Enduring Impossibility: Queer/Trans Survival in Latin/x America

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Routine cis-hetero-sexist violence has always been a condition of life under imperialist terror, even prior to the advent of terms like “cis-hetero-sexism.” Given this context, this panel aims to foreground inventive––and at times surprising––modes of survival that queer/trans Latinx and Latin American subjects improvise and uncover amid the present duresses of late-stage empire. In thinking with the conceptual framework of survival, this panel cultivates a conversation around queer and trans modes of being, living, and enduring that are otherwise imperceptible to the dominant epistemes of Western empires. These modes of survival are imperceptible because they traffic in what imperial knowing reads as impossible: the spectral, irrational, spiritual, erotic, speculative, hallucinatory, or dreamed.

As examples of the inventive and (sometimes) counterintuitive practices of crafting and figuring survival foregrounded in our panel, Dr. Dan Bustillo studies rumor as a tactic for surviving state-sanctioned spaces of confinement for punk rockers in sanatorios in Cuba and trans Latina activist Sylvia Rivera in New York City. Meanwhile, Jonathan Donabo attends to the “poetics of endurance” that emerge from Mexican women’s navigations of gendercidal bureaucracy in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Finally, Dr. Emilia “Emi” Sawada explores how contemporary artist Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa disrupts the imperial figuration of the “spectral survivor,” the gender-queer ghost of the murdered Native Californian woman and a subject who, in the afterlife of Spanish and U.S. settler colonial genocidal violence, can only subsist on Native territory in immaterial form.

Together, the panelists demonstrate that, under the ongoing duress and precarities produced by late-stage empire, queer and trans Latin/x American lives, knowledges, and forms of being find ways of persisting. Further, these panelists foreground survival as a structuring condition of both imperial terror and queer and trans Latin/x American existence in the context of ongoing empire.

As such, this panel responds to the American Studies Association’s invitation to critically “reflect on the methods, theories, and gravitational centers of our disciplines:” we investigate the gendered and sexualized violences of Spanish and U.S. imperialisms in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba as well as queer and trans Latin/x American examples of subsistence that both condition and exceed its racial and colonial logics. In so doing, our panel brings together transdisciplinary scholars as they formulate renewed understandings of survival that emerge from literature, visual culture, performance, and historical documents. Our three panelists will deliver twenty-minute individual talks, followed by a presentation of prepared remarks from our commentator, Dr. René Esparza, and a Q&A moderated by our chair, Dr. stef torralba.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “Survival Rumor: Rumor as Mad Latinx Counterattack from Prisons to Sanatorios” - Dan Bustillo

• "Les Arrebatan Hasta El Cuerpo: Feminicide, Bureaucracy, Grief, and the Poetics of Searching in U.S./Mexico Border Poetry and Film" - Jonathan Donabo, University of California Riverside

• "The Survivor in Drag: Gesture in Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa’s Cosmic Blood (2002)" - Emilia Sawada, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Chair

• Stef Torralba, Grinnell College

Comment

• René Esparza, Washington University in St. Louis

Biographical Information

Dan Bustillo (they/elle) is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of English and incoming Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Comparative American Studies, and Transgender Narratives Anthology, among other venues. They are currently working on a book manuscript titled Refusing Spectacle: Trans Latinx Counter-Security Media, about trans Latinx activist media and creative resistive strategies that build community across carceral, national, digital, and bureaucratic borders. Bustillo received their PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine, with a Feminist Emphasis in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Jonathan Ezequiel Donabo is a queer Chicano poet, dancer, and scholar based in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. Jonathan Is the author of Nolan (2020) and his poetry has also appeared in Dunes Review. Jonathan has performed for SHOWBOX LA and competed with Snowglobe Perspective’s Dance team. He is a PhD candidate in the University of California Riverside’s English Department.

Emilia “Emi” Sawada is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she was previously a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate. Her research interests include decolonial and transnational feminisms, queer theory, queer and trans of color critique, critical and relational ethnic studies, disability studies, California history, visual culture, and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. Her published writing appears in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Journal of Visual Culture.