This talk departs from the conclusion of Joshua Javier Guzmán’s book Dissatisfactions: Queer Latinidad and the Politics of Style, to argue for an alternative form of hope — one not drawn to a promised future but instead confronts the worst head-on within the here and now, like a powerless imagination expressed as a politics of codependency.

Dissatisfactions focuses on experimental Latino cultural productions in Los Angeles from 1968 – 1994 to show how style as a cultural form and sensibility become crucial for queer Latino politics. By examining cultural productions outside the sexual and racial mainstream, Guzmán’s project uncovers politically engaged styles of discontent with the Brown Power movement and Gay Liberation histories. Beginning with a cluster of historical markers in post-1968 LA (including the Vietnam War, the Chicano Student Walkouts, and Chicano militancy), the subjects of the study enact a critical dissatisfaction not only with the US nation-state, but also the activism emerging in response to systemic state violence, and in turn stylize their discontent. Each chapter takes up a stylized discontent: nausea, lo-fi, ambivalence, and malaise. Each of these stylized discontents was repurposed by queer punk Latinos as aesthetic responses to the AIDS crisis and the rapid privatization of the public sphere under Reagan, both as governor of California and then president of the United States. Thus, the book concludes with a gesture to the potential of photography to capture not only the disappointing sensuous world of the given but also the gap that separates it from the horizon of other possible worlds.

Dialogical to Dissatisfactions, this talk will bridge Guzmán’s first monograph with Guzmán’s second book in progress, entitled Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture. With its continued focus on punk, queer, AIDS, and visual culture in Reagan’s America, Brown Exposure seeks to also highlight the other side to the feeling of dissatisfaction, namely the terrible beauty expressed as the structure of visibility before the visible itself — its literary aperture — or the given seen as new. Specifically, the talk will examine two photographers creating at the same time on opposite coasts, Reynaldo Rivera in Los Angeles and Mark Morrisroe in New York City, who when read together, articulate a certain powerless hope imaged as an embrace of the non-identical.

Joshua Javier Guzmán is an associate professor at the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Dissatisfactions: Queer Latinidad and the Politics of Style (NYU Press 2024). His second monograph-in-progress is entitled Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture, which The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant generously supports.

This program is open to all eligible individuals. USC Annenberg operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.