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CONCLUSION Re-visioning Chicano/a Bodies and Texts In this concluding chapter, I want to return to several issues raised (directly and indirectly) throughout Brown on Brown. As I’ve already discussed at some length in Chapter 1, there are some critical entanglements that inform much of U.S. (borderland and postcolonial queer) cultural and literary studies today. There is the conflation of the fiction of narrative with the facts of our everyday existence. There is the fusion of cultural studies scholarship with political activism. There is the conflation of en masse resistance to real sites of power with individual acts of resistance based on identity politics. However, as I’ve begun to untangle and clarify, while narrative fiction, verbal and visual, can open one’s eyes to social and political injustice, it is not the same thing as the massive organizing and protesting of real people that historically has transformed the social and political arena. Historical, social, and political facts can inflect borderland queer literature and film, but the fiction of such narratives (its organization according to aesthetic convention) should not be made subordinate to such facts. This is not to say that we cannot study cultural phenomena such as borderland literature by and about the gay/lesbian Chicano/a experience to better understand our world. However, to better understand queer Chicano/a literature—or any cultural phenomena—does not alter the real conditions of our everyday life, nor does it work to magically transform real sites of power. To believe any differently is to divert our work as scholars whose research might lead to verifiable—or falsifiable—conclusions and therefore give us a deeper understanding of the cultural products of humanity in all their complexity and variety. Let me conclude with several general points regarding literary and film interpretation : what it can and cannot achieve. First, in regard to its cultural studies component, it should be less wishful and more realistic. To be that, it would have to stop pretending that a small cadre of academics decoding cultural phenomena have the power to change the world in the same way as the 06-T3393-CNC 6/22/05 1:56 PM Page 137 working population can when it organizes itself independently and moves towards the achievement of its self-designed goals. If borderland queer (and straight) literary and film (cultural) studies are to have any value today, we must turn to rationalist and empirical methods of gathering and analyzing data and formulating hypotheses that might help us better understand the reality we live in and the actions that really transform it. For borderland queer (and straight) critical studies to move forward, we need to be sensitive to how literature and film are organized according to verifiable elements that make up their aesthetics: those verifiable elements like style, point of view, tempo, tense, and so on that writers employ to engage readers in specific ways. The call to question the role of the literary scholar and the function of literary interpretation (queer or straight, Chicano or Anglo) in and outside of the classroom has resurfaced of late. The skepticism over what theory can actually do (especially poststructuralism’s “aporia,” “slippage,” and “différance”) to intervene and resist is warranted. At the conference on theory held at the University of Chicago on April 11, 2003, New York Times journalist Emily Eakin opened her report by observing that “These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century—psychoanalysis, structuralism , Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism—have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating” (9). That the question of theory’s role in and outside humanities departments today didn’t get much airtime suggests that theorizing the slippage of signifier and signi- fied has done little to make good on its promise: to resist, intervene, and transform a world increasingly marked by barbaric acts. Others are skeptical of theory that confuses those facts that make up everyday reality and the words and structures that make up literature. Such scholars as Robert Alter, John Searle, and John Ellis question the poststructuralist doxa: thatverba magically suffices to radically change humanres. And, already a decade ago, Frederick Crews expressed skepticism about the ability of the “discourse radicals” (his term) to resist, intervene, and...

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