Search

Ana Castillo's So Far from God draws attention to the effects of global toxicity on female bodies as the characters of the novel fall victim to various forms of social, economic, and environmental injustice such as war, AIDS, cancer, and rape. This essay engages theories on decoloniality to illustrate how Castillo textualizes spiritual practices and alternative forms of knowledge to weave an epistemically disobedient narrative. By constructing Chicana figures who embody hybrid, subversive spiritualities enabled by the syncretic space of the US-Mexico border, Castillo offers avenues for liberation from colonial and patriarchal ideologies that are textualized as physical, sexual, and spiritual transformations. Notably, the characters who refuse to see the colonial difference are consumed by the colonial matrix of power, eventually falling victim to war and industrial toxicity. By weaving spirituality, curanderismo, and the supernatural into the lived experiences of the female characters in So Far , Castillo constructs Chicana subjectivities that enact body politics of knowledge and decolonial forms of being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Laura Aguilar, a photographer and lifelong Angeleno, often foregrounds her intersecting queer, Chicana, fat, and dyslexic identities. This reading addresses Aguilar's claim to power in objecthood, actualizing a selfhood beyond the limits of subjectivity or negation by staging opacity in her photographs. Aguilar engages in what Uri McMillan calls "prosthetic performance": co-significations by an animate body and an inanimate but catalytic thing, or actuant. Layering objects upon objects, Aguilar's prosthetic performances refract normative, dominant gazes that would overdetermine the bounds of her selfhood according to the markings her body bears. She plainly addresses the trauma of misrecognition as a queer Chicana, but her performances are neither defined by her pain nor reducible to gestures of refusal. The opacity of Aguilar's flesh subverts photographic truth effects, making the archive another actuant in her performance of self-becoming and potentiality. This paper sutures critical discourses surrounding Aguilar, braiding foundational analyses of her oeuvre at their intersections with Black and Chicana feminisms, performance studies, and new materialist theorizations of the object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: En este ensayo se analizan los temas de la homosexualidad y el homoerotismo en la pieza teatral Shadow of a Man , de Cherríe Moraga, atendiendo a la identidad queer de los personajes de Manuel y su compadre Conrado. A través del papel de la institución del compadrazgo, la figura del macho, las negociaciones de la masculinidad, los efectos del patriarcado y las tensiones de culturas, políticas, géneros y sexualidades fronterizas, observamos esta obra de Cherríe Moraga con una perspectiva diferente. Mientras que la crítica, acertadamente, ha destacado la lucha feminista de las mujeres protagonistas y la agresión que ejercen los personajes masculinos, no se ha tomado en cuenta la posibilidad de una relación homosexual y homoerótica entre los compadres, la cual devela la complejidad de las relaciones entre los familiares, los tormentos de cada uno de los personajes, una reflexión sobre las tradiciones de género y sexualidad en la cultura mexicana/chicana y las conexiones con la propia experiencia de la autora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]