Cogiendo en luto

Abstract

Chavela Vargas is widely known for her unique approach to some of México’s most celebrated musical genres. Though undoubtedly a queer icon within and outside of México, critical scholarship has only recently begun to focus on the way her queer migrant subjectivity and marimacho voice, persona, and performances reinvent Mexican sonic history and interpellate listeners queerly. Importantly, her aching vocals and tragic life story coexist with pulsating sexual energy. In this essay I argue that Chavela inaugurates a postmortem politics in which grief and the erotic are held together, instead of separated or silenced by taboo. Inspired by Chavela, I introduce the practice of cogiendo en luto (fucking in grief), which asks the difficult questions: What happens when Eros and Thanatos go to bed together? How can the erotic help to shape grief, and vice versa? By linking Eros to Thanatos, Chavela makes the grief she experienced throughout her life transformative, intimate, expansive, introspective, chaotic, and at certain privileged moments erotic, orgasmic, and sensual. The essay samples lyrics and performances of some of Chavela’s songs, film cameos, and an obituary written about her by Pedro Almodóvar. Together, these queer performative interventions re-signify the grief of migration, addiction, heartbreak, and death, while forging an affective and fleshy relationship with listeners and spectators. As a queer and grieving listener/spectator/fan of Chavela’s, I also weave my own grief into the essay, reflecting on what Chavela meant to my healing process and further underscoring her unique affective contributions to contemporary queer subjectivities and soundscapes.