UCLA

This dissertation traces a genealogy of brown performance and aesthetics from the 1980s to the present. As the title suggests, contestation is a central part of the framework I use to think through the ways that contemporary artists of color negotiate the racial scripts and legacies of white supremacy that structure their lives and professional opportunities. I am interested in brownness as a disidentification with identity politics and their commodification in the contemporary United States. Focusing on brown(ed) bodies as sites of contestation—textual imaginaries of bodies, bodies of scholarship, bodies on stage, on screen, and online— I ultimately theorize brownness as a queer ecology: as a set of unruly connections, perpetuating slippages between racialized identities that at once offer the potential for antiracist and anti-imperial solidarities and also the opportunity for neoliberal cooptation through multicultural discourse and the commodification of brown aesthetics through popular media and celebrity cultures.

Chapter 1, which centers on Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez, considers contentious critical histories of Chicano literary studies, leading me to a theorization of queer brown ecologies as the nourishment, attunement to, and production of texts committed to thinking in community. Chapter 2 continues this theorization through the works of friends and artists Gil Cuadros and Laura Aguilar, and their queer worldbuilding: I argue that attuning to the queer and brown media ecologies created and made possible by these artists and their friends highlights the affecting/affective power of friendship as a mode of queer life. Chapter 3 focuses on the career of poet and novelist Melissa Lozada-Oliva to consider the brown commons made manifest in the queer media ecologies—digital and physical—by which we encounter contemporary poetry. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the contestation and protest, complicity and corporatization that crystallize in the celebrity discourse of actor and influencer Vanessa Hudgens. I suggest that affective, unruly brown texts create possibilities for anticolonial, anticapitalist solidarities based in the brown convergences US imperialism and racism has produced.