First Friday Works-in-Progress Series with Jorge Sánchez Cruz

Friday, October 2, 2020 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

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Join us in welcoming ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow, Jorge Sánchez Cruz, as he presents his work: "Debility, Negative Affect, Mobility: Undocu-Queer Aesthetics, and the Right to Thrive."

This talk examines literary and cultural productions as timely responses by undocu-queer subjects living under a landscape debilitation and a climate of negative affect. In conversation with queer of color critique and Latina/o/x studies, the selected pieces of this presentation are part of a constellation of undocumented and queer subjects’ aesthetic acts in times of crises. The talk, then, posits that undocu-queer artistic and literary practices labor a critique of the legal frames that have rendered undocumented people as disposable, while also unveil enactments of thriving and of mobility found in the work of Alan Pelaez López, Yosimar Reyes, and Julio Salgado.

Jorge Sánchez Cruz (Ph.D., UC-Riverside, 2018) investigates the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Latin (o) American literature and culture and its intersections with queer and trans studies, feminist studies, and critical theory. His manuscript, Aesthetics of Dissent: AIDS and Sexual Politics in the Americas, proposes to see, feel, and engage with minoritarian subjects’ cultural productions fueled by the search of prolonging non-normative life.

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