Eros Ideologies

“Laura E. Pérez renews the precepts of 1950s Third World liberation and extends the contemporary politics of women-of-color freedom fighters into the future. She speaks with many voices—the learned scholar, the analyst, the teacher, the maker of new aesthetics, the poet, the dreamer, and the guide—and offers her readers a multitude of routes for crossing academic and subjective terrains to find new possibilities for thinking, doing, and being. An outstanding work of decolonial writing by one of the great Chicana feminist philosophers of our time, Eros Ideologies is exactly the book I have needed to best teach my undergraduate and graduate students.” -- Chela Sandoval, author of * Methodology of the Oppressed *
“Laura E. Pérez’s newest book is a tour de force that integrates the mind-body-spirit through a series of writings that weave together the theoretical and poetical within the context of decolonization. She explores the works of artists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ester Hernández, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood as she crosses disciplines to bring the embodied psyche to bear on questions of the erotic and the spiritual.” -- Amalia Mesa-Bains, Professor Emerita, California State University, Monterey Bay
"Pérez eloquently reflects on activism, art, philosophy, poetry, politics, and selfhood. She offers radical reappraisals of the art of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Esther Hernández, and Liliana Wilson, among many artists whose histories have been obfuscated by Eurocentric ideas and whose praxes she creatively reexamines. This cross-disciplinary study powerfully recombines theoretical and literary sources that speak to academic practice, lived experience, and poetic meditation. Writing in multiple authorial voices, Pérez shatters the high/low art dichotomy that has often segregated Latinx art history from mainstream US culture. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Estevez * Choice *
"Readers unfamiliar with Latina, especially Chicana, art and politics are treated to eye-opening beauty mixed with expressions of suffering and resistance. Readers already immersed in the culturally rich world of protest art foregrounding gender and eroticisim will find new ways into the multilayered visionaries featured here." -- Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer * Religion *
"Eros Ideologies is a teacherly text: Pérez shows us not only how to look at, but also how to be with, art of the Americas.… Certainly, the use of personal prose in scholarly publications is not unprecedented in the discourses of ethnic studies, anthropology, history, literature, art, and cultural studies; but Pérez's approach is tactical as readers enter her classroom—a space of 'heart and hearth'—where she interweaves decades of close study of theoretical and spiritual texts, lifelong contemplations of artwork, and the conversations she has maintained with the many artists who made them." -- Ella Maria Diaz * Latino Studies *
"Eros Ideologies can serve as an approachable and valuable introduction to very urgent concerns." -- Andrew William Lee * Religion and the Arts *
"It is Pérez’s mindful contributions of eros, agape, philia, In lak’ech, love, and respect for art that mark this book as a starting point in discussion of works by people of color, mostly Latinx and women artists. . . . As beautiful as Pérez’s writings on the subjects can be, as rich with historical connections calling upon syncretism and community care, these analyses are primers for further work to be done." -- Helman Alejandro Sosa * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *