and they are also twice as likely to be excluded in public school spaces where students bully LGBTQ students for going against the norms of gender and sexuality.[48]
Considering how queer Latinx artists have been pressed by traditionalist norms and policies of people such as the now-deceased Senator Jesse Helms, who actively fought against federal funding for art programs and AIDS research, there is a great need for spaces to connect, create, and practice forms of self-care in the 1980s and thereafter.[49] Such spaces are, like the identities that frequent them, shaped by several factors, including nonconforming experiences of gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. This book neither purports that all Latinx experiences are similar, nor does this project use the nomenclature of Latino, Latina, or Latinx to blur the many diverse lives of individuals considered here. I employ an approach that is similar to that of scholars such as Muñoz, who have articulated critiques about the manner in which the experiences of Latinx peoples are often generalized. In the past, critics spoke about “the Latino culture,” which conjures to mind a monoculture that flattens the distinctiveness and multiplicity of Latinx social experiences.[50] Instead of maintaining such views, this book fosters a critical consciousness 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
