Teatro Caliente! (review)

The introduction examines the discourses of health that Latinx cultural workers engage in their work. First, it elaborates how Latinx artists conceptualize health within a sociopolitical landscape shaped by the Immigration Reform and Control Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and the Affordable Care Act. Second, it outlines the methodology of interdisciplinary literary study and the engagement with disability studies and the health humanities that guide the project. In order to demonstrate the kind of cultural studies analysis that the book undertakes, the introduction examines the debates surrounding the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the performance manifesto Your Healing Is Killing Me by artist Virginia Grise. Finally, it elaborates a definition of radical health, which involves both challenging the stigma of unhealth and protesting the social conditions that give rise to racial health disparities.

Introduction

2023

Unprotected Texts

2023

This chapter examines the work of artists and activists–Gil Cuadros, Jaime Cortez, Adela Vázquez, and Rafael Campo–whose work addresses the ongoing prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Latinx communities. Their work furthermore represents three decades of Latinx HIV/AIDS art: Cuadros's 1994 mixed-genre book City of God; Cortez's 2004 graphic biography Sexile, depicting the life of trans activist Vázquez; and Campo's 2013 poetry collection Alternative Medicine. Engaging with these figures in the fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic provides powerful insights for resisting the logics that present HIV/AIDS as belonging elsewhere (in a distant past or on another continent), that treat the bodies and lives of those affected as disposable, and that pathologize sexual risk-taking while failing to address structural inequities.

Sugar, Shame, Love

2023

Because diabetes is so closely correlated to lifestyle, those experiencing it are often subjected to public shaming that is both insidious and overt, treated by family members, acquaintances, employee benefits administrators, journalists, and even health professionals as responsible for their condition. In response, Latinx cultural workers seek to imagine radical health in the face of a diabetes epidemic. This chapter begins with some thoughts about how diabetes might inform our evaluation of theories of embodiment and risk (focusing in particular on Lauren Berlant's slow death and Rob Nixon's slow violence). From this meditation, it moves into an analysis of texts (by Sonia Sotomayor, Tato Laviera, Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga, and ire'ne lara silva) that simultaneously critique the social conditions that give rise to diabetes caseloads in Latinx communities and that reject the stigma associated with a diabetes diagnosis.