Joshua Javier Guzmán

This chapter is concerned with the figure of the “Latina/o subject” as it presents a problem for aesthetics and queer criticism in psychoanalysis. Particularly, this political vexation intensifies at the moment where the Latina/o
subject’s inconclusive understanding of itself intersects with the political theater of the AIDS crisis. The chapter opens up questions regarding the affective and
psychic terrain of Latinidad, by highlighting two major texts in the field of Latino studies that propose we understand Latinidad as constituted by a politics of loss and dissensus. By foregrounding “loss” as a way to put political
and psychoanalytic theory into conversation within Latino studies, the chapter demonstrates the ways that Whiteness can be thought of in tandem with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the master signifier, and, in building on Kalpana Seshadri’s astute arguement, how the desire for whiteness is a desire for wholeness and mastery. One queer Chicano writer lends insight to this mutually constitutive juncture: the late writer and scholar, Arturo Islas, who died of AIDS complications in the early 1990s—a major focus of the
chapter. The author argues that Islas’ desire for white men, often expressed in his personal journals and uncollected early fiction, was situated in excess of the well-polished writings. In other words, what gets lost is the textual evidence of an internal contradiction constituted by a desire for Whiteness, where Whiteness is understood not as phenotype but as the unconscious fantasy for wholeness.

This brief meditation on Latino the word underscores a politics of loss at play in the emergence of the new term Latinx. The term Latinx reveals how a performance of negation, identified in the very telling word no in Latino/Chicano, takes seriously the ex-factor marking the collective phenomenon known as latinidad. If the shifts from o to o/a to @ and now x are about political inclusion, it is not through liberal incorporation but through the inscription of linguistic and symbolic cuts, which hemorrhage something remarkably unnamable.

This article functions as both an introduction to the special issue and a larger
contextualization of the intervention in relation the field of Latina/o Studies.
The editors of the special issue argue that aesthetics affords the time and space
within which to linger in the many questions, complexities, and problematics
that crowd under the sign of latinidad. Through engagements with the
contemporary political landscape, earlier articulations of the latinidad via
Norma Alarcón, and the performative billboard instillations of Félix GonzálezTorres,
the editors find spaces to pleasurably dwell in the many temporal and
spatial vectors of latinidad.

As a queer child growing up in the predominantly machista culture of Southern Texas, I imagined myself as superhuman, fighting off homophobic and misogynist evildoers, the bullies that plagued my school. Alice Bag’s memoir, Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, confirmed my suspicion that there were more of us misfits-wannabe-superheroes out there. Violence Girl captures an imagining of otherworldly belongings that helped Alicia Armandariz navigate the hostile barrios of East Los Angeles to later become Alice Bag, singer of the infamous L.A. punk rock band The Bags. Despite The Bags’ short-lived circulation, Alice Bag (aka Violence Girl) stands as one of the few female pioneers of the early L.A. punk scene. Her work landed her in Marc Spitz’s famous oral history of L.A.’s booming subculture, We Got the Neutron Bomb, and a cameo in Penelope Spheeris’ documentary, Decline of Western Civilization. Bag is also known for her involvement in the feminist punk band Castration Squad, and her later collaboration with drag superstar Vaginal Crème Davis in their concept band, ¡Cholita! As queer theorist José Muñoz has asserted, ¡Cholita! created ‘‘socially interrogative performances that complicated any easy understanding of race and ethnicity in the social matrix’’ (Muñoz 1997, p. 97). Bag’s contributions as a Chicana feminist punk rocker effectively index a moment in counter-cultural production where the traversal of gender, class, and racial boundaries works as an aesthetic technique of DIY-queer world making. Alice Bag grew up in a low-income Mexican-American barrio of East L.A., surviving gang recruitment and violence in high school and a machista father who subjected Alice’s mother to domestic abuse. The constant brutality afflicted on her mother was so extreme that police, neighbors, and even a young Alice attempted to intervene. Notions of the superhero and the misfit, aesthetic experiments in the form of identity makeovers, coupled with questions of ambivalence and contradiction culminate in a story about the messy processes of surviving under the mandate of normalcy usually expressed in the form of violence and brutality. The memoir features vignette-like chapters with personal archival photographs of Alice Bag’s upbringing in East Los Angeles up until her involvement in The Bags and the all-female band Castration Squad. We also find photographs from her watershed