UC Riverside

Feeling Close investigates how contemporary cultural productions by queer and trans of color subjects reveal the reparative potentials of ordinary forms of closeness (physical proximity and/or emotional intimacy) with others. I show how acts of closeness that fill the daily lives of gender- and sexual-variant subjects of color open up experiences of spacetime that exceed colonial logics and illuminate reparative and life-sustaining modes of togetherness. I offer a method of close reading and intersectional comparatist cultural critique that shows how attention to the minutiae of lived, embodied experience brings into relief the strategies queer and trans of color subjects use to challenge hegemonic knowledge systems. My comparatist approach centers the solidarities between U.S.-based gender- and sexual-variant Filipinx and Chicanx artists and writers to demonstrate how queer and trans of color subjects’ routine contestations of colonial meaning-making and power structures illuminate otherwise unintelligible possibilities for cross-ethnic coalition. Centering literature, performance, and visual culture from the 1990s to the present, I study how sensations of physical and/or emotional closeness located within queer and trans of color everyday life disrupt dominant orderings of the world to reimagine spacetime and relationality. Each chapter pairs works by Filipinx and Chicanx cultural producers and focuses on a distinct artistic medium. Chapter 1 argues that Aurora Guerrero’s and Isabel Sandoval’s respective independent narrative films, Mosquita y Mari and Lingua Franca, depict quotidian practices through which undocumented queer and trans femme characters feel the bodies of those out of reach. It rethinks the ordinary sexual act, edging, proposing it as an analytic and strategy rooted in erotics that reveals other ways of feeling close to others across spatiotemporal locations. Chapter 2 reads R. Zamora Linmark’s novel, Rolling the R’s, alongside Rigoberto González’s memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa. It demonstrates how sensations of stickiness illuminate minoritarian configurations of geography, memory, history, and development. Chapter 3 analyzes Xandra Ibarra’s and Kiam Marcelo Junio’s respective artworks, Nude Laughing and American Karaoke. It proposes that these pieces employ corniness to critique western aesthetics and reconfigure relationalities between the viewing subject and the subject on view.