Uno Nunca Sabe: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Heteronormativity and Latina Immigrants' Sexual Politics

• In Event: Transnational Sexualities (Co-sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

This paper is based on a larger book project that draws on various women of color feminisms, such as transnational feminism and intersectionality, to critically examine how structures of power in the Global South and the U.S. shape the sexual politics of low-income Latina immigrants residing in Los Angeles, California. The participants in this study articulated their sexual politics via the discourse of uno nunca sabe (you never know what bad things can happen). As a sexual politic, it visibilized the violence mothers contended with as low-income girls in the Global South and as migrant mothers in the U.S. by framing heterosexual dating as dangerous and mothering while being low-income as undesirable. It also constructed sexual moderation as necessary for their daughters to focus on becoming upwardly mobile, which mothers believed would relieve daughters from confronting these oppressions. By employing a transnational and intersectional approach, I delineate how heteronormativity in the Global South, as well as in the U.S. informs the formation of this sexual politic. For instance, discourses that reduced low-income girls and women who were non-white to nonhuman objects of labor or sexual objects with abnormal gender and sexual morals, teach marginalized girls in the Global South influence their awareness of the ways in which class and ethnicity exacerbate gender and sexual marginalization. In the U.S. these women further contended with discourses that framed them as nonheteronormative, like that of the “hyperfertile” Latina immigrant. While some daughters and dominant discourses of the “third world women” may reduce uno nunca sabe to “traditional” or religious values, I argue that this discourse is a form of agency; mothers draw on this narrative to teach their daughters to desire a better life—one free of the sexual and gender marginalization mothers underwent since their ninez (girlhood).

Author

• Michelle Gomez Parra, San Francisco State University