Messy queer familias: Negotiating desire, pleasure and melancholia in Vida

Abstract

This article analyses the messy queer relationships that shape la familia in Tanya Saracho’s show, Vida. It highlights how the show reckons with mess as an affective structure in the lives of queer Latinx subjects, whose racialized sexualities and genders produce intricate subject positions from which to negotiate power. By offering ‘messy queer familias’ as an analytic paradigm, the article tracks the ways in which pleasure, desire, shame and melancholia converge and diverge in the storylines of the two Chicana protagonists, Emma and Lyn. I suggest that Vida tells a messy story about queer Latinx lives, and purposefully so, in order to shine light on messy relations of power. Analysing the manifestation of ghosts, queer kinship practices, the glimmers and wonders of a queerceañera, and melancholic mother-daughter relations, I argue that Vida’s characters make space within la familia for queerness to thrive.