Vomiting Up Brown is a rumination on the relational potential of regurgitative acts. Drawing primarily on work from within the field of queer of color critique, I explore the many ways that vomiting and nausea open up possibilities for an ethic of care and compassion against those forces that serve to sicken, marginalize, and debilitate. This project utilizes hopeful and vital queer utopics of the flesh to enliven readings of pained autobiographic retchings, puke-stained celebrity suicide, disordered eating practices, and rage-fueled poetics and performances. I turn to vomiting as a source of ontopoetic expression and meaning-making from which collective minoritarian modes of being and belonging are accessed and activated. This dissertation argues that shared engagements with abjection, self-annihilation, masochistic pain, and negative affects like shame and anger can bring us together across traditional boundaries of subjectivity and identity into forms of being-in-common. I ground this project in auto-ethnographic retchings of my own, guiding analyses attuned to the specifics and limitations of existing paradigms within Chicanx/Latinx studies, psychology, and queer and trans theory. I contend that vomiting and nausea are affective forms of expression useful for generating and sustaining intimacies that can be effectively used to maintain shared political commitments against structures of domination. Locating this potentiality in a woman of color feminist ethic of fleshy empathy, I call for an anti-supremacist and cross-racial queer politics built in part on loving re-citations, regurgitative rebellions, and modes of relational healing.
