Recovecos: Race, Time, and the Performance of Trans Embodiment

Malaver, Lau

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Recovecos: Race, Time, and the Performance of Trans Embodiment Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/8p58pf53f

Abstract

The dissertation, Recovecos: Race, Time, and the Performance of Trans Embodiment, investigates 21st century trans and queer cultural productions in the Américas. It explores how minoritized trans and queer scholar-artists use visual, digital, literary, and embodied art to negotiate their relationship with the present reality they find themselves in and the futures they desire to build through their own embodied experience. The project examines this temporal relationship through the theoretical framework of Recovecos (Spanish for nooks, hidden turns, twists). Recovecos is a way of perceiving and experiencing the fictive and speculative worlds that are produced through these cultural practices across time and space, which allow racialized trans and queer peoples to navigate oppression by existing simultaneously in the everyday material circumstances of their lives and in the crafted recovecos engendered through their street performance, literature, digital art, and film. The dissertation argues that Recovecos theoretically and performatively scrutinizes the meaning of embodiment and corporeal difference, and showcases how the creation of different worlds through visual, digital, literary, and embodied art shapes trans time, an alternative to racialized cis-heteropatriarchal colonial linear time. This project intervenes in and is in dialogue with Trans Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Performance Studies through its multi-medium and multi-method approach that specifically intervenes in studies on trans temporality and trans embodiment by applying Recovecos to various cultural productions by and for trans life. Included in this project are the following sub-modes of critique housed under the episteme of Recovecos: curing and curating wounds; spaces of fiction and friction; and a commons of pain. Sub-modes are articulations towards a politics of emergent relationality in which inter-racial and gendered groups are making alliances for social transformation. Therefore, the dissertation offers a multi-pronged ecology that conjoins the ontoepistemological dimensions and practices already existent in trans life, trans experience, and other communities in order to articulate emerging ways of relating with each other. To pay attention to the crucial junctures of cis-heteropatriarchy, time, and technologies of racialized gender and sexuality is to center alternative embodied experiences for and not against trans life.

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