The Rockefeller College Department of Political Science will be hosting Cristina Beltrán from New York University on Wednesday, October 11th. Cristina Beltrán's essay analyzes Latino conservative thought by rethinking the logics of assimilation through a simultaneous exploration of aesthetic possibility and negative affect. Focusing on the writings of Richard Rodriguez and José Esteban Muñoz, the essay considers how creative forms of self-individuation and political agency cannot easily be decoupled from negative forms of identification and disidentification. Drawing on Muñoz's analysis of "feeling brown," the essay explores the interplay Rodriguez stages between shame, stigma, appropriation, pleasure, and play. Turning to queer theory and theories of affect as a way to more fully understand the latent intensities and political logics that operate in Rodriguez’s queer-yet-conservative depictions of assimilation, the essay attends to the many ways that “the deployment of sexuality intersects with the deployment of race.” This reading of racialized sexuality works to resist a priori assumptions that such forms of intersectionality are necessarily reparative or politically radical. Rodriguez simultaneously articulates a queer form of racialized sexuality that resists normalization while also sustaining a conservative logic that approaches identity-based movements as spaces of disciplinary power, devoid of creativity and play.