Praise for Playful Protest
Winner “Outstanding Academic Titles of 2024”
—CHOICE, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association
“This book is a breath of fresh air. Kristie Soares recuperates joy and its multiple Latinx variants, such as gozando, choteo, and silliness, as radical empowering practices. It is a brilliant challenge to critical approaches that only focus on Latinx negative affect.”
—LAWRENCE LA FOUNTAIN-STOKES, author of Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance
"An important intervention in Latinx cultural studies . . . [Playful Protest] is an unmatched theorization of joy that is timely and necessary."
—J. GOMEZ MENJIVAR in Choice a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries
“Soares has written Playful Protest with clarity and humor; her comprehensive arguments are supported by care-filled citational practices and informative foot- notes that will inspire further research. Playful Protest’s contributions to the fields of Latinx studies, affect studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies cannot be overstated.”
—JOHN A. MUNDELL in Latino Studies
“Playful Protest is a welcome volume on the affective and political possibilities of Latinx joy. Soares compellingly illustrates that an affect like joy, as opposed to more favored affects for scholarly inquiry like depression or envy, for instance, is just as viable a site for critical inquiry and robust research. Playful Protest evidences instructively how Latinx joy, and the pleasures of joyful protest, can provide formative conceptual tools and political strategies for Latinx studies and beyond”
—MARCOS GONSALEZ in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
Pleasure-based politics in Puerto Rican and Cuban pop culture
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take political violence seriously.
Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.