Queer Relajo: Feeling the Nightscapes of Mexicanidad

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Queer Relajo: Feeling the Nightscapes of Mexicanidad

by David Tenorio

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07760-1

Paper: 978-0-472-05760-3

eISBN: 978-0-472-90518-8 (OA)

About the Book

2026 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

In 2015, Mexico City declared itself a “gay-friendly” city and followed up with a gay tourist guide and new laws permitting changes to gender markers on legal documents, sanctioning same-sex marriage, and allowing joint adoption of children. At the same time, patterns of violence and discrimination against women, trans, and queer people have continued throughout the country. In Queer Relajo, David Tenorio argues that while Mexico City aims to bring visibility to queer sociality, the benefits of legitimizing queer space remain unclear.

Combining readings of film, digital media, and performance with drag autoethnography, Queer Relajo quite literally plays with how relajo (or playfulness) structures the spaces of queer nightlife in urban contexts by revealing how nighttime intimacy can minimize the paralyzing effects of violence and precarity in a neoliberal Mexico. Considering the political implications of when a queer/trans person is present at night, Tenorio argues that queer feelings of play are not only essential to sexual liberation, but also resist neoliberal commodification and heteronormative extraction.

About the Author

David Tenorio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

“David Tenorio's Queer Relajo is without a doubt a major intervention in the fields of Mexican and Latinx queer and cultural studies. It is mandatory reading for those interested in performance cultures in the Americas, exemplifying an intellectually rigorous approach to queer and trans cultural production, infrastructural/material assemblages, and affective economies within and beyond academia that decenters predominantly English-only approaches. By foregrounding queer and trans popular, working-class practices and cultural artifacts, Tenorio ultimately pushes against the disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries in the knowledge production and cultural analysis of queer sexual cultures in Mexica and Latin/x America."

— Manuel R. Cuellar, Theatre Survey

2026 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

— Dance Studies Association

“Through the activation of the concept of ‘queer relajo’ and a rigorous use of methods from literary, visual culture, and performance studies, Tenorio provides deep and powerful analyses of queer cultural works that circulate in contemporary Mexico. Tenorio’s beautiful writing, keen and sensitive eye, and consideration to feelings situate the reader amidst the despair and the glamor (and everything in between) of queer and trans life, which is made possible by and despite the continued neoliberal encroachment and anti-trans and queer violence. An exciting and much-welcomed intervention in Mexican queer cultural studies.” — Laura G. Gutierrez, The University of Texas at Austin

“David Tenorio’s Queer Relajo is a brilliant work that explores the hemispheric construction of non-binary sexuality. Tenorio argues that trans and queer performance create alternate worlds and nightscapes using the liberating power of relajo-- defined by Jorge Portilla (1966) as an ‘intimate act of negation.’ Highly recommended.”— Diana Taylor, New York University

“Queer Relajo is a beautifully conceived book that tours readers through Mexico City’s diverse queer nightscapes. With this book, Tenorio makes a major contribution to Latino queer studies, while being in dialogue with the broader field.”— Kareem Khubchandani, Tufts University