Tuesday, 4pm, September 21, 2010 | Latina/o Bodies are a Hazard to Your Health | Guest Lecture on Rita Hayworth, Latina/o Subjectivity, and Tex[t]-Mex

Lately, Latina and Latino bodies have been wreaking havoc, roiling the American population (or, at least the blogosphere) in new ways! From Mexican journalists cavorting amidst naked athletes in NFL locker-rooms, to J-Lo's nalgas (backside!) causing marital strife, to English Professors teaching American Literature by day and dominatrixing at night, Latina/o folks have been busy--throw Danny Trejo as Machete into the mix with Jan Brewer stirring up anti-Mexican neo lynch mobs, and its a heyday for the study of Mexican representation in America.

In any event, my hope is that reading Tex[t]-Mex, my book with UT Press, will help students to grapple constructively with this miasma of Latinas/os in the news. Indy Chicano filmmaker Arthur Saenz made the call to teach my book in his Mexican Images in Film class @ SDSU's Chicana/o Studies Department and I am coming in to help his students make sense of my deathless prose! There's plenty of room and the presentation is free and open to the general public. I will guest lecture there from 4 to 4:40 or so next week, Tuesday, September 21, 2010--Hepner Hall 214. Be there or be square...



Let's end this preview with a preview--the trailer from Robert Rodriguez's and Ethan Maniquis' Machete:

update!

now gringo profes are getting fired over this "plague" of hot latina-ness

The New York Jets, Ines Sainz, Men's Lockers and the Tale of Mexicans, Once Again, Soliciting Problems With Their Bodies

I don't have the time I need to weigh in on this story of sweaty men's genitals, bombshell Latina journalists, the mass media, the blogosphere, etc. I will leave the round-up to The New York Times and the New York Post, where I lifted the video below.

With chapters on Lupe Velez and Rita Hayworth (and cameos by Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz), Tex[t]-Mex argues that Mexican and Latina/o bodies become synecdoches (a fancy word for short-cuts, part for whole, like 'all hands on deck') for the realm of the sexual--no doubt Ines Sainz's antics with Jet jocks will do a lot to cement this trope for the next few weeks.