Expressing Latina Sexuality with Vieja Argüentera Embodiments and Rasquache Language: How Women's Culture Enables Living Filosofía

Based on ethnographically grounded data, the article foregrounds the socially constructed sexual expressions of Mrs. Maria Zapata, a heterosexual immigrant woman. With her female circle, she formed the Unión de Viejas Argüenteras, an informal collective based at a Mexican bakery in the Midwest. Her creativity provides an opportunity for analyzing everyday rasquache (noncompliant, bawdy, kitsch-like) aesthetics as the basis for her Latina filosofía (living philosophy) which is grounded in the nonsexual and sexual body. An analysis of her formas de ser (ways of knowing and being) and sexually explicit language and embodiments indicate that the aesthetics are produced via a combination of formal, informal, and raunchy registers that facilitate an engagement with the material body in defiance of Western philosophy's separation of mind and body. The article posits that the women's culture and solidarity engenders uninhibited expressions of sexuality and self-fashioning and in turn uncolonized, undisciplined disorder.