"In writing this, I am thinking of contemporary figures of abjection—the asylum seeker, the victim of domestic abuse and gang violence, the parent and child violently separated at the US border. Abject Performances does not make such figures more legible, but rather encourages readers towards being with illegibility so as to create a condition for thinking through alternatives to citizenship, to accept the unknown and unknowable as a viable, yet confounding aesthetic, and a necessary, though unsustainable politic." — Eddie Gamboa, Women & Performance
"Abject Performances presents a dynamic, fascinating, and novel approach to understanding the role of abjection in contestatory articulations of Latino identity. From the esoteric to the popular, the sacred to the profane, Leticia Alvarado weaves together a narrative that convincingly positions the abject as an entirely distinct way of producing latinidad through diverse cultural products." — Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins, Journal of American Studies
"Alvarado’s book usefully brings aesthetics and affect theory to bear upon not only what Latinidad means, but also how its possibilities can shift. . . . Alvarado rigorously theorizes a strand of Latinx affective and aesthetic engagement that names a feeling we already have and a perspective we need to embrace." — Renee Hudson, ASAP/Journal
"Abject Performances is an ambitious text. The breadth of theoretical frameworks is especially impressive given the depth of critical analysis that complements them. . . . Viewing the ways in which aesthetic theory meets performance and media studies, Latino studies, and queer theory as an emerging flux continues necessary conversations in these fields." — Lacie Rae B. Cunningham, Aztlán
"In subject matter and style, Abject Performances is a dense study that will interest ethnic studies scholars versed in the specialized language used in performance studies, visual culture, cultural studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Alvarado convincingly demonstrates, through a unique and wide-ranging expressive archive, that an aesthetics of abjection reveals modes of collective belonging and social critique that refuse identitarian coherence and facilitate affiliative possibilities distinct from homogenizing cultural nationalism and liberal feminism." — Camilla Stevens, Modern Drama
"Alvarado brings together artistic, academic, and activist ways of being and doing in this world, opening spaces to imagine brighter futures. . . . Against the myth of wholeness and completion, Alvarado offers a final Muñozian gesture: circling back to the urgency of imagining futurity, Abject Performances rehearses a path towards a more sensual world not-yet-here." — Leticia Robles-Moreno, TDR: The Drama Review
“In this provocative text, Leticia Alvarado offers us abjection as an aesthetic strategy for thinking about embodied performances that bear the weight of the fraught communal failures of latinidad. Her eclectic archive of formal and informal performances of world-making practices draw her readers toward those improper subjects of Latino cultural production that expose the perverse pleasures of refusing both civic incorporation and identitarian regimes to linger in the difficult promise of racialized otherness.” — Juana María Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
“Abject Performances counters inspirational, mainstream representations of Latinos that give them a constrained place in U.S. minoritarian politics. Leticia Alvarado understands abjection as resistance: a wily, uncooperative ethos within the heroic narrative of Latino inclusion and assimilation. She sets her critical eye not on aspirational models, but on artists and performances that insist on the confusion of boundaries. The result is a brilliant contribution to Latino Studies.” — José A. Quiroga, author of Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America