In Carnalities, Mariana Ortega presents a phenomenological study of aesthetics grounded in the work of primarily Latinx artists. She introduces the idea of carnal aesthetics informed by carnalities, creative practices informed by the self’s affective attunement to the material, cultural, historical, communal, and the spiritual. For Ortega, carnal aesthetics offers a way to think about the affective and bodily experiences of racialized selves. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, José Esteban Muñoz, Alia Al-Saji, Helen Ngo, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, and others, Ortega examines photographic works on Latinx subjects. She analyzes the photography of Laura Aguilar, Véronica Gabriela Cárdenas, and Susan Meiselas, among others, theorizing photography as a carnal, affective medium that is crucial for processes of self-formation, resistance, and mourning in Latinx life. She ends with an intimate reading of photography through a reflection of her own crossing from Nicaragua to the United States in 1979. Motivated by her experience of loss and exile, Ortega argues for the importance of carnal aesthetics in destabilizing and transforming normative, colonial, and decolonial subjects, imaginaries, and structures.
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: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas’s Carnal Light 171
6. Something Very Extraordinary: Incandescence and the Wounding Photograph 210
Notes 233
Bibliography 287
Index 309
