Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism by Suzanne Bost (review)

In her introduction to Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism, titled “Beyond the Self,” Suzanne Bost establishes the parameters of her study, focusing on Gloria Anzaldúa, John Rechy, and Aurora Levins Morales, who underscore the impact of racism, ethnocentrism, misogyny, homophobia and ableism. The author places their stories in the center and in the context of posthumanist theories to reveal often overlooked relations, such as our connections to other species. Bost studies the humanity of people of color and rethinks the role of the human today, challenging such concepts as individualism, and human supremacy over the planet. Bost utilizes a social approach, but one open to nonhuman perspectives, and discusses issues at the intersection of Latinx, queer, feminist and disability studies. The memoirs she analyzes provide sources outside the Humanist tradition, as she engages in active conversation with the authors from a liminal position.

Chapter 1 combines analyses of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s memoir Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) with Irene Vilar’s The Ladies Gallery (1996) and Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict (2009), highlighting how the political strategies conceived by these writers disrupt our understandings of selfhood. Bost prefers to use the term memoir (rather than autobiography) to avoid depicting minority production as mere sociological data. Ortiz Cofer and Vilar were marked by cultural alienation, being labeled as not “American” enough or “Latina” enough; both Puerto Rican authors use fragmentation as a form of soliciting reader involvement. Ortiz Cofer writes in regards to the “editings” in the construction of memoir in Silent Dancing: “As one gets older, childhood years are often conveniently consolidated into one perfect Summer vacation” (26). Vilar’s life events are related “through a lens of pathology” (32), that is illness and abortion, as when she relates she performed 15 abortions in 17 years, for which she received death threats.

Chapter 2 covers the works of John Rechy from the perspective of depersonalization and queerness. Rechy’s novel City of Night (1963) focuses on Rechy’s encounters with drag queens, hustlers, and transgender people from the queer scene. His narrative corresponds to a period of development in the Chicano and gay rights movements. In his narrative and photographs of himself, he displays the sculpted body, that he believes should be exhibited just like works of art. In his novel The Sexual Outlaw (1977) the author gives emphasis to bodies and orifices; Bost writes: “Interiority is accessed through orifices. Selfhood is marked at the boundaries where bodies meet. The human is defined in communion with others” (59). Rechy’s narratives in the context of the AIDS epidemic mark “the panic surrounding epidemics [that] drives humans to seal off their bodies from other humans” (66). But Rechy defies these impositions of heteronormativity, generating community via promiscuity. Queer sexual subcultures, writes Bost, can teach us to accept strangers in their difference and, by not forcing them to conform to a sense of “normality,” Rechy questions Humanist conventions by presenting stories of “outlaw” otherness that break old molds of intimacy.

Chapter 3 concentrates on the point of view of animals, vegetables and digital ecologies, adopted by Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican poet, artist and activist for Disability Justice movements. Levins Morales was part of the important collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981). Levins Morales’s books Remedios (1998), Medicine Stories (1998), and Kindling (2013), might be described as “medicinal history,” as they deal with the author’s health issues and the interconnections of trans-species ecologies. Nevertheless, as Bost points out, Chicanx concerns with nature do not develop into environmentalism because they never separated from nature in the first place. Levins Morales creates a personal archive combining her experience as poet, feminist and historian and develops a transhistorical community that extends to social media. Levins Morales’s website is “a virtual farmer’s market, a place for transcorporeal collectivity and exchange” (91...