Published: Sept. 15, 2023
Playful Protest Book cover image: Along with the title, Cuban singer Celia Cruz has her eyes closed and mouth open and appears to be singing. The cover is pink, orange, red, and yellow.

Pleasure-based politics in Puerto Rican and Cuban pop culture
University of Illinois Press, 2023

Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿QueÌ Pasa U.S.A.?, ²¹³ú³Ü̳¦²¹°ù in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take political violence seriously.

Daring and original, examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.