Lubricating Violence with Pleasure in Mexico City
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4238587 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samantha Luna (0000-0002-2278-1114, Gender Studies, corresponding author), Sarah Luna |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 119-148 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/736017 |
| OpenAlex | W4414759272 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
This article charts forms of pleasure activism in Latin America that speak to both the futures of lesbian feminism and the ways in which pleasure pedagogy can lubricate violence. In the wake of what Gayle Rubin and Jack Halberstam called the “border wars” within feminist and lesbian movements over the inclusion of trans people and sex workers, I conducted sixteen months of research in Mexico City in 2021–24 among activists, artists, and pleasure pedagogues who often labeled themselves as lenchas and/or transfeministas, terms that actively include those often excluded from the category of lesbian (e.g., trans and nonbinary people as well as bi- and pansexuals) and emphasize solidarities with trans people, sex workers, and migrants. While many urges to counter violence include fighting against it or creating spaces without it, transfeminista pedagogues lubricate frictions of conflict or violence (from the outside world, as well as the symbolic violence of internal exclusionary politics) and sublate them into pleasure. Further, many of their activities include things radical feminists explicitly defined as violence, such as pornography, sex work, BDSM, and dildos. These lenchas give ejaculation workshops, manufacture intergalactic dildos, create postpornographic films, and put on Lucha Lub, a lucha libre–style wrestling event using flaxseed lubricant. This article tracks between Lucha Lub events the larger queer world-making pedagogical projects of its participants. Like the flaxseed lubricant in which fighters wrestled, activists’ approaches to pedagogy mediate between potentially violent and pleasurable frictions
Feminism · Human sexuality · Latin Americans · Lesbian · Pleasure · Queer · Transgender · Undoing · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society
| Highly cited | No |
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