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191 CHAPTER 1 QUEERING HOME . Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization is inspired by a student’s comment that she believed homophobia was a fear of returning after a period of residency away from home. From a misguided definition, Anzaldúa performs the critical work to identify the relevance of “home” in homophobia (Borderlands –). . Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, with an introduction by Donald Macedo (New York: Continuum, ). CHAPTER 2 SPEAKING SELVES . Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –. . Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, ), . . Michele Serros, Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard (New York: Riverhead Books, ). . Certainly my analysis of this particular speaking engagement does not represent the first instance where a Chicana/o has rejected the homogenizing and colonial tendencies within Rodriguez’s work. In her The Color of Privilege, Aída Hurtado criticizes Rodriguez and others for “their ideological positions [that] are not influenced by everyday interactions or by close scholarly contact with individuals whose work is to defend and promote the advancement of ethnic/racial groups” (). While Rodriguez represents a pariah for some Chicanos and Latinos who view his stance on bilingual education and ethnic identity as counter to the revolutionary aims of social justice struggles, other scholars, like Alberto Ledesma and Frederick Luis Aldama, choose to engage his scholarly and creative work as representative of a complicated transcultural subject at the center of myriad intersectionalities in need of interrogation. See Ledesma’s “Narratives of Undocumented Mexican Immigration as Chicana/o Acts of Intellectual and Political Responsibility,” in Decolonial Voices, ed. Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –, and Frederick Luis Aldama’s Brown on Brown (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). . For more on purity and Latina lesbian identity, see María Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Signs (Winter ): –. . See Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race (New York: Basic Books, ). . For a fascinating interrogation of this same question from a social science perspective , see Eithne Luibhéid “Looking Like a Lesbian: The Organization of Sexual NOTES 192 NOTES TO PAGES 15–18 Monitoring at the United States-Mexican Border,” in Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, ed. Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella (Durham: Duke University Press, ), –. . Donald Reuter defines “gaydar” in a popular—and explicitly male—context as “a word (derived from radar, of course) used to name the telepathic sixth sense which only gay men—and the occasional ultra savvy straight person—seem to possess. Its main function is to help gay men recognize one another in situations involving the general straight population.” Donald F. Reuter, Gaydar: The Ultimate Insider Guide to the Gay Sixth Sense (New York: Crown Publishers, ). . All quotations taken from my own lecture notes from this presentation by Richard Rodriguez at the University of California, Santa Barbara. . See Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), in which Derrida offers the term “différance” to encompass both the traditional sense of “difference” as distinction, as well as the continuous patterns of deferral (diff érer), whereby referents acquire meaning based not on what they are, but rather what they are not, as well as what they have the power to become. . Juan Flores points out the danger of such a Derridian approach to definition by deferral in his “The Latino Imaginary: Dimensions of Community and Identity,” where he posits self-definition for Latina/os as an affirmative practice with close ties to personal and community agency: “Latinos listen to their own kind of music, eat their own kind of food, dream their dreams, and snap their photos not just to express their difference from, or opposition to, the way the ‘gringos’ do it. These choices and preferences , though arrived at under circumstances of dependency and imposition, also attest to a deep sense of autonomy and self-referentiality. Latino identity is imagined not as the negation of the non-Latino, but as the affirmation of cultural and social realities and possibilities inscribed in their own human trajectory” (Flores and Benmayor ). My attempt at definition in deferral is not intended to strip the subjects in question of agency, but simply to disrupt what might be commonplace assumptions about Latinas, lesbians, and Latina lesbians that may or may not be true for any given...