Читать книгу Imagining LatinX Intimacies - Edward A. Chamberlain - Страница 6

Historically, scholars have associated the artistic and critical work of Anzaldúa with a field of thought known as Chicana Feminism; however, Anzaldúa’s perspectives have much to offer to the fields of geography, queer studies, and cultural studies. Her theories about liminal worlds and nonmajoritarian sites, which she envisioned as the mundo zurdo (roughly translated as the “left-handed world”) provides the basis for an incisive critical framework that questions the neglect and oppression of queer Latinx lives. As AnaLouise Keating has shown, Anzaldúa’s contributions are still less readily embraced by queer cultural critics and other academics. Keating asks, “Are most queer theorists so Eurocentric or masculinist in their text selections that they have entirely ignored This Bridge Called My Back, where Anzaldúa’s queer theorizing first occurs in print?”^[65] The critical thought of Anzaldúa indeed has received less reverence and inclusion in dialogues of queer studies. Such exclusion could be traced to the fact that Anzaldúa often disregarded the nearly ubiquitous US expectation that scholarly writing should be written in just one language—English. In her work, Anzaldúa mixed English, Spanish, and indigenous languages in her writing, blending her critical commentaries with poetic writing, and thus she resists the imperatives of the monolingual state and a shortsighted academy. Despite the efforts of feminist studies scholars who exalted the ideas of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism late in the twentieth century, there remains a cultural myopia in academia.

Forward movement away from such shortsighted stances often feels slow, even as academics and writers like Ilan Stavans have made some progress in publishing unconventional intellectual projects. Stavans’s volume, Latino USA: A Cartoon History, offers readers a historical commentary that is both critical and entertaining insofar as its intermedial approach links Lalo Alcaraz’s illustrations with Stavans’s own verbal commentary. The hybrid approach in the work of Alcaraz and Stavans is part of a larger phenomenon of cultural hybridity, a concept that has been theorized extensively by scholars such as Néstor Gárcia Canclini. Just as Gárcia Canclini shows in his research, experiences of cultural hybridity play substantive roles in the creation of artwork, popular culture, and intellectual projects across the Americas.^[66] Moreover, the success of intermedial and hybrid texts is no longer a seldom occurrence inasmuch as talented writers like Cathia Jenainati and Meg-John Barker similarly are mixing genres to make innovative cerebral projects that link visual media and theoretical perspectives.^[67] An analogous form of mixing also arises in intellectual projects where scholars compare and connect ostensibly disparate forms of cultural production that might not initially seem unifiable at first glance. The researcher Michelle Habell-Pallán proffers critical comparisons of performance art, music, and film that hold potential to create “a map of alternative paths that may lead to alternative futures” where social justice is not simply a dream but a reality.^[68] Creating similar maps can grant opportunities like coalitions that can be used to chart socially beneficial pathways as well as generate new exemplars of creative resistance to inspire action and (re)thinking in the present age.

Imagining Latinx Intimacies celebrates and embraces the cutting-edge creativities of innovators like Anzaldúa, Habell-Pallán, and Stavans by introducing concepts that bridge fields in an interdisciplinary manner. The bridging of seemingly disparate fields may allow for new perspectives and potentialities, yet such work is not accomplished without some challenges. Considering interdisciplinarity historically, there has been a rather unfortunate trend of pathbreaking projects being rejected because they are seen as flouting the usual practices. In using interdisciplinary approaches, we can begin to transform the discussion and denormalize the underlying barriers and forces of heterosexist and white institutions that shape home-spaces. This is not to say that I read all home-spaces as similar because their social and sexual intimacies (including queer intimacies) are discussed in varying ways.^[69] Carlos Ulises Decena, for instance, makes known that coming out as LGBTQ in the Latino familial home is not always a common desire for some gay immigrant men because of the possibility that such disclosures might lead to blowback.^[70] For these reasons, many queer people of color build bridges to new spaces that will allow and celebrate their intimacies. These intimate spaces often are imagined beyond the domestic sphere of family. This is not to say all queers are cast out in heteronormative family contexts, but rather they are extending their social sphere’s environs in queer forms.

In looking to the mainstream representation of the 1990s, Americans witnessed only a small number of Latinx queer representations such as in the case of the popular television show Real World: San Francisco where the Cuban American Pedro Zamora called attention to the need for social spaces that are attuned to the social struggles of being Latinx and HIV positive in the United States. Nevertheless, these TV portrayals walked a fine line between raising awareness about the social struggles of being gay and furthering practices of social marginalization such as narrating the lives of queers of color through discourses of abjection and victimization. To a limited degree, Real World: San Francisco began to mediate stories of Latinx queers in spaces occupied by white heterosexual people. By taking such paths, Latinx queers paved the way for representations in film, literature, and television. In contrast to these mainstream forays, authors and artists published humanizing stories, which challenged diminishing imagery. Equally, the financial success of sexually conscious stories from Chicana and Latina feminists like Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Ferré, and Cherríe Moraga have carved out a new kind of textual space for publishing the transgressive stories of queer Latinx peoples from the twentieth century and thereafter.^[71] In a comparable manner, openly queer Latinx creators like Arturo Islas, Rafael Campo, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Manuel Ramos Otero blazed new trails in the 1980s and 1990s by putting forth creativity that explored relations of sexuality, space, and practices like those found in the cases of patriarchal social mores, institutions, and religion.^[72] In years prior, a number of scholars charted the structures where neoliberalism and socioeconomic systems like capitalism shaped the possibilities of spatial creation as well as play roles in making spatial voids. Scholars like Mary Pat Brady, Juana María Rodríguez, Marisel Moreno, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel contribute influential studies that illuminate Chicanx and Latinx spatial experiences like that of home-spaces.^[73] Their research expands on the thought of cultural geographers such as Henri Lefebvre, Lawrence Knopp, Doreen Massey, and Linda McDowell. Akin to these scholars, I aim to theorize the imagining of alternative spaces in the representation of queer Latinx communities. In this way, I see the vicissitudes of queer Latinx experiences and spatial creativity as demanding further research, and I pursue this work with the hope that my research will illuminate a more informed pathway toward an equitable future.^[74]