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 shaped by the self’s affective attunement to the material, cultural, historical, communal, and 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, VerÓnica 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
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.
“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 Martín 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. Pérez, Professor of Chicanx and Latinx Studies, University of California, Berkeley
