2025/05/06 by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Gender Studies in Language
paper · doi:10.4324/9781003488057-2
openalex publication_date 2025/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
This chapter, originally published in Spanish in Mexico in 2006, presents an early exploration of the challenges of translating the English-language word “queer” into Spanish. I engage some of the debates regarding linguistic purity and Spanglish in the United States to then analyze debates regarding language and sexual transgression during the conquest of Mexico (La Malinche); in the work of the queer Chicana author Gloria E. Anzaldúa and the Texana singer Selena Quintanilla; in the work of the queer Puerto Rican artists Luz María Umpierre, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner; and in the Cuban American television program ¿Qué pasa, U.S.A.? and the work of Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi. I propose multilingualism and linguistic “messiness” as essential to Latinx aesthetics, and to the intellectual and emotional reception of these texts. In this sense, the linguistic transgression of Spanglish is intimately linked to the sexual transgression of queerness, especially in Latinx LGBTQ and feminist cultural representations.