Porous latinidades : Working the borders of intelligibility

In this dissertation I argue that the integration and incorporation of Chicana/o cultural work into an expanded American literary canon has run the risk of neutralizing this cultural work\u27s resistant ethnic-racial subject formations as well as obscuring or effacing their specific histories of emergence. I consider the political and philosophical implications of the study of Chicana/o cultural work as this work begins to occupy new institutional sites, outside, for example, the purview of Chicana/o studies programs. I contend that the tropes of “inclusivity” and “community” guiding the current call for a more multicultural, conflict-free American literary canon are insufficient to the task of understanding the radicalized ethnic-racial subject in resistant Chicana/o cultural work. At the same time, I want to consider the nature of this paradigmatic resistant ethnic-racial subject who has been installed at the center of a Chicana/o oppositional discourse, a subject construction I refer to throughout as the normative, heteromasculine resistant ethnic-racial subject. Queer Chicana/o cultural work challenges the centrality of this subject construction for matters of political resistance and class liberation by revealing the constructed nature of this subject formation. This cultural work resists the normative resistant ethnic-racial subject as the privileged enunciative position in oppositional discourse, attempting to reinvigorate liberationist projects by considering the added dimension of sexuality. My dissertation focuses on influential literary and scholarly representations addressing the study of U.S. ethnic-racial minority literatures and resistant ethnic-racial subjects as they assume politicized identity formations. My concern throughout the dissertation is with the different strategies we might employ in our readings and teachings of these texts, attuned to the specific institutional locations where these readings and teachings are performed, in order to imagine how the incorporative, integrative moment might still allow for the elucidation of the material histories informing the emergence of new ethnic-racial critical subjectivities