Queer Latinidad

Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana María Rodríguez

• Editore: NYU Press
• Anno: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814776865
• Argomento: Sciences sociales
• Categoria: Études LGBT

According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined.

Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields.

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.

1 Divas, Atrevidas, y Entendidas
An Introduction to Identities

Identity is about situatedness in motion: embodiment and spatiality. It is about a self that is constituted through and against other selves in contexts that serve to establish the relationship between the self and the other. Places afford preexisting narratives of former encounters; they offer a means of symbolically decoding practices that occur within certain sociolinguistic frameworks. The subject brings to the encounter her own set of decoding practices that are mediated by the regulatory power of a particular discursive space, but not wholly determined by them. The discursive space does not establish which identity practices are available, but it does provide a frame through which these practices are received in that context. The subject’s ability to subvert dominant readings is both unlimited and partial. The challenge becomes how to conceptualize subjectivity through both semiotic structures (discursive spaces) and agency (identity practices) by investigating the ways these fields work to constitute, inform, and transform one another.

Discursive spaces exist as sites of knowledge production. The clinic, the prison, the classroom construct fields of knowledge and have historically existed to define subjects. Discursive spaces need not be institutional, however; the chatroom, the bar, the street corner, the computer screen also serve to define subjects and construct knowledge practices. These spaces have their own linguistic codes and reading practices, as they engage in hiding and revealing their own internal contradictions. Objects, art, texts, buildings, maps can also create knowledge, change history, refigure language. Decentralizing the subject in space does not erase her significance; instead it highlights the process through which subjects negotiate a localized time-space framework of knowledge. This work takes as its sites of analysis three contemporaneous spheres of discourse where questions of identity are centrally operative and where the contradictions revealed by their articulation emerge and are negotiated: activism, law, and cyberspace. In each of these contexts, the question “What is identity?” becomes transformed into “What is identity for?” Under what circumstances is it constructed and whose interests does it serve?

In “Conjugating Subjects in the Age of Multiculturalism,” Norma Alarcón articulates how discourses on difference and identity create knowledge about subjects and the ways subjects speak back to create new bodies of knowledge. She states that “[t]he paradoxes and contradictions between subject positions move the subject to recognize, reorganize, reconstruct, and exploit difference through political resistance and cultural productions in order to reflect the subject-in-process” (138). Identity, therefore, is not merely a response to culturally defined differences, but is continually engaged in unpacking the stream of “paradoxes and contradictions” that inform the subject’s relationship to other subjects and the discourses that surround them. Subjects mobilize identities and are in turn mobilized by those identity constructions. In a way, Alarcón’s essay rearticulates the question “What is identity for?” by making central the implications for the competing discourses on “essentialism,” “identity-in-difference,” “multiculturalism,” and the “cultural politics of difference.” Drawing on the work of other feminists of color, she suggests that no single term or construct can fully inscribe the historically marginalized subject whose theoretical existence, insights, and ideologies have been “thought out from the site of displacement” (136). Instead, she states that many feminists of color are engaged in a politics of “not yet” as a response to the multiple attempts to determine their subjectivity, even as they construct provisional identities, or what Chela Sandoval names “tactical subjectivities.” Alarcón’s own term, “subject-in-process,” simultaneously moves past the centrality and universality of the unified bourgeois subject or “man” and makes explicit the process through which individuals negotiate the critical terrains that attempt to fix the subject and “produce structures and discourses of containment that resist change” (137). The term “subject-in-process” does not insinuate a progressional, unidirectional development; instead the process is often spastic and unpredictable, continually unfolding without origin or end, an act of becoming that never ceases. Implicit in her method is the need to situate both the subject and the discourses surrounding subjectivity within a specific sociohistorical and geopolitical context, or what she names a “situated contemporaneous horizon of meanings” (137).

Discourse provides the context and the methodology through which both identity and this “horizon of meanings” can be interrogated. Subjects are continually involved in negotiating the accumulated narratives of identity that circulate within these localized “horizons of meanings” and the contradiction revealed within their articulations. Chela Sandoval describes this practice of negotiating “between and amongst” different discourses of identity and resistance as “differential consciousness,” an activity that “U.S. third world feminists” have developed and deployed as a response to hegemonic structures. She writes,

Differential consciousness is comprised of seeming contradictions and difference, which then serve as tactical interventions in the other mobility that is power.… Entrance into this new order requires an emotional commitment within which one experiences the violent shattering of the unitary sense of self, as the skill that allows a mobile identity to form takes hold. (225–26n. 25)

Identity is slippery stuff. The practices through which subjects construct identity are never singular. We move and speak in ever shifting contexts of meaning. The community forum, the courtroom, the Internet chatroom, the departmental meeting each shape how we talk about ourselves and interpret the words of others. We are continually being read; subjectivity becomes an object of interpretation. There is always an excess that destabilizes, transmutes, or coalesces what we think we know about ourselves or those around us. Manifestations of identity can be mapped within specific fields of knowledge, but cannot be contained by them.

In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault delineates archeology as a method of investigation. “In archeological analysis comparison is always limited and regional. Far from wishing to reveal general forms, archeology tries to outline particular configurations” (157). As a method, archeology takes theory and practice as simultaneous, with neither one as a preexisting condition or construction. Discourse does not uncover objects, it constitutes them, it takes as its object of analysis that which “‘contains thought’ in a culture,” not a history of that thought or culture itself (Foucault Live 9). In this book promotional flyers, legal testimony, and Internet transcripts become the unruly subjects of academic investigation. Yet it is precisely their unsanctioned status as objects of inquiry that opens up interpretive possibilities for the representation of queer latinidad, as they announce the contradictory contours of the discursive spaces in which they emerge.

In defining the practice of archeological analysis, Foucault incessantly engages the site of contradiction as a nexus of knowledge.

By taking contradictions as objects to be described, archeological analysis does not try to discover in their place a common form or theme, it tries to determine the extent and form of the gap that separates them. In relation to a history of ideas that attempts to melt contradictions in the semi-nocturnal unity of an overall figure, or which attempts to transmute them into a general, abstract, uniform principle of interpretation or explanation, archeology describes the different spaces of dissension. (Archeology 152)

Not to be understood as merely the location of resistance, these “spaces of dissension,” sites of contestation, unmask the process of effacement that makes both hegemonic and oppositional discourses appear unified and whole. The sites I have selected for analysis are not to be read as exceptional or unique instances of these contradictory spasms that yield new forms of knowledge; spaces of dissension sprout everywhere. My goal is to document the processes through which these moments of rupture are articulated and mobilized. Feminists of color have established the numerous ways that contentious oppositional discourses such as feminism, civil rights, and cultural nationalism have maintained themselves through erasure and the melding of contradictions (Alarcón; Lorde; Moraga). Similarly, it is these “spaces of dissension” within oppositional discourses that productively trouble the waters of queer latinidad.

Que(e)rying Latinidad

La búsqueda de América Latina: entre el ansia de encontrarla y el temor de no reconocerla. (Ansaldi)

I borrow the title of Waldo Ansaldi’s text, “The search for Latin America, between the angst of finding her and the fear of not recognizing her,” to suggest what it may mean to speak of queer latinidad.¹ The spastic contradictions and wild paradoxes of bodies and sites, identities and spaces intersecting are exemplified by the juxtaposition of these two terms, both provisional and immediate. Before attempting to unravel the implications and disjunctures of their union, let me turn first to the problematics involved in the construction of latinidad. Here different discourses of history, geography, and language practices collide. Latinidad serves to define a particular geopolitical experience but it also contains within it the complexities and contradictions of immigration, (post)(neo)colonialism, race, color, legal status, class, nation, language, and the politics of location.² So what constitutes latinidad? Who is Latina? Is latinidad in the blood, in a certain geographic space? Is it about language, history, and culture, or is it a certain set of experiences?

The most common response to the question “Who is a Latina?” relies on a geographic reference. Contemporary maps of Latin America begin with México and end with the islands at the tip of Chile, with the Antilles cradled between the land masses of the north and south. Under this rubric a Latina would be a woman from Latin America, or of Latin American descent. Geographical namings, however, are constructed by history and politics, ignoring both the national boundaries of México before the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the marginalized Indigenous ethnic communities throughout the Américas that refuse to be subsumed by occupying nation-states. The Mayans struggling for autonomy in Chiapas consider themselves culturally and politically separate from México; does that also constitute a separateness from the larger category of latinidad? What about the Indigenous tribes of the southwestern United States? Many tribal members (including those with Spanish surnames) reject a Chicano identity in favor of a Native one. How are national, ethnic, and cultural definitions of identity deployed within different geopolitical sites? How do these different deployments of identity contradict and inform one another?

National identity offers the most immediately available identity category for most Latin Americans, yet it also contains within it the contradictions inherent in any national project. Guillermo Gómez-Peña uses the example of Tijuana as a site “where so-called Mexican identity breaks down—challenging the very myth of national identity” (Fusco 156). A Mexican identity as such only makes sense outside a Mexican context. It is the experience of having to define one’s sense of self in opposition to dominant culture that forces the creation of an ethnic/national identity that is then readable by the larger society. “Mexican” is a term that most English speakers understand; Lacandon, chilanga, or norteño is not. The myth of harmonious Mexican nationalism that masks ethnic and social multiplicity and conflict is reconsolidated on the other side of the border, often as a form of resistance to dominant Anglo-American culture. The constant translation between spaces is never absolute. The imposed necessity for “strategic essentialism,” reducing identity categories to the most readily decipherable marker around which to mobilize, serves as a double-edged sword, cutting at hegemonic culture as it reinscribes nation/gender/race myths on both sides of the border.

En el norte, Mexican identity can be again transformed to become Chicana identity. This new naming and its transmutations, Xicana and Xicaindia, make a claim from outside the space of national identity to assert a new culture born of Mexican, Anglo, and Indigenous hybridity. It also serves as a claim against U.S. occupation of Mexican and/or Indigenous lands; for many Chicanas/os the states of the U.S. Southwest are their ancestral lands. These are complex and contradictory claims, however: one cultural, articulated through a discourse of mestizaje; one tribal, grounded in the language of sovereign tribal rights. Manifestations of Chicano cultural nationalism usually invoke an Indigenous past to reclaim a mythical formation of the nation of Aztlán, but it is a path most often traced through the various incarnations of a Mexican nation-state.

The possibility of a “cultural identity” as a means of escaping the bonds of a univocal “national identity” may seem particularly useful for understanding Chicanismo and the cultural formations of other dislocated ethnic communities. Etienne Balibar writes, “[w]hat is called cultural identity is constantly compared to and at the limit conflated with national identity, and nevertheless is in some sense ‘sheltered’ from the empirical existence of nations, their borders, their politico-military history” (177). The relationship between these terms is further complicated by the relationship between the nation and the state, because “in practice, individuals ‘encounter’ the nation through the state (through an at least possible state) that ‘represents’ it, through the state’s institutions” (Balibar 177–78). The problem of how “cultural identity” is consolidated and written through and against other discourses of nations, states, languages, and bodies, however, remains open to contradictory impulses and practices of erasure.

Questions of the history and implications of mestizaje, mulatismo, and their resistance and collusion with state and national narratives seem particularly relevant here and further complicate easy notions of cultural identity. These terms have often served as a means to construct a cultural identity in opposition to stratified colonial Anglo/Spanish/Indigenous/African formations, as well as a way to speak about our multihued families constructed through biology and affiliation. Yet racialized markings continue to serve as discrete and interrelated emblems that inform our individual locations within these familial and social mestizo constellations. Terms such as pelo bueno (good hair), which is straight or only slightly waved, and pelo malo (bad hair), which is kinky or tightly curled; facciones finas (fine features), particularly a thin pointed nose and narrow lips; pies de indio (Indian feet), used to describe feet that are wide and flat rather than thin and arched; mancha de plátano (plantain stain), visually marked as mestizo, serve as localized cultural codes for gradations of racialized bodies in Latin/o American vernaculars, retaining the colonial valorization of Europeans.

Spanish speakers, however, have a much richer vocabulary for characterizing physical appearance than do Anglo-Americans, and racial signifiers are often employed and read without biased intent. At times, words such as negra or mulato are used as generic names for woman and man regardless of the skin color of the referent. Yet these words possess powerful shadows that can be read and received only in context. Mi negrita can sound like the embrace of a mother or lover’s voice, or as an echo of ownership and servitude. Other times racialized names like La India (the name of the popular Nuyorican salsera), El Gallego, El Chino, El Gringo come to replace given names, or to serve as a suffix to personal names. Yet El Gringo can refer to a Latino who merely “looks” like a gringo; El Gallego can be from Sevilla or be a descendent of any region of Spain; El Chino can in reality be Japanese or mestizo.³ These names or nicknames are not predetermined identifying labels, but descriptive or metaphorical representations that emerge and circulate in the context of the familial and the familiar. These names illustrate the linguistic incorporation of the cultural consequences of centuries of immigration and mestizaje, but also signal their transformation and resignification within these sites.

In the service of nation building and cultural nationalism, however, mestizaje and mulatismo can effect the illusion that previous colonial racial categories are no longer operative. Coco Fusco writes,

It is a cliché to say that Latin America has resolved its problems of identity. What has actually happened is that the state has created ideologies that propose solutions to the problem of identity, but those solutions always occlude the existence of marginalized groups who are not part of the “national project.” In this sense, we cannot think that everyone in Cuba, Mexico, or Puerto Rico identifies with the official celebration of mestizaje. Things get even more complicated when we take into account that the official notion of mestizaje is connected to concepts of nationality and territoriality. (163)

Often both popular and official projects of mulatismo and mestizaje have been used to flatten or subsume differences, reinscribe margins, and uphold whiteness.⁴ As with national identity, these cultural identities are very often grounded in hetero-masculinist narratives and highly stratified categories of racialized gender.⁵

Within a Caribbean context the anomalies posed by a Latina/o “cultural identity” seem to multiply. If Dominicanas are Latinas, are Haitianas? Geographically they share the sa...