"Cha-Cha Bitch": Reading AB Soto's Queer Latino Performance

Omar Padilla turns to an analysis of AB Soto, a Queer Mexican-American performer who has gained recognition for his music videos “Cha Cha Bitch” and “Crunchy.” Soto grew up in East LA, and both his Chicano and Mexican... [ view full abstract ]

Omar Padilla turns to an analysis of AB Soto, a Queer Mexican-American performer who has gained recognition for his music videos “Cha Cha Bitch” and “Crunchy.” Soto grew up in East LA, and both his Chicano and Mexican roots are central to his performance aesthetic. In "Cha-Cha Bitch": Reading AB Soto's Queer Latino Performance,” Padilla reads what AB Soto calls "fagging out" aesthetics to consider how Soto's performance speaks to contemporary discourses of queer Latinidad. Padilla argues that Soto's articulation of multiple subjectivities through queer performance is transgressive because it traverses the boundaries of public/private sexuality discourses. Specifically, Padilla understands Soto’s explicit performances as a meshing of raunch sexual expression and queer Chicano subjectivities, arguing that these performances map a queer-Chicano geography. Queer-Chicano geography is defined by Padilla as a process of negotiations that navigate the accepted culture of “tacit subjectivity” (Decena, 2008) within pan-Latino sexuality discourses and homonormative, white, U.S. expectations of outness.

Panel 140