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1. Queering Home: Desire Meets Theory Meets Art
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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1 1 In “The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México,” Gloria Anzaldúa maps the physical and emotionally treacherous terrain covered by undocumented women in the U.S.–Mexico border region. Vulnerability to violence, discrimination, and harsh environmental conditions marks a precarious state that Anzaldúa visualizes as a “thin edge of barbwire.” Caught between sides and defined by the spaces in between, this politically poetic metaphor lends itself well to the experience of queer Chicanas and Latinas who cross the confines of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality as they move between and among communities and forge new identities living outside the lines. Anzaldúa’s embodied borderlands juxtapose the comfort, stability, and security of home with the unsteadiness of edges, limits, and the razor-sharp points of barbwire, a fencing material usually utilized to control and/or define a territory. The barbs fortify the barrier, intensifying the physical presence of this border with the added threat of sharpened metal piercing vulnerable flesh. Anzaldúa’s imagery speaks centuries of political sleight of hand, mass disenfranchisement, and prejudicial policies where the border simultaneously joins and divides Mexico and the United States. The search for home and the fashioning of home spaces within discourses of queer Chicana/Latina community range in scope and context from linguistic to geographical to psychological. As a scholar of queer U.S. Latina/o Studies, I seek spaces of home in university classrooms, publishing houses, conference rooms, and faculty collectives. I aim to carve a home space made of a mindful language used to describe this body of work and the communities who create it. I long for a home space for myself amidst the ideas and images I envision. A key concept within my work, then, is home, whether it be the mythical Chicano homeland Queering Home Desire Meets Theory Meets Art This is her home this thin edge of barbwire. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands 2 HOMECOMING QUEERS of Aztlán, an idealized country of origin within a diaspora, or a more localized sense of belonging within a particular geographical or demographic community. A home affords its inhabitants a sense of emotional and geographical groundedness . Something homemade connotes authenticity and loving intention. Home is coalition and commonality. Yet family—the actors and agents of home—do not always live up to these idealized standards, especially when coalitions are challenged by sexual and gender, racial and/or class difference. For many subjects, “queer” pushes at the limits of “home” as defined by blood and birth. Gloria Anzaldúa addresses the critical ramifications of an interpretation of homophobia as the fear of going home. Her portrayal of home is characterized as a site of equal parts power and pain. She describes herself as a turtle, traveling with her own semblance of home, and acknowledges the forces that threaten to keep her separated from the sense of belonging and safety connected with a traditional family and community-based version of home: “And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (Borderlands ). In both references, the most significant tools in homemaking are Anzaldúa’s own agency and desire to build, rebuild, and transport a home space of her own design. Cherríe Moraga also reports that if familia is denied to her through the ignorant and hateful acts of others, she will construct her own home, her own familia “from scratch”—her own queer version of a homemade home space. When subjects are defined as “in excess” of familial, community, or societal norms home becomes a privilege denied, a pawn offered up only as a reward for good nonexcessive behavior. It should be noted, of course, that I invoke the concept of excess simply because of the manner by which sexuality, race, class, gender , and even citizenship are all read in dominant spheres on a linear scale that deems white Anglo (U.S.) heterosexual male America as the zero against which all other numbers are compared. Within this paradigm of subjectivity, double, triple, and other multiply marginalized subjects are perceived as more tragic, more tormented, more fragmented, more hostile, more complicated. This tendency toward a public perception of excess is inextricably linked to queer Latin@ representation and experience of home on all levels cosmic and corporeal . As scholars, students, performers...