Shaping Life, Shaping Work: Julio Torres’s Queer Comic Labor

Abstract: Through an analysis of comedian Julio Torres’s streaming special My Favorite Shapes (2019), this paper focuses on how Torres uses comedy to critique the US immigration system and its dehumanization of Central American migrants and explores Torres’s material engagement with shapes. Because the word shapes recalls structures and structural conditions, I turn to shapes to analyze Torres’s phenomenological critique of structural inequities rooted in racism and xenophobia. By drawing on phenomenology’s attention to figure/ground structure, Torres develops a critique of the US by focusing on what and who resides in the background versus the foreground of socio-cultural-political imaginaries. By developing his critiques through comedy, Torres uses the collective, embodied force of laughter to unsettle habitual narratives pertaining to labor and citizenship. Because Torres’s My Favorite Shapes embodies the stakes for being a queer Salvadoran immigrant in the US, I suggest that Torres’s worldmaking project centers queer-immigrant imagination as the site beyond the literal structures that shape and objectify the lives of those who are most vulnerable and who therefore hold the clearest vision of what is possible.