“Survival Rumor: Rumor as Mad Latinx Counterattack from Prisons to Sanatorios”

• In Event: Enduring Impossibility: Queer/Trans Survival in Latin/x America

Abstract

How is truth employed as a political discourse of empire and, conversely, how does an alternative form of discourse, such as rumor, become a survival practice? Drawing from trans, Latinx, and mad studies, this paper frames rumor as a survival strategy and practice of resistance under conditions of confinement. In doing so, I offer another way of thinking about the power of rumor and the fever dreams of trans and rebel life in a world that insists on our erasure.

This paper focuses on two examples of survival rumors that were circulated under shared if uneven conditions of prison and detention for trans and queer Caribbean people in New York in the 1970s and Cuba in the 1990s. The first example follows a self-crafted rumor by trans Latinx activist Sylvia Rivera in the 1970s that branded her as “a crazy bitch that bit [a cellmate’s] dick off.” Here I consider how Rivera’s self-crafted survival rumor protected her from sexual assault in a men’s prison in New York. The second example follows a survival rumor that circulated in Cuba in the 1990s and that prompted a group of starving punk rockers known as “los frikis” to self-inject with HIV and seek admission to state-run sanatorios. Los frikis heard that quarantined patients in the sanatoriums were fed ice cream (a food item associated with national resistance to US empire) alongside daily meals when food was increasingly scarce in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Here this national survival rumor and los frikis’ actions turns a space of confinement (the sanatorio) into an unexpected place of refuge and sustenance where access to food and the freedom to make banned punk music existed.

In each case, I show how survival rumor responds to colonial positionings and pathologies through contraataque (counterattack), while exposing and refusing the structured impossibilities for trans, queer, and rebel life. Circulating across different spaces of confinement, survival rumor as contraataque opens up other realities and conditions for worldmaking.

Author

• Dan Bustillo