 being here your presence tells us that these are important questions that we're going to ask together today. A little bit of housekeeping. Today is a full day and we must keep your schedule but please come and go as you need to and take care of your needs and there are restrooms in the back and there's an all-gender restroom labeled around this way. If you need caffeination there are two coffee shops right around the corner and also you should know that our keynote and panels are being live streamed at Hall around TV so please you know if there are people who you think should see this text them and say tune in to Hall around TV and if you're tweeting Facebook and Instagram about the event including the show the night case hashtag TuftsRCT 2017. For those of you who signed up for transportation to Oberon we will distribute tickets to a dinner time over there from 6 to 7 p.m. the buses leave here don't get on the bus at 7 30 it leaves here at 7 30 so please be here in time and the buses back from Oberon leave at 10 15 and so and it will leave without you. You're welcome to take lifts or public transportation back If you were iffy about coming tonight please take my word that it's gonna be fucking amazing and there will be a bar there I will be decided and also about the show tonight bring an ID with you and tip your driver. So a little about what I had in mind when she rated me. I had some of my inspiration. Victor Alcarris's web telenovela a la moda en tiempos de trompe combines melodrama with the yeah dark comedy and science fiction to tell stories of a group of queer Latinos accessing pleasure both through sex play decadent foods by laughing at the foul waves that let the next migrants were invoked during the 2017 US elections. These strange and humorous episodes remind us that desire and pleasure must be analyzed through a critique of racial inequality and that natural politics come to bear on the regulation of race gender and sexuality. Caris's work precisely captures the convergences of this year's RCD workshop, the queer color criticism and performance. And his landmark book aberrations in black towards a queer color critique, Robert Ferguson argues that sexual and gender distinctions work in tandem with fictions and materialics of race and class to secure white header capitalist interests and futures. He pairs it with his historiography of the discipline of sociology black literary texts asking art by black writers such as Tony Morrison, Aubrey Lord and James Baldwin to serve as evidence when state sanctions forms of empiricism foreclose various forms of black subject code. Artistry then serves not only as criticism but makes room for more kinds of subject goods pleasures and survivals. But as we consider the promise of artistry performance is a strange beast. For queer people of color for queer people of color carry what Jose Esteban Munoz calls the bourbon of lightness. The expectation to be the body and only the body to entertain to the point to the break of exhaustion to acquire value only in our fleshiest forms. And yet artists such as Victor Icares and Nick K find ways to to eschew and obscure the pleasure we might want to take in watching their bodies while making performance that is categorically beautiful at least to me. They use their bodies to direct our gaze towards the systems that classify, derogate and manage their bodies asking through performance and these are Nick's words. Why must why must we be hashtag carefree and hashtag joy filled? Who does this abrupt shift from hashtag Black Lives Matters and hashtag say her name conversations truly benefit in a culture of speedier recovery and self-help as the state cuts and destroys affordable health care? What you'll hear today or what I think you'll hear in our panel's keynote and performance showcase is that while this devastating moment of muleable white supremacy feels particularly painful it lives in a continuum with and echoes other on-going processes of colonization, processes that assault, abject and abandoned people, bodies, desires and ways of feeling deemed non-normative. In this on-going crisis can queer and trans-of-color artists save us before the state kills them? I want to say that I'm posing this dark question facetiously but if we consider the recently publicized theft of a black trans filmmaker Rena Gassette's intellectual artistic property a theft facilitated by producers, funding institutions, archivists and web-based media sites we see how queer and trans artists of color are left in housing insecurity while white cis male artists receive support. But today I know I can trust you with the artists and scholars whose work has so deeply respect to help us think through difficult questions. So please help me welcome Dr. Adriana Zavala director of the Consortium in Studies of Race Colonialism and Diaspora Professor of Art History who will introduce our keynote speaker. Thank you. Hi everybody, Karim Kupjandani has done an amazing job of thanking all of the people that need to be thanked so I'm going to eliminate that part of my paper here but I simply want to second my thanks. I want to give a shout out as of course to the speakers and the artists who are with us here today thank you for coming to Tufts. I especially want to thank Karim for putting this curating this extraordinary day. It's been an incredible work in progress seeing how it's developed and it's going to be an extraordinary day so thank you so much Karim for your vision for your creativity and for your courage. I also want to thank Cynthia Sanders who is attempting to get more food for us. She is the program administrator for the Consortium of Studies and Race Colonialism and Diaspora and we couldn't do any of what we do with us and Cynthia Sanders so thank you very much Cynthia at the next show. So it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker Dr. Juan Amadeva Rodriguez whose lecture Diaspora Divas Working Sex Transing Biography will open our symposium today. I am personally so excited to hear her speak. Dr. Rodriguez is Professor of Ethnic and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She's also faculty in the Performance Studies graduate group at Berkeley and before joining Berkeley she taught at UC Davis and Bryn Marr. As no doubt many of you today know Dr. Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is positioned at the intersection of ethnic studies and feminist and queer theory. Her work explores the social and psychic intricacies of racialized sexuality in diverse cultural sites. Her research has contributed to several significant intellectual currents including a renewed emphasis on the role of the sexual and queer theory. Latinx and Latin American studies in gender and sexuality, theorizations of racialized affect and the sensorial, intersectional feminist sexual politics and public policy, and performative approaches to the study of racialized sexuality. Her scholarly accomplishments are many. She's the author of two books Queer Latinida Identity Practices Discursive Spaces published in 2003 by New York University Press and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and other Latina longings also New York University Press 2014 and this second book was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize by the Modern Language Association GLQ Caucus in 2015. She has a third book under contract with Duke titled Puta Seeing Latina as Working Sex which traces the figure of the Latina sex worker across a range of visual modes of biographical representation. To explore how different forms of documentation transform our effective encounters with the sexual lives of Latina subjects and she has another book project in preparation titled Bisexuality and the Feminist Future of Queer Racial Politics and this other book considers the possibilities of redirecting queer politics toward reproductive rights, the decriminalization of sex work, recognition of alternative kinship structures, asylum and immigration rights, and criminal justice reform. Her work couldn't be more timely. In addition Dr. Rodriguez has published an impressive array of scholarly essays and creative work in blogs. She's a frequent public speaker in academic arts and community venues with appearances on NPR's Latino USA, Canadian TV News, Bajena 12 and Buenos Aires and NBCnews.com. Her work demonstrates her commitment to public engagement on issues of sexuality, race, gender, public policy, and social justice. So it is a distinct honor to host her. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Juana Mariette Rodriguez. And to Karim who, uh, except Gropa looks, you know, so sharp that just, uh, okay, I'm dealing with that. Today is new work from my new book project called Buta, Seeing Latina's Working Sex. It's organized around the image of La Buta, the whore, the perennial figure of Latinized feminine sexual incense. This project interrogates how forms of biographical production organized around Latinas in various forms of, involved in various forms of sex work attempt to make knowable experiences of sexualized embodiment across the life span. So in the larger project I explore diverse visual modes of biographical representation, the identity papers of the state, illustrated biography, the documentary film, the photojournalistic essay, and the digital traces left on social media. I'm interested in those moments where the narrative voice and visual representation collide. Specifically the project asks, how does biographical narration productively trouble our engagement with visual depictions of racialized sexuality? And conversely, how does the visual presence of the speaking subject unsettle the textual imprints she might also leave behind? So this presentation does come with a warning. So my talk today is about a person and an idea. The idea is that we might be able to tell stories about ourselves or even about other people in ways that convey something real and meaningful. This is the idea or perhaps the story that we would like to believe, that representation is possible, that if we try hard enough, if we choose our words wisely, they will carry our desires for recognition, for connection, human, and other ones across the vast expanses between us. But perhaps we have come to learn painfully and with great difficulty that the stories we perform move in social and material worlds where other fictions and feelings also roam. No matter how hard we try, we're always being misunderstood, misrecognized, misinterpreted. Our stories are never fully our own. The languages we speak, the bodies we inhabit, the gestures we offer, and the spaces we travel have been produced by everything that has preceded us. By other stories and phantasmatic projections, even as the fresh moment of the now works to make them original again and again. In their eloquent introduction to a special issue of women in performance studies, Joshua Lusman and Cristina Leon offer us lingering as a methodological mode of engagement. They write, lingering as a verb demands a kind of lanker, a dwelling that inhabits the spaces of ambivalence and ambiguity. If latinidad impacts a problem for gender, sexuality, the nation state, for unity, and so on, then lingering becomes a critical practice in meditating upon the possibilities of an impact. In this presentation, I ask that you indulge me in this desire to linger, to sit with the feminine feelings of opening for and with another, to take in the sensory possibilities of the now. I want to tell you a story about a person, Adela Vasquez, a real living person with a scent and a style and an amazing past. Because even if we know that stories are mediated and constructed, we know they do things in the world. Through the promise of imagination, stories create new conditions of being. They ignite memories that are not uniquely our own. They have the power to activate novel ways of seeing the worlds around us. So this paper is both about imagining the queer futures that Adela's stories of her past might make possible, and lingering in the present performative impacts that they might also reveal. Adela's life story is the subject of sexilium, a bilingual graphic biography by Jaime Cortez that also functions as a kind of queer, diasporic, trans, testimonial. Testimonial literatures name a hybridized genre that capture elements of the African-American oral tradition of testifying the legal discourse of testimony and the genre of life story as evidence in the public claim for the human rights of the disenfranchised. Reading sexilio as testimonial makes salient the queer racialized sexual politics that undergird Adela's story. Following John Beverly's foundational work on testimonial, this text could be said to use Adela's biography to offer a fuller understanding of the life experiences of a population that has been erased or misrepresented in public discourse. To make a claim for the human rights of transgender women, sex workers, immigrants, and diasporic subjects. And very often in this testimonial, as in this text, the subject recounts their story to a witness who constructs and disseminates the narrative of an individual whose life is marked as both extraordinary and intended to be representative of countless others we may never know. In his introduction to sexilio Jaime Cortez writes, the life of Adela Vasquez is trans everything. Transnational, transgender, transformative, and true transpixing. Sexilio narrates Adela's journey of being assigned male at birth in Cuba, forming part of the Manuel Boat Lift, working as a sex worker and later as a sexual health advocate and transgender advocate in San Francisco. As I reflect on the production and dissemination of sexilio, I am reminded of how it dutifully performs the pedagogical mandate demanded of this testimonial. Published in 2004, it was funded through the Institute for Gay Men's Health and AIDS Project Los Angeles, which for many years made it available for free as a book, while copies lasted, and for years later as a free digital download in Spanish or in English. In his introduction to sexilio, Patrick Batol Hebert, who was working at APLA at the time, writes, quote, HIV prevention is too often preoccupied with tiny pieces of what we do rather than the fullness of what we feel and the vastness of who we are becoming. Sexilio is special because it reminds us of the power of storytelling. Of course, those were the days before PREP and the medical management of HIV and AIDS, when stories valued as medicine were still being funded. Batol Hebert, Jaime Cortez, and Adela Vazquez are all part of what Hebert calls the diasporic folk of Proyecto Village. A reference to Proyecto Contracida por Vida, a Latinx HIV prevention agency, where I first met Adela, Jaime, Batol, and so many others, and which I wrote about in my first book Cuy Platinidad. So while Adela's story is narrated in the familiar as told too style, so central to testimonio, the author is neither an anthropologist nor an enlightened foreign intellectual. Instead, in the introduction, Jaime Cortez, himself a queer Latino and Adela's friend, describes his own insecurities as an illustrator, writer, and researcher, and narrates his own investment in the story. He writes, when the fear and uncertainty came in knocking, I turned back to the transcripts of my interviews with Adela to remind myself why I need this story to be in the world. Not just because I'm a queer child of immigrants for a lover of both comics and sexual narratives, but because this story is so fucked up, fabulous, gravity, and human that it opens a vast space where we can all ponder our own sense of risk, exile, and hope. Cortez sees his labor, all 800 hours of it, not as a work of detached altruism designed to promote the human rights of others, that is part of his desire, his need, to create a capacious space for imagining his own life. I should also note that Adela is my friend too, so the intimacy and friendship that the text performs, that this text performs, is one that implicates the subject, the narrator, and the critic. All of us bound together in a kind of queer kinship through our shared work with Proyecto. In Sexilio, Adela's story begins, not to brag, but my birth was revolutionary. Adela was born in Gamaway, Cuba in 1958 in the rural countryside of one of the country's interior provinces on the eve of the Cuban Revolution. Sexuality is lived differently on the countryside. It is seen and sensed outdoors. Early on in the story, Adela states, I was fascinated by farm sex, cow sex, chicken sex, insect sex. Then she proceeds to describe how she used to fuck this one banana tree. On the next page we get this, the top says the tree got boring, and I graduated to humans. I used firm temptations to get sex. And the panels below describe how the young Adela would lure her classmates to the barn with the promise of sex with the goat, and then offer herself in exchange. Do you want to put your thing in me instead? Now these stories of banana trees, farm temptations, and nine-year-olds having penetrative sex might seem spectacular and foreign, or perhaps horrifying to some. But what is immediately clear is none of that is how it appears to Adela. This is her story of childhood sexuality, her terms of narrative engagement. Farther down, we get this. Nine years old, and I was pimping a goat to get laid, and you know what? That goat was not even that cute if you really look at the bitch. Oh child, I was such a manipulating liar, but I couldn't help it because even then I would do anything for sex. Besides, it was great revenge. How getting fucked by a boy who thought he was coming to fuck a goat is about getting revenge? Well, that part isn't exactly spelled out. It should already be clear that Adela is rarely interested in how we might read her story, what sense or nonsense we might make of the story she tells. But perhaps, if we linger, we might imagine the ways the boys might have treated the nine-year-olds who grew up to be Adela, and we might conjure why she might want to exact revenge in this moment of her childhood or in the recitation of the scene of youthful sexuality years later. This panel also visually represents the orality upon which the book is premised, that unlike its function in much of testimonial literature, where the transcription of the oral marks an illiterate subject, here orality registers friendship and the importance of storytelling in the formation of queer community, whereas Lisa Kecololi Chang Hall writes, I have a theory that gay identity is really founded on storytelling and gossip, not sex. And in fact, people often have sex so that we can talk about it. I think Lisa was really a part of this. In the text, we hear the speaking subjects and through humor and rhetorical gesture, the reader is brought into the intimacy of the exchange into a moment of shared friendship. In the bottom panel, Gortez allows us to visually step outside of the time of the story and returns us to the time of the present, or at least the present that he's in. We see Adela smoking a cigarette in the comfort of her San Francisco apartment, and you sort of see how the smoke curls into the panel above. The tea and cookies suggesting that this was a long leisurely exchange between documentarian and speaking subject. Graphic novels make possible the visual justification of different temporal registers coexisting on the same page. For this text, those shifts transport us across now only time, illustrating a then and a now, but also across genders and geographies, even as we remain within the narrative sphere of Adela's life story. While much of the text documents Adela's life in Cuba before her exodus, several passages record the periods in her life when sex was less about desire and more about sex as a commodity. The image in the top left is Adela having recently arrived in Fort Chappie, Arkansas. The improvised refugee camp for where many manuelitos were deposited after she had suffered a brutal beating before leaving Havana. On the prior page, she tells us that having been unable to find a bed in the overcrowded barracks, Adela sits on a bench under the storms. A stranger approaches her and says, hey mama, why is that nice face so sad tonight? In the panel we see here, the stranger informs her that having been in Fort Chappie a month, he's now the barracks czar, a position that includes the benefits of a private shower. In these moments of seeing Adela in masculine drag, I meet a person I've never met before, but I confess this is an insight I came to in writing about the text, not in my initial reading of it. Literature and fantasy train us to jump back and forth into different temporal registers to inhabit different bodies and perspectives effortlessly. On the following page, in a full page spread, I return to the Adela that I know. At the time of Cortez's interview and the dialogue reflects back on her early days in the camp. I was a rep child, tore up, beat down, dirty, hungry tire, but after just 48 hours in the USA I had a poppy and a private crib. All I did was a poodle and a picket fence. I was so exhausted I almost didn't realize he was seducing me, but then I realized and I thought, I know this, it's beauty and sex. It'll be what I need. Different country, same exchange. Pussy power, baby. Pussy power. Rather than, that's right, um, rather than essentializing a connection between feminine sexual labor and genitalia, Vasquez's text disrupts it, even as it links sexual labor to the heterosexual domestic family of the fantasy of the American dream, a poodle and a picket fence. Just later in a chapter called Legal Tender, Adela, now established in Los Angeles with a gay Cuban sponsor, begins a more formal relationship with sex work. Makeup, drugs, clothes, hormones, food, and one million other expenses. It was hard to keep up with my salary from sewing work. I wasn't living rent free anymore so mama needed to capitalize big time, so I said fuck it and went and took Gucci pictures and then I put an ad in the whole rag, Hollywood connections, to see if I could get some business. In the top panel alongside this lament, we see the actual ad Adela used to promote her sexual services. Capitalizing on her difference, she describes herself as a quote exotic Cuban she-mail. I told you there would be offensive language. We might all agree that the text is cringe-worthy, but she makes clear that it worked to pay the rent. And as in the episode with the goat, readers can leave their judgments aside. The inclusion of an actual photographic clipping in the text performs a kind of dumbling, where the subject of representation is situated in the presence of her own image. And as she states in the panel below, the response was off the hook, even if the number one request was for the surprise down south. But in the bottom right panel we also glimpse her boredom and frustration at performing the tired narrative of racialized transgender exoticism. Positioned together on a single page within the context of a graphic depiction of her life, we can ask which is the real Adela? On the next page, even as she tells us that mama figured out a whole menu and prices for everything ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. We also learned that Adela had tired of having sex be her job. I was a great fuck, but a lousy hoe. I hated it when I wanted to have dinner first. I'm not trying to date your ass, Sun-Song. So awkward. As a prostitute, I had no sexual freedom. I was a product, a service, an idea, but never really a human being. Sometimes I think, my God, I used to be a math teacher. Within the context of my own writing project, Adela's story of using sex to pay the bills reminds readers that sex work as a kind of temporary employment is actually the norm. Few people grow old working in the profession, although of course some do. The retirement package really sucks. The sense of alienation and objectification from her labor that Adela describes in this passage directly mirrors Karl Marx's thoughts on the estranged labor that permeates capitalist production when he writes, the worker therefore only feels herself outside her work and in her work feels outside herself. Apart from how these stories speak to the labor of sex work, Adela's larger narrative articulates the other ways that we see Latina's work sex, as it illustrates the different kinds of things for which sex and sexuality can be exchanged. Pleasure, shelter, money. In her book Queen for a Day, Marcia Ochoa, another queer child of projectos diasporic village writes, glamour, beauty and femininity are technologies with specific practices that result in social legibility, intimate power and potentially physical survival in a hostile environment. Here alongside Marcia's quote is a photograph of Adela working sex, translating what Ochoa calls transnational economies of desire and consumption into a strapless outfit, a flowered up doom, a pink and orange makeup palette, a particularly feminine gesture of registering interest and aloofness simultaneously. The year is 1991. If until now you had only glimpsed Adela through Jaime Cortez's comic illustration, this image presents another view, one that captures a particular moment and style 13 years before the release of Sexy Lior. The photograph also reveals how glamour functions as its own kind of sexual labor. This look took work. I pause here because the visual presence of Adela in living color has entered the room and it is precisely that moment that I'm interested in marking. What does it mean to see Adela outside the narrative frame of the testimonio that Cortez has provided? How are his drawings of her related to the image we see here or the image of her that you had already conjured? What might it mean to read her image in all of the queerest senses of the word alongside her story? Perhaps like me you're finding it hard to look away from those perfectly lined pink lips. Images invite us to linger and having taken in as much as we can, the presence of an image can begin to demand more. Nowadays when we want to probe deeper into the visual archive of someone's life we look to Facebook or more likely for this generation Instagram. And Adela's Facebook page does not disappoint. In the profile picture her hair is blonde and short her chosen name Adela Cuba. Here the designer sunglasses perform their own kind of shade. While her feet is cluttered with the usual collection of political and personal rants and raves Adela also maintains a photo album that she has entitled The Amazing Past a personal visual archive of her larger-than-life history. How are the narrative conventions of testimonial undone in a digital age when each of us can document our own lives complete with images stories and silences? If the digital with its overload of sights and sounds doesn't necessarily get us any closer to the real what does it instantiate? Here we see Adela strutting her stuff for the camera and her audience. This is Esta Noche a broke down dive queer Latino bar the last queer Latino bar to close in San Francisco. In his meditation the dirt that haunts looking at Esta Noche Ivan Ramos reflects on a photograph of the sign where Esta Noche used to be lingering in what he turns the ghostly after lives of a queer Latino space that meant so much to so many including to Adela. But here in these photographs we are transported to a time before gentrification and the white re-territorialization of the mission district. Esta Noche is open for business packed with the possibility of action and Adela is silently belting out a song. In this Facebook folder most of the images like these have been digitized from actual printed photographs like those some cropped many include captions added through the haze of memory. I want to stop and linger on her hair just for a moment and the ways that hair marks her racially in these photographs in ways that might appear different from what we've seen before. We also see hair as labor in the bottom right we see her without makeup and with curlers in her hair a visual testament to both the labor and the magic of glamour among her many other skills at one point in her life Adela was a hairdresser. That these images required an additional level of labor including effective labor to digitize and caption marks their significance even if that significance is never fully provided to those who stumble across them. Their significance like the earlier moment of narrating revenge is something we can only speculate. What does Adela see in these younger images of herself that she wants to share or remember or document? All of these efforts at curating her life visually serve as a testament to her impulse to give her memories material substance even if that substance is digital. But while Adela may lack many things most importantly a job at the moment what she does not lack is documentation. Before appearing in Sexilio she was interviewed for a public radio program of transgender women in San Francisco. She was also featured at Proyecto's promotional materials including the image shown here that I reproduced in my book La Pimidad. She was also interviewed by the late oral historian Horacio Roque Ramirez and appeared in the 2009 documentary diagnosing difference about transgender women in San Francisco. Let's listen. Let's see if this works. This in passing is a word that discriminates immensely not everybody can pass. And passing is something that the doctors will tell you to do. You try to pass. Well, no matter how much I pass I will never be a very heroic woman. You have the grain of her voice the cadence of her accent to add to the sensory archive of Adela's biography. Almost eight years ago and she seems to be performing mature matron for the camera blonde again including highlighted eyebrows more subdued makeup sporting transparent pink reading glasses that mark the age of anyone over 48. I can assure you she is not that subdued in person not really. I recall Sandra Cisnero's short story about one year 11 you're also 10 and 9 and 8 and 7 and 6. Adela will turn 60 next year but she's also the 30-something performing the 22-year-old Marielito washing up on shore. The nine-year-old pimping goats. In 2014 Adela appeared on the cover of San Francisco Weekly in a feature article by Juliana de Gabo Lopero that developed into a bilingual book of collected oral histories on queer Latinx immigrants. That close up photograph captures precisely the kinds of details we might try to hide as we age the weight of lines around the eyes the texture of aging skin but her hair is purple and it matches her lipstick perfectly. 50-ish fierce fabulous a punk Buddha who really does not give a shit what you think about how she looks. What those interviews became a book Cuentamelo the cover image chosen was another one of Adela's glam shots from years gone by the arch of the eyebrow performing its own singular drama. Inside are seven brief first-person narratives with illustrated drawings and once again we get an illustration of Adela, this time the artist Laura St. Rome's rendering of her presence. In 2015 Adela was once again the subject of oral history for the book Queer Brown Voices Personal Narratives of Latina Latino LGBT Activists edited by Uriel Quezada, Leticia Gomez and Salvador Vidalof Viz. In her preface Gomez talks about the problems of translation and mediation that oral histories instantiate and specifically calls out editorial issues that arose with elements of Adela's oral history. It seems that at one point in the interview conducted in English and published in conducted in Spanish and published in English Adela talks about women born females and normal women in ways that made the editors rightfully uncomfortable. Another moment of Adela authored cringe-worthy text. Yet because those comments were voiced by a trans woman the editors decided to faithfully reprint the interview. I tried to imagine the interviewer wanting to interrupt Adela's monologue perhaps trying to use her utterance as a pedagogical moment to make a point about language normativity and transgender embodiment but Adela is old school and stubborn. Not up on the latest queer lingo of cis and most likely not in the mood to be schooled. Last year just saying um last year I had students work on a Wikipedia projects to document queer color figures the minor figures that mean so much to so many and after reading six CDO a student created a Wikipedia page for Adela because nothing says no well I gotta make a Wikipedia page. If you've been keeping track that makes at least seven separate accounts of Adela's life each one a partial problematic rich and imprecise attempt at biographical representation. Rather than capturing the subject's unique difference these variegated gestures of recognition enact the inherent impossibility of representing alterity. Representation invariably falls short producing both an absence that is never fully capable of capturing the psychic contours of embodied subjectivity and an excess that is produced through the performative possibilities of interpretation and yes misinterpretation. The hardest part certainly for academics or perhaps it's the most comforting is that even in the presence of the biographical subject even if Adela was here with us now representing herself we wouldn't really know her not completely and maybe that's as it should be. In giving an account of oneself Judith Butler writes precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition onto others. What would it mean to allow others the kind of inscrutability that the effective messiness of our own lives demand? If we understand social relations take place within a field of power Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant invites us to rethink the underlying dynamics of our encounters with alterity. As the subject of colonial spectacle who is at once fully exposed and wholly invisible Glissant is not invested in being faithfully represented but in affirming his resistance to having his difference determined. In his texts the poetics of relation Glissant like Butler decades later deploys the idea of opacity as a way to resist the move to know comprehend and capture the other. Glissant writes agree not merely to the right to difference but carrying this further agree also to the right to opacity. For Glissant opacity or the refusal of transparency is precisely what might allow a fuller acknowledgement of social relations. Glissant affirms that the right to opacity becomes the necessary precondition that might make the vulnerability and heartbreak demanded of human connection possible. For Glissant opacity allows us to see the other to register their difference but it also stops short of ascribing a meaning to that difference. Rather than totalizing forms of knowledge production the argumentative demands of theory or even the persuasive potential of compelling interpretations Glissant offers us poetics as another way to cling to the effective potentiality that our desires for representation might also engender. Butler writes as we ask to know the other or ask the other say infinitely or definitively who he or she is it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy by not pursuing satisfaction and letting the question remain open even enduring we let the other live since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give up it. In the ruins of representation there is feeling the sense of the corporeal that also leaves its trace in the archive. In the introduction to feeling photography Elsbeth Brown and Ty Poo acknowledge that studies of image making that have emphasized representation and the disciplinary construction of meaning have quote generally been less instructive in providing a full account of alterity end quote instead they suggest that quote focus on feeling allows photo scholars a rich theoretical terrain to reimagine relationships the complex relationship between images power and subjects. Reading and seeing for feeling rather than for meaning opens a rich interpretive space that challenges the evidentiary logics of knowledge production following Archery de José Esteban Munoz as a methodological mode of interpretation lingering in the sensorial spaces that feeling far and open registers a queer form of evidence and evidence that has been queered in relation to the laws of what counts as proof. Focusing on feeling performs its own refusal of transparency it performs a kind of knowledge production that is at ease in unknowing it invites a lingering in ambiguity and ambivalence as a methodological practice feeling enacts a reckoning with the unruly practices of succumbing to memory and imagination it asks that we open ourselves to the magic of sensation. In a digital age the project of this Emonio that Beverly described in 1998 has been forever transformed we can no longer pretend we are giving voice to subaltern subjects or transforming the academic enterprise by constructing ever more expensive projects of representation yet returning to Beverly we find another insight that resonates with my own rather than attempts at representation he writes we seek to register instead the way in which the knowledge we construct and impart is structured by the absence difficulty or impossibility of representation of the subaltern this is to recognize however the fundamental inadequacy of this knowledge and of the institutions that contain it of course it is not only the subaltern subject that exceeds the recognizable categories of knowledge production and the institutions that contain her all of us struggle to be seen heard and sensed by those around us even as we stumble in our efforts to fully account for the fullness of our lives or the feelings they inspire yet it is only through this reckoning with the failure of representation in letting the question remain open even enduring that we might let the other live. Lately on Facebook Adela has taken to manipulating photographs old and new applying more holy and filters smoothing the edges of age in most of the images on Facebook she appears as glamorous as ever Ochoa asserts glamour allows its practitioners to conjure a contingent space of being and belonging but Adela's ability to produce her own images or control how they might circulate is not quite the point even she is unable to capture who she is or account for all that her life might signify to others or to herself. Adela is unenforced now the non-profit jobs have run dry or been taken over by a bright new crew of young queer and trans activists who know how to speak the new lingo that these jobs require. Gentrification has made San Francisco unaffordable and the influx of privileged whiteness has made it unlivable. Adela tried to leave she went to Florida they had to come back to San Francisco to an uncertain future in a city that seems to have no place for her perhaps for now the place of glamour and Adela's life the contingent space of being and belonging is Facebook. Ironically Facebook is precisely one of sort of the tech giants responsible for the gentrification that has made life in San Francisco for people like Adela impossible. Perhaps sex stops working but the elsewhere of youth and the memory of sexual futures that could have been inhabits the image the images she keeps there even as the strain and heartbreak of living remains out of sight rather than produce knowledge about the other the archives that surround Adela Vasquez's life ask that we linger in the effective traces that stories leave behind the feelings that overflow the image they call on us to dwell in the uncertainty of speaking seeing and sensing each other clearly. Thank you. Question but I think this talk also comes with like a really important like intersection of what's recently happening with Reina Gossett and her documentary with Marcia P and like the complexities of how critical and necessary and really mandatory it is that like we're telling our own stories and that all this complexity would not be shown with like somebody else who's coming from like an anthropological like sociological whatever academic point of view where it's kind of like some things are just fraught and need to be told the way that they need to be told so thank you this is like a really big thank you so much and also I think that film was uh there was another filmmaker yeah so um there's uh yeah it's two filmmakers so in this retelling of like oh we also have to remember that there's some it's like Engels no one ever calls themselves an Engelist but you know Engels wrote stuff too. I was wondering if you had heard anything about um her thoughts on Cuba especially considering that she went back to Miami so her relationships with the Cuban American community in the US I wonder if there is anything to know that. So Leila's a really bad subject um she yeah um she doesn't perform what we want her to perform and so she's super critical of Cuba she's like hi I'm not coming out um and uh very anti-Castro um and even now sort of refuses to go back and so that's that's not a position that I hold right so there is this way in which um I would like her to think differently but she doesn't and so uh you know and that's the thing the idea that the people we want to represent are not uh just who we want to represent they are their own complex beings um and just like those moments where she's using this really cringe worthy text you know that you know her discourse on Cuba is sort of informed by uh who she who she's listening to in the the more reactionary Cuban community. Hi thank you so much for your um incredibly actual exuberant thoughtful presentation. Thank you. Yeah um my name is Clara Castaneda and um uh one of the things that I really appreciated about what you said was um what it means to encounter another um with a sense of uh openness and a sense of our own lack of knowledge regardless of what we are think we're seeing um as we encounter that other um and sort of related to that and I just really not a criticism okay I just want you to hear that okay um so you're representing Ade Lago represents herself and um you're very careful I'm sorry this is a dissertation I didn't mean to speak for so long um you're representing her and you're very careful about how you help us watch what we're seeing and how harsh it is and I guess I was just curious about your own negotiation of um one thing I noticed was how exuberantly you represented her words and I just wondered about your negotiation of all that in this process. Yeah so I'm trying to represent Ade Lago I think is trying to represent herself and um um talking about how we're both sort of failing but you know trying to keep super I think I read that way because I'm a mom and so I you know when you read to kids you have to like when the character speaks you know and 40 minutes is a long time to give a talk and so I want to keep you you know talking about farm sex and and trying to keep it lively but I do love that moment where we like yes I time that moment where we hear her voice and then every all of my exuberance kind of comes undone because we have her voice now right and then once you hear her voice everything else that's from her you just hear differently like if you've ever heard someone speak and and then now you read them and hear that so so yes it um in the talk I am trying to do this layering of what you see and I'm trying to give you a sensory experience of the different ways we take in biographical information um yeah I thank you so much for the wonderful keynote um so I have a kind I guess a kind of boring question about form and genre apologize um so you started out by framing um sexilio as testimony and testimonial and um right so my association with that genre and that form um right right and I mean it's it's all about um bearing witness to violence providing evidence um seeking a kind of uh retribution right it's a fake public um violence that is hidden but I really love how your um your uh use of lingering and of querying evidence really kind of undoes the dna so to speak of that form yeah and so I'm wondering um you know what does thinking of it through the frame of testimony do for you and if the genre is sort of more pliable then maybe we give it credit for ask me like you know why are you framing it this way and I think things are happening now I think um there's this overload of memoir as this like more memoirs than like I think it's like the genre right of the 21st century um and it's always supposed to be kind of pedagogical it's always supposed to sort of do something and so maybe everything has become testimonial right whereas if before it was this kind of exceptional that is both supposed to be representative of the larger but exceptional at the same time um there is this way in which as like aren't we all of both exceptional and represented to me above like the different genres that we are right um so probably like that time I like that now but what I do think that that so so thinking about this testimonial um I think does uh speak to the specific way in which this text I think did have a pedagogical function at you know Proyecto uh I mean AIDS project LA was putting at this was like AIDS education um and it was supposed to be somewhat representative in its exception you know in its exceptional form I also think that the digital completely undoes testimonial so but I think we're still like using this these genres of um presenting life the life story um in ways that are speaking to all four different kinds of um if not violence is forms of harm thank you one that was an amazing talk as usual um I I want to deal with this problem of witnessing that's the one you know um that precisely through thinking about sort of like the candidness of how she speaks and like not be up to date on like our latest like queer lexicon which is a lexicon that's just like constantly updating itself that like we just always have to be so proper as like queers um I'm wondering to what extent does that produce bad witnesses to what extent is like queer studies no longer able to recognize the other so if what do we do with the the messiness of these categories I know you've dealt with this in your work in bisexuality versus queer but like how do we deal with this now in terms of the queer evidence that's a great question I mean um the idea that you know we do on our subjects we want our subjects we want our texts we want our films to do what we want them to do and when they don't like we either don't talk about that part or um you know somehow try to crush it into these frames that we have um but you know messiness is like where all the juice is um I like juice um I just think it's like you know as scholars like you have to whatever you think that limit is where like I don't get this part this is what I can't do then that's actually almost like where you kind of need to start like if you don't do that then you're really you're just using the text to fulfill your own desires rather than being inspired or motivated to to think through that messiness even if you present it and say you know shit's fucked up I really don't know what to do with this um because there's a lot of shit that's just fucked up that we just don't know what to do it um in scholarship and life and in in the world and so um rather than try to sort of contain that or box that or set it aside um we need to sort of talk about those moments for example I've had you know young people who are precisely taking those jobs right it's not a bad thing we want you everyone needs a job right but this idea of like okay like we as scholars we're training these young people who know this language and they're going in and they're but they're also competing with other for these jobs right so that's that's just the kind of messy reality um of age discrimination and um how different people benefit from it um so it's those kinds of you know that kind of messiness that we have to uh just sit with and not try to fix or the juice first of all it's it's it's so wonderful to to hear from you again and you know I'm just so grateful that you're here that chaos my student Berkeley has a job now um so you know so I think my question is in is in conversation with the last two in a lot of ways so I the person in back there um brought this the really lovely point about testimonial and I guess it gets me to think about how in your example you know contrary to the ways in which we think about testimonials also often solidifying a subject we see this sort of auto dismantling of the subject so it seems like there's this there's this way in which testimonial is in you're you're you're deploying it in such a way that that that it that it sort of self-destructs in ways that are really productive and as you say messy but I guess my question is um you know what exactly do we do with a messiness when we're trying to contend with queer futurity so I guess my I guess what I'm wondering is what is queer futurity in your formulation um given our attraction to to these to these these ways that are these these these imperfect politics for example um well the queer future is messy and juicy uh wishful thinking are you okay uh so so it's um we're supposed to figure out how to deal with that messiness and still do our work um and and not always try to sort of fix everything I think there's this um like this kind of constant policing of ourselves in one another um that actually works against forms of solidarity and allyship and just getting shit done um so um allowing ourselves to be imperfect allowing other people getting over disappointment um you know in in sexual futures you know I've tried to think of this idea of the gesture as like because everything we come up with is going to get co-opted it just won't fit um there is no sort of perfect pure political position stands posture a word that's somehow untainted and so um and I and frankly I actually worry that you know critique is easy creativity is hard critiquing something else is really is easier than coming up with something right and um I tell students you know if you're really lucky one day it'll be your book on the seminar table how do you want to be rep right what does it mean to regenerate what does it mean to allow other people to to try and fail and to recognize that the option was not trying so in our politics the option is always not trying or it's trying and allowing yourself um the vulnerability to be willing to fail and but I worry that you know when we don't get it all the way right um the critique is so fast and furious and punishing that particularly I think for younger you know people just coming into political action it can be pretty paralyzing um I did a workshop once it was like for I don't know sex something a week at the take this and uh students talked about how they had organized a workshop on lube because you know they said well you know we thought like everybody uses lube but no not everyone uses lube um and so they so people felt um we don't use lube so they marginalized um so it's true this is like a true story um so everything is not for everyone different people um hear what you say and do in different ways and use it as uh to create or transform something else and so um I'm more worried about not doing things because we're scared of getting them wrong so I think we have to take criticism gracefully you know we can't like fall apart everyone says well you know you could of but it's also important to to under you know understand what it is to try um attention is not the best thing to get that but I'm worried about people not trying so thank you so much sorry over here thank you so much for this talk I know I'm sorry and I'm going to pick up on a line that many other people have picked up on which is testimonial and I think precisely the fact that so many of us are attaching to this shows you that it's a really valuable mode of inquiry I actually struck yes we will welcome and you is the sort of paradigmatic example it's not actually the origin of right monia right and one of the sort of founding figures in the field is the Cuban Michelle Bermet and a story like consumer that's for me your project actually has this wonderful potential to bring testimonial back to some of its roots in a certain way that's really exciting but I wanted to maybe push back or ask you to clarify a little bit on what I see is perhaps a kind of tech utopianism that's coming out in terms of your figuration of the digital the way that the digital is interrupting the testimonial form because I feel like this is actually something that has come up again and again this is the phonograph this is the tape reporter this is a whole project for example Rebecca Maugh at Harvard talks about this in terms of what the state department thought was going to do with technology in the middle of the 20th century it always seems to us that our new emerging technology is going to completely revolutionize the idea of mediation and allow people to speak to results and never quite gets there so I wondered if you had more to say about that well you know I certainly make the point that you know whatever tech provides what is not providing is housing for the people still left in San Francisco I don't know I didn't get one the you know what I really want to make clear is that we're fully capable of representing ourselves and so even as we see social movements around the world using digital uploading things live streaming as we are now live streaming that that's not it's not unmediated it's not the real it's not the truth it's not liberatory but it is right so we have to sort of as we've done with you know everything from like you know I think of like slavery as a kind of destiny on you right so and we think of the ways in which those were mediated what what was their political effect with what did they do in the world how were they authorized so all of those all of those questions I think are still at play and curiously you know there's a lot of like you know if you have an iphone and and you don't have an oscar you know or you're not upload like we're not making movies or web series or something we could be because we have the technology in our hands we're just too lazy right so anyone can do this now should everyone do this the other question that I ask is I mean there's certainly political projects but when I think about documentary now and this kind of like overload of documentary part of me wants to think about form so I would ask what happens to form right is this idea that just you know me filming you telling your story that that's somehow enough what else needs to happen just to capture people's attention because that isn't enough anymore so I do think that I do think that it's gotten rid of the anthropologist in a particular way like the anthropologist that goes up to people that you yeah you know I don't think that anthropology departments are for going away but this idea of representing the subaltern I think has to go away I think that idea has to go away because um yeah you don't think it's going away I don't think that's what anthropology does no um uh I don't think that that's what anthropology does but I do think that there's there's certainly a stream of that um that this ammonia was kind of in response to that was trying to do that I don't think that's necessarily what anthropology does now um but I think that idea that you could go out there and and just document something that no one else had seen or heard and that that was that was producing knowledge about these people others um yeah yeah I don't think that that's necessarily it's not what you know Marcio chose an anthropologist that's not what she does a lot of people a lot of them have very best friends but I do think at one point it was this idea of of representing the other or making the unseen scene and I think that the moment that we're living in um technology does interrupt that in ways that are pretty significant are pretty significant my name is Lily and Guesha hello um I just wanted you to talk more about the other's sociality and what I noticed in the beautiful images you shared is the one time she's really with peers is childhood um and then also because she's your friend and so I'm just curious about um you know what kind of community she had um throughout her adulthood and into the president and sort of what did she like as a friend she's a little bit of work um we argue about politics um we um aging is a motherfucker and so a lot of what we talk about is what it means to sort of um get older and still be queer and still be sexual and still go clubbing and um what she was aware um so that's what she's like as a friend I mean that's what we talk about um she has a lot of people um she's lived in San Francisco a really long time at this point she did try to go to I think it wasn't Miami told her Miami might have been better it was another community in in Florida and like literally I don't think she lost it two months um I don't think she liked those Cubans as much as she thought they would um yeah so she came back um but a lot of the people from Brouilletteville that that group of people um very few of us can afford to live in a city anymore um a lot of people just left uh for other places so there's no like kind of center there anymore um bring her to uh just talk to my classes um she gets a kick out of that uh she loves all of these projects like she'll talk to anybody um she loves all of these projects um that people are sort of interested in her um her friends are less like well how come she gets all this play um she is a very good storyteller um she's fun funny delightful um but community changes you know gentrification has really impacted uh how we're able to live community um because yeah there are things that happen in San Francisco that you sort of make it back to the city for but it's it's not the same you know it's more of a commitment we have time for one short question thank you so much I was supposed to thinking about uh testimonial as a way of documenting the extraordinary uh suffering and traumatization that has been imposed on people as a way of beginning to try and bring to light what has been done by this country other countries so I was curious because her persona is so brash um how you think about suffering in her experience sex studio the most painful for her was was what it meant to leave Cuba um and even though this I will never return it was her line good um but her mother is there and the the kind of um that loss is uh is is so hard and um you know other people that have people that have gotten political asylum um people that are undocumented and and just can't cross the border um that is is there's all kinds of you know all kinds of pain in the world um but I do think that exile has a certain um there's a depth to that that I think is hard to fill and I think it's hard to fill um because even if there are other people to sort of hold you on wherever you land um that sense of not having a home to go back to is almost like not having a pass to go back to and so I think she feels that really strongly other pretty awful things have happened in her life but what she sort of talks about what I feel is the most on the surface for her now like decades later is um what it meant to leave Cuba please join me in a round of applause for let you know that there is more food thank you Cynthia for coming through and being amazing um and our next one will start in 15 minutes