Marcos Gonsalez – författare

A love letter to queer of color theory and how it has helped the author to discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work towards liberationMarcos Gonsalez found his greatest source of joy when he encountered queer theory in college. As they put it, "queers and college go together like peanut butter and jelly," and for them, this was especially true. Seeing himself reflected in the work José Esteban Muñoz was life-changing: Muñoz's theory of disidentification empowered Gonsalez to reclaim their Latinx and queer identities--and inspired him to push back against the largely-white monolith of queer theory.In the sophisticated yet intimately disarming prose of In Theory, Darling, Gonsalez takes his copy of Disidentifications to the gay bar, to the classroom, to their childhome and beyond, inviting us to go along with him as he limns the queerness of reality TV, mourns the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre, searches for their uncle in Paris Is Burning, looks for Muñoz's legacy in the streets of New York, and situates themself in the lineage of the queer elders who have come before him.Conversational yet deeply analytical, intimate yet wide-ranging, youthful yet sophisticated, Gonsalez's essays crackle with intellectual energy--and remind us just how life-giving theory can be.

A love letter to queer of color theory and how it has helped the author to discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work towards liberationMarcos Gonsalez found his greatest source of joy when he encountered queer theory in college. As they put it, "queers and college go together like peanut butter and jelly," and for them, this was especially true. Seeing himself reflected in the work José Esteban Muñoz was life-changing: Muñoz's theory of disidentification empowered Gonsalez to reclaim their Latinx and queer identities--and inspired him to push back against the largely-white monolith of queer theory.In the sophisticated yet intimately disarming prose of In Theory, Darling, Gonsalez takes his copy of Disidentifications to the gay bar, to the classroom, to their childhome and beyond, inviting us to go along with him as he limns the queerness of reality TV, mourns the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre, searches for their uncle in Paris Is Burning, looks for Muñoz's legacy in the streets of New York, and situates themself in the lineage of the queer elders who have come before him.Conversational yet deeply analytical, intimate yet wide-ranging, youthful yet sophisticated, Gonsalez's essays crackle with intellectual energy--and remind us just how life-giving theory can be.

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.

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.