ABSTRACT
When the Sense8 science fiction web drama (2015) connected eight strangers from different parts of the world and featured an Anglo transgender woman named Nomi (Jamie Clayton) and Lito Rodriguez (Spanish actor Miguel Ángel Silvestre), critics at large applauded the show’s representation of LGBT characters. While the computer genius Nomi comes from a wealthy and conservative family in the US, Lito brings the element of imaginative sexuality, situational improvisation, and outsized empathy to harness the emotions of his psychically linked companions. We, too, are enthusiastic fans of the Sense8 series. However, as Laura Fernández examines in this volume, we also share a complex and mixed response to Silvestre’s Lito, who so robustly represents aspects of the Latin lover stereotype (why couldn’t Lito be the computer genius?), even as he subverts heteronormative prejudice and provides a more thoughtfully styled Latinx imaginary than the vast majority of his Latin lover counterparts in popular culture. To wit, he is definitely not the “Guatemalan gardener Javier” who we are told seduces an underage Paula (Jane Lynch) in the film The 40-Year-Old Virgin . However, the faceless gardener alluded to in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the Lito character both have in common an overt, hyper-sensual nature that crosses into the realm of prohibited, but irrepressible, sexual drives.
