Revolting Indolence
Revolting Indolence
The Politics of Slacking, Lounging, and Daydreaming in Queer and Trans Latinx Culture
How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive.
Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in “productivist” ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices—revolts that in turn are treated as revolting.
Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.
Revolting Indolence is a radical defense of laziness as a world-making practice for queer and trans Latinx artists. Marcos Gonsalez’s unexpected and highly complex critical moves engage an extraordinary archive, ranging from Angie Xtravaganza in Paris Is Burning to Valentina in RuPaul’s Drag Race; the photography of Reynaldo Rivera; the literary memorialization of Pulse Orlando; Justin Torres’s debut novel We the Animals; the art of Sarah Zapata; and the paintings of David Antonio Cruz. This is truly a paradigm-shifting work.
In this stunningly original and brilliantly argued book, Marcos Gonsalez compels us to take indolence seriously. Illuminating the liberatory potential of leisureliness as indexed by a spectacular archive of literary, visual, and everyday life practices, Revolting Indolence offers a much-needed critical framework that resists sanctimonious demands for affirmative representation while maintaining an audacious grasp of inassimilable modes of queerness.
Marcos Gonsalez is an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. He is the author of Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land.
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Liberating Indolence
- 1. Glimpsing Angie Xtravaganza: The Trans Latinx Imaginary of Paris Is Burning
- 2. Lounge Lizard Aesthetics: Los Angeles Nightlife Visualities
- 3. The Poetics of Latin Night: The Literatures of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting
- 4. Slacking Off on the Mainstage: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Performance of Spectacular Obfuscation
- 5. The Textures of Our Daydreaming: Justin Torres’s We the Animals and the Art of Sarah Zapata
- Coda: Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
