Imagining Latinx Intimacies addresses the ways that artists and writers resist the social forces of colonialism, displacement, and oppression through crafting incisive and inspiring responses to the problems that queer Latinx peoples encounter in both daily lives and representation such as art, film, poetry, popular culture, and stories. Instead of keeping quiet, queer Latinx artists and writers have spoken up as a way of challenging stereotypes, prejudice, and violence occurring in communities ranging from Puerto Rico to sites within the mainland United States as well as transnational flows of migration. Such migrations are explored in several ways including the movement of queer people from Chile to the United States. To address these matters, artistic thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Frances Negron-Muntaner, and Rane Arroyo have challenged such socio-political problems by imagining intimate social and intellectual spaces that resist the status quo like homophobic norms, laws, and policies that hurt families and communities. Building on the intellectual thought of researchers such as Jorge Duany, Adriana de Souza e Silva, and Jose Esteban Munoz, this book explains how the imagined spaces of Latinx LGBTQ peoples are blueprints for addressing our tumultuous present and creating a better future.
Edward A. Chamberlain is Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma, USA
Part I: Close to Home: Rescripting Domestic Spaces / Introduction: Stories of Queer Latinx Intimacies and Spatial Experiences / Chapter 1 - Reimagining the Family Home: The Queering of Domesticity in Puerto Rican Storytelling / Chapter 2 - Enhancing Schools: Creating Social Alliances and Queer Spaces in the Young Adult Fiction of Gonzalez and Sanchez / Part II: Far from Home: Alternative and Imaginary Spaces / Chapter 3 - Connecting and Performing Online: Interactive Experiences in Two Multimedia Texts by Queer Puerto Rican Artists / Chapter 4 - Mapping Poetic Spaces: Subversive Intimacies of Humans and Nonhumans in the Scenes of Anzaldua and Arroyo / Chapter 5 - Navigating Spectacular Spaces: Regarding Bodies and Chilean American Lives in Reyes's Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives / Afterword - Looking to the Future: Remembering Spatial Creativity and Confronting Violence Across Queer Contexts / Appendix - Three Brief Resource Lists for Latinx and LGBTQ+ Communities
In a time when walls and borders are being erected, Edward Chamberlain's urgency to build bridges connecting differences, becomes an imperative effort to create safe spaces for new coalitions to flourish. Physical or imaginary, these geographies are necessary to sustain a sense of belonging, healing, community and self-development that will ultimately empower Latinx groups. Chamberlain's book contributes, therefore, to a growing literature on Latinx and queer studies by shedding light to new aesthetic and political interventions based on intersectional intimacies. -- Irune del Rio Gabiola, Professor of Spanish and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, Butler University Imagining LatinX Intimacies highlights queer social relations and the analysis of different types of space in contemporary literature and film by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and Chilean American lesbian and gay artists in the United States. Edward A. Chamberlain's provocative readings of geography, family, and society illuminate how art creates community, challenges orthodoxies, and works to transform our lives. -- Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages, and Women's Studies, University of Michigan Imagining LatinX Intimacies highlights queer social relations and the analysis of different types of space in contemporary literature and film by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and Chilean American lesbian and gay artists in the United States. Edward A. Chamberlain's provocative readings of geography, family, and society illuminate how art creates community, challenges orthodoxies, and works to transform our lives. -- Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages, and Women's Studies, University of Michigan Through an analysis of intimate, quotidian, and unassuming spaces, Imagining Latinx Intimacies presents a timely analysis of Latinx LGBTQ artists and authors creating new artistic and virtual spaces to cultivate intimacy, community, and connections. Chamberlain deftly illustrates how Latinx LGBTQ people challenge the imposition of U.S.-based heteronormativity while creating spaces that celebrate and nourish queer intimacy. -- Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Texas State University Imagining Latinx Intimacies explores brilliantly the connectivities between Latinx gender and sexual identities and the formulation of new sites of intimate spatiality, redefining what it means to be queer and Latino/a/x in Latin America and across the Latin American diaspora in the US. Through insightful and probing analyses of poetry, short fiction, personal narrative, film, and visual art, Edward Chamberlain examines alternative queer/Latinx worlds in the making from reformulations of home space to the crafting of public spaces of intimacy and community resistant to racism, homophobia, transphobia, displacement, and the effects of colonisation. A major contribution to comparative queer studies that investigates new spaces of belonging that have emerged as critical responses to damaging and oppressive social relations. -- William J. Spurlin, Professor of English and Vice-Dean, College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences, Brunel University London Imagining LatinX Intimacies provides a thoughtful application of queer experience and theory to multimodal artistic examples of queer Latinx relationships. Chamberlain provides an interdisciplinary discussion about the myriad, and often innovative, ways that Latinx queers create intimacy in diverse spaces. Drawing on artistic exemplars, such as film, novels, paintings, poems, and memoirs, Chamberlain urges readers to consider new ways to (re)conceptualize family and relationships for Latinx queers. -- The Journal of Family Theory and Review
