Atrévete te-te, salte del clóset: Provocaciones sexuales y políticas en la producción cultural puertorriqueña

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the practice of provocation as a recurrent feature and strategy present in Puerto Rican cultural production of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I study provocation as public displays of noncompliance and defiance by queer, anti-colonial, and counter-hegemonic identities. I argue that Puerto Rican artists and cultural agents representing, or coming from marginal communities, have relied on provocative aesthetics and rhetoric to convey dissidence, social malaise, and to rebel—so to speak—against national and colonial order. Through their work, these artists and cultural agents provoke social responses that lead, in spite of different forms of censorship, to increased visibility. In this sense, I consider the outcomes of censorship and social persecution, and the ways both draw attention to the identities and practices they aim to eliminate from the public sphere, and whose proliferation they aim to discourage. The body of works is multidisciplinary, ranging from writing, to music, graffiti, and mural art. In each chapter, I analyze works that are noncompliant with what I describe as dominant cultural logics of patriarchal order. I conclude that these works reveal (and resist) the fact that Puerto Rican national-colonial discourse encourages the violent assertion of masculinity, gender-based violence, trans/homophobia, and racism.