Imagining LatinX Intimacies. Edward A. Chamberlain
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home and social sites as always being ruled by heterosexism, I explain how homes and social spaces can be reimagined as queer-friendly and enable further actions like resistance and positive “emotional refreshment.”[61] This idea is shored up by the scholarly work of researchers such as Lauren Berlant, Jennifer Cooke, and Ann Cvetkovich, whose research on intimacy demonstrates the usefulness of intimacy and spaces.[62] As these scholars show, intimacies can be perceived as striking political interventions. Yet these personal experiences also are already made vulnerable by social and national pressures across the United States, even in sites such as the home-space that may appear sequestered from the political fractiousness of US public life.[63]
In contrast, creative acts can function as a means to remediating damage and generating healing forms of bridges such as those that Anzaldúa theorizes in her later anthology This Bridge Called Home. To extend this way of thinking, it behooves us to ponder what it takes to create these spaces that link communities and allow people to connect with one another. What does it take for diverse cultures to come together and become more socially hybridized? To theorize this situation, I turn to the research of Adriana De Souza e Silva and Sarah Whatmore. They have developed concepts of “hybrid space” that have certain commonalities with the spatial thinking of Anzaldúa, though they look at hybrid spaces in different contexts such as mobile technology.[64] Their discussions of hybrid spatial experience provide a means of explicating the links between queer Latinx spaces and those beyond their local sphere such as more public spaces like dance halls that feel intimate and have a domestic resonance. Through these lenses, I develop a notion of queer hybrid space to articulate the multilayered sites that queer Latinx people inhabit. The lens of queer hybrid space also gives space-makers and researchers a means of naming resistant forms of social and community investments that take shape in several spatial forms. Queerly hybrid spaces include art, texts, and contexts that not only create bridges between people but also resist deleterious imperatives for purity and separatism that lead to conflicts such as border disputes, culture wars, and community violence. In pragmatic terms, practitioners can use this framework to extend research in multiple disciplines like border studies and Latinx studies.
In studying these contexts, I reflected on my own positionality as a queer and white researcher who exists at the interstices of communities as well as outside of cultural norms. I am a queer son of a heterosexual woman who immigrated to the United States from Australia in the 1970s. As I grew up, I realized my mother was not seen as “belonging” in the United States. As a child, I helped her to practice for her citizenship test, which made me see that she was perceived as an outsider and Other. In a comparable way, I was made to feel like an outsider when my peers labeled my interests as “girly” and cast my physical mannerisms as “different.” I was perceived as feminine, queer, and unathletic—three unpardonable sins that deviated from my rather traditional school’s social expectations and values. As I was bullied by youths extolling such values, I also struggled with my own body image, which caused me to question the social mores that shape one’s internal sense of identity and self-worth. These events led me to become more reflective and hold a deep passion for studying how ideas of belonging, normative practices of social life, and human movement shape humanity. In light of this, I have devoted my life to understanding how social problems such as discrimination, hate speech, inequality, and violence give rise to a dearth of socio-spatial possibilities for queer and brown peoples. I find a common cause with Latinx queers that show an interest in challenging biased attitudes and normative practices, which have had the effect of shoring up discrimination, otherness, and exclusion.
Making Connections: Methods for Examining Queer Latinx Spaces
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