Queer Latinidad
Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Publication Year: 2003
According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined.
Juana Mar'a Rodr'guez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields.
As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.
Published by: NYU Press
Contents
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pp. vii-
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-xi
This book is a manifestation of the many gifts of knowledge I have received over the course of my life. Like the different spaces I describe in this text, multi-formed spaces have shaped my intellectual formation. I grew up in a home where ideas, humor, cari�o, and chaos ate together. My grandmother adored me and taught me almost everything ...
Preface: A Note of Caution to the Reader
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pp. 1-4
Writing is silent. Barren white spaces hold the cryptic black marks of text. Margins impose an imaginary wholeness, even as they establish a border of difference. They contain the marks and signal their separateness from other texts. I know something about margins and the centers they create. I know that the borders ...
1. Divas, Atrevidas, y Entendidas: An Introduction to Identities
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pp. 5-36
Identity is about situatedness in motion: embodiment and spatiality. It is about a self that is constituted through and against other selves in contexts that serve to establish the relationship between the self and the other. Places afford preexisting narratives of former encounters; they offer a means of symbolically decoding practices ...
2. Activism and Identity in the Ruins of Representation
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pp. 37-83
Activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history, a dialogue between the memories of the past and the imaginings of the future manifested through the acts of our own present yearnings. It is an encounter with the ghosts that reside within and inhabit the symbolic and geographic spaces that shape our worlds. ...
3. The Subject on Trial: Reading In re Tenorio as Transnational Narrative
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pp. 84-113
Enter now the space of a U.S. Immigration Court House, blocks away in downtown San Francisco. Walk past the metal detectors and armed guards and through the cool dry open hallway bustling with lawyers carrying thick black bags. Wait for the elevator that will transport you to the echoing corridor and leave you facing ...
4. “ Welcome to the Global Stage”: Confessions of a Latina Cyber-Slut”
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pp. 114-152
Una vez, y dos son tres. Once upon a time I entered a volcanic space in an online world, quietly, without expectation, to polish my Spanish and to amuse myself after hours of study. I lingered in silence for a while, lurking, disconcerted by the banter of men who seemed to know one another, frustrated by the myriad of regional colloquialisms, ...
Epilogue: Closing the Book
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pp. 153-162
At this moment of factitious endings it seems fitting to return to other beginnings, to other texts that I could have produced, other rhizomatic routes I could have followed. And today, this day that I recompose this conclusion, I feel like dancing. (Like Marcelo Ten�rio, I like to dance.) ...
Notes
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pp. 163-190
Bibliography
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pp. 191-210
Index
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pp. 211-226
About the Author
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pp. 227-
Juana Mar�a Rodr�guez is an assistant professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
E-ISBN-13: 9780814769263
E-ISBN-10: 0814769268
Print-ISBN-13: 9780814775493
Print-ISBN-10: 0814775497
Page Count: 239
Publication Year: 2003
