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An intertextual experiment with Queers Read This...

Life at its best is a space of utter chaos. Having no respect for those who traverse the margins.

Queers Read This: "How can I convey this reality? How can I convey that your life is in danger of seizing to exist? That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious and deviant act. The very fact that you are alive, breathing, filling up space with your flesh and bones, and the reality that you feel emotions for another human being means that you are a revolutionary and you don’t exist."

There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages the existence of the borderland. Homosexuality is an invisible institution and the only reason you are spared is chance, intellect, or because machista rhetoric necessitates the presence of los otros—necesitan a alguien a ser la cogid@. Pero estamos los otros entre los otros: la jotería.

The jot@ is up and against a White heterosexist framework that imposes particular understandings of what it means to be a sexual body in this world. Within the Mexican@ and Chican@ cultural contexts, homosexuality does not exist. Sexual orientation is based solely on sexual positionality. Los activos pass through the machista framework and retain their privilege that is afforded to them—a privilege and power that is shaped and formed in schizophrenic response to White heterosexist hegemony. Los pasivos son de los otros. Son los cogidos, los maricones, los homosexuales. I employ the use of the category of la jotería to describe the sexual bodies that fuck back. To describe a consciousness that links our sexual bodies to queer temporalities that are rooted in our tradition from the spine of Frida, to the butchered Coyolxauhqui, to the rough tender voice of Chavela.

Where do we locate la jotería in the postcolony? La jotería functions as subversive intervention and a relentless critique of masculinist and colonial categories of body, space, and time. La jotería explores a sacred geography we are all too familiar with: the margins. As a category of sexual bodies that are absent from the conversation because of our embodied realities as brown and pink individuals, la jotería critiques the impositions of Western White hegemonic masculine discourses. It introduces a new language to talk about sexuality in the postcolony.

Queer and feminist theoretical frameworks have a long history of being, and often times continue to be, monolithic. Speaking in the language of White, Western, Christian hegemonic masculinist ideologies, that when imposed upon homosexuals and other gender deviants, morphs them into their own idealized image of sexual morality. Being that we are not all White, Western, Christian heterosexual men, certainly is of no importance in those particular narratives.

We are reminded, however, that as jot@s in the postcolony seek to challenge those constructions of sexual normalcy that define sexuality in own contexts. Our diversity is our strength in the face of the familiar, tyrannical colonial project to impose the monolithic, all-enveloping truths.

This is our manifesto como la jotería.

Es nuestro (mari)festo.

Those in the margins remain erased and excluded within the composition of the imagined nation called America. These groups think to overthrow the government, with such racist legislation as the SB 1070 bill and, and defy those who identity within the majority of America: The White heterosexist.

It is somewhat possible to theorize ways retaliate against a colonizing and racist system of government that imposes such legislation, however only through the assistance and adoption of those who are willing to resist and subvert societal ‘norms.’ But there’s still something at work preventing them form achieving their goals; that is, the invisibility of white privilege. Now, however, is the time to reveal and deconstruct the invisibility of white privilege and its monstrous creations. Expose to the world the constructed narratives that operate through the filters of White heterosexism—a product of the colonial encounter.

The White heterosexist is oblivious of their privilege trapped in their own world and incapable of empathizing with those who don’t share their power. They are isolated from reality and cannot relate to anything lacking assimilationist qualities. At best, they are lackluster beings trapped in little universes, constructed realities, feeling only positive emotions which can only be associated with people who look, think, and act like them. Homosocialism runs rampant in the construction of nation. Afraid to face the ‘real world’—whatever that is—they are only aware of what and who they are.

Overflowing with positive emotions and non-empathizing ways, the White heterosexist is only concerned about one thing: assimilation. They have no regret for destroying cultures and depleting people. SB 1070, HB 2281, Proposition 8: the blueprints for how to get rid of the ‘illegals,’ ‘incompatibles,’ deviant behaviors and ways of thinking. The disposing of our cultural histories and the celebration of our heritage como la jotería and the recognition of relationships, because all these cultural images of brown bodies and same-gender oriented bodies uniting are not the cultural images of what is American.

Since they lack the lens to see the world outside their imposed binaries of a ‘black and ‘white’ world, White heterosexist discourse seeks to eradicate any form of coloration seen in society because it is the only way they can deal with the endeavors of legislatively eliminating the those whose embodied realities resist the normative trajectories they hope to impost through said pieces of law. Living in a belief system to be rightfully theirs and seeking law enforcement to pave the path clear of any obstructions they might encounter in the purification of the nation.

La jotería no existe or at least will seize to exist within this imagined space we call nation. The nation allows the privilege of White heterosexist discourse to assume any position it wants in order to impose systems of assimilation and doctrines of erasure upon the society.

Until the nation can take responsibility for the invisibility of the privilege it possesses as a result of White heterosexism.

Try to understand their power.

Try to empathize with those who don’t share mutual access to power and those who dwell in the margins. Anzaldúa cries out for us to listen to what our jotería is saying. That’s when the queers of color can fight back and resist such heinous legislations and borders around what constitutes nation and citizen. To fight back against borders and normative boundaries that exterminate beautiful ways of living and people’s rich culture making our global context unique.

Where is our space and time? Where do we locate la jotería in the postcolony? Nation and family time dictates our urban spaces that force us into the bedroom así que nostros podemos coger como los otros. We are not white enough to be twinks, bears, daddies, etc. We are a commodity, a fetish, a genre of porn the White faggot jerks off to. We remain to be los otros entre los otros because we do not fit within the normative trajectories of what is LGBTQ in the American context. We are not Mexican@s or Chican@s because we are the pasivos that fuck back. Where is our time and space? We are entirely rejected and not brought into a shared experience in the queer temporalities already in place, nor are we participating in the brown temporalities and spaces because we belong to an institution that doesn’t exist.

Is our time and space a Queer Aztlán? Comadre — We cannot have a primitivist conception of time. Primitivism is characterized by returning to a natural state before corruption, a time to the best. Aztlán is still loaded with images of violence and homosexual degradation and humiliation, why do we still hold onto the romanticized image that this is our utopia? We remain betwixt and between, on the borderlands because we can’t go home. Anzaldúa talks about homophobia incorrectly being described as the fear of going home, but how appropriate of a concept. If we fear going back to our homeland and we fear living in this world, then what temporal space do we belong to?

We occupy the liminalities of sexuality. We need to traverse in the margins and only make them wide so that the content between them becomes smaller and smaller to the point that it doesn’t exist and all that’s left is blank space. The White (hetero)normative world attempts to eliminate us so why not eliminate it. I implore you to be the subversive entity that crosses the borders. Jump the fences of normative time and space and nation, and fill up the margins.

Un abstracto abstracto del joto, el subalterno y la subjetividad queer en Latinoamérica

Al discutir la homosexualidad en términos discursivos, la palabra “queer” no existe en español. Históricamente, la homosexualidad sigue siendo descrita y definida en términos de posicionalidad sexual—un producto del binario de “activos” y “pasivos.” Sostengo que este binario borra la identidad sexual y la autoafirmación de personas “queer.” Así, yo pregunto, ¿Cómo podemos hablar sobre el deseo entre personas del mismo sexo en la poscolonia? En este proyecto, empleo el término “jotería” no sólo como una categoría de identidad sexual, sino también como un marco teórico para hablar sobre el deseo homosexual en Latinoamérica. Teniendo en cuenta la ausencia de un término nativo para discutir los latinos queer, creo que “jotería” reclama una categoría de una identidad que se ha utilizado para borrar y hablar por el sujeto queer. Me interesa cómo los pensadores queer utilizan estructuras teóricas que ya existen en los discursos latinoamericanos para hablar de jotería como una categoría dentro de las conversaciones que ya están ocurriendo sobre el poder y la subjetividad en relación al cuerpo y la sexualidad. Por consiguiente, este ensayo considera los debates subalternos para situar el sujeto joto dentro de estos marcos para abordar y escenificar las conversaciones sobre quién es el subalterno, quién es el joto y si ambos pueden hablar o definir su propia encarnación en sus propios términos. A través de estas conversaciones, argumento que los estudios subalternos y los estudios jotería exponen los límites y las desventajas de cada uno, mientras trabajan para identificar una manera de hablar de los cuerpos en los márgenes.

Can the Subaltern Fuck?

As my brown body laid next to his white skin, I only existed in a sexual context through my relation to him. My language, my name, my flesh, and my thoughts give him satisfaction. But it was still his voice, his pleasure, and his embodied reality that made me exist. As I think about the sexualized brown body of the jot@, I am overwhelmed by what feels like non-existent voice. Why can't our colored boys who speak softly be heard? Why can't we have the freedom to fuck on our own terms and not in relationship to the context of our colonizers?

According to Gayatri Spivak, postcolonial studies must push for postcolonial intellectuals to learn that their privilege is their loss. Within my postcolonial frameworks, we need to consider the queer subject and where we located it. So what about the sexual subaltern or the queer subaltern subject? For Latin American subaltern studies (if I may quote liberally from the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group),

The subaltern...is not only acted on, despite the tendency in traditional paradigms to see it as a passive or "absent" subject that can be mobilized only from above; it also acts to produce social effects that are visible, if not always predictable or understandable, by these paradigms or the state policies and research project they authorize. It is our recognition of this role of the subaltern, how it curves, alters, modifies our life strategies of learning, understanding, and research, that underlies the doubts besetting these traditional disciplinary and historiographic paradigms, paradigms that are themselves related to the social projects of national, regional, and international elites seeking to manage or control subject populations and that bring in their wake the danger of filtering cultural hegemonies all the way across the political spectrum, from the elites themselves to the epistemologies and discourses of revolutionary movements looking to subvert their power in the name of the "people."

For me, then, the subaltern is by nature a queering subject. In the construction of a jotería space, the jot@ subverts the theo-political boundaries of accepted sexual practice in light of a cultural context that erases homosexual identity on the basis of sexual positionality. In effect, the jot@ "curves, alters, modifies" and repositions jotería as a the@-erotics and has the agency to not only be fucked, but to fuck back. It is our sexual histories that enable the body to produce a response to these colonial sexual structures of oppression and undoes a death-dealing erasure of our identities.

I intentionally sexualize Spivak's rhetorical strategy of asking if the subaltern can speak, to ask if the queer subaltern subject can fuck. Reflecting on the ritual of sati, Spivak argues, "One never encounters the testimony of the women's voice-consciousness. Such a testimony would not be ideology-transcendent or 'fully' subjective, of course, but it would have constituted the ingredients for producing a counter sentence." For Latin American subaltern studies, the rise of the genre of testimonio was imperative to the field. As I lay bare and brown next to the milky skin of my lover, I can't help but where my voice and testimony is within that sexual encounter, and will it always be filtered through his positionality.

Testimonio is equally an important aspect of producing a jotería theology, but I challenge us to move one step further and consider how we can produce a sextimonio. A sextimonio, like testimonio, is a transcending voice that functions in a liminal space that empowers and produces solidarity among nuestra jotería. Alberto Moreiras argues that testimonio is extratextual; that is, it “suspends the literary at the very same time that it constitutes itself as a literary act: as literature, it is a liminal event opening onto a nonrepresentational, drastically indexical order of experience” (212). It already abandons the literary as part of its nature and is more political than it is literary. Moreiras seeks to put an end to the desire to see in testimonio a recuperation of the ‘real’ in the face of fiction or the literary.

I propose that not only should we consider if the subaltern can fuck, but if the subaltern has a voice in using that sexual experience to be a political move. Sextimonio is a genre of our queer subaltern experiences that brings to light the paradoxes in human experience, re-educates the body and the popular, but also affirms the jotería body as a sexual one that takes ownership of that sexuality beyond culturally categorizing markers.

As I think about locating the jotería subject in Latin American discourse, I am interested in how subaltern studies informs and speaks to the colonial experiences of queerness. Is the subaltern a useful category for deconstructing and making sense of same-sex desire in the postcolony? Some scholars have argued that we've exhausted subaltern studies and that we are in a post-subaltern discourse. What does that mean then for the queer subject? So again, I ask: Can the subaltern fuck?

Jotería and the Postcolonial

How do we categorize same-sex desire in the postcolony? Where do we locate it? What vocabulary are we to use when talking about same-sex desire in contexts where 'homosexuality' is an invisible institution? It is through these questions that I approach this blog, that is, a blog interested in examining how we complicate and wrestle over these questions through queer, feminist, Chicana/o, Latina/o, postcolonial, and theological perspectives.

As a Chicano activist-theologian, I am frustrated by the lack of attention to theological conversations around racialized queerness. I find the same neglect in ethnic studies in engaging theology as a way of understanding the embodied experiences of queer people of color. Accordingly, I am interested in producing a conversation at the intersections of all of these areas. In doing so, I employ and claim the ideologies of jotería as an identity and way of thought. Looking into my own contexts where the term 'homosexuality' simply cannot exist in language, I push back against the derogative nature of the term and instead embrace the identity already given to me and think about how to further extend and complicate the idea within the frameworks of cultural studies, literature, theology, etc.

Gloria Anzaldúa writes, "Chicanos need to acknowledge the political and artistic contributions of their queer. People listen to what your jotería is saying." It is in this spirit that I approach this project, to draw attention to what we do say, experience, and embody as la jotería and to bring in my own background in theology and question how this all operates on a spiritual and theological level.

Why theology? Because I believe that these discourses deal with ultimate questions about how we understand and interpret the world around us, which I believe to be fundamentally religious. I am interested in what a jotería theology does for queer and liberation theologies, and what it does for cultural studies. I use all these categories aware of their histories, tensions with one another, and power dynamics. But it is through these areas that I am interested in countering hegemonic pedagogies and instead construct pedagogies that deal with oppositional circumstances.

Why postcolonial? I recognize the ways in which queer studies and ethnic studies remain to be under the stricture of power dynamics informed by normative identities. The reality is, we have all been touched by the colonial project at one point or another in our lives and experiences, and it is thus the goal of my discussion to go at the class that's interested in keeping the colonized exactly where they are.

It is my intent to engage the intersectionality, intertextuality, intersexuality, and multiplicities that this new category of identity and thought introduces. I look forward to discussion that emerges on my part and through those willing to contribute.