Bottoms Up

Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance

Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gomez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781479829156
• eBook ISBN: 9781479829163
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Proposes a queer way to be in the world and with others

Invoking queer aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Bottoms Up explores a sexual way to be with others while living with loss. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez demonstrates how aesthetic representations of sex—namely, bottoming—function as allegorical paradigms, revealing the assemblages of violence that have constituted the social, cultural, and political shifts of Mexico and US Latinx culture from 1950 to the present.

With playful, theoretically nuanced prose, Cervantes-Gómez builds upon queer of color theory and continental philosophy to present the "bottom" as a form of relational performance, which she terms "pasivo ethics." The argument develops through a series of compelling case studies, including a series of novels by Octavio Paz and Luis Zapata that trace the position of the bottom in Mexican nationalist literature; the forms of exposure, risk, and proximity in the performance work of artist Lechedevirgen Trimegisto; a reading of violence and the erotic in the work of artist Bruno Ramri; and reading artists such as Yosimar Reyes, Yanina Orellana, and Carlos Martiel as they build a framework of sexual inheritance that carries the traumas of Mexicanness into the diaspora.

Through a broad archive rooted in hemispheric Latinx performance, Bottoms Up considers how sexual and political power are bound up with each other in the shaping of Mexicanness. Placing particular emphasis on questions of queer and trans Mexican embodiment, the book explains how Mexicanness is constituted through discourses of exposure.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: A Bottom’s Theory of Exposure
• 1. Like a Dagger: Lechedevirgen Trimegisto Risks Aesthetics
• 2. After Vampiro: Fucking Like Adonis García
• 3. Bruno Ramri and the Corruption of a Mecos State
• 4. Altars for los Hijos de la Chingada: Crossing Sex with Yanina Orellana and Yosimar Reyes
• 5. Stuck on Carlos Martiel: The Blackness of Hemispheric Latinx American Performance
• Coda: The Trans Pasiva
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author