Description
Book SynopsisHow the queer Chicano punks of post-1960s Los Angeles developed a unique politics of style
In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Javier Guzmán explores the queer punk and Chicano/Latino avant-garde art scenes in post-1968 Los Angeles from the rise of Ronald Reagan to the height of the AIDS epidemic. He demonstrates how styleas a cultural form and sensibilitybecomes essential to Latino politics at the moment the utopian impulses of the 1960s begin to fade.
Guzmán uncovers how queer Latinos in Los Angeles used performance, underground media, experimental art, and literature to interrogate the limits of Chicano nationalism and the burgeoning politics of gay liberation. These subcultural forms give rise to a theory of what he calls stylized discontent, expressed as nausea, lo-fi, ambivalence, and malaise. Each chapter of the book is framed by a specific stylized discontent, demonstrating how they were repurposed by queer punk Latinos as responses to the AIDS crisis and th
