Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment

Abstract

Aesthetics of Excess:The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment Carolyn Silva (bio) Jillian Hernandez's Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020 In the book Aesthetics of Excess, University of Florida professor Jillian Hernandez explores the racialized and gendered experiences of working-class Black and Latina women and girls as their bodies and aesthetics are assessed, represented, and marginalized by societal norms of cultural production. The book attempts to capture the duality between legitimized versus deviant forms of gendered Blackness and Latinidad manifested through the bodies and aesthetics of girls and women of color. Hernandez's book is also a cautionary tale against discourses of excess that racialize the gendered aesthetics of Black women and Latinas by using white Eurocentric values, discourses, and imagery as the norm and producing a false dichotomy between excess and modesty as proxies for savagery and intellectual superiority, respectively. Born out of community work, the book draws on Hernandez's work with the Miami group Women on the Rise! (WORT), a space where art and theory collide, converse, and are shaped by the lived experiences and perceptions of girls and women of color. Situated in Miami, a city historically entangled with the aesthetics of Blackness and Latinidad, the book also captures Hernandez's complicated relationship with her own identity. Indeed, the book is inspired by Hernandez's own experiences as a woman of color, and the contrast between her own understanding of her aesthetics as a working-class Latina and the overtly sexualized gaze society attributes to Black and Latina women's visual identity. In exposing her conflicted relationship with her own identity, Hernandez walks us through the aesthetics, discourses, and representations of excess often associated with working-class Latinas and personified by the label of chonga. In Hernandez's tale, the representation of the chonga in popular culture allows us to understand [End Page 423] the politics of class and gendered aesthetics that racialize girls and women of color through the sexual aesthetics of excess. As Hernandez explains, the aesthetics of excess refers to the "creative, diasporic, iconographies and practices of bodily styling, art-making, and cultural production" (10) enacted by Black and Latina girls and women. Transgressive in nature, the aesthetics of excess capture women of color's attempts to engage in bodily representation to challenge hegemonic perceptions of gender, race, and sexual normativity that insist on perceiving excess "as a negative, a social liability, or deviancy" (11). Conversely, Hernandez chooses to read excess as a tool of empowerment and a form of cultural production utilized by women and girls of color to complicate notions of cultural and hierarchical perceptions of cultural productions that ultimately illustrate the "interplay between the sexual, racial, class, and gender discourses circulating in media" (9). Indeed, as Hernandez notes, women of color across the African diaspora have utilized and strategically positioned their bodies as canvases of representation that speak to issues of "race, gender, class, and sexuality for Black and Latina women and girls as they make art with and about their bodies" (7). Yet, as Hernandez notes, the cultural recognition of deviant modes of Latinidad embodied by the exaggerated aesthetics of girls and women of color came accompanied by a societal assessment that further racialized and marginalized Black and Latina bodies within and outside academic spaces, a trend exemplified by the polarized reactions to Cardi B, an AfroLatina, and her sexually charged music video "WAP," featuring Megan Thee Stallion. Policed by academia and society alike, the excess often carries the historical marks of "diasporic creative, cultural, and spiritual lineages that predate European colonization" (11) while troubling ideas of race formation, gender, and sexuality that continue to oppress women of color. Viewed in this light, excess becomes a creative practice embodied and enacted by women of color that "trouble sexual policing and reveal class disparity" (17). After all, as Hernandez suggests, by showing up as themselves in dehumanizing spaces, women of color have utilized excess as an agentic tool to subvert racialized sociocultural boundaries, legitimate their personhood, and agitated normative discourses. [End Page 424] Carolyn Silva Carolyn Silva is a PhD candidate in the...