Marrón /x envisionings: visualising queer beauty as feminist antiracist affective refusal and care in sequential art activism

This article contributes to debates on mobilising queer perspectives on beauty as tools against racism and gender-based violence in contexts ruled by whiteness-centring racial mixture ( mestizaje ) regimes. Drawing on queer, critical race, feminist and visual studies’ frameworks and multimodal methods, the article explores representations on Marrón / Marrona / Marrxn 1 (racialised ‘brown-skinned’, as the colour marrón in Argentina is used as a racial category similar to moreno – both meaning shades of ‘brown’ – in other Latin American countries) beauty in relation to intersectional antiracist discourses and queer politics of affect in sequential art – a medium that mobilises visual shorthands in connected ways to convey complex narratives, such as digital and printed illustrations, fanzines and comics – in Argentina, a society that envisions its national self as white, albeit within flexible boundaries shaped by racial mixture discourses. The article reflects on the connections between lived experience-based intersectional antiracism, queer politics of affect and sexual citizenship in artworks by Marrona artist-activist Abril Carissimo, aka @bbywacha. I argue that art practices that mobilise queer beauty as forms of affective refusal and care, offering perspectives grounded in lived experience and critical intersectional antiracist literacies, can function as an exercise in political imagination to confront historical oppressions and revendicate civil and human rights. Such an exercise proposes models of social justice-orientated and inclusive diversity in representation, while also challenging visual regimes of whiteness regarding erotic desire, gendered affect and the right to appear as a subject of rights in the public space.