In A Kiss across the Ocean Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys. He recounts these bands’ importance for him and other Latinx kids and discusses their frequent identification with these bands’ glamorous performance of difference. Whether it was Siouxsie Sioux drawing inspiration from Latinx contemporaries and cultural practices or how Soft Cell singer Marc Almond’s lyrics were attuned to the vibrancy of queer Latinidad, Rodríguez shows how Latinx culture helped shape British post-punk. He traces the fandom networks that link these groups across space and time to illuminate how popular music establishes and facilitates intimate relations across the Atlantic. In so doing, he demonstrates how the music and styles that have come to define the 1980s hold significant sway over younger generations equally enthused by their matchlessly pleasurable and political reverberations.
Richard T. Rodríguez is also the author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics (2009), a co-editor of "Queering the Middle: Race, Religion, and a Queer Midwest," a double special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (20.1-2, 2014), and a contributor to the anthology: Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (2011), all of which are also published by Duke University Press.
Until April 17, all of these titles are 50% off when ordered on the Duke University Press website using the discount code "SPRING23"
