Conjured Bodies

Queer Racialization in Contemporary Latinidad

Laura Grappo

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781477325209, 9781477325193
• eBook ISBN: 9781477325223
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

2022 Honorable Mention, John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA)
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book, Latinx Studies Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
2024 Honorable Mention — Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, Empowering Latino Futures' International Latino Book Awards

This study argues that powerful authorities and institutions exploit the ambiguity of Latinidad in ways that obscure inequalities in the United States.

Is Latinidad a racial or an ethnic designation? Both? Neither? The increasing recognition of diversity within Latinx communities and the well-known story of shifting census designations have cast doubt on the idea that Latinidad is a race, akin to white or Black. And the mainstream media constantly cover the "browning" of the United States, as though the racial character of Latinidad were self-evident.

Many scholars have argued that the uncertainty surrounding Latinidad is emancipatory: by queering race—by upsetting assumptions about categories of human difference—Latinidad destabilizes the architecture of oppression. But Laura Grappo is less sanguine. She draws on case studies including the San Antonio Four (Latinas who were wrongfully accused of child sex abuse); the football star Aaron Hernandez's incarceration and suicide; Lorena Bobbitt, the headline-grabbing Ecuadorian domestic-abuse survivor; and controversies over the racial identities of public Latinx figures to show how media institutions and state authorities deploy the ambiguities of Latinidad in ways that mystify the sources of Latinx political and economic disadvantage. With Latinidad always in a state of flux, it is all too easy for the powerful to conjure whatever phantoms serve their interests.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “The browning of America”: Conjured Bodies and Queer Racialization
• 1. “This could be Satanic-related”: Fantasies of Innocence and Criminalization in the Case of the San Antonio Four
• 2. “A life is worth more than a penis”: Lorena (Gallo) Bobbitt and the Domestication of Abuse
• 3. “A troubled, battered mind”: The Queer Lives and Deaths of Aaron Hernandez, 1989–2017
• 4. “Who’s going to tell Sammy Sosa he is Afro-Latino?”: Transraciality and Panethnic Latinx Authenticity
• Conclusion. “Feeling brown”: Conjuring Latinidad, Here and Now
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index