Ethnic, Critical Race, Postcolonial, and Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies, in addition to various allied and intersecting fields and practices are in large part undergirded by a counterhegemonic impulse that involves lucid critiques of power and compelling explications of counter-power in diverse contexts. This graduate seminar seeks to continue, and complicate, these mappings through rigorous attention to the oftentimes vexed ideologies at play in various discourses and practices of dissent. Taking select contemporary Latinx literature, film, and popular culture as our case studies, the seminar will explore the complexity of the acknowledged and unacknowledged relationships to power underlying various literary, cinematic, and performative genres that ostensibly are understood to be “transgressive.” Accordingly, we will draw upon various theories of transgression (resistance, banditry, disidentification, differential consciousness, mimesis, signifying, carnivalesque spectacle, biopower, etc.) in addition to related scholarship. Primary texts include Chicana/o farmworker narrative and verse by Helena Maria Viramontes, Tomás Rivera, and Gary Soto (with possible proletarian narrative and verse by Luis Rodriguez and select poets as an alternative); Puerto Rican independentista cinema and testimonio by Ana Maria Garcia and Oscar Lopez Rivera; Cuban American feminist performance art and testimonio by Coco Fusco; Chicana performance, spoken word, and slam poetry by Amalia Ortiz; theater by Chicano-Riqueño Manuel Lin Miranda and mixed-heritage Puerto Rican Quiara Alegría Hudes; as well as pan-Latinx punk and Son Jarocho music by Alice Bag, Las Cafeteras, and select other musicians.