Joshua Javier Guzmán’s book Brown Exposures: Queer Photography and the Literary Aperture will consider experimental Latinx and queer punk photography between 1979–95, including the group of artists known as the Boston School, such as David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, and Mark Morrisroe; the photographic, video, and literary works of LA-based queer and Chicanx artists Diane Gamboa, Laura Aguilar, and Reynaldo Rivera; and the work of San Francisco–based artist Lourdes Portillo. Guzmán will compare the photo- and language-based processes of these artists and the ways they have responded to policing strategies, lethal drugs, surveillance, pollution, malfeasance, illness, incarceration, and other unspeakable acts of disrepair that Reaganite policies inflicted on disenfranchised communities from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
Joshua Javier Guzmán is a scholar of minoritarian performance, a cultural theorist, and a queer, Latinx, first-generation college graduate from the Texas/Mexico border. He is assistant professor, vice-chair of graduate affairs in the Department of Gender Studies and chair of the LGBTQ Studies Program at UCLA. Guzmán is the author of Dissatisfactions: Queer Chicano Style Politics (NYU Press, forthcoming) and his scholarship appears in the award-winning collections Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (DelMonico, 2018) and Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2019), and in the journals Aztlán, English Language Notes, and Social Text. He co-edited a dossier on the work of José Esteban Muñoz for Afterimage and “Lingering in Latinidad: Aesthetics, Theory, and Performance in Latina/o Studies,” a special issue of women & performance: a journal of feminist theory. He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University.