Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Thomas Conners
Meeting time: Thursday, 12:45-2:45 pm
What does Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny have to do with 16th century Mexico criminal archives? What does the Netflix series Pose (2018) have to do with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)? They converge in the queer borderlands, Chicana lesbian Gloria Anzaldúa’s spatial framework. Just as border studies has taught us that such encounters and crossroads exist far beyond literal borders, so too does this course delink from any geographical space, instead deploying Anzaldúa’s framework to provide an account for two major arcs while centering gender and sexual non/normativity. First, how the competing Latin American and North American ideas about race have shaped Latinx communities since Spanish colonialism and through and beyond 19th and 20th century US imperialism have functioned in no small part through gender roles and sexual norms. Second, how queer Latinx writers, scholars, musicians, and filmmakers have responded to these pressures by daring to imagine beyond the constraints of racialized cis- heteromasculinity. Reading historical, archival, and legal documents to substantiate the former arc, and theoretical, literary, and filmic texts from Queer and Latinx Studies to analyze the latter, this seminar’s queer borderlands encompass Central American, Chicanx, Cuban, DominiYork, Nuyorican, and South American histories and collectives to historicize Latinx’s arrival at a crossroads and the horizons that lie before it.