My first course in women's studies was Gloria Anzaldúa's “Women of Color in the U.S.” I took the course with a group of women with whom I shared a house in Santa Cruz. We were Chicana and Filipina, all of us activists in MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) and APISA (Asian/Pacific Island Student Association). That spring quarter, we worked our way through Anzaldúa's recently published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza while also reading essays by Audre Lorde, Norma Alarcón, Janice Mirikitani, and Chela Sandoval. We read lesbian erotica by Azucena Coronel and listened to Cherríe Moraga read poetry. Along with my housemates and activist friends, I spent the quarter reading and talking and learning about how to think more deeply about questions of gender, race, and sexuality and about how these categories helped to shape my personal, intellectual, and political identity.
I share this anecdote to highlight one particular instance of how intellectual, personal, and political crossings can shape one's research trajectory in powerful ways. In my case, it was my interest in Latino studies and Third World organizing that led me to women's studies and to the study of feminism. Later, as a graduate student in political theory at Rutgers University, it was my coursework in feminist theory through the Women and Politics program that gave me new ways to think about the study of Latino politics. More specifically, my Santa Cruz experience underscores how my own passion for Latino politics initially brought me to feminism. In graduate school, it was feminist and queer theory that profoundly came to shape my understanding and approach to the study of Latino politics.
Of course, my anecdote breaks no new ground in arguing for the importance of racialized sexuality and the need to theorize “the race of sex” and “the sex of race” (King Reference King1990). Yet in joining the chorus of those challenging the “additive” approach, I want to suggest that making this shift requires attending to the distinction between theories and populations. Too often, Latino-politics scholarship draws on the insights of feminist theory only when the topic is Latina women. Similarly, many automatically link theories of intersectionality with the study of women of color. This essay challenges this collective tendency to conflate identities with concepts. Our scholarship must, instead, risk forms of theorizing that engage in analogy and metaphor. This approach generates insights through the pursuit of unexpected correspondences and partial similarities. Such work is not without its perils: It requires attention to historical context and an awareness of the dangers of appropriation—dangers that always adhere to practices of contact and engagement.
As a subfield of political science, Latino politics has generally echoed the heteronormativity of the discipline in failing to make gender and sexuality central to its analysis. Across the quantitative and qualitative divide, feminist theory and queer theory are generally treated as if their intellectual contributiveness adheres solely to particular populations—that is, women and GLBT communities. In a related vein, feminist theory often seeks to confront the racialized challenge to the field through a defensively celebratory approach that often praises the insights of women of color rather than seriously engaging and debating their arguments and claims. In each case, the scholarly stance tends toward neglect and/or shallow veneration rather than deep engagement. Such narrowly representative logics are ultimately (though often unintentionally) complicit in the marginalization of deeply intersectional work.
Given the challenges that exist here, what would it mean for the study of gender and sexuality if feminist scholars began to draw deeply from the field of Latino studies?Footnote 1 Concurrently, what might it mean for the study of Latino politics if scholars engaged theories of gender and sexuality not only when discussing Latino subjects marked as queer and/or female? What would it mean to make the study of racialized sexuality central to our analysis of Latino politics?Footnote 2 In my own research, I attempt this sort of work by drawing on the insights of feminist and queer theory to understand the practice and logics of civic Latinidad. Feminist debates regarding the category woman have proven to be particularly generative in this regard.
THE INCOMPLETENESS OF THE CATEGORYFootnote 3
Informed by feminist scholarship, my research reflects an ongoing attempt to develop a nonfoundationalist account of Latino identity (Beltrán Reference Beltrán2010). This effort to reimagine the content and parameters of contemporary Latino politics was informed by a desire to push against the disciplinary logic of Latino group unity—that is, the tendency to naturalize agreement among Latinos and to presume that shared culture and/or identity would produce political agreement. Such an ahistorical approach to Latino identity has the troubling tendency to depict Latinos as subjects whose interests and shared attitudes exist prior to politics. Such an approach not only tends to view conflict between Latinos as a sign of political failure (rather than as a manifestation of politics itself), but also makes it difficult to analyze successfully and confront creatively the political and cultural diversity of the various communities and populations that make up U.S. Latinidad.Footnote 4
In confronting the fact that “Latino” was a category suffering from a loss of analytic credibility, I came to the realization that theorists of Latino identity faced a challenge similar to that of feminists during the “category woman” debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Like second-wave feminists, Latino activists have often framed their desire for political power and enhanced representation through the logic of group unity. Yet in both movements, assertions of commonality and community were challenged by those who felt estranged by such homogenizing narratives.
Postmodern feminists in the 1990s and beyond shifted the debate away from the search for the category or practice that would unite all women and toward analysis of the political construction of the category itself. Challenging the political assumption that “there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally,” Butler argued against the presumption that “the oppression of women has some singular form discernable in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination” (Reference Butler, Butler and Scott1992, 317). Recognizing that political communities are always implicated in dynamics of power, this body of feminist scholarship finds value in the “multiplicity and undecidability” of human subjectivity (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1993, 158). In these approaches, ascribed identities are refigured as “achieved ones,” substituting “an enforced commonality of oppression with communities of those who have chosen to work and fight together” (Dean Reference Dean1996, 179).
Building on the insights of feminist and queer theory, I argue that Latino identity must be similarly reconceived. Rather than striving to uncover the unitary core that binds Latinos, scholars and advocates should embrace, rather than resist or deny, the instability and incompleteness of the category “Latino.” Such an approach does not mean abandoning the pragmatic political needs of subjects positioned as Latino in our society. Nor does it mean denying the racism and discrimination that Latinos have experienced as a group. As Butler (Reference Butler1990) reminds us, to deconstruct the subject does not mean to negate the subject. Instead, understanding Latino identity as productively incomplete—as a heterogeneous form of process rather than resolution—allows us to analyze and evaluate the various political formations that emerge from such provisional subject positions. Rather than trying to invoke Latinidad to secure a particular politics, scholars and advocates should confront Latinidad's multifarious political possibilities—from its ability to consolidate forms of corporate power to its capacity to support progressive movements for immigration and workers' rights.
CONCLUSION
When studying for my minor field exam as a Rutgers graduate student, I had little idea that the effort to answer a requisite exam question regarding “the category woman” would ultimately help me think more deeply about the field of Latino politics. But it did. My effort to draw on these debates as a way of theorizing Latinidad is just one example of what it might mean to utilize theoretical concepts in ways that exceed the limiting forms of correspondence that too often define our approach to intersectionality. Yet such work must be attuned to the dangers of merely “applying” feminist theory to Latino communities, an approach that runs the risk of treating communities of color as the raw material for theorizing democratic life. Instead, for such work to flourish, such scholarship must move in both directions. For example, the fields of Latino studies and Latino politics have developed a rich body of scholarship (much of it with a strong gender component) that theorizes the nature of citizenship, membership, migration, globalization, and political participation (Bosniak Reference Bosniak2006; Chavez Reference Chavez2008; De Genova Reference De Genova2005; García Bedolla Reference García Bedolla2005). Feminist theory and women and politics scholarship would be invigorated and enhanced by a deeper engagement with Latino studies—an engagement that goes beyond simply referencing those subjects identified as “Latinas.”
