In our discussion on Latin@ racial erotics, we read the short stories:
“How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie” by Junot Díaz from Drown (1996, Riverhead Books)
“Halfie” by Ana-Maurine Lara. 2009. Callaloo 32 (2): 414-420.
“White Girl” by Myriam Gurba from Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella (2007, Manic D Press)
These works narrate the complexities of racial fetishism and desire in queer and heterosexual Latin@ contexts. Rather than frame racial erotics as pathological and exploitative, we drew on work by Isaac Julien and Nguyen Tan Hoang to understand how racialized sexualities can conduct anti-racist work by providing avenues for pleasure in playing out racial power dynamics, working on them–and working them over.
Student Amy Vien was struck by how white women are framed as hypersexual in Junot Díaz's “How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie,“ and Latinas as more sexually conservative. It made her think of how Latinas are framed as hypersexual in the dominant culture–whereas the framing of white female hypersexuality was articulated by a Latino male perspective in the story.
She wrote:
Professor Hernandez,
I took a class on Social Inequalities last quarter and I learned about how there is data on Whites generally engaging in sexual intercourse earlier than Latinas. It made me think of a paragraph I wrote for an essay in the class:
In Chapter 4 of The Latino Threat, Leo R. Chavez contradicts the myth of Latina hypersexuality by citing evidence from a study of Latinas in Orange County. It demonstrates that Whites generally engage in sexual intercourse earlier than Latinas. “On average, white women began sexual relations about a year younger than all Latinas surveyed, a statistically significant difference” (p. 100). Strikingly, when all U.S. born Latinas sampled in Orange County were studied together, Latinas had an almost equal amount of babies to white women. Chavez has shown that myths have hurt Latinas, because they have been stereotyped as having loose morals. In turn, these myths draw a boundary between citizens and noncitizens. These myths hold that Latina’s children will take advantage of social services and would take over the U.S.
I disagree with this myth. A great number of Latinas have used birth control, which indicates that they are cautious about controlling their fertility rates in contrast to being the stereotypical out-of-control producers.
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Amy ties our class discussion into a larger examination of how sexual discourses implicate Latin@s in constructions of citizenship. I’m interested in how students will respond to our upcoming unit on Performing the Latina Slut/Embodying Knowledge, where we will consider the feminist and anti-racist work conducted by women who avow hypersexuality.