Sex, Respectability, and Candy: The New Limits of Normativity in Queer El Paso, Texas

This study explores how queer identified Mexican-Americans perceive and navigate their sexuality in the border region of El Paso, Texas at a moment in which homosexual identities and practices are being normalized. Although social attitudes about homosexuality have liberalized and same-sex marriage is now legalized in 37 states, these benefits frequently privilege a specific type of normative or homonormative, cosmopolitan queer subject. This study asks the following questions: How are discourses of homonormativity translated into practices among the everyday lives of queer Mexican-Americans in El Paso, Texas? How is homonormativity enacted in the particular spaces Mexican-Americans navigate in El Paso, a place outside of the urban milieu in which theoretical debates about homonormativity emerge? I argue that homonormativity is shaping Chicano/Latino cultural notions of respeto while notions of respeto are shaping the queer politics of homonormativity. Utilizing feminist ethnographic research principles, I conducted two months of fieldwork among queer Mexican-American men and women between the ages of 18-50, integrating methods of participant observation, informal conversations, and in-depth interviews. Although none of my informants was familiar with the term homonormativity, they mobilized the rhetoric of respectability to discuss the ways in which their identities and sexualities were recognized and acknowledged in their communities