Carnalities

Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self and coeditor of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader and Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance.

Preface: Skin of Light ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 I. Carnal Crossings: Eye and Mouth 27 1. Affected by the Eye: A Prelude to a Carnal Aesthetics 29 2. To Be a Mouth: Anzalduan Carnalities 56 3. Spilling Herself in Trees: Autoarte and Laura Aguilar's Queer Erotics 87 II. Border Crossings: Sorrow and Memory 131 4. Sorrow, Aesthetic Unsettlement, and Sonic Rupture in the Mexico-US Borderlands 133 5. Crossing and Feeling Brown: VerOnica Gabriela CArdenas's Carnal Light 171 6. Something Very Extraordinary: Incandescence and the Wounding Photograph 210 Notes 233 Bibliography 287 Index 309

"This is a remarkable book. Through an analysis of artistic practices and ideas, Mariana Ortega produces a feeling-thinking, or sentir-pensar, of the contemporary conditions of immigrant life, Latinx life, female embodiment, and queer life. By focusing on an aesthetics of the carnal, she explores how art can change our habits of perception to help us see and feel what is before us. This is a book that has a heartbeat." - Linda Martin Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York "Mariana Ortega is a compassionate thinker who argues for the importance of feelings and affect, both as these negatively shape us within racism and homophobia, for example, and also as that which might allow us to resist and transform the oppressively dominant. This highly polished, deeply thought, and carefully argued book is the product of a mind deeply in touch with aesthetic sensibility, bodily knowledge, and a hunger for love and justice. A lovely, mature work." - Laura E. Perez, Professor of Chicanx and Latinx Studies, University of California, Berkeley