What a book! Laura Grappo’s Conjured Bodies is the tour de force Latinx cultural studies has been waiting for. Original and elegantly written, Grappo’s book is set to shift conversations on the politics of race and sexuality in Latinx media studies, queer studies, and critical ethnic studies. With a stunning archive that takes popular media representations seriously as invaluable source material for scholarship, there is no other book quite like it.
~Richard T. Rodriguez, UC Riverside, author of A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad
[Conjured Bodies] provides an accessible and significant exploration of the construct of race in the U.S. Grappo’s book provides an insightful and engaging discussion of the importance of understanding both the value and danger of malleability...Grappo’s book provides thought provoking and gripping arguments about the possible consequences, harms, and issues of conjured identities, images, and bodies that is well positioned in current explorations of intersectionality...a necessary read for any serious student and scholar of Latinidad.
~Ethnic and Racial Studies
Conjured Bodies expands the understanding of the politics of race and sexuality within Latinidad—the notion of a shared Latin American identity—by introducing readers to the concepts of Latinx ambiguity and queer racialization...Conjured Bodies is a vital addition to mainstream media research within Latinx studies, media studies, queer studies, and critical ethnic studies…Highly recommended.
~CHOICE
Conjured Bodies is an impactful study that opens conversations on spectrality and racial categorizations, allowing scholars in Latinx studies, gender studies, LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, carceral studies, and hauntology to build on the author’s interdisciplinary research.
~Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies
