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.

Thinking through sex, genderfucks, and the urban space: What is queer Mexicanidad?

I've attended many Pride parades in the United States, each year seeing the same firetrucks with the same go-go boys, the same businesses expressing their "support for diversity" so as to tap into the gay consumer market. Over the years I've wrestled with feeling like Pride in the U.S. has lost it's grassroots radical legacy of presence and subversion of the status quo, and has instead defaulted for a more capitalist White homonormative image. Most recently, however, I had the unique opportunity to be present in Mexico City during their annual Marcha.

After beating my face with my friends Ché and Howl, we got on the crowded Metrobús in club-kid butch drag and headed for the Ángel de Independencia. We dove into the largest crowd of queer people I have ever seen (larger than New York Pride by comparison). As I was enveloped by the city, the fashion, the barely contained hostility for censorship, I felt alive and I felt proud.

Mexico's relationship with censorship and homosexuality is a bit more complicated than other countries in Latin American countries in which homosexuality was criminalized under dictatorships and sexual dissidents would be sent to camps, prisons, or disappeared entirely. The burden of a cultural history with machismo and homophobia, however places the specters of censorship and shame into a larger cultural context that I see younger generations of queers in Mexico responding to a problematizing in creative and provocative ways. The relationship between the urban landscape of Mexico City and the sexual freedom being celebrated got me to thinking...

In many ways the urban dwelling of the city attempts to regulate a privatization of sexuality and sexual cultures. The normative flows of time and space do not create natural sexual spaces or sexual time. Capitalist and nation time construct what Americans subscribe to as the work day and then forces them into ‘family time’ and the end of the work day shift. This regulation of the time and space reinforces the normative sexuality around certain constructions of what ‘family’ means and what family actually looks like. And in any case, it is a privatizing of sexuality and does not allow for queer sexuality to be a part of either family, or work time, or to participate in the public spheres of the urban dwelling. But there is a unique relationship between these forms of queer sexual cultures and urban spaces that is worth exploring.

Queer sexuality at its foundational core refers to any form of sex or sexual behavior that is non-procreative sex. However, in other conceptualizations of the queer sex, queerness describes same-sex sexual behavior, and any other variation of sexuality that is not within the confines of one man/one woman marriage. I employ the use of ‘queer’ to describe the resistance to any normative trajectories of sexuality, including describing sexual practices that are extramarital, group oriented, and outside of the bedroom—such as bathhouses, public cruising sites, parks, churches, etc. But to take queerness and the act of queering beyond the realm of sexuality is a rhetorical move. To describe the queering of something means to reject the normative trajectories and linear ways of operating that are in place in order to produce a new knowledge about that something, which in this case would be urban spaces. The queering of urban spaces describes the resistance of constructed norms that are shaped by urban existence: which I describe to be spheres of private vs. public and regimented time and space.

So can urban spaces be queered? I would argue, yes. Both in the traditional and expanded non-traditional definitions that I described. I also use the category of ‘queer’ beyond just the colloquial sense of its meaning. In other words, it is not solely about gender relations and constructions of sexuality. Rather, I believe these spaces and figures I explore are subverting all forms of normativity, thereby not only “reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identities, constructions of gender,” as David Halperin describes, but at the same time, “forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community.”  This project speaks to a queering of hierarchies and binaries presented in urban spaces that attempt to regulate bodies within the normative trajectories of sexual time and space.

As a theological category, ‘queer’ operates to help to explain and interpret the world around us through the traditions, narratives, and experiences of queer persons. If theology is “talk about the divine,” then, following the trajectory of the definitions of ‘queer’ that I described, queer theology offers a way of speaking about the divine in normative terms, or as Patrick Cheng describes,

In light of the definition of ‘queer’ as transgression, queer theology can be understood as a theological method that is self-consciously transgressive, especially by challenging societal norms about sexuality and gender. Thus queer theology refers to a way of doing theology that, in the words of the Magnificat, brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly. In particular, this theology seeks to unearth silenced voices or hidden perspectives. 

Spaces and bodies that represent public sexuality remain at the margins of popular society. I put these representations of public sexuality from these pieces in conversation with a theological lens to consider the ways in which their relationship with urban landscapes presents a space or moment for an experience with the divine. As Cheng reminds us that “queer theology draws upon experience as a source for theology.” As is the case for other contextual forms of theological reflection, “queer theology is premised upon the belief that God acts within the specific contexts of our lives and experiences, despite the fact that LGBT lives and experiences have been excluded from traditional theological discourse.”

There is a collapsing of time and space when the image of the queer and the image of the urban space collide with one another. The City becomes a space of queer temporalities that operates within the non-normative structures of time and space. Queer temporality challenges the hallowed humanistic assumptions on time and life stages that posit the ‘responsible’ adult individual as emerging into maturity from the naïveté and confusion of adolescence, preparing for marriage and reproduction, with emphasis on inheritance and continuity from generation to the next. “Queer time” according to Jack Halberstam is time outside the framework of “reproductive time,” something thrown into focus at the end of the twentieth century by the AIDS epidemic that saw many lives telescoped into a few years of urgency and risk. People who live outside familial time often live outside capitalist (re)production and in marginalized or abandoned spaces—they are “ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed.”  Although these are all ‘queer subjects’ in that they live outside the heteronormative organization of space and time, which is expressed and performed through the urban space. For Halberstam, the transgender body is the subcultural/queer subject par excellence because it is “within and between embodiment, place and practice.” Therefore, as a queered body in a space that holds onto a legacy of machista frameworks that do not know how to account for it's queer people, we as club-kids and genderfucks are eager to find creative ways of problematizing these spaces.

I am interested in the ways that urban spaces become restructured without the privatization or other spatial aspects. In other words, in what ways is public sexuality performed with the actual urban spaces and not just within the walls of the bedroom or the bathhouse? What does it mean for sex and the urban space to overlap one another?