Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire

Introduction

HE GROWING DISSATISFACTION over the past twenty-five years with monological and monocausal approaches to subjectivity and power has motivated some of the most powerful experiential creative writings by women of color, such as those included in the edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981), and, in turn, has generated some of the most enabling and robust scholarship in a range of interdisciplinary locations, including postcolonial studies, gender studies, African American Studies, and queer theory. As the epigraphs above suggest, if the identification of gender as the primary variable for investigating sexual identity forecloses a consideration of the equally meaningful place of racial formation and class relations in our “sexual” lives, then the acceptance of race and ethnicity as the defining characteristics of people of color prevents an adequate examination of the significant roles that sexual desires and sexual prohibitions play in racialization. We can now say with certainty that race and sexuality are not self-contained, discrete categories. Reading Chican @ Like a Queer stays with that certainty, even, or especially, when the analysis leads me to unpredictable terrain and de-masterful uncertainty. If racialized sexuality is one of my key terms, that is, I mean for it to do much more than stand in as a de rigueur flashpoint. This brings me to the queer work that I mean for the term “de-mastery” to perform in my subtitle. As tiny as my mere two-letter prefix may seem, I cannot begin to do justice to what its expansiveness has meant for me as a We believe our racial and class backgrounds have a huge effect in determining how we perceive ourselves sexually. —AMBER HOLLIBAUGH and CHERRÍE MORAGA (“What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With”) Indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class. —EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK (Epistemology of the Closet) Introduction Chican@ Literary and Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, and the Challenge of Racialized Sexuality 2 READING CHICAN@ LIKE A QUEER reader, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher. And I actually do not want to do justice to it, when to “do justice” to de-mastery—to master de-mastery—would be to discipline, to tame, to reduce, to render intelligible a structure of feeling whose force is precisely in its unintelligibility, what Raymond Williams eloquently describes as “something not yet come,” something still “at the very edge of semantic availability” (Marxism and Literature, 130, 134). In embracing de-mastery over certainty, I want to resist what the Lacanian theorist Antonio Viego describes as a “reductive and ego amplifying narrative of Latino and Chicano subjectivity,” our desire for which shows us to be problematically in thrall with the unspoken conditions of our subjugation and shows us to have become overinvested in and insufficiently critical of ego- and social psychological explanations of human subjectivity that continue to obsess over notions of subjective unity, wholeness, adaptation, adjustment to reality, “mental health,” and that definitively place in parenthesis all of the poststructuralist lessons we have learned about language and the effects of language as structure on the speaking subject. (Dead Subjects, 141) My investment in “de-mastery” extends to the ethnic/racial signifier that I use in the book’s title and, where appropriate, within the book itself. My queer performative “Chican@” signals a conscientious departure from certainty , mastery, and wholeness, while still announcing a politicized collectivity .1 Certainly when people handwrite or keystroke the symbol for “at” as the final character in Chican@, they are expressing a certain fatigue with the clunky post-1980s gender inclusive formulations: “Chicana or Chicano,” “Chicana and Chicano,” or “Chicana/o.”2 But I want my “Chican@” to be more capacious than shorthand. I mean for it to catch our attention with its blend of letters from the alphabet on the one hand and a curly symbol on the other hand, a rasquachismo that at first sight looks perhaps like a typo and seems unpronounceable. While some people pronounce “Chican@” as “Chicana, Chicano” or “Chicana/o,” I prefer the diphthong ao. The ethnic signifiers “Chicana,” “Chicano,” and “Chicana/o” when they are used as nouns and not adjectives announce a politicized identity embraced by a man or a woman of Mexican descent who lives in the United States and who wants to forge a connection to a collective identity politics. I like the way the nonalphabetic symbol for “at” disrupts our desire for intelligibility...