James Estrella

Areas of Interest:

I am interested in reading "texts" that redirect the conversations of homosexual subjugation to the borderlands of Anglo American queer urban history and the histories of working-and-middle class racial and ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including but not limited to Pico-Union, Koreatown, East L.A., South Central, and Hollywood. Whether through theme, characterization, or narrative/poetic/dramaturgical form, my current research situates literary aesthetics alongside historical and anthropological texts--queer of color bulletins and newspapers, media images, condoms, student art, yearbooks, police records, diaries, labor contracts, medical documents, HIV/AIDS clinics, and bars and nightclubs--in order to explore the complex links between the political and transnational dimensions of the postures of love, health, community formation, coming out, and the hierarchical institutions that have sought to exclude, circumscribe, or tame them. For me, then, the texts I read and the silenced history held within them epitomize discursive forms that combat those oppressive forces based on socially instituted categories by rendering those categories visible for gay and lesbian Latina/os, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Other interests include comparative ethnic and sexual minority relations in East Los Angeles and Hollywood, 20th century U.S. American history and literature, Latin American history, archives of California public health and education, spatial theory, and Chicana/o and African American literary experiments with Renaissance and Shakespearian poetics.