Towards Decolonial Queer Latinidad: Gloria Anzaldúa and the Borderlands of Temporality
Abstract
The concept of borderlands, highly influenced by Gloria Anzaldúa's 1987 Borderlands/La frontera (Aunt Lute Books), is crucial for bringing into decolonial perspective the current political debates about immigration which... [ view full abstract ]
The concept of borderlands, highly influenced by Gloria Anzaldúa's 1987 Borderlands/La frontera (Aunt Lute Books), is crucial for bringing into decolonial perspective the current political debates about immigration which still rely on binary delineations of power, identity, time, and space. In Anzaldúa's enunciation, borderlands are key sites of becoming, and of undoing hierarchies of abjection and denial that have supported conservative definitions of democracy, progress, straight temporality, heterosexual desire, homonormativity, whiteness, maleness, and ability. It is not surprising, in this context, that the decolonial conception of the borderlands, a queer concept tout court, has been kept "in place" such that Anzaldúa's queer theorizing remains marginal within the U.S. and Latin-American canons of queer theory almost 30 years since the book was first published. As problematized by such critics as Jasbir Puar and Jin Haritaworn, among others, queer discourses often reinstall straight temporality and U.S. exceptionalism by fixing racialized others in a non-liberatory, archaic past. This straight narrative of queer liberalism must be fruitfully challenged and exposed for making counter-histories of sexuality and desire unintelligible in their supposed anachronicity. Following this broad criticism, my aim is to consider the specific decolonial potential of Anzaldúa’s work on the concept of borderlands by interrogating: (how) does her theorizing complicate not only the historiography of queer theory but also the normative notion of Latina identity, which is predicated on a progressive, evolutionist border-crossing from Latin America to the United States?
Authors
-
Eliana Ávila
(Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Topic Areas
Cultural Studies , Feminist and Women's Studies , Gender Studies , History , Latinidades , Literature and Literary Studies , Sexuality , Transnational , Chicano/a -- Mexican , Humanities
Session
QUEER-6 » How to Be(come) a Queer Latina/o (1:45pm - Saturday, 9th July, San Rafael)
Presentation Files
The presenter has not uploaded any presentation files.