
Playful Protest
The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media
Pleasure-based politics in Puerto Rican and Cuban pop culture
Cloth – $110
978-0-252-04529-5
Paper – $28
978-0-252-08742-4
eBook – $19.95
978-0-252-05481-5
Publication Date
Paperback: 09/05/2023
Cloth: 09/05/2023
Cloth: 09/05/2023
Series: Feminist Media Studies
About the Book
Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take political violence seriously.Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.
About the Author
Kristie Soares is an assistant professor of women and gender studies and codirector of LGBTQ studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.Reviews
"An important intervention in Latinx cultural studies . . . [Playful Protest] is an unmatched theorization of joy that is timely and necessary." --Choice“Kristie Soares masterfully deconstructs joy in the cultural production of Puerto Ricans and Cubans in the United States as a range of affects that holds within it various contradictions around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. In writing that is clear, inventive, and in numerous instances emotional and profound, Soares conducts a thorough examination of each term as it appears in specific cultural texts, guiding us through the historical and cultural implications of centering joy in Latinx life in the United States.” --Latino Studies
"A welcome volume on the affective and political possibilities of Latinx joy. Soares compellingly illustrates that an affect like joy, as opposed to more favored affects for scholarly inquiry like depression or envy, for instance, is just as viable a site for critical inquiry and robust research. Playful Protest evidences instructively how Latinx joy, and the pleasures of joyful protest, can provide formative conceptual tools and political strategies for Latinx studies and beyond." --Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
Blurbs
“This book is a breath of fresh air. Kristie Soares recuperates joy and its multiple Latinx variants, such as gozando, choteo, and silliness, as radical empowering practices. It is a brilliant challenge to critical approaches that only focus on Latinx negative affect.”--Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, author of Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance