DALLAS BUYERS CLUB: Making Rayon Real - Jared Leto

by Kal Petkov

To add a little context, Leto’s character in the movie is a transsexual man with AIDS in mid 1980’s Texas. McConaughey’s character, Ron, who also has AIDS but is not gay, smuggles and sells illegal drugs (unapproved by the FDA) from Mexico which help alleviate symptoms and increase the overall health of people with AIDS.

I believe the movie relates to well to, and has many similar topics as our last novel: Queer Latino Testimonio, which spoke a lot about the stigma surrounding gays with regards to AIDS in the mid-late 80’s and early 90’s. The main connection between this movie and Queer Latino Testimonio is the subject of AIDS and how the gay male community was singled-out or scapegoated for the spread of the disease. A good example of this in the movie was when McConaughey’s character first discovered he had AIDS. His friends immediately cast him out of their circle and accused him of being a “faggot”. Similarly, there was a negative image surrounding the famous artist Keith Haring with regards to his sexuality and why he had
contracted the disease.

Mapping Pleasure with Anya Wallace

On April 29th, 2014 our class enjoyed a visiting lecture and workshop by Anya Wallace, a doctoral candidate in Women’s Studies and Art Education at Penn State University who is also an artist and girls’ educator (www.anyamwallace.com). She discussed her pleasure-focused sexuality scholarship with black girls and young women and led the class in a creative pedagogy she has developed called “pleasure mapping.” Students created visual and textual representations that recollect their experiences of pleasure–sexual and beyond.

This slideshow features pleasure maps created by students who have chosen to share them on the course blog. I am moved by the complex and beautiful work the class has created, their maps evoke bodies and pleasures in wonderous multiplicity.

–Prof Hernandez

The below is a preview, the full slideshow is at: http://www.photosnack.com/my-slideshows/details/pdx9yjmm?jsalbum=1

Twerk Like a Scholar: Embodying the Erotic

by Gregory Valdivia 

I came across this video, and it made me think of our class conversations around sexual subjectivity. This video highlights the feminist discourse around twerking and exposes this art form as a reclamation of cultural tradition and erotic autonomy. 

I love this concept of erotic autonomy, because it gives me a language to discuss the “slut vs. scholar” debate. In this case, we see the “slut” not only as an embodiment of cultural and erotic knowledge, but actually we see this embodiment infiltrate into academia. YAS.

These girls state that twerking is a feminist/cultural/scholarly issue because it unearths a conversation around bodily autonomy and placing the notion of the “ideal woman” onto all women’s bodies. 

Kimari Brand, the twerk scholar, believes that twerking dismantles the politics of respectability, which are assumed cultural iterations of domesticity that restrict women from sexual self-determination and as she calls it, erotic autonomy. She would twerk in public to demonstrate that twerking is more than just a “sexual” dance, but rather it is the cultural performance of empowerment, fun, health, and radical change. 

#everyBODYisflawless

In recalling our discussion on Tuesday on the ‘slut v. scholar’ and reading Vanessa del Rio’s interview in Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, something that really caught my attention was the agency that these women have over their body and body image. Society has often stigmatized and created boundaries for what can be defined as beauty. I find it extremely empowering to know that women take language such as ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ to redefine and claim their identities. Similarly, I found these women in this video reclaim what it means to be ‘fat’ or ‘big beautiful women as we also discussed with the April Flores reading in The Feminist Porn Book.

This video and blog posting that follows it, creates a space for women to have a conversation about body positivity and reclaiming what we define as beautiful. Beyonce’s newly released video and song #Flawless is used to empower young women, while also sharing a message of positive feminist movement in today’s male dominated society. I think the video in this blog is extremely creative and powerful while also tying in the important academic material we have covered in class. 

By Rosemary Mcdonnell-Horita

Latinas & Sexual Morality: A Response by Student Amy Vien

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. 

//////////////////////////

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. 

Student Gabrielle Herenica posted this photo she found on Facebook, writing, 

“This image represents what people think or want Latinas to be. Similarly,this relates back to the regulation of Marielitos where Americans wanted to grant their access into the U.S. for being anti-communists, not really acknowledging their homosexuality. Thus, Americans may perceive and believe that all Latinas are princesses and warriors, suppressing any or all of Latinas’ true identities.”

Student responses to our unit on Regulating Erotics: Sexuality & Governmentality

Over the past two weeks we have been exploring the ways in which the state regulates the sexuality and reproduction of Latin@s through immigration laws and reproductive health policies.

The images in this post, submitted by student Ricardo Xuya, respond to the text  ”Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S. Citizenship among Cuba’s Homosexual Exile Community, 1978-1994” by Julio Capó Jr. (2010. Journal of American Ethnic History 29 (4): 78-106.)

The class was broken up into small groups for discussion and responded to questions like: Under what circumstances were queer Marielitos asked to confess the ‘truth’ of thier sexuality? To whom did they need to make these confessions? In what ways did queer Marielitos use silence and confession to obtain access to U.S. citizenship?

Ricardo wrote, “These pictures related to Thursday’s class discussion because we were talking about sexuality and the government. Also we talked about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I don’t remember if it was in our group or in class, but we discussed how people have to “hide” who they are. As well as how much power the country or government have over sexuality.”

In relation to this issue, student Gabrielle Herencia shared this link on “Excluded,” a film documenting the immigration struggles of a gay bi-national couple: 

http://home.sandiego.edu/~lnunn/excludedthemovie/Home.html

Latina/o Sexualities Class Reading List

>Putting the syllabus together for Latina/o Sexualities, a new course design for me, brought up a lot of questions and feelings in relation to what knowledge is available and how it represents Latina/o sexual identities, subjects, and practices. It was a process that was academic, creative, and personal. My thanks go out to those who provided me with feedback and suggestions. The quarter is painfully short, and there was so much great work I had to leave out. 

I hope that what I have put together generates conversations among the class not only about the state of the field of Latina/o sexuality studies, but what its future might look like, there is still a lot of work to do…Prof Hernandez 

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

>>>REGULATING EROTICS: SEXUALITY & GOVERNMENTALITY

 Thursday, April 3

 Michelle Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978, Vintage Books)

Pages 1-74

 Tuesday, April 8

 Complete The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

Introduction, Ladelle McWhorter, from Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (1999, Indiana University Press).

 Thursday, April 10

 Selections from Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico by Laura Briggs (2002, University of California Press)

 Chapter 1: Sexuality, Medicine, and Imperialism: The International Traffic in Prostitution Policy

Chapter 5: The Politics of Sterilization, 1937-1974

 Tuesday, April 15

“Introduction: Queering Migration and Citizenship” by Eithne Luibhéd from Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, edited by Eithne Luibhéd and Lionel Cantú Jr. (2005, University of Minnesota Press), pages ix-xxi

 “Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S. Citizenship among Cuba’s Homosexual Exile Community, 1978-1994” by Julio Capó Jr. 2010. Journal of American Ethnic History 29 (4): 78-106.

 >>>COLONIAL & RACIAL DESIRES

 Thursday, April 17

“Masturbation, Salvation, and Desire: Connecting Sexuality and Religiosity in Colonial Mexico,” by Zeb Tortorici. 2007. Journal of the History of Sexuality 16 (3): 355-372.

 Tuesday, April 22

“Marquillas cigarreras cubanas: Nation and Desire in the 19^th Century” by Alison Fraunhar. 2008. Hispanic Research Journal 9 (5): 458-478.

 Thursday, April 24

“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)

Tuesday, April 29

“(Re)collecting Pleasure with Young Black Women and Girls in the Vibrator Project”

Visiting speaker Anya Wallace, Ph.D. Student, Penn State University

 –Begin reading Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, And Juanito Xtravaganza by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (2007, Palgrave Macmillan), pages 1-55

Thursday, May 1

Queer Latino Testimonio pages 57-119

“‘I look sexy—but sweet’: Notes on Mario and Maria Montez” by Roberto Ortiz

http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2014/03/17/i-look-sexy-but-sweet-notes-on-mario-maria-montez/

 >>>PERFORMING THE LATINA SLUT, EMBODYING KNOWLEDGE

Tuesday, May 6

Excerpt from Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior

(2010, Taschen)

 “Being Fatty D: Size, Beauty, and Embodiment in the Adult Industry,” by April Flores from The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure

(2013, The Feminist Press)

 Thursday, May 8

“Confessions of a Latina Cyber-Slut” by Juana María Rodríguez in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003, New York University Press)

Tuesday, May 13

Flaming Iguanas by Erika Lopez (1998, Simon & Schuster, pgs. 1-138)

 Selections from Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

 Thursday, May 15

 Complete Flaming Iguanas  

 >>>FLUID DESIRES

Tuesday, May 20

“Tacit Subjects” by Carlos Decena. 2008. GLQ 14 (2-3): 339-359.

Thursday, May 22

In-class film screening, Mosquita y Mari (2012, directed by Aurora Guerrero)

 >>>SEXUALITY AS CREATIVE PRACTICE

Tuesday, May 27

Introduction, “Performing Disidentifications” from Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by José Esteban Muñoz (1999, University of Minnesota Press)

 “VIRUS.CIRCUS.MEM” by Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand from Speculative (Exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2008, Zach Blas and Christopher O’Leary) <possible visit by Micha Cárdenas>

Thursday, May 29

 Luz Calvo 2004. “Art Comes for the Archbishop: The Semiotics of Contemporary Chicana Feminism and the Work of Alma Lopez”. Meridians 5 (1): 201-224.

 Selected works by Sandra Cisneros, including “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” in Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. Edited by Ana Castillo. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

Tuesday, June 3

Visiting speaker Alice Bag, renown LA-based, Chicana punk performer, will be discussing issues of Latina sexuality and performance

We will read selections from her memoir Violence Girl: From East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story (2011, Feral House)

 Thursday, June 5

“'Miss, You Look Like a Bratz Doll’: On Chonga Girls and Sexual-Aesthetic Excess” by Jillian Hernandez National Women’s Studies Association Journal 21 (3): 63-91. (2009) 

"Untitled Feminism" by Juana Maria Rodriguez

Latina sexualities scholar Juana Maria Rodriguez discusses the video art piece “Untitled Fucking” by Amber Hawk Swanson & Xandra Ibarra

“The sexual gestures looming behind Untitled Fucking might be imagined as too perverse, too dangerous, or simply too trivial to be worthy of feminism. But if those of us invested in imagining our own sexual futures allow a politics of respectability to set the terms of what might constitute a feminist agenda, we vacate the space of public discourse on sex to others who will not hesitate to assign meaning to our psychic and corporeal practices. And that is something we all need to think about.”

violencegirl:

I see my Chicana identity as a celebration of both my Mexican and American heritages as well as an honest appraisal of the sociopolitical practices of these two societies and their influence on Chican@ society. Both sides of my heritage have values and traditions which are beautiful but sometimes flawed. Mexican and American societies are both guilty of sexism, classism, racism, and homophobia and they both need fixing. I refuse to romanticize them or choose one culture over another.