Staging Darker Desires: BDSM and the Coloniality of Affect in Latina Feminisms and Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Ciento

Desire is never politically correct.

–Cherríe Moraga (“Queer” 160)

Love is not entirely ethical, if it has any relation to desire, which it must, if it is to be recognizable as love.

–Lauren G. Berlant (“Properly” 684-85)

Romantic love and erotic desire¹ have operated as ports of entry into radical politics and activism for Chicana feminism. As is especially demonstrated in the scholarly and creative work of Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Cherríe Moraga, Emma Pérez, Sandra Soto, Carla Trujillo, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, among others, these forms of affect operate as vital nexuses for laying bare the imprints of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and US imperialism on the Chicana social body and inciting self-preservation, healing, and coalition-building. Yet, while much of this vibrant work focuses on how colonial imaginaries subtend the white male Eurocentric gaze, there persists an aporia regarding how Chicana desire is haunted by coloniality and methodologies for reckoning with this embodied colonial legacy. This absence of discussion around the complex and often invisible ways in which coloniality haunts the most intimate aspects of our lived experiences impoverishes our theorizations and praxes of affective politics.²

This article addresses this lacuna by placing into conversation decolonial Latina and Chicana feminisms—including the work of Moraga, Pérez, María Lugones, and Lorna Dee Cervantes—to conceptualize what I term the coloniality of affect³ and to examine BDSM play (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) as a potential methodology for disidentifying⁴ with gendered structures of domination shaping racialized desire. The coloniality of affect names how forms of affect, including romantic love and erotic desire, are never innocent but profoundly moored in social worlds, namely in what Lugones calls the “modern/colonial gender system” (“Heterosexualism” 187), or coloniality’s imposition of sexual dimorphism and corresponding gender roles and sexualities. BDSM play may constitute a technology of decolonial thinking and praxis by making visible and reckoning with the coloniality of affect and obviating distinctions between private, or the “infra-political,” and public politics. Because BDSM depends on the performance of heternormative gender scripts—the dominant “top” and submissive “bottom”—to enact erotic fantasies, it also holds the potential to “pervert” and subvert these scripts, to adumbrate their performative and socially constructed nature, opening up space to critique, reimagine, and refunction them.

The first section of the essay brings into dialogue decolonial Latina and Chicana feminisms to excavate a heretofore largely invisible genealogy of critical thought that articulates the coloniality of affect and charts the disidentificatory potential of BDSM. Whereas Lugones’s modern colonial gender system opens up new vistas for considering the gendered somatic politics of coloniality, Pérez’s and Moraga’s provocative work on Chicana desire and sexuality, including Moraga’s cursory (although incisive) ruminations on the disidentificatory potential of BDSM, more fully fleshes out Lugones’s somatic politics. This scholarship not only radically shifts conversations around racialized desire—refocusing attention from the projection of colonial imaginaries on the Chicana social body to how this corpus internalizes and acts on such imaginaries—but also proposes a methodology for the revolution of colonized desire or the coloniality of affect through BDSM.

The second section further expands this genealogy of Latina feminist thought by tracing acclaimed Chumash and Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’s exploration of the coloniality of affect and BDSM in her representative poem “100 Words for Compass” from Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (2011). Taking a lead from Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson (“Poetry”), I approach Cervantes’s poetics both formally, closely analyzing her use of language and form, and as a vital site of theorizing and philosophizing.⁵ In this representative poem, Cervantes reconstructs BDSM scenarios of discovery buttressed by familiar gendered cartographic tropes and ambivalent colonial discourse. In this manner, Cervantes reveals how coloniality saturates both white male Eurocentric fantasies and Chicana love and desire. This disidentificatory poetic performance of BDSM also holds in abeyance and interrupts the colonial logic of affect and...