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Dos X

Disability and Racial Dysphoria in Latinx and Filipinx Culture
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025

About this book

An examination of the interconnectedness of brown-racialized people across multiple identities, told through case studies of television, literature, and writing.

As a Filipinx immigrant to the United States, Sony Coráñez Bolton has frequently been mistaken as Mexican. Dos X theorizes such misrecognition. What does it mean to exist in this liminal state, which Coráñez Bolton dubs the “racial uncanny”? What generative possibilities emerge from the presumed interchangeability of Latinx and Filipinx bodies—and from the in-betweenness of brownness as such?

Dos X tracks misrecognition through cultural products like the TV series Undone, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, and the nonfiction work of Jose Antonio Vargas. Misrecognition, Coráñez Bolton argues, produces moments of uncanniness in which subjects experience dysphoric attachments to identities that aren’t supposed to be theirs. In the context of racial capitalism, racial dysphoria is a disability because it undermines certainty about what one’s body is and therefore what role one is meant to play as a laborer. But racial dysphoria can also be revealing. Coráñez Bolton identifies vast potential in this supposed disability, which compels its “sufferers” to confront their shared position within the social, political, and economic organization of capital’s empire, opening new avenues for liberatory solidarity.

Author / Editor information

Sony Coráñez Bolton is associate professor of English & Spanish and chair of Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines.

Reviews

Dos X boldly maps the epistemic and affective webs that arise from racial dysphoria, questioning the attachments we hold to calcified categories, histories, and practices of recognition. Sony Corañez Bolton invites us to engage with gaps, misrecognition, prosthesis, and histories of trauma not only to construct an archive of desire and subjectivity but also as gateways to inhabiting, activating, and ultimately transforming other worlds and ways of knowing.
— Allan Punzalan Isaac, Rutgers University, author of Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor

Sony Coráñez Bolton demonstrates how moments of racial misrecognition are not mistakes but instead constitute a racial uncanny, revealing colonial and capitalist structures of power that have similarly shaped Filipinx and Latinx experiences in the United States. His richest intervention is deploying queer studies and disability studies frameworks to explore moments of racial uncanny, a move that lays the groundwork for social and political organizing beyond race.
— Faye Caronan, University of Colorado Denver, author of Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique

Every time I look at this cover, I see something new — a clear sign that it’s something special. An examination of the “racial uncanny” that’s impossible to not examine further thanks to this amazing design choice.
— Spine Magazine

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    vii
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    List of Illustrations

    ix
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    Preface: The great bracero

    xi
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    Introduction: Racial Dysphoria

    1
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    1. Ability as Property: On the Frontier Prosthesis and Colonial Drag

    23
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    2. Filipinx Spanish: Crip Genres of Anti- Assimilation

    47
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    3. Filipino Jose, Not Mexican José: On the Disability Affects of Filipinx Undocumentality and Racial Dysphoria

    89
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    4. Mad Migrant Imaginary: Asian American and Latinx Disability Politics in Translation

    121
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    Coda: Basement Archive in the Tropics

    143
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    Acknowledgments

    151
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    Notes

    153
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    Index

    171
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
June 5, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781477331385
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.7560/331361
eBook ISBN: 9781477331385
Keywords for this book
Insurrecto (2018); La Malinche (Cortez; the Aztecs); Undone (TV series); Jose Antonio Vargas; racial passing; politics of language and translation; racial mis-recognition; dispossession; shared colonialist experience; Asian-American and Filipinx-American Studies; Latinx Studies; disability studies; gender and sexuality studies; race and ethnic studies
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
Downloaded on 2.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7560/331361/html
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