Aurora Guerrero is a California-based queer Chicana activist, writer, and filmmaker born in San Francisco's Mission District and currently residing in Southern California. Born to Mexican immigrant parents, she is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of the Arts. Her films include Pura Lengua (2005), Viernes Girl (2005), and Mosquita y Mari (2012). In the ten years since its release, Mosquita y Mari has become a film classic, making a significant impact on queer studies scholarship and in university courses in Latinx studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and media studies.This dossier spotlights the impact of Guerrero's film—focused on the intimate bond between two fifteen-year-old Latinas growing up in the working-class immigrant Los Angeles neighborhood of Huntington Park—in the context of the classroom. Beginning with a conversation between Guerrero and Richard T. Rodríguez, the dossier includes four contributions by Gayatri Gopinath, Ariana Ruiz, Amalia Cabezas, and Larissa M. Mercado-Lopez that spotlight the pedagogical value of Mosquita y Mari for thinking about the complexities of sexuality, gender, class, race, and desire. Indeed, Guerrero's film—which refuses hard-and-fast categorizations of identity—proves generative for considering intimacy against the grain. In her compelling reading of Mosquita y Mari, Micaela Jamaica Díaz-Sánchez understands the film as operating in tandem with what Chicana lesbian theorist Emma Pérez (1999) calls “the decolonial imaginary.” In the film, Díaz-Sánchez (2017: 110) writes, “The decolonial signals a process and not a final location or destination. Guerrero participates in developing a decolonial aesthetic by resisting the logic of completion. She offers us images of desire that disarticulate heteronormative notions of intimacy.” And this is why Mosquita y Mari continues to matter a decade after its initial appearance.

Ulrike Müller's Herstory Inventory (HI) is a collection of over one hundred works on paper by “feminist” artists who were given “drawing assignments” that began with textual prompts taken from an archival list of T-shirts that Müller discovered in the collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). HI has also had multiple incarnations as a staged reading/live performance, audio installation, collective art project, art exhibition, and book, and its relay across media participates in a fascination with the archive that has pervaded LGBTQ culture, resulting in a proliferation of new archives that is one manifestation of the “archival turn.” This essay focuses on how Müller's HI uses the LHA as a point of departure for a creative practice that not only opens lesbian feminist archives to new visibility and new publics but also creates a transgenerational dialogue around lesbian feminist politics and representation — both honoring and reviving its history and subjecting it to critique. HI's engagement with the LHA's lesbian feminist commitment to archival autonomy provides an interesting case history for radical archival politics, as tensions between counterarchives and archival critique get played out through the tensions between lesbian and queer feminisms. Returning to the politics of representation and visibility that have been so central and vexing in lesbian feminism, HI puts art practices in conversation with archival ones. The project approaches the archive through abstraction and drawing, both practices of representation that resist the realisms of documentary media such as film and photography, to enact a queer politics of visibility.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, hustlers and street queens staged countless food riots, sit-ins, and pickets in downtown “vice” districts across the United States. One cannot appreciate the indignation and rage that sparked these rebellions without understanding the moral values and economic norms shared by those who took collective action: the self-defined “kids on the street” who often traveled from central city “tenderloin” to “tenderloin,” connecting far-flung districts through migratory circuits. Sustaining themselves through sex work and other criminalized economies, kids created in these districts a distinct counterpublic with its own moral norms, performance practices, rituals for renaming new members, conventions for collective housing, and networks for pooling resources. Urban renewal and increased policing in US cities violated these norms, providing the anger and indignation that fueled central city uprisings during the long 1960s. Understanding the anger that prompted street kids to rebel allows one to grasp what the author calls their performative economy: the reciprocities, obligations, and moral norms shared by the kids on the street and the ways they were materialized and transmitted intergenerationally via performance.

The locus amoenus boasts a long history in cultural representation as a motif affiliated with impossible unions. This article seeks to articulate it as an analytic category for contemporary queer cinema. It does so on the basis of a detailed analysis of Stephan Lacant's Freier Fall (Free Fall, 2013). Lacant's film presents two intertwined temporal structures that converge in the film's evocation of the locus amoenus. On the one hand, Free Fall depicts a heteronormative habitus into which its main character, Marc (Hanno Koffler), is socialized. Here, in the domain of chrononormativity (Freeman), the protagonist's past and present align and are intended to shape the future. On the other hand, the locus amoenus generates an alternate, queer temporal order for Marc: on meeting Kay (Max Riemelt), Marc derails. The regular liaison with Kay poses a threat to the hegemonic order and indexes a queer presentism competing with the regimented hetero temporality of his familial life. The analysis of these competing and intertwined temporal orders will show how the regular narrative recurrence of the locus amoenus in the film — next to being a driving force for the film's melodramatic sentimentality — also stimulates “viewerly” pleasure. This pleasure is immediately tethered to the rhythm of the motif's recurrence and the disabling of hegemonic pressures faced by the protagonist. However, the momentary recourse to queer pleasure afforded by the locus amoenus does not anticipate affirmative queer futures. As this article demonstrates, the locus amoenus advances a queer presentism that compromises liberatory potentials.

Review Article| April 01 2023 “Filmmaking Found Me”: A Conversation with Aurora Guerrero Richard T. Rodríguez Richard T. Rodríguez Richard T. Rodríguez is professor of English and media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (2022). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2023) 29 (2): 262–268. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10308549 Connected Content Companion: Thinking and Teaching with Aurora Guerrero's Mosquita y Mari Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Richard T. Rodríguez; “Filmmaking Found Me”: A Conversation with Aurora Guerrero. GLQ 1 April 2023; 29 (2): 262–268. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10308549 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search Issue Section: Moving Image Review You do not currently have access to this content.