10

Wise
Latinas

.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the

court in May 2009 was met with great skepticism by the North
American right. When Republicans went through her public record,
they came across a speech she had given at a few universities. Sotomayor
and Obama’s enemies had attached themselves to the quote, “I would hope
that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more
often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived
that life.”1 Republicans decried this quotation as an example of reverse rac-
ism. Their objection, it would seem, had much to do with the idea that a ju-
rist who did not claim universality in the fashion in which white men could
was an invalid adjudicator. I contend that the sensationalist ire the term
generated was in no small part due to her use of the term “wise Latina.”
It would seem that the term “Latina” and its linkage to a word like “wise,”
which is usually associated with more universal subjects, was precisely the
site of provocation for her conservative enemies. We are left to conclude that
“wise” is a word reserved for subjects who claim a more objectivist mode of
knowledge production and knowing.
This essay focuses on what I would like to describe as the “otherwiseness”
of brownness. By “otherwiseness,” I mean to render the production and per-
formance of knowledge that does not conform to the mimetic coordinates
assigned to both the designations “wise” and “other.” I want to sketch an-

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 other, more subterranean route to the production of knowledge. To do this,
I cast an odd Puerto Rican predecessor to Justice Sotomayor: underground
screen legend Mario Montez. This essay meditates upon Montez’s embod-
ied production and performance of knowledge during select moments from
his work with Andy Warhol and Jack Smith. I turn to Montez’s performance
as an important and indexical moment that allows us to imagine a brown
otherwise. The cinematic/performance moments I consider display Mon-
tez’s performance of an affective particularity that displaces much of the
coercive mimesis that structures North American understandings of La-
tino particularity. This essay draws a zigzagging line between Montez and
Sotomayor and contemporary performance artist Nao Bustamante for the
purpose of a brown mode of knowledge production and knowing-­beyond-­
knowing, of otherwiseness, which gives us a richer account of feeling and
being brown in America.
I will narrate the parallel tales of Montez and Sotomayor’s star-­turn per-
formances, especially the staging of both of their big auditions for career-­
making cameras as well as the way in which Bustamante, like Montez and
Sotomayor, found affective and other immaterial resources to stand tall in
the face of hostile fire. The linkage between feeling brown and being brown
is crucial to the larger sequence of writings that this chapter belongs to.
No simple idea of Latino ontology makes any sense unless it is linked to a
phenomenological field. We often know latinidad, or brownness, through
its affective contours, which is to say the set of collective and often conta-
gious responses to one’s historical and emotional situation. This relay of re-
sponses is once again knowable to us as a kind of affective performativity,
a kind of feeling which is a mode of doing. Certain collectivities, like those
that provisionally cohere under the sign brownness, share historical trajec-
tories of negotiating particular sets of material obstacles within the social,
which include, but are not limited to, uneven distribution of resources; sys-
tematic race-­, nation-­, and language-­based bias; unjust and phobic immi-
gration policies; and a general tendency to be scapegoated during a nation-­
state’s moments of economic or cultural instability. Thus, I am interested
in a mode of affective particularity that I am describing as brownness, and
this focus leads me to the project of describing particular performances of
brown feelings that produce knowledge about singularities and pluralities
that do not conform to anticipatable notions of reason. But these alterna-
tive and often-­subterranean paths to knowledge production and reception
are, I want to insist, not reason’s other. The simple rejection of reason as a
majoritarian project seems too easy and indeed counterproductive. Such a

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 move simply shores up simplistic dyads of cognition and emotion that need
to be interrupted. More nearly, my aim, through the route of affect, is to
chart a provisional de-­universalizing of reason for the express purpose of
imagining and describing multiple modes of being, feeling, and knowing in
the world. This knowing brownness of the world is, more nearly, participat-
ing in a shared sense of brown.
The uproar over Sonia Sotomayor’s now-­infamous line, one she repeated
in a few academic contexts over a span of about five years — the assertion
that she hoped that a “wise Latina woman” might reach better conclusions
than white males without the same experience — points to calcified opposi-
tion to the convergence of particularized (in this case gendered and ethnic)
experience and wisdom and its loose cognates, knowledge and reason. For
many of us who have been toiling in the fields of race, sex, and other minori-
tarian modes of knowledge production, the right’s rancor reads as a strange
validation of the resonance and significance of our shared project and the
potential disruption and challenge it continues to represent. A partial de-­
universalizing around wisdom, a particularizing of reason, was a very con-
troversial and exploitable proposition. Certainly, it cuts to the core of so
many debates that structure our political moment. The conservative attack
suggested that a Justice Sotomayor would rule from a position of empathy
and experience, the realm of the affective, and not the law with all its nomi-
nal claims to objectivity and universalism. While critical legal studies may
have handily dismantled legal discourse’s objectivism as a system, the ju-
ridical still authorizes itself as blind to particularities of being-­in-­the-­world
like race, class, ability, or sex.
Within the right wing’s framing, empathy, emotion, and the particular
are wisdom’s other. Briefly reading within the right’s protocols of argumen-
tation, I want to think about the epistemological circuits that Latinas and
other nonuniversal subjects participate in as a kind of otherwiseness. This
idea of the otherwise is partially indebted to the work of recent theoreti-
cal interventions in critical race theory such as Kandice Chuh’s framing of
an anti-­identitarian Asian American studies based on a mode of critique
that eschews the subjects and calls for a collective understanding of ethnic
particularity through the project of imagining otherwise.2 Equally impor-
tant is Rey Chow’s notion of a “coercive mimesis” that understands ethnic-
ity itself as a captivity narrative, one that is compelled upon the minority
subject within capitalism.3 Legal theorist Richard T. Ford understands this
phenomenon in terms of a minority subject’s “compelled performance” be-
fore the law.4 Both Chow’s and Ford’s paradigms are grafted onto a Lacanian

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 analysis in Antonio Viego’s important Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of
Loss in Latino Studies.5 Through Viego’s lens, the affective performances of
Latina otherwiseness represent what he would call the hysteric’s discourse,
a discourse that potentially interrupts the compelled performances and co-
ercive mimesis that structure reality for racialized subjects.6
The conservatives’ attack fell short, and Justice Sotomayor’s nomination
was approved 68 to 31. This essay considers Sotomayor’s performance on
the stand and, concomitantly, the performance of those Republican senators
who questioned Sotomayor. The event that is Sotomayor’s confirmation is
one in which two different performances of public affect collided. My inter-
est in the Sotomayor case is not based on sustained interest in legal or court
history. Disappointment did not overwhelm me when Sotomayor proved
not to be a particularly progressive juror, since I never estimated that her ac-
cession to the court would prove to be a radical challenge to the normative
forms of subjectivity produced by U.S. law. In my estimation, the Sotomayor
confirmation hearing and eventual confirmation did nothing to loosen the
binds of coercive mimeticism that tie Latinos to flattened-­out regimes of
identity.7 None of this is to suggest that the Sotomayor confirmation was not
a laudable event. Indeed, it is mostly a good thing when segregationist bar-
riers are broken, but such modes of integration can too easily be celebrated
as a disordering of institutions of power when that is simply not the case.
Instead, I look to this case in an oddly comparativist fashion by looking at
a slightly unpredictable precedent to Sotomayor’s interrogation, Andy War-
hol’s Screen Test #2. I turn to this avant-­garde precursor to the major court
case for a few reasons. Chief among them is an impulse to link Latino popu-
lar culture and politics with aesthetic traditions that intrinsically challenge
the coercive mimesis that so hampers Latino and ethnic studies. Mario’s
mimesis, her performance of affective particularity in the face of playwright
Ron Tavel’s show-­business grilling, tells us another story of brownness that
is not a heroic fable, but, instead, an account of a canny performance of
otherwiseness in the face of majoritarian scrutiny. I also want to stage this
clustering of historically unaligned examples to offer a sense of brownness
as sprawling and vast; the sense of brownness I am writing through is an
account of different pieces, across space and time, touching but not fusing.
When asked by Gerard Malanga to name his greatest superstar, Jack
Smith named Mario Montez. When asked why, Smith responded that it
was because the drag superstar “immediately enlisted his audience’s sym-
pathy.”8 Montez was a central figure in the New York avant-­garde of the
1960s. He was born René Rivera in 1935. Legend has it that Montez was a

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 10.1  Screen capture of Mario Banana, 1964. Directed by Andy Warhol.
16 mm film.

Puerto Rican, a sometime civil servant who was born into an extremely
Catholic family. Montez met Jack Smith, the mother of the New York under-
ground. Montez and Smith were briefly involved. They shared a love of Hol-
lywood B movies. Their great icon was Dominican spitfire María Montez,
who was most famous for her exotic over-­the-­top persona and movies like
Cobra Woman (1944), which have become official camp classics. Smith se-
lected Montez’s name as a tribute to the screen goddess. Montez met War-
hol through Smith, and the drag superstar went on to make several films
with Warhol.
One of those first films, Mario Banana (1964), represents a conflation of
tropicalism, sexual innuendo, and musty glamour.9 The piece speaks beau-
tifully to a mingling of the quotidian and the exotic, the everyday rhythms
of life, where the ordinary (eating a banana) and grand extravagance collide.
Both trashy and avant-­garde, the film renders Mario Montez’s particular art
drag persona. Mario inhabits the over-­the-­top style of the already exagger-
ated spitfire, lovingly reimaging her way of being in and out of the world at

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 once. Mario’s look is equal parts glamour girl and clown. Her act of eating
a banana is equal parts lascivious and corny. The viewer’s eyes are drawn to
the glimmering brooch on the diva’s headpiece, its luster, reflective and ab-
sorbing. The short film tells a story, like Mario’s face itself, of another style
or mode that is not just outdated but maybe partially out of time, albeit also
off key, like the singing Maria Montez did on stage and screen. These are
all aesthetic pulsations from the realm of a brown otherwiseness where so
many people and things actually linger and dwell. It is portrait of life as the
virtuosity of not really being virtuoso.
This leads us to the film at this essay’s center. Screen Test #2 was made in
1965 and featured Ronald Tavel, the founding playwright for the Theatre of
the Ridiculous, interviewing legendary drag performance diva Mario Mon-
tez.10 Tavel is never on camera in the film, but he is constantly heard as he
auditions Montez for the role of Esmeralda in a proposed remake of The
Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is telling that Tavel sets the stage for Montez’s
performance of affective particularity as he begins his inquisition by asking
the diva how he feels.11 He responds breathlessly, “I feel like I’m in another
world, a fantasy . . . like a kingdom meant to be ruled by me, like I could give
orders and suggest ideas.” Montez’s opening gambit is a dreamy insistence
on feeling otherwise, a certain belonging to a world where he is not subor-
dinated because of his position in the social, but instead exists in a sphere
that is “meant to be ruled by [him]” and where he gives orders and has
ideas. Some would describe Montez’s lines as a merely delusional fantasy of
escape, but such a reading would be missing something in the drag diva’s
breathy structure of address. He knows his historical condition but chooses
to perform and act otherwise, insisting on inhabiting a fantasy and mak-
ing escapism not an act of avoidance but the signaling of an otherwiseness.
Tavel indulges this vibe for quite a while, lauding Montez’s performance
oeuvre in films by Jack Smith and Ron Rice. Things eventually turn ugly
when Tavel insists that Montez repeat after him, “For many years I have
heard your name, but never did it sound so beautiful until I learned you
were a movie producer, Diarrhea.” The juvenile gag plays on for a while as
Tavel attempts to get Mario to repeat the word “Diarrhea” as many times as
possible. Montez, always in ingenue mode, plays along. As the drama pro-
gresses, Tavel directs Mario to pretend he is a female geek who has bitten
the head off a chicken, to show how he will seduce her male costars, dance
a gypsy dance while sitting down, scream in character, display how he can
be both sad or evil using only his eyes while half his face is covered by a veil,
and repeat a story about choking his pet python. Montez weathers the ver-

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 bal indignities that Tavel fires upon her. He responds to all these prompts
with her face alone. All of this abuse is within the game. Tavel disrespects
and ridicules, and Montez responds by performing a kind of spacey oblivi-
ousness while playing along. A line is seemingly crossed when Tavel orders
the starlet in training to lift his skirt. He is next instructed to unzip his fly,
stare at his penis (which is never shown), and comment upon it. Montez
seems not to be enjoying this treatment but never stops playing along. The
whole film leads to a fantasy bubble almost, and yet never quite, bursting.
Mario never stops being Mario; if anything, she becomes more brazenly
himself by never losing “herself.” Tavel oscillates between flattery, suppli-
cation, and mean hectoring.
One can see this as a familiar tale: it is like the tale of a transgender
working girl who tolerates her exasperating john. Tavel’s producer is like
the john who might like a transgender sex worker who might like what we
can describe, in a euphemistically somewhat hackneyed fashion, as some-
thing extra down there. Montez plays it not so much as a deluded transves-
tite but, instead, as a knowing professional who understands just how to
follow his script, which always includes the reluctant revelation. Despite or
maybe because of the general force field of hostility projected onto Montez,
he emerges a radiant superstar, one who has dramatically, despite Warhol’s
minimalist framing and Tavel’s performance abusiveness, emerged as the
survivor. It’s said that everyone loves a true survivor, and Montez seems to
be cognizant of this fact.
My plot summary is based on my own notes from two viewings of the
film and, importantly, on Douglas Crimp’s careful reading of the film in
his essay “Mario Montez, for Shame!” Crimp’s article initially appeared in
Regarding Sedgwick, an anthology of essays that employed Eve Sedgwick’s
critical writing to address different research sites and projects.12 His arti-
cle is also part of his monograph “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy
Warhol.13 The aforementioned essay employs Sedgwick’s important work
on shame and queer performativity that was ultimately published in the
volume Touching Feeling.14 Crimp marks Montez’s performance of shame
and its central and formatting force in regard to queerness. The essay works
with the Sedgwickian (via cognitive psychologist Silvan Tompkins) framing
of shame as affect that is located in both the self and other. The theory of
shame shows us how the other can so easily flood one, especially if one is a
shame-­prone person. Crimp identifies the somewhat tautological framing
of the shame-­filled person as someone who knows shame by having been
shamed. Thus, Crimp gives an account of the shame that floods the viewer

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 who watches Tavel’s rough treatment of Montez. Crimp explicates: “Shame
is both productive and corrosive of queer identity, the switching point be-
tween stage fright and stage presence, between being a wallflower and being
a diva, so too it is simultaneously productive and corrosive of queer revela-
tions of dignity and worth.”15
This description is reminiscent of Sedgwick’s description of Warhol’s
own affect, in her essay “Andy’s Shyness, Andy’s Whiteness,” where she nar-
rates Warhol’s shyness as the kind that could paradoxically fill up a room.16
Mario’s shaming at the hands of Tavel floods Crimp, according to his ac-
count of his own spectatorship. He suggests that this film’s narrative speaks
profoundly of our most universal encounter with otherness. That particu-
lar moment, the moment when affect “floods us” as a powerful and format-
ting force, is what I find most useful about Crimp’s account of Screen Test
#2. Crimp’s reading offers a specific case of shaming, that of a Puerto Rican
transgender performer, in order to offer a general account of how shame
functions.
In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes her own relation to case
studies as one in which a specific case is used to speak to the general, what
she describes as an interest in “generalizations,” an interest in “how the sin-
gular becomes delaminated from its location in someone’s story or some
locale’s irreducibly local history and circulated as evidence of something
shared. This is part of [her] method, to track the becoming general of singu-
lar things.”17 Berlant goes on to discuss how after case studies become “de-
laminated” and generalized, they hopefully resonate across multiple scenes
of the specific. Crimp’s reading is only a partial becoming-­general inso-
far as it functions as a pretty specific evidencing of queer shame, yet the
specificity or singularity of a Puerto Rican subject’s racialized shaming is
not reflected upon. This is one of the reasons why Crimp’s reading of the
film has not been without controversy. Latino studies scholar Lawrence La
Fountain-­Stokes denounced Crimp’s reading first in an open letter to Crimp
distributed on the internet, and later in an essay in the anthology Gay La-
tino Studies.18
I wish to comment on this controversy while clearly demarcating why I
bring up La Fountain-­Stokes’s pointed criticism of Crimp. I am not inter-
ested in championing Crimp or La Fountain-­Stokes in this debate. I am in-
debted to Crimp’s reading and, in general, to his crucial research on War-
hol. Yet, as the reader will see, my reading diverges from his in that I do
not fully subscribe to his shame reading and wish to offer an alternative. I
certainly feel an affinity with many of the political impulses that animate

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 La Fountain-­Stokes’s reading of Screen Test #2, yet I also want to offer an
alternative to his reading. I will briefly narrate this clash between critics
not because I am choosing a side, but because I intend to call attention to
what I see as the neglected question of what I will describe as the affective
performativity of Screen Test #2, which is to say, the affective doing that
the film accomplishes. La Fountain-­Stokes’s criticism of Crimp happens in
the frame of a larger misgiving about the trend in queer theory to theorize
queer shame. La Fountain-­Stokes is deeply skeptical of the potential utility
of queer shame as a category for queers of color, who, in his opinion, must
pursue validation in the face of the systemic social harm directed at them.
Queer shame, in his estimation, is deeply antithetical to both queer of color
critique and the lived politics of racialized sexual minorities. (He describes
my own writing on the topic of queer shame as “slightly jaded,” but he goes
on to blast Crimp, Michael Warner, Sedgwick, and the organizers of a queer
shame conference held at his home institution, the University of Michigan.)
I have some disagreements with La Fountain-­Stokes on the topic of queer
shame, a concept that I have found useful in my own writing about race and
sex, yet nonetheless I feel extremely simpatico with the politics that fuel
his writing. I disagree with him on the “difference” that shame makes. La
Fountain-­Stokes attacks Crimp for not dwelling on Montez’s particularity
as a Puerto Rican or, in Berlant’s terms, for moving toward generalization
at the expense of specificity. For La Fountain-­Stokes, the approach to Mon-
tez through the route of anything but pride and uplift in the face of adver-
sity can only be seen as disappointing. I, more in sync with Sedgwick, find
queer shame to be incredibly descriptive of the affective contours of queer
of color and brown particularity. What I am calling brownness includes
the ways in which brown people endure, strive, and flourish in relation to
systemic harm. Brownness’s conditions of possibility are the ways in which
brown folks harness the shame directed at them, at one moment rejecting
it in favor of shamelessness, and at different moments occupying shame as a
copious and generative affective register. Crimp’s analysis is doomed to dis-
appoint La Fountain-­Stokes’s project due to the Puerto Rican scholar’s deep
investment in the positive affect that is associated with a particular queer
Puerto Rican identitarian pride. I find the choreography of radical otherness
that Crimp traces in Montez and Tavel’s stylized, macabre dance to be illu-
minating insofar as Screen Test #2 is a story about Mario’s evanescence and
weird brilliance under duress. From my perspective, the account of queer
relationality that the Warhol text and Crimp’s explication of it provide is in-
structive and useful, especially in the rendering of otherness that it makes

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 possible. The deployment of shame as a category of analysis is antithetical
to political and scholarly agendas that demand positive affect and the con-
tinuous rehearsal of rigid identitarian framings.
While shame as a category might disappoint some linear political proj-
ects, it nonetheless provides a vivid and useful description of the affective
and quotidian reality of queers of color and brown people who actualize
their singular and plural senses of the world through, with, and against
shame and shaming. Shame can be and often is generative of desires, erot-
ics, pedagogies, survival strategies, and striving skill sets that are evidenced
daily in the actually lived experience of queers of color and other brown
people. Yet shame has its limits. In Crimp’s reading, “poor Mario” is over-
whelmed by shame and affectively beaten down. The shaming of Mario
fills Crimp with shame in the same way it fills La Fountain-­Stokes with an-
ger. Both of these responses to the film are equally valid. When consider-
ing the working of affect, it is important to remember that it is always in
flux. Shame transforms to anger and then to pride faster than the blink of
an eye. The reverse order is equally true. While pride in one’s singular and
pluralized experience of the world is nothing like a bad thing, it is certainly
not the only thing. Describing any scene or situation as being dominated
by one affective signature risks missing out on the possibility of offering a
nuanced account of art or life. This aspect of my critique then extends to
Crimp’s reading too. Insofar as I agree that shame and shaming are deeply
formatting of queerness, they are not the singular or even privileged affect
node. We need to cast a fuller picture of affect’s volatility in relation not only
to spectacle but also to the quotidian. If we revisit Berlant’s methodological
point about the specific, we are able to consider the ways in which Crimp’s
reading of the case of Screen Test #2 disappoints as a theoretical generaliza-
tion for La Fountain-­Stokes, because it is unable to resonate with other spe-
cific scenes of gay Latino shaming.
Then there is the question of performance. Crimp describes the feeling
of shame that floods one while watching Screen Test #2, and La Fountain-­
Stokes insists that the correct affective response to the film would be anger,
an anger that is directed at both Tavel and Warhol, the exploitative white
males he perceives to be film’s authors. (In my estimation, author effect in
Warhol’s films, especially the Screen Test films, is much harder to account
for since the mostly improvisational performances captured by the camera
shape these films much more than acting shapes traditional narrative films.)
While I see the work that shame does, I think it is important to foreground
that Montez and Tavel are performing their roles. Certainly, these roles may

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 mirror their lived relationship to some degree, but it would be folly to think
it is their actual relationship. Crimp discusses how Warhol described the
Montez/Tavel interaction as being very “real.” But let us consider what the
performance does. It certainly may feel very real, and Tavel’s forcing Mon-
tez to reveal his biological gender is certainly a tense and dramatic moment.
This moment is, nonetheless, about a set of twice-­behaved behaviors:19 the
process we are watching is a form of performative mimesis. It is real in that
it is really interesting and compelling. If mimesis is the imitation or repre-
sentation of aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in lit-
erature and art, and if coercive mimesis is a form of mimesis that conforms
to a fixed and set repertoire of behaviors often associated with ennobling
narratives of uplift and pride, then the drama staged in Screen Test #2 by the
three people whom I think of as being the three collaborators on the piece
(Warhol the unconventional director, Tavel the scenarist and off-­camera
voice performer, and Montez the improvising on-­screen performer) is one
that interrupts the narrative protocols associated with a static understand-
ing of identity. It is a performance of dreaminess and indignation.
Indeed, I think performance is exactly the language to discuss what
Montez is doing. I want to assert that while Warhol’s films, like Jack Smith’s
cinema, stand as invaluable filmic texts, they also serve as wonderful docu-
mentations of many performance practices that would otherwise be all but
lost to us. So while they are not live performances, they are crucial docu-
mentations of the live. Mario performs a kind of affective otherwiseness
that is conveyed as a mimesis that resists the coercive strictures of norma-
tive gender, and in doing so allows the viewer to consider the perfomativ-
ity of the performance, which is to say the kind of doing that performance
accomplishes. In my reading of Tavel and Montez’s engagement with each
other, I see them both performing a kind of excess that is rich with agency.
This excess might be something that we can preliminarily describe as camp.
At one moment in Miss Montez’s audition, Tavel asks her to scream in the
way that Esmeralda would. Montez screams for quite a while, even after
Tavel attempts to hush her. When we think of these screams, we can begin
to associate them with a tradition of screaming and shouting as musicality.
Mario’s scream is the diva’s scream, and as such it is revelatory of the ways
in which sonic performance might shatter the strictures of an objectifying
mimetic protocol. Fred Moten discusses a tradition of female blues impro-
visation as signifying what he calls “the resistance of the object.”20 This re-
sistance of the object is the central move in what Moten calls a black radical
tradition. Of course the object need not scream to resist. Sometimes the ob-

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 ject resists by vamping and camping in the way that Montez does in so many
of both Warhol and Smith’s films. Let me add that I do not mean to view the
performances as resisting the filmmakers so much, since I see both Warhol
and Smith as, to call on the colorful language of addiction, enablers par ex-
cellence. What I think is being resisted in these avant-­garde films by these
odd queer men is the kind of compulsory performances of sex and race that
annihilate people every day. What the films and the performances show us,
in part, is how to live and feel these scripts differently. We can view Screen
Test #2 now and see it as a counternarrative for being and feeling brown,
both in the face of whiteness and on its own terms. Montez’s performance
of affect displays a kind of sly agency that would not be visible or desirable to
a certain scholarly or activist lens determined to see the world in black and
white. I posit that such a black-­and-­white agenda does little for the project
of brownness or brown feelings.
As I suggested at this essay’s onset, I saw a lot of Montez and Tavel in
the summer of 2009, during the Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia
Sotomayor. Certainly, it can be said the Republicans made her speak quite
a bit of diarrhea. They made a point of having her sell out her own spon-
sor, Barack Obama, by saying that empathy had no place in legal judgment
and that only reason and the law should ever be applied instead. This split
many on the left. I am myself of two minds on the question. The skeptic in
me saw this speaking of diarrhea as the quickest and safest path to confir-
mation, while the idealist in me felt that there was something profoundly
wrong about selling out empathy and the world of emotion and particularity
it represents. It’s important to note that Sotomayor has been a moderate jus-
tice whose rulings have not especially pleased the various left constituencies
that lobbied on her behalf. Thus the point is not to lionize Sotomayor but,
instead, to understand the performances at the heart of her confirmation
hearings and connect them with the brown performances of otherwiseness
I have discussed in relation to Montez and will go on to link to the work of
another wise Latina performance artist.
When asked about the judge’s impending nomination, the Republican
senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, said Sotomayor would be
confirmed if she avoided a “meltdown.” Meltdowns have traditionally been
the province of women and ethnics, even though the last few years of public
culture have been replete with fascinating white male meltdowns. (It seems
that women and people of color no longer own that.) Pledging allegiance to
feelings is dangerous. In a New York Times op-­ed regarding the confirma-
tion hearings, Maureen Dowd wrote that “any clever job applicant knows . . .

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 you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy
questions even though that’s why the president wants her.”21 Watching those
hearings, I could not help but think of Montez and Tavel’s mock interview
and the very real one being televised. Many of us who felt any commonality
with the judge understood that the game being played was like the dynamic
between trans hustler and the john who knows but doesn’t want to know. In
both cases, the players kept to the script. The trans hustler and john script is
a consensual fantasy that saturates popular media and lived cultures of pub-
lic and commercial sex. In the case of Sotomayor and the hostile senators, a
weirdly analogous fantasy of knowing and not knowing was being enacted
on a national stage. For some political observers, the proceedings did not
entertain. Frank Rich, another New York Times columnist, declared that as
political theater the confirmation hearings “tanked.”22 Rich was looking for
drama to rival the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill affair. I would bet that Rich
would not get Warhol’s films either.
The Sotomayor confirmation hearings, with all the Republicans’ bum-
bling attempts at getting her to reveal a true self, were a kind of theater of
the ridiculous. The flattest of the jokes was the senator from Oklahoma’s
bad Ricky Ricardo impersonation when he addressed the judge by saying
she had some “’splaining to do” in relation to her reasoning regarding gun
control legislation. Sotomayor’s response to the flat-­footed and ethnically
disparaging comment was minimalist. Unruffled, she briefly laughed at the
senator’s joke and quickly picked up her testimony again. She maintained
a slightly bemused smile throughout, refusing to take any of the bait dur-
ing the hearing. This not taking the bait was the performance of insisting
on enacting another world, a world where she is allowed to “give orders and
have ideas,” which is, of course, the world that her adversaries were actively
working against. It is a performance of coolness or even iciness in the face of
adversity. Like Montez, Sotomayor refused a performance that her inquisi-
tors were attempting to coax out of her. Instead, she did something else, in
much the way Montez did decades before the confirmation hearing of 2009.
How does a wise Latina respond to that kind of ignorance cloaked in
power? I think that remains an open question. But certainly a case worth
studying is Sotomayor’s icy performance, her refusal to be intimidated or
to have a meltdown. Looking at Sotomayor’s interview, we notice a weird
resonance with Montez’s performance of an aloof spaciness; that is not to
say that iciness and spaciness are the same thing, but that they both repre-
sent an antianticipatory response to dominant affect, a feeling, a perform-
ing and being otherwise. And thus I offer the cases of Sotomayor and Mon-

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 tez as examples of the performance of otherwiseness, which is to say the
sort of wisdom in and through feelings that can potentially enable us all to
negotiate many of the hostile interviews that life offers us. These examples
of otherwiseness are manifestations of an ontopoetics of brownness as an
alternative sense of the world that perform an alternative mode of sharing.
As an epilogue of sorts, I want to quickly turn to Nao Bustamante’s most
recent performance project, Personal Protection.23 The project begins, on a
very immediate level, as Bustamante’s response to her participation in the
2010 reality show Work of Art. Following the model of other reality compe-
tition shows like Project Runway and Top Chef, a sequestered cast of contes-
tants participates in weekly competitions wherein they are gradually elimi-
nated based on their performances. Each week, cast members/contestants
who are deemed by a panel of “expert” judges to have underperformed are
sent home. While Work of Art was supposed to feature new, emergent art-
ists, the face of Nao Bustamante was familiar to many interested in queer
and Chicana performance art. Bustamante is an established artist whose
work has been written about by many queer cultural and performance theo-
rists. Her participation in the show seemed to be a performance of infiltra-
tion, not unlike that of her older video Rosa Does Joan. In Rosa Does Joan,
Bustamante inserted herself into Joan Rivers’s tv talk show of the early
1990s as the character of Rosa the exhibitionist. In this most recent infiltra-
tion, however, Bustamante was instead playing and competing as herself.
From week to week, Bustamante was competing against mostly younger art-
ists, and it became clear to many that the show was interested in “discover-
ing” the next great art star. It also became increasingly clear that this would
be a young, naive, “natural” talent ready to be molded. The judges finally
settled on Abdi Farah, a young African American artist from Philadelphia.
Bustamante was the favorite contestant of many who were familiar with her
work and with queer Chicana aesthetics. Her aspirations of winning were
thwarted in the fourth episode when Bustamante was cut in a surprise dou-
ble elimination round along with the show’s only out gay male contestant.
Work of Art went on to become a much straighter affair after the elimi-
nation of Bustamante. That fourth episode featured famed censored Latino
artist Andres Serrano, who joined the regular panel of judges, all of whom,
unlike Serrano, represented middle-­of-­the-­road art world sensibilities and
tastes. It is telling that Serrano was the only judge who appreciated Busta-
mante’s installation — a strange, abject piece that featured the artist in a
makeshift, dilapidated hut-­like structure and a costume that oozed primal-­
looking brown fluids. The piece visualized what could perhaps be imagined

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 as a rendering of wounded subjectivity. During the judging of contestants
segment of the show, Bustamante, half in character and refusing to take off
her disturbing costume, was eliminated by the regular judges, who could
not get the artist to spoon-­feed them a description of her work that appealed
to their commercial sensibilities. Like many shows of these types, editing
practices attempted to identify contestants with certain tag lines. Busta-
mante’s was taken from a response to one of her previous judging sessions
where she explained that she was “not responsible for [the judges’] experi-
ence of [her] work.” Of course not being responsible for their experience
of her work set the stage for her eventual elimination. Bustamante came
off as sullen, slightly resentful, and unwilling to please, unlike winner and
model minority Abdi Farah.24 Bustamante was literally mired in the ooze
of a seemingly primal, festering wound that she refused to let go of. In this
way, we might think of her as Wendy Brown’s resentful queer, female, or ra-
cialized subject who is desperately caught in ressentiment’s web.25 But such
a reading would be wrong insofar as the television show was a singular ap-
pearance in Bustamante’s performance practice.
Her follow-­up to her appearance on Work of Art is an ongoing piece titled
Personal Protection. Personal Protection’s first manifestation is as an ob-
ject: it is a handmade dress composed entirely of the supposedly bulletproof
polymer Kevlar. The dress is fashioned to look like the kind of gown worn by
femme Mexican resistance fighters. It includes multiple layers of Kevlar fab-
ric, a flower-­like corsage adornment made of the fabric, and an extra apron
layer adding to the piece’s matronly look. The dress represents the manifest
desire to be bulletproof in relation to the harsh interviews and evaluations
the minoritarian subject must constantly endure. The garment is the liter-
alized veil of otherwiseness that insists on another mode of being and feel-
ing in the world. It is not difficult to imagine Mario Montez slipping into
a version of the gown or Sotomayor sporting a Kevlar robe on the bench.
In a video that is the project’s next component, Bustamante and a local
upstate New York gun enthusiast “test drive” the dress in an open, snow-­
covered field by shooting it with rifles and ammunition of different calibers.
Bustamante plays with the gun hobbyist, getting him to talk about the fan-
tasy of shooting Mexicans. But it is important to remember the dress is not
meant to simply be a target; it is meant to perform a certain kind of resil-
ience to threats and obstacles that punctuate existence for so many. The
dress perhaps signifies something like a previous wounded attachment to
female Mexican resistance fighters, and also a response to the symbolic vio-
lence visited on Bustamante by Work of Art and its judges.

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 10.2  Installation view of Nao Bustamante, Soldadera, 2015, at the Vincent Price
Art Museum. Photograph by Monica Orozco. Courtesy of Nao Bustamante.

Wounded attachment is a phrase that I lift from Wendy Brown, not to

evidence it or shore it up, but instead to offer a critique of Brown’s for-
mulation. Brown famously argued that “politicized identity thus enunci-
ates itself, makes claims for itself, only entrenching, restating, dramatiz-
ing and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future — for itself
and others — that triumphs over this pain.”26 Are the spectacles of Montez
getting berated by Tavel in Screen Test #2 and of Bustamante being shot
at by a gun nut examples of minoritarian subjects basking in the politi-
cal impasse that is their “wounded attachments”? What about the national
drama of Sotomayor’s televised confirmation hearing? Is Personal Protec-
tion a ressentiment-­laden piece of art that dramatizes the injuries of Latina
women within the social? Brown offers a structural account of all the ways
in which attempting to think about the singularity of particular struggles

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 within the social can never get to the point of a politically salient general-
ization. Like Berlant, I contend that work that starts out in the key of the
particular — let’s say art and media that signals the abuses that Latinas and
Latina femininity endure within North American culture and politics — can
become more generalized without ever losing its resonant specificity. This
ability to resonate is key, and in this way we can once again understand the
difference that affect makes. The structural booby traps within the social
that Brown warns us against are fueled by a belief in a pervading feeling
of Nietzschean ressentiment dominating not only the actions but also the
strategies and tactics of social actors who do not automatically displace the
particular or the singular for the general or universal.
Brown’s theory of the impasse that she describes as wounded attachment
depends on a belief in a stable and rigid affective field. But certain affective
responses, especially unanticipatable ones, performed through the modes
of comportment and behaviors that I have described as the wise Latinas’
repertoire of brown otherwiseness, inherently suggest something else. They
suggest another kind of response to social wounding than the repetitive and
unthinking attachment that Brown diagnoses as the problem plaguing the
politics of many people, many of them brown, who reject an aspirational
universalism. The example of Bustamante’s dress, one associated with her
Mexican heritage, being repeatedly shot at again by the gun enthusiast, may
visually cohere to some aspects of Brown’s theory of wounded attachment,
but it differs in some crucial ways. Bustamante’s performance aesthetics
play with the idea of being a perpetually wounded subject trapped in the
impasse of what amounts to a stalled singularity. But the artist’s work sym-
bolically breaks off from Brown’s idea of wounded attachment through her
unpredictable response to this wounding. Bustamante goads the shooter
to keep on firing. After the dress has been shot up, she inspects the bullet
holes and gleefully reports that the Kevlar has caught the bullets and that
she would probably have survived if she had been in the dress. She engages
the visibly confused marksman, who reluctantly agrees that she probably
would have survived.
Bustamante, like Montez and Sotomayor, the otherwise Latinas I have
discussed, refused to take responsibility for the experience of those who
would pass judgment on her. Her work represents the refusal of the com-
pulsory mimetic performance that is often thrust upon the minoritarian
subject. Otherwiseness is a performance of affective noncompliance that is
intrinsically linked to a sense of brownness that Jean-­Luc Nancy would de-

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 scribe as simultaneously being singular and plural.27 Our sense of singular-
ity is only knowable in relation to the sense that is produced in relation to
the plurality of singularities that constitute the world. Feeling brown is an
aspect of a larger sense of brown that is simultaneously singular and plural.
It is through feeling that we know, or more nearly sense, the brownness of
the world and each other.

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