Imagining LatinX Intimacies. Edward A. Chamberlain
of the ways that Latinx lives and spaces intersect with a set of genders and sexualities that transgress normative constructions. Incorporated here is the thought of scholars that research intersectionality, a major critical concept that was first articulated by the US legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s.[51] In the case of Latinx LGBTQs across the United States, a pernicious set of homophobic and racist practices continue to intersect within a slew of contexts and cause a painful double marginalization. To address the artistry that challenges this painful phenomenon, Imagining Latinx Intimacies takes a more socially conscious approach and builds on the concept of Latinx as a means of challenging the gender dichotomy implicit within the ethnonym Latina/o, which has been read as expressing either feminine or masculine gender experience. This binary forecloses the possibility of self-identifying in multiple ways such as nonbinary and transgender. More recently, scholars such as Catalina M. de Onís, Roy Pérez, and Juana María Rodríguez have contributed telling commentaries on the manifold ways in which Latinx writers, filmmakers, and artists have contributed to, or have participated in, the ongoing instantiation of Latinidad that extends beyond dualisms, deepening our understanding of Latino-ness.[52] While showing a spectrum of ways to perform Latinidad, their work thoughtfully illuminates the manner in which queerness informs the making of Latinx lives and spaces.
To develop this line of thinking, Imagining Latinx Intimacies links discussions of Latinidad to the significant scholarship of Nayan Shah, who first articulated the relevant concept of “queer domesticity,” a framework that underpins the first half of this book.[53] In his study, Shah vocalizes that queer domesticity manifests as a mix of social circumstances and practices that run counter to the normalized western visions of heterosexual relations that are shored up largely by a cult of “respectable domesticity.”[54] Shah uses the concept to theorize the social relations that were created and perceived within San Francisco’s Chinese American population during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although my study here does not examine Asian immigrant culture, I find Shah’s terminology provides a useful framework for Latinx forms of culture that similarly go beyond the heteronormative spatial relations. In particular, his ideas provide a supportive lens for understanding the queer spatial relations generated by the cultural artifacts of film and literature. In the texts I study here, the “queer domestic” manifests in multitudinous ways, showing the rich diversity of possible belonging and kinship experiences. The daily lives of queer people and related circumstances, such as battles against HIV/AIDS, tend to remake spatial arrangements. By “remake,” I refer to the ways that queer people’s social relationships and values transform domestic and spatial arrangements for the betterment of all people, hence making the domestic sphere and other milieus more hospitable and inclusive to people existing outside the center of cultural and societal normality. Moreover, I view this “queer domestic” as being a phenomenon that extends beyond the typical home-space inasmuch as I contend the privacies of queer relationships often spill over to locales that may not be perceived as domestic per se—as I show in my discussion of school-based clubs that exhibit a domestic dimension.
The spillage of queer relationships is further explored within the second half of Imagining Latinx Intimacies, where I provide three case studies of queer spatial imaginings. This queer spillage of relationships takes on another dimension in the latter half of the book, where I examine how queer Latinx artistry from the early 2000s exhibit a highly imaginative approach that connects disparate elements and alternates between bizarre and playful. To explain these hybrid depictions in the second half of the book, I introduce a concept that I call the queerly inventive, a term that is meant to capture the fanciful, performative, and spirited way that Latinx lives are being depicted through language, imagery, and scenes. The terminology is a way of identifying a broader set of imaginative phenomena, and this neologism serves as a critical formulation that is intended to give a name to a set of cultural and artistic dynamics. In several pieces considered here, the depicted bodies are given greater emphasis and challenge US physical ideals. These cultural artifacts show bodies that are imaginary or metamorphosed into figures that are half-human and half-animal (or plants). These cultural producers’ embrace of such radical imaginings is comparable to the inventive interventions of advocates and reformers such as AIDS activists late in the twentieth century. To grab the attention of the media, groups such as AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) imaginatively created direct actions such as street theater and die-ins, which ultimately were intended to foster dialogue, democratize society, and empower people with AIDS that typically were denied rights and opportunities.[55]
Although judges, the state, religious groups, and others have attempted to repress queer and Latinx communities by historically associating these groups with abjection, immoral conduct, psychosis, and Satanism (among other negatives), a cluster of queer artists and activists have built socially engaged artwork in the form billboards, fundraising, Internet campaigns, poster campaigns, demonstrations, and other forms of civil disobedience that use queer personal experience as evidence to counter problematic defamation. Hence, I read the creative work here as being artistic extensions of larger LGBTQ liberation and Latinx movements that cross the Americas in a range of sites late during the twentieth century.[56] This diverse set of printed and visual texts has much in common with the activisms of the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Chicana/o Movement, Black Lives Matter, and UndocuQueer Movement, which similarly resisted systemic bias. This diverse set of artists likewise encourages us to throw off the constraints that hinder the expression of our personal stories and intimate spaces. As I have assembled this book’s archive of art, film, and writing, it became clear that not all people identify themselves or their activities using the same terminology. Still some terms, such as the words gay and queer have managed to circulate in numerous parts of the world. In view of that, I wish to foreground my use of the term queer for the sake of clarifying and because it is one of the overarching concepts that animates my larger discussion of the artists’ actions, lives, materials, and intellectual projects. In using the term queer, I remain cautious because like many other critics in the field, I believe that this term can be limiting and that it often connotes the idea of a pregiven or essential identity. However, this book does not impose a fixed identity on the characters or artwork. Instead, I endeavor to make sense of the lives, styles, and social phenomena experienced within these contexts. Siobhan B. Somerville also rightly points out that the concept of “‘Queer’ causes confusion.”[57] Somerville’s critical discussion of the term’s meanings shows that although the concept can be flexible, the multiple meanings can lead to some forms of bewilderment, especially if critics disregard the need to carefully contextualize their use of the term. In part, I use the term queer as a way of uniting the pieces—not for the purpose of erasing their unique sense of self—but rather for the purpose of assembling a coalition of speakers who can testify about similar circumstances. In the process, my project embraces the fairly common viewpoint that these lives are shaped by sociopolitical discourses, ideology, and practices. Through this optic, I consider how the heterosexual allies of queer peoples, such as caretakers or the friends of queers, similarly can occupy a positionality of queerness when they socially align themselves in common cause with Latinx queer peoples. My queering of heterosexuals here is not meant to be assimilative in approach, but rather, this method highlights how queerness can have many valences and materialize in a slew of forms.
In part, Imagining Latinx Intimacies uses the term queer to articulate how some seemingly straight people and cultural objects, such as literature, can be said to exhibit a queer sensibility. This sensibility is—within the eyes of dominant culture and queers themselves—antinormative, irreverent, and unconventional by the often-unspoken standards of Anglophone white cultures. Similarly, I remain thoughtful about how the concept and experiences of queerness are polysemous and ensconced in multiple histories. Ultimately though, a common language can be helpful to bring these topics into dialogue. In his book Queer Ricans, La Fountain-Stokes insists queer functions as a suitable idiom to discuss Latina/o and Latinx experiences insofar as this concept has gained a currency in academia, activism, and public forums, among others.[58] Yet some strands of queer theory have overlooked some socially affirming experiences that allow for conviviality.[59] Scholars such as Michael D. Snediker theorize it is actually possible to embrace optimism and positive forms of affect in queer