Asco’s Asco and the Queer Affective Resonance of Abjection

Abstract

This essay renarrativizes existing accounts of Asco’s formation and unifying ethos, centering the role of negative affect, to show how the group’s abject aesthetic strategies offer an alternative political vision of national belonging predicated on uncivic participation. It foregrounds a queer discordant site of genesis and recruitment that recasts Asco not as a concrete group but as an abject structure of feeling in Chicano East Los Angeles. Asco’s play uniquely highlights and challenges Chicano nationalist heteronormativity and its connection to representative presence as the grounds for enfranchisement, thus problematizing sedimented models of minority national inclusion. By harnessing negative affect, Asco instead reveals a vulnerable collectivity that coheres around and validates feelings of disenchantment and dis-ease while resisting a reparative move toward coherent minority subjectivity and unified communities.