Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces enacts a cultural studies approach to exploring the relationship between social spaces and identity formation in queer Latin@ communities. The chapters consist of case studies involving the cultural production of a multi-gender Latin@ HIV prevention agency in San Francisco; the court transcripts and media depictions of an immigration ruling involving a gay Afro-Brazilian seeking political asylum in the United States; and the linguistic practices of constructing digital sexual and ethnic identities in the internet chat rooms of cyberspace. Along the way, the book probes at the fissures and fault lines of identity categories and shifts our attention to how subjects engage the spaces where identity is demanded, explored, and reimagined. As the chapters move from activism, to law, to cyberspace, Queer Latinidad argues that the means of articulating, performing, and inscribing racial, ethnic, and sexual subjectivities are continually informed and mediated by the discursive sites in which these are produced and consumed.
As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.
“As an object of study, queer latinidad demands a practice that moves across geographic, linguistic, and imaginary borders, not simply because it is more provocative to do so, but because the very disciplines that divide Latin America from North America, music from literature, politics from performance, or queer studies from Latino studies have been based on paradigms constituted through our marginalization” (Queer Latinidad, 30)
PRAISE
It is rare to find as vital and sassy and smart an essayist as Juana Rodríguez. She takes you through the intersections of culture and theory in ways that compel us to rethink what queer does to Latinidad as much as what Latinidad does to queer. She shows what it means, politically and culturally, to read for the possibility of survival and affirmation. She is careful, attentive, dynamic, disorienting, and exhilarating as she reads political and cultural events, literary and theoretical texts, and the nuances of language use for a complex cultural subject in process. A fabulous read.
—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California at Berkeley
Mapping slippery subjects outside of fixed identities, this book is always against closure: Queer Latinidad at its best.
—José Quiroga, author of Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America
A fascinating critical approach to the development of the so-called latinidad, i.e., the identity of Latinos in the US. Unlike that in other ethno-queer studies, Rodríguez's data and primary texts of analysis are not literary works. Instead, this refreshing, funny, and daring book takes the reader through unexplored queer Latino communities.... Highly recommended.
—Choice
Rodríguez furthers her work . . . with an engaging writing style that is poetic, personal, philosophical and theoretical. . . . This book is highly recommended.
—Reforma Newsletter