Mariana Ortega

This essay examines photographic representations of queer Latinidad. A longing to discover a photographic history of Latina lesbian desire prompts a discussion of queerness in the context of Latinx love, sexuality, and desire. By way of examples of photographic representations, queer Latinidad is presented as complex and capable of encompassing paradoxical but expansive, nondichotomous understandings of sexuality and of gender presentation. Such photographic representations also allow for disidentifications that introduce the possibility of desires that cut across races and racism. Following Muñoz, queer Latinidad is ultimately connected to a sense of longing and melancholia that is resistant in the face of the various erasures of queer Latinidad, both in the context of queer theory and in the context of everydayness.

In _Carnal Aesthetics_, 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.

Carnal Aesthetics presents a phenomenological study of aesthetics grounded in the creative practices of Latinx artists and individuals. For Mariana Ortega, carnal aesthetics offers a way to think about the affective and bodily experiences of racialized selves in their engagements with art and photography. Ortega looks primarily at Latinx photography and Latinx subjects, tracing the transformative potential of artmaking for the self's liberatory growth. Ortega draws heavily on the work of Gloria Anzaldua as well as critical phenomenologists and queer of color theorists such as Linda Martin Alcoff, Helen Ngo, and Jose Esteban Munoz. Ortega explores how creative practices stage encounters with the carnal, ending with an intimate reading of photography through a reflection of her own crossing from Nicaragua to the United States in 1979. Motivated by her own experiences of loss and exile, Ortega argues for the importance of carnal aesthetics in destabilizing and transforming practices of normative, colonial, and decolonial subjects, imaginaries, and structures.

A fenomenologia encontra-se em um momento crítico, enquanto investigadores reinterpretam textos canônicos e reverenciados de Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger e Maurice Merleau-Ponty para tentar demonstrar sua importância política e ética. Mais especificamente, os fenomenólogos desejam demonstrar a relevância da fenomenologia para as análises críticas das diversas identidades sociais. Devido aos compromissos metodológicos com o método transcendental, uma predileção por evidências apodíticas, o apelo para a suspensão da atitude natural e a busca por categorias ontológicas gerais, os investigadores contemporâneos não reconheceram imediatamente a fenomenologia como uma fonte provável para teorizar as estruturas históricas e contingentes. Talvez o problema seja que a própria Filosofia em si, como observa Helen Ngo (2019), tem “uma tendência bem conhecida em direção à abstração e à conceitualização que pode dificultar o reconhecimento da natureza profundamente histórica e da especificidade situada do racismo” (p. 207; grifo nosso). De fato, a descrição de Ngo sobre o “acerto de contas” da raça pela Filosofia é muito apropriada; a Filosofia precisa confrontar suas práticas de omissão e supressão ou, em resumo, seu racismo. Certamente, uma filosofia como a fenomenologia, que leva a sério a experiência vivida e o mundo da vida, precisa teorizar a raça como uma característica fundamental da experiência vivida e da criação de sentidos. Não fazer isso indicaria um profundo fracasso em se envolver com o famoso “problema da linha de cor” que W. E. B. Du Bois (1989) entendeu tão agudamente como o principal problema do século XX, mas que claramente continua a nos assombrar.

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press.

Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately an attitude and practice of critical criticality and a mode of critical impurity are suggested so as to avoid problematic traces of the logic of purity. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Latina feminist theorizing stands to enhance critical phenomenology.

This paper examines photographic representations of the racialized body, more specifically, photographic representation of Afro-Mexicans, a group that has been previously made invisible from Mexican national identity but that has reemerged as the “Third Root of Mexico.” The question guiding the discussion is whether such racialized bodies can be represented in such a way that does not perpetuate racist, colonialist desires and impulses. First, I analyze the indexical nature of photographs and its role in the indexicality of race. Second, I discuss the problematic representation of Afro-Mexicans in the series Tierra Negra (Black Earth), by contemporary Mexican photographer Maya Goded. Last, I examine photographic representations of racialized bodies in light of contemporary U.S African American–Latino relations.

This essay examines photographic representations of queer Latinidad. A longing to discover a photographic history of Latina lesbian desire prompts a discussion of queerness in the context of Latinx love, sexuality, and desire. By way of examples of photographic representations, queer Latinidad is presented as complex and capable of encompassing paradoxical but expansive, nondichotomous understandings of sexuality and of gender presentation. Such photographic representations also allow for disidentifications that introduce the possibility of desires that cut across races and racism. Following Muñoz, queer Latinidad is ultimately connected to a sense of longing and melancholia that is resistant in the face of the various erasures of queer Latinidad, both in the context of queer theory and in the context of everydayness.

This article discusses sorrow in terms of its resistant possibilities. It describes bodies of color as ontological sites of sorrow in the context of racism and xenophobia. This sorrow, however, does not condemn these bodies to hopelessness and erasure. Rather, it may constitute a rupture with a present that fails to acknowledge racist and xenophobic practices. In addition, it connects sorrow to the kind of melancholia that bodies of color experience given their being-in-worlds that consider them unwanted, unworthy, and disposable. By way of photographic analysis, this article also presents the notion of aesthetic unsettlement in order to point to coalitional possibilities across experiences and histories of woundedness, melancholia, and sorrow.