Introduction

The introduction defines joy as a politicized form of pleasure, and it argues that Cuban and Puerto Rican diasporic media producers engage with joy to negotiate systems of racialized gender that date back to colonization. It begins by tracing how political versions of joy in Cuban and Puerto Rican media are reactions to racist depictions of Latinx joy that have pervaded popular discourse over centuries of colonial and imperial rule. It then explains how this theorization of joy extends out of work in women of color feminisms, affect theory, performance studies, Latinx studies, and queer of color critique. Finally, it contends that joy remains an understudied affective response precisely because its relationship to the political is often ambiguous.