Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production

by Marivel T. Danielson

Overview

Homecoming Queers provides a critical discussion of the multiple strategies used by queer Latina authors and artists in the United States to challenge silence and invisibility within mainstream media, literary canons, and theater spaces. Marivel T. Danielson's analysis reveals the extensive legacy of these cultural artists, including novelists, filmmakers, students and activists, comedians, performers, and playwrights. By clearly discussing the complexities and universalities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class intersections between queer Chicana and U.S. Latinas, Danielson explores the multiple ways identity shapes and shades creative expression. Weaknesses and gaps are revealed in the treatment of difference as a whole, within dominant and marginalized communities.

Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813545721
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	08/19/2009
Series:	Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

MARIVEL T. DANIELSON is an assistant professor of literature and cultural studies in the department of transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Queering Home: Desire Meets Theory Meets Art
2. Speaking Selves: Language and Identity in Transition
3. Moving Violations: Performing the Limits of Representation in Marga Gomez's jaywalker
4. The Birdy and the Bees: Queer Chicana Girlhood in Carla Trujillo's What Night Brings
5. Complicating Community: Terri de la Peña, Cristina Serna, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Ela Troyano, and Carmelita Tropicana
6. Performing the Erotics of Home: Monica Palacios, Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana
7. Dancing with Devils: Gendered Violence in Novels by Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas
8. Our Art Is Our Weapon: Women of Color Transforming Academia

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Offering a whirlwind thematic tour of the most iconic contemporary Latina lesbian performers today, Danielson organizes this critical voyage around the central question of how latinidad and sexuality complicate the concept of home. This book makes a valuable contribution to Latina/o and queer studies and demonstrates the complexity of Latina representations of belonging and homecoming. Recommended.

Choice

Short version: Marivel Danielson's analysis of Chicana Latina desire in contemporary cultural production is a much welcome contribution to the slowly growing corpus of scholarship on female sexuality.Long version:In Homecoming Queers Marivel T. Danielson offers the reader accessible yet intellectually insightful readings of a wide array of contemporary Chicana Latina cultural production - performance, fiction, essay, poetry and video, some of which are often neglected by academia. By bringing to bear the importance of the queer, brown and female body on its ostensibly opposing discourses of home and community, Danielson's analysis of Chicana Latina desire in contemporary cultural production is a much welcome contribution to the slowly growing corpus of scholarship on female sexuality.

Associate Professor The University of Arizona - Laura G. Gutierrez

Homecoming Queers treats issues central to the formation of queer Latina identity, subjectivity, and representation. The book makes strong interventions in the transdisciplinary locations that comprise Latina/o literary and cultural studies and cultivates the furthering of our engagement in making social change.

University of California, Riverside - Tiffany Ana Lopez