https://monicahuertaphd.com Monicahuerta Sun, 27 Apr 2025 03:24:48 +0000 https://monicahuertaphd.com en https://monicahuertaphd.com/Homepage-New-Option-1 Mon, 21 Jun 2021 18:08:48 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/Homepage-New-Option-1 MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; BOOKS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; ESSAYS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; CURATION https://monicahuertaphd.com/BIO Thu, 15 Jul 2021 17:10:00 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/BIO MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; BOOKS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; ESSAYS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; CURATION <img width="1112" height="1144" width_o="1112" height_o="1144" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/14669fbe246ccbf3af4df8311cf9262fff9508b8736195c597e1651c08d84719/PortraitMonica.png" data-mid="113924880" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/14669fbe246ccbf3af4df8311cf9262fff9508b8736195c597e1651c08d84719/PortraitMonica.png" />For collaborations and invitations, please fill out this form.︎&nbsp;︎ Monica Huerta is a critic, curator, scholar, and editor. She works across mediums to amplify freer futures and the courage to make them real. Alongside visionary makers, she learns from histories of sensing the world otherwise to unearth new possibilities in the present. Her current projects explore contemporary Latinx conceptual art, the sensory as a borderlands, Global South futurism, and the art of sports. Essays appear in ArtForum, Society + Space, The Nation,&nbsp;Intervenxions, Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries, Women &amp; Performance, and many peer-reviewed academic journals. With media theorist, Ava Shirazi, she founded the::sense::archive in 2023 as a curatorial experiment. The core mission is to center artists’ practices, and the goal is to un-learn and remake aesthetic inquiry. Beyond that, morphing sensoria take the lead. Together, Ava and Monica are curating exhibitions of archivally-based contemporary art for the Princeton University Art Museum (Spring 2026) and the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College (Spring 2027). Textiles of Consciousness: Faig Ahmed opens at the Art@Bainbridge space on March 28, 2026. Monica is the author of two books. Most recently,&nbsp;The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (2023) tells a new story about how race and photography shaped early intellectual property law. The book is glowingly reviewed in Art Journal, Women &amp; Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Lambda Literary Review, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Her first book, Magical Habits, was deemed a “striking debut” by the New York Times Book Review. The book is an example of hybrid criticism committed to what Saidiya Hartman calls “undoings of the plot.” Orbiting a childhood spent in Chicago’s Mexican restaurants, and written in distinct genres - fiction, personal essay, fairy tale, criticism - the book&nbsp;experiments what knowledge-making might become. Magical Habits&nbsp;won a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and&nbsp;received rave reviews from&nbsp;ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History,&nbsp;Library Journal, MELUS, Foreword, Lateral Journal, and many others.Monica is a member of the editorial collective for the Duke University Press series,&nbsp;Writing Matters! The series supports authors who seek new forms for new thoughts. For that reason, the series is rigorously undisciplined, seeking to publish research-based, field-shifting works that expand the tone, reach, claims, and attitudes of conceptual critical writing.&nbsp;Monica is an independent scholar, who taught for a decade&nbsp; at Princeton University after being a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Duke University. She has also taught at Rutgers University, Pace University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the Técnologico de Monterrey in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her work has been generously supported by the Banff Centre for Arts &amp; Creativity, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the New York Public Library, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, an M.A. from Princeton, and a B.A. from Harvard.&nbsp; https://monicahuertaphd.com/Books Tue, 22 Jun 2021 17:00:49 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/Books MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO&nbsp; &nbsp;•&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;BOOKS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; ESSAYS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;CURATION Books<img width="694" height="1042" width_o="694" height_o="1042" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be7b574d395afc459f18e53c3449f7881ef68d1117c0f14ef4f44c996ef5f28e/FINAL-COVER.png" data-mid="123718866" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/694/i/be7b574d395afc459f18e53c3449f7881ef68d1117c0f14ef4f44c996ef5f28e/FINAL-COVER.png" /> THE UNINTENDED: PHOTOGRAPHY, PROPERTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF RACIAL CAPITALISMThe Unintended traces the subtle ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the ownership over images. The book pulls together an archive that encompasses performance and portraiture alongside the legal, emphasizing the making of “expression” into property to focus our attention on the failures of control that cameras do not invent, but rather put new emphasis on. The Unintended proposes that analyzing the sensed horizons of intentionality is another way into understanding how white supremacy functions. Ultimately, its unique reading practice offers a historically-specific vantage on the everyday workings of racial capitalism and the inheritances of white supremacy that structure so much of our lives. BUY&nbsp;HERE “Wholly original and exciting...Monica Huerta addresses the workings of capital in relation to the medium—not only photography’s status as a commercial practice, but also how it took up and redefined the ways bodies could be regarded as property. Closely historicized yet wide-ranging in its implications, Huerta’s book models a profoundly ethical attention to what the photographic archive can reveal.” — Dana Luciano, author of How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States “Huerta’s inventive method of reading photographs through discourses of legal, race, and performance studies is matched by the freshness of her authorial voice and textual structure. She invites us into the text to “co-work” (192) with her. She sits next to you while you teach photo history in the classroom, while you become uncomfortable trying on a new method of reading, and while you integrate these unfamiliar photographs into your habitual archive of racial imagery.” — Jordan Reznick, Art Journal “Monica Huerta seems to deliver a surprising analytic turn on every page. This book made my head spin.” — Caleb Smith, author of Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture “[Huerta’s] research is...singular for how it weaves together these two insights--that whiteness is an aesthetic ‘alchemy of the intentional and the unintended’ [C. Robinson]--by drawing out of the archive the intense anxiety that the potential for unintended expressions produced among whitened subjects once they could be captured and circulated in photographs (30). Photographs threaten to reveal the precarity by which whiteness exists as an aesthetic constant. Indeed, whiteness is elusive and ‘chaotic’ because it has no content--it is a pathology of anxiously lurching in multiple directions in order to police the ‘tattered fringes of self-control’s fictions and enforcements’ (10).”&nbsp;— E. Lou Barnick, Women &amp; Performance: a journal of feminist theory “Locating performative acts by and for the camera, Huerta gives us an interdisciplinary book that frames photographic material as crucial to how we understand artistic authorship culturally. With playfulness and wit...this an excellent read for scholars of theater, arts, and law.” — Jess Saldaña, Lambda Literary Review“This argument is provocative...it asks us to question how expressions of whiteness are reflected through photographic images and photographic practice, and how under white-surpemacy, expressions of whiteness were used to legitimize photographic image copyright as a form of property maintenance.”&nbsp;— Ever Josue Figueroa, Ethnic and Racial Studies <img width="600" height="900" width_o="600" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/74bec78df19b62fa8fb167afee065183980a9c5f9497905f7e6667f4cd856f58/978-1-4780-1417-1_pr.jpeg" data-mid="112061848" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/74bec78df19b62fa8fb167afee065183980a9c5f9497905f7e6667f4cd856f58/978-1-4780-1417-1_pr.jpeg" /> MAGICAL HABITS In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with the afterlives of history and racial capitalism.BUY HERE “This striking debut blends personal and political essays with U.S. and Mexican histories, photos, menus and a fable to indulge ‘multiple habits of thought rather than proposing there is one way of knowing.’” — The New York Times Book Review “Magical Habits is as much a treasure trove as it is a book—full of surprises, glittering insights, lyrical vignettes, personal archives, political history, family lore, and brilliant literary critique. The writing is exquisite, for the book is both polyphonic and constantly—effortlessly—changing tack. I would turn the page without any sense of where Monica Huerta might take me next, only knowing that I wanted to follow, that I did not want to come out from under this spell.”&nbsp; — Justin Torres, author of We the Animals “Monica Huerta moves readers toward a habit of being captured by objects that mesh one's own singular and collective histories. We learn to breathe with them and to be dispossessed by them. This fantastic book enchanted me and taught me so much.” — Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism&nbsp;“Magical Habits’s blend of personal archive and theory prompts the reader to question their assumptions around what constitutes accepted archives and heralded academic discourse. . . . Huerta performs a rich kind of self-ekphrasis, looking at material from her own life and family for clues about how to live alongside scholarship: television, family lore, tales from her love life that read like movie reels." — Rosa Boshier, Los Angeles Review of Books “...an intimate, academic, genre-bending study of&nbsp; race, history,&nbsp; and heritage...a much-needed reminder that there are countless ways to tell a story..." — Arianna Rebolini, The Millions“Delightfully heterogenous and perfectly unblended, Huerta’s mixture of creative and critical writing spans from history to monologues, to tales and family documents. . . . As a book which ‘seeks to enact as much as describe,’ Magical Habits is a love story between the reader and the writing, one to be read with generosity and eagerness (ix).” — Adriana Murad Konings, ASAP/Journal“Magical Habits, is unlike many other contemporary Latinx studies monographs. It breaks with generic conventions of literary criticism and stuns with Huerta’s reflections on everyday encounters with history and capitalism via family, place, race, self, and the stories they intertwine.” — Jennifer M. Lozano, MELUS “Monica Huerta delivers a labyrinthine and whimsical study....The reader’s curiosity will be piqued by Magical Habits’ experimental structure, and by the author’s decision to abandon traditional academic writing in favor of an intimate prose that fluctuates between storytelling and critical thinking.”&nbsp;— Anaïs Ornelas Ramirez, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association“Thanks to Huerta’s text, I have finally understood that to learn from other knowledges we must think within those knowledges.” — Judith Sierra-Rivera, American Literary History “Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits takes us deep into the possibilities of everyday objects, feelings, and questions. . . . I love this book because I, like Huerta, am committed ‘to take on scholarly rituals that lead to elsewhere.’ This memoir that is also a collage and a performance does just this.” — Suzanne Bost, Prose Studies "Thoughtful, wry, and intimate, Magical Habits is a memoir that’s rich with questions...." — Meg Nola, Foreword“Huerta weaves into each chapter powerful stories of her upbringing and family and the narrative of her own winding path in academia. She cleverly uses a variety of documents and historical archival material, sourced from her family and their businesses in Chicago and Mexico, to explore wide-ranging themes.” — Amy Lewontin, The Library Journal“Magical Habits is a combination of human storytelling, academic research, and life questions and can trigger a philosophical and anthropological discussion that would last for hours.”&nbsp;— Nivea Bona, European Journal of American Studies https://monicahuertaphd.com/Essays Fri, 10 Feb 2023 16:31:54 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/Essays MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; BOOKS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; ESSAYS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; CURATION Essays <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5d606cc1ea8639d4f8145b8f04c29ab9b13677ea188f23988eefb08f3cf16d7f/IMG_5506.jpeg" data-mid="246824817" border="0" data-scale="98" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5d606cc1ea8639d4f8145b8f04c29ab9b13677ea188f23988eefb08f3cf16d7f/IMG_5506.jpeg" /> An Invitation to Faig Ahmed’s Process in&nbsp;Textiles of Consciousnessco-authored with Ava Shirazi, Princeton University Art Museum Magazine, forthcomingImage: Ava Shirazi, Monica Huerta, Faig Ahmed with Ahmed’s Speech of Birds (2016), installed at Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery. <img width="1006" height="1238" width_o="1006" height_o="1238" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7edae7379cb6cd61ad482f3caf7cdd3c7a7d3e9f3da5c8a103f34f357866a26/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-8.16.05PM.png" data-mid="245919725" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f7edae7379cb6cd61ad482f3caf7cdd3c7a7d3e9f3da5c8a103f34f357866a26/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-8.16.05PM.png" /> “DIASPORIC COLLAGE: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People,” at CENTRO, Center for Puerto Rican StudiesArtForum, February 2026Excerpt: While collage is often associated with the disruptive, nonnarrative tendencies of the European avant-garde, this show proposed strategies for continuity and induced slow looking. CONTINUE READINGImage: María Martínez Cañas, Absence Revealed 006, 2021. <img width="1200" height="907" width_o="1200" height_o="907" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/72a8b30310ed456b957c203dec2ee80c8ed05ccd898a6370fc5df5a7643a0ebe/Ziba-Rajabi-Glitched-Home.jpg" data-mid="237122005" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/72a8b30310ed456b957c203dec2ee80c8ed05ccd898a6370fc5df5a7643a0ebe/Ziba-Rajabi-Glitched-Home.jpg" /> GLITCH|STICH: Sensing Survival in Ziba Rajabi’s&nbsp;Glitched Home co-authored with Ava Shirazi, Society + Space, December 2025Excerpt: Rajabi’s refusal to stretch the canvas—first an aspiration of return, then a critique of the traditions and institutions that would misread her—lends density to the compact rectangular shapes she cuts....The spaces between what she calls canvas-pixels give the impression that at any moment the whole might be rearranged, that the pixels might be capable of reconfiguring the image. Portable. This is a sense of glitch as temporary, as potential, even temporary potential energy, undivided from a glitch as the precarity of being held together with knots and stitches. CONTINUE READINGImage: Ziba Rajabi, Glitched Home 2021. Photo courtesy of artist. <img width="1105" height="1130" width_o="1105" height_o="1130" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/32ac1d1c0b2626321eba31c28265a2ba2d285a7b17c5cc65cc1c2fe205036ef4/MH_Categories-19.png" data-mid="205450589" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/32ac1d1c0b2626321eba31c28265a2ba2d285a7b17c5cc65cc1c2fe205036ef4/MH_Categories-19.png" /> AN OPEN LETTER TO STUDENTS: Universities Do Not Deserve Youco-authored with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, The Nation, September 2025Excerpt: If we were together in a classroom, we would ask you: What does it mean that “the practical” that has been presented to you as a foregone conclusion is ultimately to the detriment of the planet’s well-being? CONTINUE READING <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ef15a9df9af394d022007ea4885befd0b5a3847bda47153ca66aa62f9319c63/IMG_0493.jpeg" data-mid="229271543" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6ef15a9df9af394d022007ea4885befd0b5a3847bda47153ca66aa62f9319c63/IMG_0493.jpeg" /> Where Brown Study Turns; on Sandra Ruiz’s Left Turns in Brown Study ASAP/J, June 2025Excerpt: When else has soap been used to make a shrine? That is the wrong question: the ordinary—“an event and a sensation,” “both animated and inhabitable” (Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 4)—is teeming with homes and their smells-sounds-threads-heartbeats. The sensory does not only lead to a memory, it compounds, expands, intensifies, dimensionalizes a memory, transgresses particularity (without erasing it) for a moment of mutual recognition.CONTINUE READING Image: Entrance hallway, "Sensory Turns and Visceral Riffs: From Syllable to Sound to Print," with monoprints by Daniel Hughes Vernola, inspired by Sandra Ruiz, Left Turns in Brown Study (Duke UP, 2024), Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, New York, December 18, 2024. Photograph by M. Huerta. <img width="1800" height="1800" width_o="1800" height_o="1800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/db3998708fa78ee0934bc09df459531529947b638c3a0db3e11a230099d3395f/9223501_Krajnak-RePose-016.jpg" data-mid="230322785" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/db3998708fa78ee0934bc09df459531529947b638c3a0db3e11a230099d3395f/9223501_Krajnak-RePose-016.jpg" /> Starting Without a Beginning: Tarrah Krajnak Intervenxions, April 2025Excerpt: [Krajnak]&nbsp;seeks out the questions...historical ideas of “the female pose” raise. Sparse staging and white clothing emphasize the positioning of her limbs, her disinterest in articulating an intelligible expression, to take away everything but the pose, and even then, to be uninterested in the precision of its reproduction. The photographed poses might be inviting us to seek out the unimagined branching paths that lead somewhere else in time. CONTINUE READINGImage: Tarrah Krajnak, REPOSE/Portfolio 16, 8x10 Silver Gelatin Print, 2022 to Present. <img width="1080" height="608" width_o="1080" height_o="608" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9bbbe4219ebbf0d8ffef1440cc49fb32e839d2356bec399aa97591ae65569f3d/Cordova_Act-Yellow-from-Joan-Los-Angeles.jpg" data-mid="229333478" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9bbbe4219ebbf0d8ffef1440cc49fb32e839d2356bec399aa97591ae65569f3d/Cordova_Act-Yellow-from-Joan-Los-Angeles.jpg" /> From Nothing to Letting Nothing Go New Literary History, Vol. 55, No. 3-4 (2025)Abstract: This essay reengages Barbara Johnson's restaging of W. H. Auden's proposition that writing makes nothing happen. It pivots away from that proposition by moving with Latinx artist Sofía Córdova’s work toward the implicit and explicit commitments of contemporary networks of study that inherit intellectual genealogies of critique that would not recognize the “nothing” Auden and Johnson claim. Image:&nbsp;Sofía Córdova, GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry, Yellow: Break Room (still), 2019-21. Three-channel video, color, sound, 25 min; published in JoanLosAngeles.org. <img width="625" height="1024" width_o="625" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/021c4617f3e98957c1943f416d03c12ddade6f3d5189d80be6a6d83b930e0442/Attributed-to-Mumler_or-Helen-Stuart_group-spirit-photograph-1861-8.jpg" data-mid="229333480" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/625/i/021c4617f3e98957c1943f416d03c12ddade6f3d5189d80be6a6d83b930e0442/Attributed-to-Mumler_or-Helen-Stuart_group-spirit-photograph-1861-8.jpg" /> Photography Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, edited by Robert Spoo and Simon Stern (2025) Abstract: This entry follows conflicts over privacy and evidence among photography, law, and literature’s historical interrelations. It offers how various literary authors found in photography’s legal conundrums a way to grapple with modernity’s vocabularies for its own contradictions; these challenges for law were intertwined with the aesthetic questions photography prompted of art more generally. This entry also points to important theorists whose writings help illuminate literary engagements with the ‘laws of image,’ as Samantha Barbas has phrased it. ORDER HEREImage: Attributed to William Mumler, or possibly Helen F. Stuart; Five ‘spirits in background,&nbsp;1861-68, Getty Digital Collection. <img width="515" height="770" width_o="515" height_o="770" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fd0437ada343be37b54d1d32a7ce6a3ee91a1493ec8f154f7a6300874208220a/Wenzell_House_of_Mirth.jpg" data-mid="229333479" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/515/i/fd0437ada343be37b54d1d32a7ce6a3ee91a1493ec8f154f7a6300874208220a/Wenzell_House_of_Mirth.jpg" /> Realism’s Reputations, Financialized Whiteness American Literature, Vol. 96, No. 3 (2024) Abstract: This essay uses the legal rearticulation of reputation as white heteropatriarchal property in the United States to piece apart the preoccupation with characters’ reputations in realist fiction. It focuses on two later-nineteenth-century arenas of what property theorist and legal scholar K-Sue Park has called the “generative dynamics” of racial capitalism: new markets in private commercial credit and the socio-legal (re)production of reputation. In so doing, the essay unearths realism’s invisiblized generic presupposition that reputations are a neutral or self-evident category of experience. CONTINUE READING Image: A. B. Wenzell illustration for Edith Wharton, House of Mirth (1905) <img width="1374" height="1784" width_o="1374" height_o="1784" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dbff1c5414061be87e111a1f1bb72ac5936aa1e944e1d003dff7e5b80650eaa4/Screenshot-2023-04-23-at-1.13.12-PM.png" data-mid="196303495" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dbff1c5414061be87e111a1f1bb72ac5936aa1e944e1d003dff7e5b80650eaa4/Screenshot-2023-04-23-at-1.13.12-PM.png" /> On Rearrangement: “You Belong Here: People, Place, and Purpose in Latinx Photography”ArtForum, November 2023 Excerpt: THE WORDS CAST arms open and outstretched, signaling recognition and an offer that does not presume the addressee is a hugger: You belong here. Heard in a slightly different register, it’s an insistence in addition to an affirmation, as though someone else has said otherwise—a someone the words don’t need to mention, a someone the speaker and “you” together do not allow to set the terms. Or, there might not be a reason to say the words except in the way an ocean greets sand, one beloved to another beloved living in its meaning. In any case, and though received differently depending on where and how you stand in the world, in the gallery we’re overhearing a conversation whose coordinates might be in the middle of being rearranged. CONTINUE READINGImage: Gabriela Ruiz and Bibs Moreno, Untitled, 2017, ink-jet print, 30 × 20" <img width="1545" height="2000" width_o="1545" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7ae10453dd1f90b4d6aaf10154d3c67a007e3fb108e93e3dee9c0ec2eba661f/Post45-Cluster-Image.png" data-mid="205449091" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c7ae10453dd1f90b4d6aaf10154d3c67a007e3fb108e93e3dee9c0ec2eba661f/Post45-Cluster-Image.png" /> Co-editor ||&nbsp;Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster Contemporaries: a post45 digital space, co-edited by Monica Huerta and Tyler Allen Tennant, December 2022Table of Contents || Reading Challenges: Introduction - Tyler Allen Tennant || Can I Get an Amen? or Citation and the Speech of Fantasy - John Lurz || Bijuriya Chamke! Curating My Drag Sound - Gabriel Dharmoo || Drag Queens in Stars and Stripes - Talib Jabbar || Queer Childhoods and Drag Race - Mary Zaborskis || “I Love You Dearly, Bitch” - Jewel Pereya || Drag Queens Everywhere - Sophie Chamas || Piñata Drag: Crystal Methyd and the Pleasures of Quirky Latinx Aesthetics - Marcos Gonsalez || || Drag is the Medium [Outro] - Monica Huerta and Brittany Lynn (Ian Morrison) CONTINUE READING <img width="1154" height="1490" width_o="1154" height_o="1490" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/020efc34ddfa36472ca01ced5092a129048db7f3983270b37f0da6b229332d8e/Screenshot-2025-04-05-at-8.13.22PM.png" data-mid="229333481" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/020efc34ddfa36472ca01ced5092a129048db7f3983270b37f0da6b229332d8e/Screenshot-2025-04-05-at-8.13.22PM.png" /> Drag is the Medium [Outro]Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race cluster of&nbsp;Contemporaries: a post45 digital space, co-edited by Monica Huerta and Tyler Tennant, December 2022 Abstract: In this lightly edited interview, Ian Morrison — who performs as Brittany Lynn, and is the Don of Philly's Drag Mafia — says his priority is for folks at his shows to have a good time. His steady, open demeanor (and glowing skin! tell me your secrets!) makes his unmistakably South Philly cadence that much more charming. He describes Brittany as "a mom from South Philly," peppering performances and social media posts with "Hey, hun," and our conversation with "do you know what I mean(s)?" that sound a little more like "jknowwhaddImean?" CONTINUE READING Image: Brittany Lynn (Ian Morrison). Photo courtesy of Morrison. <img width="1064" height="1064" width_o="1064" height_o="1064" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e12f234c5a6e6c6f57529ba8522f546f17f470657edbd7821cc057155123fd9/desertification.jpeg" data-mid="167993127" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3e12f234c5a6e6c6f57529ba8522f546f17f470657edbd7821cc057155123fd9/desertification.jpeg" /> An Essay Written in Sand ArtForum,&nbsp;December 2021 Excerpt: What I didn’t know was how to feel in touch with the year-plus between us, in the fleshy, nervy, felt ways of forty years of habit. Those habits are where materiality and immateriality, narrative, history, psychology, and physiology have usually danced a tango. Even if some years it’s been a tango on sand, it’s choreography my consciousness and sensorium together have known and kept for me. CONTINUE READING Image:&nbsp; Grids of hay stabilize against desertification, Minqin, China. Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA/Shutterstock <img width="978" height="1600" width_o="978" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0140a2ec99f8e65ae815d9422f44f98ed7983ad24b8d73f29e549f5ca85540c5/Redeemed-in-Virginia.jpeg" data-mid="229333553" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/978/i/0140a2ec99f8e65ae815d9422f44f98ed7983ad24b8d73f29e549f5ca85540c5/Redeemed-in-Virginia.jpeg" /> Hold Still: Coming Undone Reading Print Culture Like a Work of Art New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture, eds. Jesse Schwartz and Daniel Worden, Bloomsbury (2022) Excerpt: My reason for trying to “think like a work of art,” is to find still another way of relating to historical and aesthetic worlds that are ultimately irretrievable. Like [Stephen] Best, I am not trying to recover them in order to suture the genocidal politics of the nineteenth century with oppositional politics of the twenty-first. ... What I try to reencounter in these images are the linked and unstable channels of geography and time. CONTINUE READING Image: Renowden,&nbsp;Redeemed in Virginia by Catherine S. Lawrence. Baptized in Brooklyn….by Henry Ward Beecher, May, 1863. Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence, a Redeemed Slave Child, 5 years of age. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Print Division. <img width="1105" height="1130" width_o="1105" height_o="1130" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5ac36a5f95ad606bc71d4ec67a73d3a3bfe1a89335e49b0494513c3a901b489c/MH_Design_071521-42.png" data-mid="167967037" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5ac36a5f95ad606bc71d4ec67a73d3a3bfe1a89335e49b0494513c3a901b489c/MH_Design_071521-42.png" /> Find Something New to Love (as long as it’s not Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza)Los Angeles Review of Books,&nbsp;December 2020 Excerpt: Cheese is the penultimate layer of the Mexican Pizza, before the black olive slices, diced tomatoes, and sliced green onion, but after enchilada sauce, all of which is layered on top of two fried tortillas (née tostadas) that hug close to either seasoned ground beef and refried pinto beans or just the beans. Like some of the most comforting things, it’s really a very simple idea. CONTINUE READING <img width="624" height="1024" width_o="624" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b2f3bd768af7f22debeb14c66569bdc25837f296f77207d86f6656d066d197f7/Learning-is-Wealth.jpeg" data-mid="229333484" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/624/i/b2f3bd768af7f22debeb14c66569bdc25837f296f77207d86f6656d066d197f7/Learning-is-Wealth.jpeg" /> Anti-Racism and the Problem of the SoulLos Angeles Review of Books,&nbsp;June 2020 Excerpt: So very many of the performances of “reckoning” or “recognizing” happening in private and public manage to feel hollow even when urgently expressed. CONTINUE&nbsp;READINGImage: Charles Paxon,Learning is Wealth. Wilson, Charley, Rebecca &amp; Rosa. Slaves from New Orleans, 1864. <img width="1105" height="1130" width_o="1105" height_o="1130" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/32ac1d1c0b2626321eba31c28265a2ba2d285a7b17c5cc65cc1c2fe205036ef4/MH_Categories-19.png" data-mid="205450589" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/32ac1d1c0b2626321eba31c28265a2ba2d285a7b17c5cc65cc1c2fe205036ef4/MH_Categories-19.png" /> Expanding the Sayable: Listening, Teaching #TeachingC19, eds. Sari Edelstein, Don James McLaughlin, and Kelly Ross (2019) Excerpt: I’ll be honest: the conversation with my class about classroom culture did not begin comfortably. ... There was no immediate, grand epiphany, and the group did not instantly dive in or feel inspired to take a risk. It was, instead, a little awkward. CONTINUE&nbsp;READING <img width="1105" height="1130" width_o="1105" height_o="1130" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b3f1afd13ebdfa72248e8d1bd6a3d4899f507cfad0530126fa80314115bc486/MH_Categories-17.png" data-mid="205450619" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4b3f1afd13ebdfa72248e8d1bd6a3d4899f507cfad0530126fa80314115bc486/MH_Categories-17.png" /> Geometry &amp; Mechanism: Material Metaphors and the Force of Uncertainty of Legal Thought New Literary Analysis of Law Special Issue of Critical Analysis of Law (2018) Abstract: This essay takes up the metaphors through which realists and Critical Legal Studies scholars created an idea of legal formalism. These insistently material metaphors emphasized that the errors of so-called formalist jurisprudence arose from two things: first, the material location of law; and second, the purpose of law in relation to the material world. The essay shows how metaphor in particular was rhetorically suited to this kind of dual work. This essay shows that legal realists’ reorientation toward the material was forged through making material forces precisely out of the immaterial of contingency and uncertainty. CONTINUE&nbsp;READING <img width="950" height="1368" width_o="950" height_o="1368" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9ed55d07794952c0be2f2efe3e50fe770a46ec37bfd6e08448186a2ca6a33ab/Screenshot-2025-04-05-at-8.57.42PM.png" data-mid="229333570" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/950/i/b9ed55d07794952c0be2f2efe3e50fe770a46ec37bfd6e08448186a2ca6a33ab/Screenshot-2025-04-05-at-8.57.42PM.png" /> The Queer Digital Touch of Racial Sight Queer Circuits in Archival Time Special Issue of&nbsp;Women &amp; Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vol. 24, no. 2 (2018) Abstract: Michael Jason Enriquez digitally altered celebrity headshots to make the celebrites look like they are wearing chola make-up. The “cholafied” headshot circultated on a Tumblr account, which at its most popular, in 2012 and 2013, spread to over 160 countried and had half a million page views, over 20,000 Tumblr followers, 90,000 reblogs, and at least 60,000 shares on Facebook. Attending to the sensory, affective, and historical rituals hidden in the haptic register of this quotidian digital archive...insinuates and approximates one aspect of what racial seeing feels like in our contemporary moment. CONTINUE&nbsp;READINGImage: Michael Jason Enriquez, homegirl used all my aquanet, from Cholafied. <img width="517" height="760" width_o="517" height_o="760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d83869d178145fb84ca1ad1e652216303b379dfefdf1a92dbbb794a68f5b229c/Manola.jpg" data-mid="229333557" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/517/i/d83869d178145fb84ca1ad1e652216303b379dfefdf1a92dbbb794a68f5b229c/Manola.jpg" /> What’s Mine: Involuntary Expressions, Modern Personality, and the Right to Privacy J19: The Journal for Nineteenth Century Americanists, Vol. 4 No. 2 (2016) READ&nbsp;HEREImage: Newsboy cabinet card, Marion Manola, date unknown, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library. <img width="1105" height="1130" width_o="1105" height_o="1130" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/712a53de6fddda6488a783dc985ffd0f02bf16ac289e887d3493c51e49c62c78/MH_Design_Background-19-20.png" data-mid="205450677" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/712a53de6fddda6488a783dc985ffd0f02bf16ac289e887d3493c51e49c62c78/MH_Design_Background-19-20.png" /> Review of Jennifer De Leon’s White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, &amp; Writing (2021)American Literary History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2024) Excerpt: I put the sentences here, sometimes, to be free from carrying them with me. This is when writing becomes an archive. I let the sentences happen to me, sometimes, because what I need is for direction to reveal itself. This is when writing activates thinking. I carve sentences into buildings, into cities, to hold a world that would not exist without them. This is how writing pushes back against gentrifying buildings, unlivable cities, and sinking shorelines. I also keep some sentences quiet, afraid more won’t arrive. But writing isn’t always safe, even when we clutch at its fictions. CONTINUE READING https://monicahuertaphd.com/Curation Wed, 18 Aug 2021 17:13:40 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/Curation MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; BOOKS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; ESSAYS &nbsp; •&nbsp; &nbsp; CURATION https://monicahuertaphd.com/PersonalLimits Mon, 13 Sep 2021 03:04:59 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/PersonalLimits MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO&nbsp; &nbsp;WRITING&nbsp; &nbsp;COURSES&nbsp; &nbsp;PROJECTS&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;CV <img width="2400" height="2400" width_o="2400" height_o="2400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/563ed4a4e86d72d038038bdc930176fd7a7fdd9996dd56bc5dc26e6bd2bbbede/Personal-Limits-Title_Personal-Limits-Logo.png" data-mid="120364491" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/563ed4a4e86d72d038038bdc930176fd7a7fdd9996dd56bc5dc26e6bd2bbbede/Personal-Limits-Title_Personal-Limits-Logo.png" />For collaborations, invitations, and inquiries: mhuerta@princeton.edu︎&nbsp;︎ Magical Habits, Labyrinth Books, and Princeton Public Library present: Personal Limits Professor Monica Huerta in virtual conversation All events are free and open to the public! Register at Labyrinth Books.October 13, 2021 5:30pm ET Sarah Chihaya &amp; Merve Emre, award-winning co-authors of The Ferrante Letters&nbsp; November 11, 2021 6pm ETLili Loofbourow, award-winning staff writer at Slate -- Watch here! December 8, 2021 6pm ETDan-el Padilla Peralta, award-winning author of Undocumented February 9, 2022 6pm ET Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned, Dub: Finding Ceremony &amp; Tala Khanmalek, founding director of Sailing for Social Justice -- Watch here! March 30, 2022 6pm ETYomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, award-winning author of Decolonizing Diasporas &amp; Tao Leigh Goffe, founder of Dark Laboratory April 8, 2022 6pm ET Namwali Serpell, award-winning author of The Old Drift Support for this program has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Humanities Council, Program in American Studies, and Department of English. <img width="2401" height="2400" width_o="2401" height_o="2400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71a8b97c5e2eb727a52526dc5a52b8a856b29e85f91569bc22d36990955359a1/Personal-Limits-Event-List_Personal-Limits---TAN-Color.png" data-mid="120363976" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71a8b97c5e2eb727a52526dc5a52b8a856b29e85f91569bc22d36990955359a1/Personal-Limits-Event-List_Personal-Limits---TAN-Color.png" /> https://monicahuertaphd.com/American-Studies-Forum-Wesleyan-University Sun, 27 Apr 2025 03:24:48 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/American-Studies-Forum-Wesleyan-University MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO&nbsp; &nbsp;WRITING&nbsp; &nbsp;TEACHING&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;CV Events <img width="3300" height="5100" width_o="3300" height_o="5100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f1d6069b5f7c330a628fff8097f6c3e7d0a08ba20cec3070cce252a7b8657fc/AMST-Forum-4-25-25.jpg" data-mid="231613859" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f1d6069b5f7c330a628fff8097f6c3e7d0a08ba20cec3070cce252a7b8657fc/AMST-Forum-4-25-25.jpg" /> Mad Matters 2025 American Studies Forum Wesleyan University https://monicahuertaphd.com/the-sense-archive-residency-VISCERA-POETICS-with-Ziba-Rajabi Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:02:32 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/the-sense-archive-residency-VISCERA-POETICS-with-Ziba-Rajabi MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO&nbsp; &nbsp;WRITING&nbsp; &nbsp;TEACHING&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;CV Events <img width="1080" height="1350" width_o="1080" height_o="1350" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d61aebe21e67f0fb353a077952750118bbb3754e276c4608aa8c277e82aa407e/VP-Rajabi-Marketing_Cacao.png" data-mid="228995641" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d61aebe21e67f0fb353a077952750118bbb3754e276c4608aa8c277e82aa407e/VP-Rajabi-Marketing_Cacao.png" /> the::sense::archive::residencyVISCERA::POETICS with Ziba Rajabi April 9 :: workshop :: Collab Hub April 11 :: conversation :: Morrison Hall 224 https://monicahuertaphd.com/the-sense-archive-workshop-WET-DRY-STITCH-with-Shannon-Alonzo Tue, 18 Feb 2025 01:19:31 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/the-sense-archive-workshop-WET-DRY-STITCH-with-Shannon-Alonzo MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO&nbsp; &nbsp;WRITING&nbsp; &nbsp;TEACHING&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;CV Events <img width="1075" height="1075" width_o="1075" height_o="1075" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c9b457c82b2693d2e4973b90224c0d094963a754c6bbd0936210e099f8ade67c/Shannon-Alonzo-Marketing-2.png" data-mid="226740689" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c9b457c82b2693d2e4973b90224c0d094963a754c6bbd0936210e099f8ade67c/Shannon-Alonzo-Marketing-2.png" /> the::sense::archive::workshopWET::DRY::STITCH with Shannon Alonzo VCAM @ Haverford March 18, 2025 https://monicahuertaphd.com/MLA-Visual-Culture-Forum-WITNESSING-WAR-AND-GENOCIDE Tue, 10 Dec 2024 03:05:27 +0000 Monicahuerta https://monicahuertaphd.com/MLA-Visual-Culture-Forum-WITNESSING-WAR-AND-GENOCIDE MONICA HUERTAcritic • curator • creatrix BIO&nbsp; &nbsp;WRITING&nbsp; &nbsp;TEACHING&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;EVENTS&nbsp; &nbsp;CV Events <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f690f76309ab5b36dad426fa6d43a3ea91b756c70de44fea0d54208320f52dd/Witnessing-War-and-Genocide.png" data-mid="223132277" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8f690f76309ab5b36dad426fa6d43a3ea91b756c70de44fea0d54208320f52dd/Witnessing-War-and-Genocide.png" /> Witnessing War and Genocide, hosted by the MLA Visual Culture Forum, January 10, 2025