"Queer" en Latin@

This essay reviews three scholarly works of queer-inflected US Chican@ and Latin@ studies that appeared in 2009 and 2010. The projects range in disciplinary approach from cultural studies (Rodríguez) to literary studies (Soto) to performance studies (Gutiérrez), but the review situates them on the common ground of a critical, interdisciplinary (queer) "humanities" methodology that continues to test its efficacy in accounting for ongoing processes of subjective formation and de-formation, both individual and collective, that insist on organizing themselves into and around categories like gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and race. The essay employs a recent theoretical intervention (Viego's) into ethnic and queer studies' more conventional and static invocations of subject formation to provide a productively critical frame for its engagement of the projects under review. Taken together, the review concludes, these projects simultaneously mark the impressive extent of the unfolding political histories and critical practices that have in less than a generation produced the conditions enabling such innovative and restless work, and in turn provide a set of potent questions to energize future work committed to the even more thoroughgoing critique of violent power as it continues to articulate itself through racialization, sexualization, and other forms of unequal economic, social, cultural, and political division.