UCLA

“Desert Dreams” probes the discursive intersections of trauma, identity, and the body across experimental works of contemporary literature and performance (1998-2023) by artists of the Latin American diaspora. I bring attention to the monolithic archetype and border fantasies central to the figure of post-Enlightenment “Man” as structuring hierarchies of race through a politics of identity. I argue that Man in this sense is a “homunculus” that orders the world’s political economy and enables the US to maintain hegemony over desire. TransBorder writers reveal the inherent fragmentation of identity and lack of control undergirding said figure by unearthing alternative understandings of the body. In the realm of TransBorder performance, these artists also launch interventions into the actual transnational political economy, while imagining possible futures beyond the coloniality of borders. Central to my dissertation is a theory of “queer transitivity” which is attuned to the textual and bodily ruptures and reconstructions of minoritarian aesthetics. Queer transitivity marks the productive slippages between trauma and the erotic through notions of structural indeterminacy and contingency. These slippages mark the possibility of moving beyond an economy of desire that is dominated by coloniality, which itself requires the policing of our bodies and sedimentation of our identities. Ultimately, TransBorder artists tap into repressed queer affects and the trans* process of identity formation to make room for not only subjective transformation, but also speculation on our collective futures. In the face of the racialized and gendered fantasies of borders and representation, their alternative scripts, visions, and erotic practices constitute new ethical imaginations to capitalism, or, “desert dreams.”