Periscope articles and content
“I have a right to show my color, darling! I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!” The opening pages of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life summon the specter of Crystal Labeija. In a now-iconic scene from the … Continue reading “Afro-Fabulating in the Shadows”
What does it feel like to describe an appearance that hasn’t quite come into being? To conjure a sensation at the edges of haptic awareness? To make a case for a time yet to announce itself as present and always … Continue reading “Dark Descriptions of Black Appearance”
Film plays an important role in Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life and offers a kind of historical starting point in the 60s and 70s for the contemporary span this book covers. Nyong’o introduces his project via … Continue reading “A Dark Cinema”
Blackness is both elastic and not. Blackness is ascribed to many who can trace ancestry to the African diaspora, a relation that has been determined by the transatlantic slave trade. Here, blackness is tethered explicitly to people and their lives. … Continue reading “Blackness, the Virtual, and the Work of Fabulation”
I. There are some things that seem too volatile to be touched, that confound consideration. Moments, that when they appear, time opens up, reaches across space, prods, squeezes, cathecting pain and pleasure. These moments pivot between fragility and indestructibility and … Continue reading “On Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Black (Diasporic/Nordic) Arts”
Almost a decade ago, Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez published Los migrantes que no importan, first in Spain and then in Mexico, recounting his journeys with Central American migrants as they traveled through Mexico to the US border. It remains one … Continue reading “Introduction: On the Accumulation of Bodies”
My first encounter with Capitalismo gore was in 2012. Back then, I was living in Barcelona with a group of activists and academics, and we were asking each other about the violence in Mexico, represented in the European media through … Continue reading “Escape Routes to Capitalismo Gore“
I first encountered Sayak Valencia’s brilliant Gore Capitalism accidentally, sometime in 2012. During one of my visits to Tijuana, my hometown, I made a trek to Librería Sor Juana, the city’s feminist bookstore, where Capitalismo gore seemed to pop out … Continue reading “Finding Meaning in Gore”
In 2012, Los Angeles artist Rafa Esparza used the following materials to stage his performance STILL in LA’s Elysian Park: soil, artist’s breath, translucent balloons, jute rope noose, shovel, and a cardboard box. Only a few spectators experienced this performance … Continue reading “Time Dislocated: Masculinity and the Performance of Breathing”
J. Marion Sims describes the first time he saw a vesicovaginal fistula as if he had been gazing at a captivating portrait. “Introducing the bent handle of a spoon, I saw everything, as no man had seen before,” writes the … Continue reading “In the Flesh”
In Gore Capitalism, transfeminist intellectual Sayak Valencia gives us a vocabulary, a taxonomy to articulate a horror that before 2010 we did not have words to name in Mexico. We had the numbers, the statistics, the hard, cold data to … Continue reading “Gore Capitalism and the Contemporary Grammars of Violence and Resistance”
Gore Capitalism was first published by a small press in Spain in 2010. That was four years before the disappearance of the 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Guerrero. It was before the discovery of mass graves in … Continue reading “Countering Gore Capitalism”
I proposed the concept gore capitalism to explain the atrocious quotidian violence that has taken place on the Tijuana border for over a decade. Thus, operating through a theoretical, philosophical, and transfeminist framework, gore capitalism became a concept used within … Continue reading “Gore Capitalism Then and Now”
Consider the many airport terminals that are under construction right now all across the globe. Imagine for a moment that they are not pieces of infrastructure with a yet-to-come opening date but monuments of the future past, their lounges already … Continue reading “Pacing the Airport”
Its grip is firm, yet soft. It confines you, but with the best of intentions. Like a weirdly sexual caterpillar or a slug that has come to rest on your shoulders, it covers the back of your head and your … Continue reading “Welcome Confinement: Notes on the Neck Pillow”
