Put@ Rants of Being an Hijo de la Chingada

She straddles two worlds and remains fucked by both: La Chingada! I come back to La Malinche because of her disidentification that burdens her body and the signifiers of her identities as determinedly marginal. Octavio Paz names her passivity that renders her defenseless; she is left nameless and disappears into the void. The very void that appears between the First World of the academy and the Third World identities that make up our embodied subjectivities that are called incompatible, frauds, less-than, unintelligible, but mostly are just illegible to the White straight eyes that read them. What they don’t understand is that this disidentification is a survival strategy.

In his introduction to his seminal text, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz employs disidentification as a strategy for systems of power and our queer subjectivity: “one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it” (1999, p. 11). But the void that exists between systems of power constructs and impasse that sentences queer bodies to the role of the passive and the defenseless; in ways that continue to perpetuate the silences of the closet that inhibit queer voices from accounting for their own cultural production and the artistic productions of their position in this time and the spaces they occupy and embody.  

Gloria Anzaldúa, comadre: We haven’t stopped speaking, and they haven’t stopped trying to listen. But we speak a language clashing worlds don’t understand; a language they are not ready for. Mujerista and feminist theologies have already questioned the erotics of power in place that fail to account for the everyday experiences of bodies in difference, which enables the claiming of our sexual experience as hijos de la chingada through the dexterity of transdisciplinary approaches and the repeated tolerance of the discomfort that exists at all epistemological levels. How the put@ subject understands and interprets the world around her is a theological question. But she remains surrounded by hostile worlds that are difficult and dangerous to describe. Worlds that impose a necropolitical agenda upon her subjectivity; she is not counted, she is not human (considering relationships between Mbembe’s necropolitics and his response to Foucault’s biopower). 

Why are we so quick to accept La Malinche’s passivity? The cultural narratives we have taken for granted let her remain obsolete and lost. We created her nothingness. Let her be angry! I am dissatisfied with the interpretation that her being is entirely left to the shadows and she’s been abandoned by both worlds: by both her chingones. What if the anger that comes from the shame she experiences is a necessary queer intervention in understanding the put@ aesthetics at work that cripple queer brown bodies in cultural production, but also the academy. But La Malinche is not Job. The anger from the trials in her life is not celebrated as a test of patience and faith. Her faith is already discredited. She becomes Job's wife, by giving up on the abusive power that is imposed upon her family and children. Instead, she haunts with La Llorona wanting to reclaim her children; sorting through the fragments of dis-membered bodies. It is precisely the systems in place that have failed to give her accurate representation. La Malinche commits acts of dis-grace. Undoing the grace that was never extended to her in the first place. The indecency of the put@ opens her up the messiness of human sexuality that defines our Christian fetish with the humanness of Christ’s incarnation (variation of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s “indecent Christ”).

I take a theological approach to reading La Malinche because of my own disidentified subjectivity. Exercising a language that I have been burdened with, while also resisting other languages that I choke on through my forced interlocutors. Beyond that, I continue to enjoy and celebrate my formal training in theology and religious studies. Like La Malinche, I can never fully go home. I will remain a product of two worlds, fucked by both of them with my body left exposed and beaten. But I can find resistance in that embodiment and my familiarity and comfort within theological discourses prohibit me from abandoning it entirely. Instead, I need to continue to create new paradigms by which to articulate the differences we’ve been fucked by—to consider the failure and the impasse as spaces for theological inquiry. Pasivas fuck back.

Escúchame

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.