Monday, April 27, 2015

Lola von Miramar and Larry La Fountain at Loisaida Festival in May 2015

Two fantastic upcoming events curated by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé:

Friday, May 22 : Performing Queer Latin@ Loisaida: A Cabaret

This event is on May 22, 2015 8:00 pm

LOISAIDA_FEST-LOGO-4COLOR
Performing Queer Latin@ Loisaida: A Cabaret (8:00-10:30 pm)

Sponsored by: Loisaida Inc.
Loisaida has a long tradition of LGBTQ Latin@ artistic expression, experimentation and activism which developed from encounters among racially, ethnically, generically and sexually diverse folks in streets, parks, restaurants, cafes, theaters, galleries, bars, and cabarets. Some of New York City’s most legendary queer Latin@ performance artists pay tribute to this tradition and kick off the Loisaida Center’s 28th Annual Loisaida Festival.

Performances by:

Emanuel Xavier is a poet and performer of Ecuadorian/Puerto Rican heritage and an iconic figure of the Loisaida spoken word and performance scenes.  He is the author of the poetry books Nefarious (2013), Americano: Growing up Gay and Latino in the USA (2012), Pier Queen (2012), and If Jesus Were Gay & other poems (2010), the novel Christ Like (2009), and the audio spoken word album, Legendary (2009).  He is editor of Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry (2011) and Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (2008).  He appeared on Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry on HBO and has performed in cities throughout the United States, Buenos Aires, Ghent, London, and Paris.
Susana Cook is an icon of the Lower East Side lesbian underground.  Born in Argentina, Cook is a New-York-based playwright, performer and director of works in political theater.  She has staged 16 original plays, includingHamletango100 years of AttitudeDykensteinSpic for Export, and Ther Values Horror Show, in venues such as Dixon Place, P.S. 122, W.O. W Café Theater, Ubu Rep, and The Kitchen.
Jorge Merced is an award-winning actor, theatre director, and queer scholar and activist. He is associate artistic director of the Pregones Theater where he has directed plays and performances such as Baile Cangrejero, El Apagón, Blanco, Aloha Boricua, Migrants!, Las facultades, Neon Baby, and Marchers Trilogy and the readings and workshop productions for the Asunción Playwrights Project.  His New York directing credits also include Fellini’s La Strada with René Buch, El huésped vacío and The Smell of Popcorn (IATI).  As an actor, he is acclaimed for his role as Loca la de la locura [The Queen of Madness] in Pregones’s play based on the writer Manuel Ramos Otero’s short story of the same name, El bolero fue mi ruina [The Bolero Was My Downfall].  He has trained, performed, and directed throughout the U.S. and abroad in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, and Spain.
Karen Jaime is an acclaimed spoken word/performance artist and poet, an accomplished scholar, and a postdoctoral research associate (2014-2015)/ Assistant Professor (2015-) in the Department of Performance and Media Arts and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University.  As a performer, she has served as the host/curator for the Friday Night Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe, participated in the spoken word documentary Spit!, and was featured in the Emmy-award winning CUNY-TV program Nueva York.  As a poet, Jaime’s work is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians.”  Her critical writing has been published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, in the online journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, e-Misférica, and in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.  Karen is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Queering Poetry in Loisaida: Language, History, and Performance at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Hosted by: Larry LaFountain-Stokes is a distinguished creative writer, scholar, and performer. He is an associate professor of Spanish and American Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and author of the bilingual book of short stories and personal essays Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails, the performance piece Abolición del pato, and the scholarly study Queer Ricans: Puerto Rican Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora.  He is well-known for his performance persona Lola von Miramar.
Curated by: Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé is professor of Spanish and comparative literature, and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute at Fordham University in New York.  He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, a book about art and queer Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s, and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. He has been a recipient of the Ford Foundation and the NEH fellowships.


Saturday, May 23 : Reconstructing Queer Latin@ Loisaida in Cinema Literature and Art

This event is on May 23, 2015

LOISAIDA_FEST-LOGO-4COLOR
Reconstructing Queer Latin@ Loisaida in Cinema
Literature and Art (1:00-5:30 pm)

Sponsored by: Loisaida Inc.
Loisaida has long been recognized as an international cutting-edge center of creativity and experimentation in the arts and activism. However the contribution of Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists in creating this culture, which has inspired the rest of the nation and the world, has only recently been the object of scholarly study. The Loisaida Center pays homage to two of the founding figures of Queer Latin@ Loisaida art and activism, drag performer Mario Montez (1935-2013) and performance artist Alina Troyano (a.k.a Carmelita Tropicana), divas of queer Latin@ Loisaida cinema and stage, by showing two of their most famous and representative films, José Rodríguez-Soltero’s The Life, Death, and Assumption of Lupe Velez (1966) and Ela Troyano’s Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1996). The viewing of Lupe will be introduced by Yale University film historian and curator Ron Gregg. The viewings ofLupe and Your Kunst will be followed by Q & A with curator Ron Gregg, the artist Alina Troyano, and the director Ela Troyano. A panel of distinguished scholars discussing the state of the research on the contribution of Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists to Loisaida’s cultural and social life will follow the viewings. Curated by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé.

Divas of Queer Latin@ Loisaida Cinema and Stage:
Mario Montez and Carmelita Troyano

1:00-2:00 pm José Rodríguez-Soltero’s The Life, Death, and Assumption of Lupe Velez (1966) (50 mins). Starring Mario Montez. Introduced by Ron Gregg (Yale University)
2:00-2:30 pm Ela Troyano’s Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1996) (27 mins). Starring Carmelita Tropicana.
2:30-3:30 pm Q and A with Ron Gregg, Ela Troyano, and Alina Troyano (a.k.a Carmelita Tropicana).

The State of Research on Queer Latin@ Loisaida: A Round Table Discussion.

3:30-5:30 pm A panel of distinguished scholars discusses the state of the research on the contribution of Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists to Loisaida’s cultural and social life: What have Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists contributed to the culture of experimentation and innovation, social and individual expression that is associated with Loisaida? What have the interactions been between Latin@ lgbtq artists and activists and other queer Loisaida artists and activists? What have the interactions been between Latin@ queer artists and activists and Loisaida artists and activists from other racial and ethnic groups? What have the interactions been between Latin@ queer artists and other Loisaida Latin@ artists and activists? What are the “hidden” or unexplored histories of queer Latin@ Loisaida? Where should we look to recover these “hidden” or unexplored histories? What role or roles have queer Latin@ Loisaida artists and activists played in the cultural, social, and economic transformations of Loisaida from 1970s to the present?
With the participation of:
Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University)is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She is an associate professor of English and Latino Studies at Columbia University, the director of the Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activist archive at Butler Library. Among her books and publications are Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (winner, 2004 CHOICE Award), The Latino Media Gap, and Sovereign Acts. Her films include AIDS in the Barrio, Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, and Small City, Big Change. In 2005, she was named one of the “100 Most Influential Hispanics” by Hispanic Business magazine, and the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her in 2008 as a “global expert.” She is also the recipient of El Diario/La Prensa’s annual “Distinguished Women Award” (2010) and Columbia University’s “Most Distinguished Faculty Award” (2012).
Roy Pérez (Willamette University)is an accomplished scholar and poet and an assistant professor of English, American Ethnic Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He received his PhD in English at New York University with concentrations in Latina/o literary and performance studies and is a past fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has published poems and essays in Glitter Tongue, the Best of Panic! poetry anthology, TheThePoetry, bully bloggers, and FENCE Magazine, and recently adapted one of his poems to film with director Finn Paul. His current scholarly book project, Proximity: Queer Configurations of Race and Sex, examines the function of interracial closeness in the articulation of sexual identity by queer artists from the late-nineteenth century into the twenty-first.
Karen Jaime (Cornell University)is an acclaimed spoken word/performance artist and poet, an accomplished scholar, and a postdoctoral research associate (2014-2015)/ Assistant Professor (2015-) in the Department of Performance and Media Arts and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University. As a performer, she has served as the host/curator for the Friday Night Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe, participated in the spoken word documentary Spit!, and was featured in the Emmy-award winning CUNY-TV program Nueva York. As a poet, Jaime’s work is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, and in a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians.” Her critical writing has been published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, in the online journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, e-Misférica, and in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Karen is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Queering Poetry in Loisaida: Language, History, and Performance at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Larry LaFountain-Stokes (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor)is a distinguished creative writer, scholar, and performer. He is an associate professor of Spanish and American Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and author of the bilingual book of short stories and personal essays Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails, the performance piece Abolición del pato, and the scholarly study Queer Ricans: Puerto Rican Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. He is well-known for his performance persona Lola von Miramar.
Moderated by: Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (Fordham University)is professor of Spanish and comparative literature, and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, a book about art and queer Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s, and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. He has been a recipient of the Ford Foundation and the NEH fellowships.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

Being With: A Special Issue of Social Text on the Work of José Esteban Muñoz

Just came across the "Being With" 2014 special issue of Social Text, which Lisa Duggan mentions in her "He Does Class and Race, She Does Gender and Sexuality (and Class and Race): Heteronormativity in the Left Academy" blogpost on Bully Bloggers. (Thanks for posting on Facebook, William Calvo-Quirós!) It is a very moving and fascinating tribute to leading scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013), full of insightful essays, poems, and performance documentation. Some highlights include Jean-Luc Nancy's "Ode to José Esteban Muñoz" (masterfully translated by Damon R. Young), Joshua Chambers-Letson's reflection on organ transplants and Pedro Almodóvar's classic film All About My Mother ("Compensatory Hypertrophy, or All about My Mother"), Alexandra T. Vazquez's "Parts of a World," Joshua Javier Guzmán's "Notes on the Comedown," Tavia Nyong'o's "In Finitude: Being with José, Being with Pedro" (about Pedro Zamora), José Quiroga's "Unpacking My Files: My Life as a Queer Brigadista," and Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas's "It’s Kinda Cold Out Here: A Poem Assembled from Correspondence, with an Introduction." A beautiful publication!

Social Text (Volume 32, Number 4 121, Winter 2014, Special Issue Editors: The Being With Research Cluster).


Friday, April 17, 2015

15th Annual Latin@ Culture Show at the University of Michigan

15th Annual Latin@ Culture Show: Caminos, at the Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Image from 14th Annual Latin@ Culture Show with Lola von Miramar

Come out, come out, wherever you are! Tonight Michigan está de quinceañera! Yes! It's the 15th Annual Latin@ Culture Show and who is the host? The one and only Lola von Miramar, who is recovering from her cough but will be there with all of her wit and charm! Come to the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre at 7:00pm. In Ann Arbor, Michigan! Viva! See Facebook event here.


Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Larry La Fountain-Stokes Presents “The Drag of Poverty”



Article published in The Ledger:


PHOTO BY Michelle De la cruz
PHOTO BY Michelle De La Cruz

Over 50 faculty, staff, and students gathered in Jane Russell Commons on April 8 to hear Larry La Fountain-Stokes’ presentation “The Drag of Poverty: Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Welfare Queens.” Support for the event came from the Arts and Lecture Committee, Division of Culture, Arts, and Communication, American Studies Faculty, Diversity Resource Center and Staff of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. The talk was the first of a two-part tour with a presentation at the UWT on the 8th, followed by a presentation at the Seattle campus on the 9th.
La Fountain-Stokes’ talk is part of a book project entitled Translocas: Trans Diasporic Puerto Rican Drag where he focuses in on transvestism and performance while asserting that drag has the ability to question gender and sexuality and explore things like ethnicity, poverty, and race.
La Fountain-Stokes, author, performer, and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, focuses his research on drag performance, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in cultural studies, Latin American literature, and performance studies. In the talk, attendees had the opportunity to explore sexualization of Latino/a poverty in the United States. Through examining performances of drag queens in film and television, La Fountain-Stokes walked the audience through what he calls “The Drag of Poverty” and framed a new meaning for “welfare queen.”
La Fountain-Stokes posed questions like, “what does it mean to consider drag as a political act that has the power, not simply to challenge binary gender norms, but also to question other social formations and power structures in society?” and “what does it mean to see drag as something more than mere entertainment?”
The presentation highlighted Erika Lopez’s The Welfare Queen, Holly Woodlawn in Andy Warhol’s film Trash, and Monica Beverly Hillz commonly known from the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race. La Fountain-Stokes used these performances to demonstrate how queer Latino/a performers from the working-class, in his words, “have been forced to negotiate challenging life and work environments and to recreate or invent themselves in some cases appropriating and flipping the stigmatized category of welfare queen…historically, marginally, minoritarian subjects such as diasporic Puerto Rican drag queens have been largely excluded from government services or assistance such as welfare or gainful employment…this leaves limited employment opportunities.” He goes on to correlate the spaces these performers find themselves in with limited employment opportunities being the exact places in which we see the aforementioned performances.
The talk concluded with a few questions posed by staff, students, and faculty members for elaboration on how the performers in such different mediums connected and more details on the compensation for the performers on the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The event ended with a reception and a spread of cookies and cake.
Students received the talk well. Student Nathan Pelland said after the talk, “Sometimes I find myself questioning whether Drag Race is an alright representation of queer communities in media…it is very problematic, sometimes it’s transphobic and there are certainly racist attitudes within it…I was very enthralled in this lecture today for hitting many of those points and concerns yet also noting its significance to the gay community.”
American Studies (AMST) faculty such as Ed Chamberlin, who gave the introduction and closed the event, and Dr.Ingrid Walker were glad to have brought La Fountain-Stokes to UWT. The AMST faculty agreed in regard to La Fountain-Stokes’ works, saying that it embodied or brought together the issues covered in the AMST major. With the revamp of the AMST program, events like this shine a light on the major and represent  some of the core concepts that are covered or examined in the American Studies major.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Cuando los hombres se maquillan: Recordando a Alex Soto

El distinguido y reconocido transformista puertorriqueño Alex Soto falleció el jueves 9 de abril de 2015 a la edad de 49 años debido a un fallo cardíaco. Se encontraba en Springfield, Massachusetts (EE. UU.) recibiendo tratamiento médico y rehabilitación por su condición de diabetes y las complicaciones de salud que acarreaba. Nos solidarizamos con su familia y much@s admirador@s en este momento de gran tristeza. Conmovedoras expresiones de pésame han sido emitidas en la prensa por Samantha Love y en Facebook por Barbra Herr, Yoryie Pas Iempre y el bar Zal Zi Puedes, entre otr@s. Tuve la oportunidad de ver a Alex Soto en La señorita Margarita (obra del dramaturgo brasileño Roberto Athayde) en el Centro de Bellas Artes de Santurce y en la obra Vidas de herejes de Héctor Méndez en el Festival de Teatro del Tercer Amor en el Teatro Coribantes en 2007, la cual reseñé en Claridad.

ALEX SOTO, TRANSFORMISTA PUERTORRIQUEÑO


Aquí compartimos un video producido por El Nuevo Día sobre el tema del transformismo en Puerto Rico:

CUANDO LOS HOMBRES SE MAQUILLAN: EL NUEVO DÍA


Conferencia Distinguida Nilita Vientós Gastón: Rubén Ríos Ávila presenta la Conferencia "Cartografía Queer"

Conferencia Distinguida Nilita Vientós Gastón

 

Conferencia Distinguida Nilita Vientós Gastón: Rubén Ríos Ávila

presenta la Conferencia "Cartografía Queer"

Jueves 16 de abril, 2:30pm, Anfiteatro 2 DMN,
Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
La Conferencia Distinguida Nilita Vientós Gastón del Programa de Estudios de Mujer y Género elige cada primavera honrar el legado de Vientós Gáston e invita a ofrecer una conferencia, a una investigadora o investigador, creador o creadora de las diversas disciplinas cuya obra se haya distinguido por su excelencia y por su relevancia para los estudios de género. Este año se le ha conferido al Dr. Rubén Ríos Ávila. La conferencia, titulada "Cartografía Queer", será el jueves, 16 de abril de 2015 a las 2:30 p.m. en el Anfiteatro 2 del Edificio DMN de la Facultad de Estudios Generales. 

¡Les esperamos!
Para más información escríbanos a:

programageneroupr@gmail.com

O visite nuestras páginas:

Portal Oficial: programagenero.org

Facebook: Programa Género UPRRP

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Cooking with Drag Queens Season one Premiering April 22!

Today at the University of Washington, Tacoma!


Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Speaking today on The Drag of Poverty: Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hills, Welfare Queens. 4:15pm, Milgard Assembly Room, Univ. of Washington, Tacoma