Homovideo and the Noise of Latinidad in Gregg Araki's Totally F***ed Up

The panel concludes with Joshua Javier Guzmán’s investigation, “Homovideo and the Noise of Latinidad in Gregg Araki's Totally F***ed Up,” into how the early films of Gregg Araki stand not only as the beginning of New... [ view full abstract ]

The panel concludes with Joshua Javier Guzmán’s investigation, “Homovideo and the Noise of Latinidad in Gregg Araki's Totally F***ed Up,” into how the early films of Gregg Araki stand not only as the beginning of New Queer Cinema, but also as an extension of the intersection of Chicano avant-garde art and L.A. queer punk. He foregrounds Araki’s notable soundtracks of “shoegazing” music that accompany narratives of disenfranchised, often ambiguously raced, youth culture. Araki’s use of shoegaze draws our attention to the queer Chicano, Steven, in the tight-knit queer family at the center of Araki’s early film Totally F***ed Up, and particularly Steven’s use of home video to capture the everyday lives of his friends in L.A. Though Araki is never theorized as participating in Chicano cultural production, Guzmán demonstrates how shoegaze aesthetics and home video documentation allow us to read Steven as Araki’s authorial surrogate within the film’s narrative.

Panel 342