Racial Shame and the Pleasure of Transformation

Abstract

This essay analyzes Latino conservative thought by rethinking the logics of assimilation through a simultaneous exploration of aesthetic possibility and negative affect. Focusing on the writings of Richard Rodriguez, the essay considers how creative forms of self-individuation and political agency cannot easily be decoupled from negative forms of identification and disidentification. Highlighting the interplay Rodriguez stages between shame, stigma, appropriation, pleasure, and play, the essay turns to queer theory and theories of affect as a way to more fully understand the latent intensities and political logics that operate in Rodriguez’s queer-yet-conservative depictions of assimilation. In seeking to give an account of queer affect in Rodriguez, the essay attends to the many ways that “the deployment of sexuality intersects with the deployment of race.” This reading of racialized sexuality works to resist a priori assumptions that such forms of intersectionality are necessarily reparative or politically radical. Rodriguez simultaneously articulates a queer form of racialized sexuality that resists normalization while also sustaining a conservative logic that approaches identity-based movements as spaces of disciplinary power, devoid of creativity and play.