ford Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. She is the author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2018) as well as numerous publications in academic journals and exhibition catalogues including Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A, Firelei Baéz (ICA Boston), and Scientia Sexualis (ICA Los Angeles). Her current book project, Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation, received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Participant: Jillian Hernandez, Associate Professor, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, University of Florida

jillianhernandez@ufl.edu

Jillian Hernandez is a curator and scholar of gender and sexual politics in Black and Latinx cultural production. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment was published by Duke University Press and her most recent exhibition, Liberatory Adornment: Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, Kenya (Robinson), was on view in 2021 at the Flaten Art Museum. Jillian has written extensively on popular culture, publishing work on chonga style politics, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Blowfly, Bad Bunny, and Pretty Taking All Fades. She is currently working on a second book project, High Maintenance Feminism: Tracing a Cultural Movement that examines how femme cultural producers are demanding care and value in a post-2020 context. A public-facing scholar, Hernandez has launched the video podcast FEM STUDY on her YouTube channel and has published art reviews and culture articles for Refinery29, Intervenxions, and Latina magazine. She has recently contributed to the exhibition catalogue for The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century and Documenting the Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida.

Rikki Byrd
The University of Texas at Austin, African and African Diaspora Studies Department

info@rikkibyrd.com

Rikki Byrd (she/her/hers) is a writer, educator, and curator. She is the founder of the Black Fashion Archive, co-founder of the Fashion and Race Syllabus, and is currently an assistant professor of visual culture studies at The University of Texas at Austin in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Art and Art History. Across her writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, she draws connections between Black aesthetic practices, including 20th and 21st century art, fashion studies, and performance. She is currently at work on two book projects. In Loving Memory: Black Performance and the Sartorial Politics of Mourning explores the ways that Black people perform mourning through clothing, textiles, and adornment. The project connects an array of objects such as Rest in Peace T-shirts, performance, and contemporary art to consider and critique Black postmortem visual histories. Byrd’s second project is a book of essays tentatively titled Notes on Black Fashioning, which explores a range of histories, rituals, social, and political issues that forward creative explorations of Black history, embodiment, and popular culture. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Cultured, and Teen Vogue, and across exhibition catalogs, academic journals, and books, including The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, International Journal of Fashion Studies, and The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. She has contributed to curatorial projects at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, and South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, among others, and is the inaugural Radicle Curator-in-Residence at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

Alex Mireles (she/they)
University of California Santa Barbara - Department of Feminist Studies

mmireles@ucsb.edu

Alex Mireles is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she investigates Latinx identity, queerness, and global capitalism through aesthetic movements in fashion, media, and visual cultures. Her dissertation, Paisa Imaginaries: Popular Culture, Creative Labor, and Queer Mexicanidades in Southern California, 1980-Present, explores the queer potential and world-making possibilities in Mexican American popular culture, focusing on Mexican regional music, fashion, media, and nightlife. Mireles investigates how material conditions and cultural elements interconnect, offering new perspectives on identity and expression. Beyond her academic work, she is a co-founder of the Queer Arts Collective and brings a rich background in fashion and media production to her endeavors. With experience as a wardrobe stylist, line producer, and assistant director, she blends creative practice with scholarly insight to contribute to both fields. Her work highlights the dynamic interplay between cultural production and academic research.

Aracely Garcia Gonzalez, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Effron Center for the Study of America, Princeton University

ag4163@princeton.edu

Aracely García-González received her Ph.D. in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar; her training is in critical ethnic studies, emphasizing social processes, cultural studies, visual culture, history, and the legacies of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. Her research focuses on the connections between histories of colonialism, global capitalism, gender, and economic vulnerabilities in marginalized communities. Her book-length project, “Flirting with Sexual Economies,” outlines how Latina sexualities and aesthetics reflect U.S. capital accumulation and are integral to how capital moves, particularly in the Americas. She theorizes how Latina sex and cultural workers flirt with imposed ideas about their excessive sexualities as they navigate the dehumanizing economic conditions of the 21st century.



Chaz Antoine Barracks, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University

chazbarracks@gmail.com

Chaz Antoine Barracks (he/they) is an artist-scholar, mixed-media filmmaker, and host of Black Matter podcast. Chaz is invested in interdisciplinary research and a creative practice that centers Black joy and uses storytelling to bridge knowledge gaps in the things we seldom learn about in academe
when it comes to Black life in America. Chaz is currently working on a book project entitled, Con-artistry as Black Joy, a multimodal project that uses autoethnography and media analysis to contextualize the intellectual contributions of Black queer femmes who live beyond the rule to secure joy by any means necessary.

Amoni Thompson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California Santa Barbara-Department of Feminist Studies

amonithompson@ucsb.edu

Amoni Thompson (she/her pronouns) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation explores what Black girls’ visual and material cultures might teach us about the value of the interior, self-possession, and Black spatial practices. Her work has been published in The Black Girlhood Studies Collection: Imagining Worlds for Black Girls, becoming undisciplined: an academic zine, and the Journal of Visual Arts Research.