"Through the use and study of photography, archives, literature, television, film, and installation art, Marcos Gonsalez makes a case for the role that indolence plays in challenging a neoliberal capitalist economy that is deeply embedded with cis-heteronormative and white supremacist values. By focusing on the ways in which queer/trans Latinx people find ways to demonstrate their lack of willing participation in these systems, he finds that dozing, slacking, daydreaming, partying, and lounging revolt against these systems and in turn are treated as being "revolting." Everything from the trans ur-text that is Paris is Burning, and the subsequent controversies, conversations, and evaluations of it in the decades since its debut, to RuPaul's Drag Race, to documentary photography of queer and trans life in Chicanx Los Angeles to writings and remembrances of the Pulse nightclub shootings, visuality, memory, racial and sexual identity merge together to shape alternative paths of resistance and ways of living within this culture and its economy"--
How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive.
How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive.
Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in productivist ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practicesrevolts that in turn are treated as revolting.
Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.