Mariana Ortega presents a phenomenological study of aesthetics grounded in the work of Latinx artists, theorizing that photography is an affective medium crucial for processes of self-formation, resistance, and mourning in Latinx life.

Preface: Skin of Light  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
I. Carnal Crossings: Eye and Mouth  27
1. Affected by the Eye: A Prelude to a Carnal Aesthetics  29
2. To Be a Mouth: Anzalduan Carnalities  56
3. Spilling Herself in Trees: Autoarte and Laura Aguilar’s Queer Erotics  87
II. Border Crossings: Sorrow and Memory  131
4. Sorrow, Aesthetic Unsettlement, and Sonic Rupture in the Mexico-US Borderlands  133
5. Crossing and Feeling Brown: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas’s Carnal Light  171
6. Something Very Extraordinary: Incandescence and the Wounding Photograph  210
Notes  233
Bibliography  287
Index  309

Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self and coeditor of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader and Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance.