Papers by Kimberlee Perez
SOUTH OF LIVING With reluctance, without actually meaning it, I hail one cab after another from t... more SOUTH OF LIVING With reluctance, without actually meaning it, I hail one cab after another from the sidewalk where we stand, face to face, taking up space on this Chicago street, in a neighborhood known for and to lesbians. When learning I would move to Chicago, someone directed me. Here. Was certain I would be comfortable. Here. With my people. Here. Lesbians. Here. It is not unusual for someone to direct me in this way. To whom and where I might belong. You must try this Mexican restaurant, I was told on a job interview, upon arriving at a new job, countless other times. In this bar you'll fit right in, I've been told, just as often. Do you know, fill in the blank lesbian, Chicana or Latina, other person from Midwest. The people that direct me in these ways are often white. Well meaning. Each direction toward a new and other relation. Away from the one who points. Each direction not in response to a request I have made. As hard as it is, I ask or otherwise search toward what I am inclined. What I am inclined toward is silence. Isolation. This is not necessarily a choice, choice is a spiky beast. Be it choice or necessity, in silence and isolation are my comforts. This makes people uncomfortable, she insists, years after we meet. Years after even, this moment on the street corner at the end of the evening, where we have met for the first time after a five-year silence between us. This moment, this later moment, could be a repetitive moment during which she coaches me on being with others. At a conference. On an interview. At a social event. I call her for help. She picks up. She. There. I scare people, she tells me, describing the scene in her way. I break my prolonged silence with a brief and pointed statement. Met often with silence. I tell her I do not get it. She plays along. Tells me, you scare them. Tells me, in the way she truths to me, coaxes uncomfortable underbellies into the light. Actually, I am aware I make people uncomfortable. At times, I like it. Provoke it. Relish in the mutual squirm. The squirm reflects multiple truths. The learned like, the habits that ingrain KIMBERLEE PÉREZ 138 CHICANA/LATINA STUDIES 19:2 SPRING 2020
Precarious Rhetorics
The body calls out, from itself, about itself. I Can't Breathe. At the edge of a speech act, a pe... more The body calls out, from itself, about itself. I Can't Breathe. At the edge of a speech act, a performative doing (Austin). I Can't Breathe. Breath, required to speak. I Can't Breathe. A performative anticipation. I Can't Breathe. An announcement the body makes from itself, about itself, to another. I Can't Breathe. The announcement, a relation. I Can't Breathe. The relation, precarious. I Can't Breathe. Relations of precarity are dependent (Berlant 192). Racial precarity secures dependence through the maintenance of difference (Holland 3), misrecognition, invisibility, and hypervisibility (C. Smith 6), incarceration and terror (Cacho 121; Hartman 7). I Can't Breathe. A demand for recognition. I Can't Breathe. In precarity, recognition is incomplete, unwilling, perhaps impossible (Butler, Precarious 43-45; Butler, Frames 5-7). I Can't Breathe. A gesture of relation, otherwise, and elsewhere. In a moment. Of coalition. 1 A coalitional moment. To resist, and to generate otherwise, and elsewhere, across lines of similarity and difference, is one potential of coalition. Coalition's potential materializes in what Karma R. Chávez theorizes as the coalitional moment, which "occurs when political issues coincide or merge in the public sphere in ways that create space to reenvision and potentially reconstruct rhetorical imaginaries" (8). This is to say that something, some things are apt to happen when political issues coincide or merge in the public sphere. A movement's taking up of the rhetoric of another is a political strategy, one of appropriation.
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2010
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 6(2), pp. 96-117, Apr 18, 2013
To start this dialogue, guest editor Karma R. Chávez posed a series of general and unbinding ques... more To start this dialogue, guest editor Karma R. Chávez posed a series of general and unbinding questions to participants about the meanings of queer theory and its relationship with questions of culture. The dialogue unfolded over the course of three weeks in an online forum and covered several important themes. First, participants engaged questions surrounding the meaning of queer, and its relationship to different cultural and linguistic contexts, especially with regard to diaspora, settler colonialism, and postcoloniality. Second, participants considered the interplay between queer and trans theories, which led to considerations of the body, memory, and homonormativity. Third, after the “coming out” of the U.S. actress Jodie Foster, participants had a lively discussion about the politics of visibility, responsibility, and accountability for different LGBTQ subjects. The dialogue concluded with final meditations.
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2013
Still Political" explores the politics of hair. Through interdisciplinary exploration and diverse... more Still Political" explores the politics of hair. Through interdisciplinary exploration and diverse methodologies that interweave and span personal narrative, autoethnography, performative writing, and collaborative performance, the pieces in this forum meditate on and question body/hair politics. Individually and collectively, through the sites of their bodies and experiences, the authors probe themes that include history, the academy, intimate and stranger relations, transnational and local politics, individual and collective resistance, and more. Grounded in an intersectional approach, each piece interrogates the body/hair and the body/hair in relation.
Nwsa Journal, 2005
... Postmodern feminists challenge racialized categories as they argue that identities are fluid,... more ... Postmodern feminists challenge racialized categories as they argue that identities are fluid, fragmented, and discursively constructed, charging woman of color feminists with essentialism (Pérez 1998; Sandoval 1998). ... Gabi and Mickey met as students in graduate programs. ...
I was neither present for the debut of Blasphemies on Forever: Remembering Queer Futures at DePau... more I was neither present for the debut of Blasphemies on Forever: Remembering Queer Futures at DePaul University in the Spring of 2009 nor during its most recent performance at Arizona State University in 2010. The two times I did see Blasphemies live in Fall 2009 were varied enough to inform different experiences, reads, and relations. The bar in Chicago was interactively playful, rowdy, and had a two-drink minimum. There were no drinks when, at DePaul University, the performance ran one night during the National Communication Association's annual conference and followed Terry Galloway's Out All Night and Lost My Shoes. The feeling in this audience of primarily students and convention goers was formal, and for that I liked my space alone up in the tech booth where my labor was both as audience and operator. In less public contexts, I've watched rehearsals and video documentations, offered both invited and unsolicited comments, and dialogued with its roots in dissertation-related writing and performance. I recount these contexts to situate this solo performance 1 in a circuit of space, time, and relations.
Books by Kimberlee Perez
Amidst rapid advances of mainstream gay and lesbian platforms, questions of essential sexual iden... more Amidst rapid advances of mainstream gay and lesbian platforms, questions of essential sexual identities, queered rituals of family, queered notions of intimacy, queer considerations of time, and the possibility and value of queered systems of relation are largely absent. Resisting the public face of a normative and homogenous gay and lesbian community, and embracing a broadened conception of queerness, this book brings together 29 writers – a diverse community of scholars, lovers, and activists – to explore queer theory and embodied experiences within interpersonal relations and society at large. Enacting a critical intervention into the queer theoretical landscape, the book offers an alternative engagement where contributors centralize lived experience. Theoretical engagements are generated in relation and in dialogue with one another exploring collectivity, multiple points of entrance, and the living nature of critical theory. Readers gain familiarity with key concepts in queer thought, but also observe how these ideas can be navigated and negotiated in the social world. Queer Praxis serves as a model for queer relationality, enlisting transnational feminist, critical communication, and performance studies approaches to build dialogue across and through differing subjectivities.
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Papers by Kimberlee Perez
Books by Kimberlee Perez