Between Camp and Cursi

Between Camp and Cursi PDF Author: Brandon P. Bisbey
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438486677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Between Camp and Cursi examines the role of humor in portrayals of homosexuality in contemporary Mexican literature. Brandon P. Bisbey argues that humor based on camp and cursilería—a form of "bad taste" that expresses a sense of social marginalization—is used to represent key social conflicts and contradictions of modernity in Mexico. Combining perspectives from queer theory, humor theory, and Latin American cultural studies, Bisbey looks at a corpus of canonical and lesser-known texts that treat a range of topics relevant to contemporary discussions of gender, sexuality, race, and human rights in Mexico—including sex work, transvestitism, bisexuality, same-sex marriage, racism, classism, and homophobic and transphobic violence. Emphasizing the subversive possibilities of the comic, Between Camp and Cursi considers how this body of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature has challenged heteronormativity in Mexico and wrestled more broadly with both the colonial underpinnings of modernity and hegemonic Western gender norms.

Between Camp and Cursi

Between Camp and Cursi PDF Author: Brandon P. Bisbey
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438486677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between Camp and Cursi examines the role of humor in portrayals of homosexuality in contemporary Mexican literature. Brandon P. Bisbey argues that humor based on camp and cursilería—a form of "bad taste" that expresses a sense of social marginalization—is used to represent key social conflicts and contradictions of modernity in Mexico. Combining perspectives from queer theory, humor theory, and Latin American cultural studies, Bisbey looks at a corpus of canonical and lesser-known texts that treat a range of topics relevant to contemporary discussions of gender, sexuality, race, and human rights in Mexico—including sex work, transvestitism, bisexuality, same-sex marriage, racism, classism, and homophobic and transphobic violence. Emphasizing the subversive possibilities of the comic, Between Camp and Cursi considers how this body of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature has challenged heteronormativity in Mexico and wrestled more broadly with both the colonial underpinnings of modernity and hegemonic Western gender norms.

Anachronism and Its Others

Anachronism and Its Others PDF Author: Valerie Rohy
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438428669
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description


The Politics of Taste

The Politics of Taste PDF Author: Ana María Reyes
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147800455X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In The Politics of Taste Ana María Reyes examines the works of Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic, Marta Traba, who championed González's art during Colombia's National Front coalition government (1958–74). During this critical period in Latin American art, artistic practice, art criticism, and institutional objectives came into strenuous yet productive tension. While González’s triumphant debut excited critics who wanted to cast Colombian art as modern, sophisticated, and universal, her turn to urban lowbrow culture proved deeply unsettling. Traba praised González's cursi (tacky) recycling aesthetic as daringly subversive and her strategic localism as resistant to U.S. cultural imperialism. Reyes reads González's and Traba's complex visual and textual production and their intertwined careers against Cold War modernization programs that were deeply embedded in the elite's fear of the masses and designed to avert Cuban-inspired revolution. In so doing, Reyes provides fresh insights into Colombia's social anxieties and frustrations while highlighting how interrogations of taste became vital expressions of the growing discontent with the Colombian state.

Romancing Yesenia

Romancing Yesenia PDF Author: Masha Salazkina
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520400763
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance Yesenia. The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes Yesenia’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and of the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing "Yesenia" argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.

Desiring Emancipation

Desiring Emancipation PDF Author: Marti M. Lybeck
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438452217
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Uses historical case studies to illuminate women’s claims to emancipation and to sexual subjectivity during the tumultuous Wilhelmine and Weimar periods in Germany. Desiring Emancipation traces middle-class German women’s claims to gender emancipation and sexual subjectivity in the pre-Nazi era. The emergence of homosexual identities and concepts in this same time frame provided the context for expression of individual struggles with self, femininity, and sex. The book asks how women used new concepts and opportunities to construct selves in relationship to family, society, state, and culture. Taking a queer approach, Desiring Emancipation’s goal is not to find homosexuals in history, but to analyze how women reworked categories of gender and sex. Marti M. Lybeck interrogates their desires, demonstrating that emancipation was fraught with conflict, anachronism, and disappointment. Each chapter is a microhistorical recreation of the actions, writings, contexts, and conflicts of specific groups of women. The topics include the experience of first-generation university students, public debates about female homosexuality, and the stories of three civil servants whose careers were ruined by workplace accusations of homosexuality. The book concludes with a debate between the women who joined the 1920s homosexual movement on the meanings of their new identities.

Comic Effects

Comic Effects PDF Author: Paul Lewis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438410700
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Lewis draws on both humor theories and research, arguing for the development of interdisciplinary methodologies in the study of literary humor. He demonstrates that the sociologist of humor and the comic playwright approach the same subject—humor in and between groups—with different tools, that writers of Bildungsromane and developmental psychologists share a common interest in the role of humor in maturation, and that the monsters that haunt the psyches of professional comedians can be useful in understanding the odd minglings of humor and fear in Gothic fiction. His treatment of writers who differ widely in their use of humor suggests that the complexity and diversity of humor make it a richly variable determinant of character, genre, and writer.

The Culture of Cursilería

The Culture of Cursilería PDF Author: Noël Valis
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursilería refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursilería, Noël Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture. Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to argue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity. The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.

Negotiating Sainthood

Negotiating Sainthood PDF Author: Kathy Bacon
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1904350925
Category : Saints in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Negotiating Sainthood

Crossing Through Chueca

Crossing Through Chueca PDF Author: Jill Robbins
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816669899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
An exploration of queer Madrid's physical and symbolic literary culture.

Julio Galán

Julio Galán PDF Author: Teresa Eckmann
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826366023
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
From his provincial origins in the small northern Mexico town of Múzquiz, Coahuila, to his meteoric rise in Manhattan's East Village art scene, to having achieved international standing at the time of his early death at forty-seven, Julio Galán was radically transgressive. The artist extended contemporary Mexican painting beyond the cultural criticism of Neo-Mexicanism (neomexicanismo), redefining Mexican identity as gender-expansive in his art. Galán combined gender-fluid imagery, his performative persona, queer self-representation, and cross-cultural visual and textual references to create large-scale, layered, dialogical visual puzzles. An artist ahead of his time, Galán's content and imagery is relevant to contemporary LGBTQ+ social movements. Replete with full-color reproductions of Galán's artwork and photographic material, Teresa Eckmann's book serves as the first English-language monograph on the artist's life and work. Anyone interested in art in Mexico and Latin America will find this book an indispensable addition to their library, and it will be a core book on the study of this artist for decades to come.