Trans-ing Cosmopolitanism: Precarious Passages and Transgressive Intimacies in Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (original) (raw)
Related papers
Literary representations of global migration to Spain have augmented in concert with the increase in immigration at the turn of the twenty-first century. While these texts tend to express an empathetic stance toward the hardships that immigrants face, they often fall short in capturing the complexity of the nation's changing ethnic composition and critically engaging with the issue of a Spanish author narrating the stories of subjects who have immigrated to the Iberian nation. This essay proposes that in Cosmofobia (2007), Lucía Etxebarria purposefully addresses the potentially colonizing position of authoring a fictional text about immigrant experiences in Spain, with narrative strategies that highlight her role in creating the work that we read and that attend to an ethical elaboration of a transnational feminist project. The author's representation of gender and place in the context of an intricate social web in global Madrid suggests that concerns common to women of different ethnicities may reshape conceptions of community and create new spaces for interethnic collaboration. Las representaciones literarias de la migración mundial en España han aumentado a la par con el incremento de los flujos globales de inmigrantes hacia el país ibérico en los albores del siglo XXI. Mientras que en estos textos se tiende a mostrar cierta empatía hacia las dificul-tades enfrentadas por los inmigrantes, en ellos no necesariamente se capta la complejidad de la cambiante identidad y composición étnica en la península. Este ensayo postula que en Cos-mofobia (2007), Lucía Etxebarria deliberadamente contempla la potencialidad de la posición colonizadora al escribir una obra ficticia sobre las experiencias de inmigrantes en España con estrategias narrativas que resaltan su rol como creadora de la pieza que leemos y que atienden a la elaboración ética de un proyecto feminista trasnacional. En la obra, la representación de género y lugar dentro de una intrincada red social en un Madrid global sugiere que aquellas preocupaciones comunes entre mujeres de diversas etnias podrían servir para reestructurar las concepciones de comunidad y para crear nuevos espacios para la colaboración interétnica.
Race in Trans and Queer Migration: Arcoíris 17’s Contesting of Colonial Legacies
The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication, 2023
The "1st Trans Gay Migrant Caravan," Arcoíris 17 (Rainbow 17 or Rainbow Caravan), marched in Nogales, Mexico, making their case for acceptance into the United States on August 10, 2017. This chapter focuses on their recorded press event and subsequent march in Nogales to understand how trans and queer migrant epistemologies embody rhetorical productions against the colonial legacies of race. The Rainbow Caravan’s queer worldmaking crafted from lived experience is rhetorically shared through their bodies, attire, testimonios, and chants, exclaiming their ability to survive and belong. I point to their migration as a decolonial act—one of critique—where queer and trans bodies move to communicate and displace nationalists and colonial legacies of the modern/gender colonial system. The migratory refusal of containment, or migration as a worldmaking practice, by trans and queer migrants becomes a humanizing representation of survival against domineering systems that punish and contain other racialized and queer subjectivities.
Sexual citizenship and migration in a transnational perspective
2016
This working paper is based on a lecture given at the Summer School “Multiple Inequalities in the Age of Transnationalization”, June 23-27 2014 at Goethe University Frankfurt. In it, I explore the linkages between sexuality and migration and aim to show that instead of deeming them a narrow subfield of migration studies, thinking through these linkages has much wider implications for different fields, including post- and decolonial queer studies, the study of race and sexuality, the study of citizenship and state projects of inclusion/exclusion, and for work that attempts to ce-center the predominant knowledge production focused on the Global North
This book brings together a diverse range of critical interventions in sexuality and gender studies, and seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging. The book is organized around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (Part 1); sexuality and "race" (Part 2); and sexuality and religion (Part 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about "sexual nationalism," or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-à-vis an uncivilized, racialized "Other." The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilized to explore the interplay between sexuality and "race," nation, ethnicity and religious identities. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of "Europe" and of European nation-states.
Of borders and homes: the imaginary community of (trans) sexual citizenship
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2006
This essay maps the connections between transgender/transsexual rights and nationalism in Australia. Comparing Jay Prosser's idea of a transsexual 'politics of home' with the recent legalisation of transsexual marriage in Australia, it argues that marriage rights are granted by the state on the ability of particular bodies to maintain and reproduce a series of demarcated zones: between male and female, but also between 'Australian ' and 'un-Australian', 'white' and 'nonwhite.' This has been most evident in a successful Australian transsexual marriage case, Re Kevin, where the success of the respondents relied on arguing that transsexuality is a biological condition. Establishing the gender of the transsexual respondent involved 'proving' biology through reference to his social performance of normative masculinity. But the norms of masculinity used to 'prove' such a thing are socially constructed and, as such, racialised: home maintenance, proficiency with powertools, enjoying the white Australian tradition of barbeques and sport. Exploring the Australian political context of the court case, where 'Australian-ness' has a particular meaning and a particular value, I critique the liberal-democratic capitalist structure of rights claims in which gender variant subjects must present 'whiteness' as a form of cultural capital in exchange for rights. The cost of this exchange falls overwhelmingly on gender variant subjects who don't present a racially/culturally normative performance of masculinity.