Doing Justice to Rebeca: Jotería Listening Beyond Gender Binaries and Ethnographic Legibility

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Queer Futurity: Chosen Families; Doing Justice, and Honoring Our Communities

Abstract

This paper revisits C.J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re a Fag to re-listen to the figure of Rebeca through jotería listening—a method grounded in women of color and decolonial feminisms. While Pascoe’s analysis has been foundational, her reading reproduces colonial gender logics by framing queer Latinx masculinity through proximity to cis-male norms and obscuring the racialized dimensions of gender performance. We offer jotería listening (Alvarez, 2021) as a sonic, relational, and embodied method that centers fugitive frequencies and affective practices often dismissed by traditional educational ethnography. Through intergenerational vignettes and methodological rupture, we argue for a queer of color approach that reimagines what educational research can hear, honor, and hold in relation to queer and trans youth of color.

Authors

• Omi Salas-SantaCruz, University of Utah

• Cydney Y. Caradonna, University of Utah