AJAAS NATIONAL CONFERENCE 2024

This year’s Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) conference Jotería Pleasure: Re-Grounding Our Desires is organized around the interplay of pleasure, power, and decoloniality. We place jotería at the center of current social and political uprising to confront the violent consequences of COVID-19 and other forms of oppression and loss. Within this context, we re-ground our jotería desires as necessary for our existence. Since existir es resistir, we re-center jotería desires as resistance to white supremacy, sexism, heterosexism, capitalist extraction, and the lasting legacies of coloniality. We recognize that by embracing the pleasures of life, we are reclaiming jotería as experience, practice, knowledge, performance, and artmaking. We acknowledge radical and liberatory pleasures, and possibilities, that lie with re-connecting spiritual worlds, past and present, with jotería futures. We prioritize the project of re-grounding ourselves, and our desires, in and to our cuerpos and lands. By re-grounding ourselves within jotería pleasure we are taking up space and we are taking our time.

For us, jotería affirms consciousness and celebrates multiple ways of being, knowing, and becoming. We seek to live in a world where oppression is eradicated everywhere. We believe critical knowledge of self is a path to individual and collective well-being. It is a practice of pleasure. A healthy jotería embodies familia and contributes to a social ethos of humanization and transformation in the face of dehumanizing pressures. Our familias strive to establish trust by communicating truthfully and kindly, committing to having each other’s backs, and making beauty and fostering pleasure from our challenges. AJAAS dreams of communities where members of the jotería flourish. Fluidity is what binds us. Jotería experiences, practices, and knowledges also build on rigorous studies, an expansive and living field rooted in women of color feminism, muxerista pedagogy, and queer and trans of color critiques, precisely because these fields center Afro-Latina/o/x, Latina/o/x, Chicana/o/x, and Indigenous peoples including those of the African and Caribbean diasporas.

This conference aims to create a space for critical dialogue, community building, and artistic exploration, engaging with diverse perspectives, experiences, and presentations. We encourage submissions investigating the intersections of pleasure, desire, and resistance while challenging normative, death-seeking systems, narratives, and binaries. We invite healers, activists, scholars, writers, community members, musicians, and artists to think, teach, act up, play, create, and communicate within jotería pleasures.