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This book articulates Jotería Communication Studies as a subdiscipline and as a praxis for resisting multiple forms of oppression by focusing on how everyday performances of identity and culture challenge master narratives of power and control. Although this book is for scholars, artists, and practitioners from communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, cultural studies, or even, Latinx and Chicanx studies in education, sociology, history, literature, media, arts, and humanities, this book speaks to and with those nonheteronormative mestizas/os who perform their sexuality and gender in queer practices and communicative forms-Jotería. As a methodological intervention into the study of marginalized and subaltern communities, this book provides research on Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (GBTQ) Chicano and Latino communities from specific geographic regions of the U.S. Southwest. Utilizing multiple methods, this book provides a cultural map or political snapshot of a particular time and place from a particular point of view or location and generates knowledge that highlights reflexivity, cultural/queer nuances, and decolonial acts of resistance. Specifically, this book locates "theories in the flesh" in the borderlands narratives of Jotería, such as cuentos, pláticas, chismé, testimonio, mitos, and consejos. These theories of power and resistance create knowledge about how Jotería make sense of their own difference, how people interpret their assumed or perceived difference, and ultimately, how difference is managed as an emancipatory tool toward the goal of queer of color world making.
List of contents
Introduction: Theories in the Flesh as Resistance in Everyday Communicative Life - Borderlands Narratives and Snapshots of Jotería- Historias Remembering Jotería - Narrating and Staging Theories and Methods of Resistance Unbecoming the Poem - Jotería Performance Rhetoric - Index.
About the author
Robert Gutierrez-Perez is an assistant professor of communication and culture at the University of Nevada, Reno in the Department of Communication Studies. He is an author, editor, poet, and performance artist.
Summary
This book articulates a communicative praxis for resisting multiple forms of oppression by showing how everyday performances of identity and culture challenge master narratives of power and control. As an emancipatory tool, it recenters nonheteronormative Latinx experience difference as a managed form of queer of color worldmaking.
Report
"In Jotería Communication Studies, Robert Gutierrez-Perez invites us into a personal, political, and ambitious new story of communications studies for everyday life. Gutierrez-Perez literally writes and works joteria as theory and method for those whose queer marginalization can never be known in totality, giving credence to the lived-experience and felt-experience as rich, epistemological treasure. This poetic and pointed work provides a window into the future of communication studies and theories of communication-covering much-needed ground through storytelling, theory-making, and speaking unapologetic truths." -Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Director, Frederick Douglass Institute of African & African-American Studies
