Imagining LatinX Intimacies. Edward A. Chamberlain
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]
The Chapters and Organization of
Imagining Latinx Intimacies
To understand these representations of queer Latinx intimacy, this book is organized into two major sections that altogether explore five kinds of spatial experience. These five spaces are: the domestic spaces of queer homes, the social spaces of gay and straight groups including gay and straight alliances (or GSAs), queer online spaces enabling intimacy, natural spaces including the human body, and sensational public spaces of spectacle such as beaches and theaters. These approaches are employed in recognition of the fact that Latinx queers negotiate between multiple concrete circumstances of daily labor and radical social scenes that make possible pleasure and a more inventive playfulness that is less constrained by the dominant culture’s codes. The first set of studies in this book is placed under the heading of “Close to Home: Rescripting Domestic Spaces.” This section offers case studies of the ways queer Latinx peoples are represented as using practical approaches such as community organizing to create inclusive spaces in the real world. These quotidian domestic spaces contrast with those of the second section “Far from Home: Alternative and Imaginary Spaces,” where I examine three spatial experiences that are host to a mix of Latinx bodies, which exhibit hybrid, unusual, and virtual qualities. These latter chapters explore the relationship of nonconventional corporealities and spatiality that resist the inculcated status quo by embracing a more performative and inventive approach. Surveying these two major zones of Latinx cultural production affords readers a greater understanding of the creative breadth and intellect of queer Latinx artists from the 1990s and 2000s.
By taking these approaches, I aim to offer a more balanced and organized study of the creativities that are used to combat spatial violence like social exclusion and the diminishment of Latinx queers in homophobic spaces. To begin with the more material elements of familial life, I commence with the queer domesticity explored in chapter 1—“Reimagining the Family Home,” which compares a short story by Moisés Agosto-Rosario with Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s documentary titled Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994). This study of migration and home-spaces elaborates on the investigations of Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Radost Rangelova.[75] Using these lenses, I contend these creative narratives show a queer trajectory, which I interpret as a hybrid spatial experience that connects people and spaces in ways that often challenge facile thinking about spatial experiences. This heuristic allows us to think about how the social experiences created in dance spaces partially mirror intimate relations of kinship, yet also foster notable social dynamics such as a relationality that is more ephemeral, flexible, permeable, and unfixed. Then in chapter 2—“Enhancing Schools”—I shift from focusing on the individual’s home to nearby social spaces created at schools and neighboring households for the goal of examining a set of queer writings from a popular area of writing—young adult fiction. In this second chapter, I explicate two young adult novels that depict LGBTQ youth groups. Beginning with a collection of youth-focused poetry titled So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks (1999) from the Mexican American writer Rigoberto González, I situate how questions of youth have played a key role in the making of Latinx cultural productions. Following this context, I compare González’s novel The Mariposa Club to the novel Getting It by the Mexican American author Alex Sánchez. This text depicts the social challenges and achievements of creating supportive queer youth spaces during the early 2000s. Through a comparative approach, Latinx spatial dynamics are theorized as playing key roles in the emotional and psychological development of transgender and queer Latinx youths.
In the second section “Far from Home,” the chapters explore portrayals of virtual and imagined life experiences that likely would resonate with readers as rather bawdy, peculiar, and just plain impossible. This move toward more imaginary spaces including performative contexts allows readers to reflect on the ways that queers move beyond the constraints of physical space and foster hybrid spaces beyond that of the home. This move beyond the physical is a means of fostering queer spaces that Deborah R. Vargas calls “alternative imaginaries” where Latinx queers may find conducive spaces for self-making, community, and radical creativity including alter egos and erotic play, which is less constrained by the rather serious and lock-step real world.[76] Building on these ideas, in the third chapter, I elucidate online forms of virtual performance through a study of two Puerto Rican texts that embed online communications in print-based books. This section illuminates how the Puerto Rican writers Rane Arroyo and Ángel Lozada fashion forms of web-conscious artistry that hybridize digital media, literary texts, and online performance of queerly social identities. With this imaginatively integrative approach, Arroyo and Lozada create a powerful set of statements about the need for social spaces, including that of technological spaces that can facilitate non-normative intimate interactions.
In chapter 4, I compare another innovative form of writing, which shows the imagined mixing of humans and non-humans including animals and natural environments. Several pieces of poetry by the Chicana writer Anzaldúa and the Puerto Rican writer Rane Arroyo focus on the experiences and spaces of nonhuman living beings. Resembling forms of therianthropy, which is a form of lived hybridity, readers observe beings that defy the ordinary physiques of our world. These imaginary scenes are compared with the artwork of the renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the Mexican American artist Tino Rodríguez, both of whom embrace a similarly imaginative form of mixing within their visual forms of artwork. I offer an analysis of these blendings by exploring Arroyo’s collection The Singing Shark and a newly published collection of pieces by Anzaldúa that recently have been made available through the generosity and efforts of the scholar AnaLouise Keating. In reflection on these exceptional pieces of poetry, I explain how the writings’ peculiar figures such as Arroyo’s shark-man and mermaids mobilize challenges to the problematic imperatives of purity and the exploitation of natural landscapes. Arroyo’s work also builds on the ideas of another notable narrative—West Side Story—to show how this half-man, half-shark figure is struggling with a body that is ill-equipped for the human environment. His text is read as an intimate allegory about the ways that Latinx queers navigate and negotiate heterosexual social spaces. To conclude the chapters, chapter 5, “Navigating Spectacular Spaces,” offers an elucidation of the spaces and experiences narrated in the memoir Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives,