Toxic Loves Impossible Futures

Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of our current global political-environmental crisis and the interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life and human relationships. In a world in which "a woman's voice" exists in bodies called on to occupy important positions in corporations, government, and cultural and academic institutions, to work in factories, and to join the army—but whose bodies are systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the double burden imposed on them to perform both productive and reproductive labor—Emmelhainz asks: What is the task of thought and form in contemporary feminist-situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the current context of the production of redundant populations, the omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation, toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more. These reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Chris Kraus, Alaíde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day, Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Marie Paley, Raquel Gutiérrez, Sara Eliassen, and Silvia Gruner. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.

During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role—its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage—author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or "subjunctive aesthetics." In English, the subjunctive is a grammatical mode that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible. In the Spanish language, it is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Each chapter of Subjunctive Aesthetics takes up one of these modalities to examine how Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be.

This critical anthology of writings by Carlos Monsiváis represents a foundational set of texts by an exceptional (yet under‑translated) Mexican cultural critic. Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist situates the urgencies of social movements as they developed in real time. Spanning from 1973 to 2008, Monsiváis’s essays, which were originally compiled by scholar Marta Lamas, analyze the role of women in a patriarchal culture from pre‑Columbian times to the present. This critical edition offers extensive annotation and cultural background to understand the cogent, but particularly Mexican arguments that Monsiváis makes, many of which are extremely relevant in today’s political economy in the US and the world. Norma Klahn and Ilana Luna’s translation, critical introduction, and commentary consider issues of context, history, and conventions, framing Monsiváis’s debates in relation to global feminist history and human rights struggles.

Through political and cultural analysis of representations of the so-called war on drugs, Oswaldo Zavala makes the case that the very terms we use to describe drug traffickers are a constructed subterfuge for the real narcos: politicians, corporations, and the military. Though Donald Trump's incendiary comments and monstrous policies on the border revealed the character of a deeply depraved leader, state violence on both sides of the border is nothing new. Immigration has endured as a prevailing news topic, but it is a fixture of modern society in the neoliberal era; the future will be one of exile brought on by state violence and the plundering of our natural resources to sate capitalist greed. Yet the realities of violence in Mexico and along the border are obscured by the books, films, and TV series we consume. In truth, works like Sicario, The Queen of the South, and Narcos hide Mexico's political realities. Alongside these examples, Zavala discusses Charles Bowden, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and other important Latin American writers as examples of those who do capture the realities of the drug war. Translated into English by William Savinar, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist will be useful for journalists, political scientists, philosophers, and writers of any kind who wish to break down the constructed barriers—physical and mental—created by those in power around the reality of the Mexican drug trade.

Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. Through economic concerns, elites created a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination, and independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that would nationalize a rich and productive economic apparatus. Mexico, Interrupted investigates these economic hopes during the difficult decades between 1821, the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain, and 1852, a period of political polarization after the US-Mexico War that led the country to the brink of another armed conflict. Drawing on political and popular media, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsession with labor and idleness in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. Focusing on figures of work and its opposites, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs these decades’ “economic imaginaries of independence”: the political and cultural discourses that structured understandings, beliefs, and fantasies of the relationship between “the economy” and the life of an independent polity. By bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, Gutiérrez Negrón offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates the history of the “spirit of capitalism” in the Americas.

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance. Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.

No book until now has tied in two centuries of Mexican serial narratives—tales of glory, of fame, and of epic characters, grounded in oral folklore—with their subsequent retelling in comics, radio, and television soap operas. Wright’s multidisciplinary Serial Mexico delves into this storytelling tradition: examining the nostalgic tales reimagined in novelas, radionovelas, telenovelas and onwards, and examining the foundational figures who have been woven into society. This panorama shows the Mexican experience of storytelling from the country’s early days until now, showcasing protagonists that mock authority, make light of hierarchy, and embrace the hybridity and mestizaje of Mexico. These tales reflect on and respond to crucial cultural concerns such as family, patriarchy, gender roles, racial mixing, urbanization, modernization, and political idealism. Serial Mexico thus examines how serialized storytelling’s melodrama and sensationalism reveals key political and cultural messaging. In a detailed yet accessible style, Wright describes how these stories have continued to morph with current times’ concerns and social media. Will tropes and traditions carry on in new and reimagined serial storytelling forms? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for the next episode.

The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities. Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state. A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.