Mar 11, 4:30 PM: Deborah R. Vargas: "The 'j' (jota/queer) in Jenni Rivera"

The late Latina singing-sensation Jenni Rivera was a bilingual superstar who had an enormous fan base across the US and Mexico. In her talk, Vargas will reconsider Rivera's pop iconicity as a queer Latina subjectivity, what Vargas argues is the “j” (pronounced “jota,” the Latino Spanish vernacular of “queer”) in Jenni as queer. Deborah R. Vargas is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which explores the lives and performancse of Chicana singers for the ways they push the heternormative limits of sonic imaginaries in borderlands music. Her areas of research and teaching include: Chicano/Latino cultural studies, critical race feminisms, queer of color critique, feminist ethnography, borderlands theory, and oral histories.

Date: March 11, 2013
Time: 4:30 PM