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La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in Ae Diaspora. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 272 pp.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes's Queer Ricans is a groundbreaking exploration of queer Puerto Rican and Diasporican poetics and expressive cultures. In its cartography of art practices and forms, it is also a significant contribution to a variety of emerging and ongoing lines of inquiry in US Latino/a cultural and performance studies. While unprecedented in its scope and detail, Queer Ricans may nonetheless be profitably read alongside such books as Frances Negrón-Muntaner s Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (2004) and Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé's Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (2007); all three books help us "queer" the Puerto Rican corpus, mining the art and performance cultures of Ricans on the mainland in an effort to underscore the performativity (in a Butlerian sense) of Puerto Rican identity practices, always plural and provisional. In doing so, they nudge us away from printbased and island-bound conceptions of Puerto Rican identity and towards complex diaspora-centric and body-centric perspectives.
What is perhaps most remarkable about La Fountain-Stokes's book is its scope. From the canonical yet confounding short stories of the island's most celebrated contemporary writer, Luis Rafael Sánchez, to the independent films of Chicago-born director Rose Troche and the dance and performance works of Bronx-based artists Arthur Aviles and Elizabeth Marrero, Queer Ricans reads Rican sexualities in ways that complicate binaries (high-low, island-mainland, gaystraight), calling instead for broader frameworks and for new ways of reading and relating. In his introduction, La Fountain-Stokes characterizes the book as an attempt to "see how sexuality has been a constitutive element in shaping Puerto Rican migration principally (but not exclusively) to the United States, and how different artists have represented or publicly articulated this issue" (xii), and argues that we must look to prejudice, ignorance, and/or sexism and homophobia as reasons for the "longstanding, historical refusal to acknowledge the centrality of sexuality to migration"...