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2. Speaking Selves: Language and Identity in Transition
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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10 2 Ibegin with a word, as all books must. A label for him, a title for her. Which X marks your spot? This book’s title alone contains three labels: queer, Chicana, and Latina. Each word maps a clear path toward gender, sexuality, and/or ethnic identity. Language necessitates order. Yet human experience and subjectivity are inherently disorderly. Consequently, the notion of linguistic representation suggests an oxymoronic state—an organized mess, fixed movement, controlled chaos. Subaltern and feminist critics have also identified language as an instrument utilized by dominant powers to orchestrate past and present subjugation of women and people of color. Trinh T. Minh-ha implores: “How many, already, have been condemned to premature deaths for having borrowed the master’s tools and thereby played into his hands?” Octavio Paz further extends the rami fications of women’s subjugation to male authority upon declaring: “[The Mexican woman] never expresses her femininity because it always manifests itself in forms men have invented for her.” Both in terms of the existential and political conflicts between language and expression, how do women of color, and specifically queer Latinas, subvert this representational conundrum? Any attempt to communicate identity through verbal expression inextricably ties us to the limits of labels defined in broad essentializing brushstrokes. While some artists and scholars search for the perfect descriptors, others grapple with, reappropriate, and rewrite existing labels, or fashion entirely new words to speak the multiple worlds they inhabit. While the creation of new descriptors may aid in our self-expression and definition, the act of labeling also poses the potential risk of re-creating traditional paradigms of power and exclusion. Circuitousness defines almost all attempts to discuss one-to-one relationships between identity labels and the communities they claim to represent , since these relationships will never be unitary or neatly contained. Speaking Selves Language and Identity in Transition If men are gay, I want to be precious! —Monica Palacios, Latin Lezbo Comic SPEAKING SELVES 11 There are always exceptions and individuals who will be excluded based on the definitions that emerge from a union of language and ideology. Rather than straining to sharpen blurry edges and control unruly labels, the writers included in the current chapter move to accept the inherent limitations of the language in which we communicate our realities and to utilize their creative work to envision words and worlds fluid enough to fit the slippery subjectivities expressed and experienced within. Through an empowerment of interstices— the middle spaces between words, identities, and communities—I identify the strategic deployment of Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness into myriad creative and critical spheres in order to speak of the centrality of queer Latina subjectivity. Theorizing Identity There is a danger in invoking identity labels, in life and scholarship, because one must situate their meanings within a limited context, knowing full well that the identities described are not stationary, but fluid and ever evolving. However, the danger of abandoning identity labels in favor of a skewed version of universality is greater—since the dissolution of identity and community labels threatens to deconstruct the very communities and subjectivities that give structure, unity, and inspiration to movements for political, social, and economic justice. Debates over the validity of the essentialist tendencies of identity labeling have prompted the development of a theoretical model of strategic essentialism that acknowledges the constructedness of essence, yet continues to utilize this construction with particular tactical goals in mind, fully aware of the risks and erasures involved in its deployment. For Tejana historian and novelist Emma Pérez, the movement is inward, toward spaces of increased commonality, rather than outward to encompass larger or more universalized communities. In one of her contributions to the groundbreaking Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, Pérez advocates a specific conceptualization of strategic essentialism—un sitio y una lengua (a space and a language)—that is particularly relevant to the needs of Chicanas and other lesbians of color: “The space and language is rooted in both the words and silence of Third-World-Identified-Third-World-Women who create a place apart from white men and women and from men of color, if only for a weekend now and again” (Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse” –). Such an application of essentialism is conscious, enacted with an astute awareness of the need to reach beyond essentialized sites of identity labeling in order to establish and care for connections...