Item Details

title

"Memory is all that Matters;" Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process

author

Caicedo, Laura

abstract

My paper explores the incommensurability between chrononormativity and queer Latinx experience. The “seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines” which comprise the conventional markers of adulthood – college, career, marriage, children, death – anticipate a linear progress through life, but are constitutively inapplicable to both queer and Latinx identities in contemporary society (Freeman 3). In contrast to a chrononormative account of subjectivity, I posit and theorize memory as the more appropriate temporality for queer Latinx subjectivity, precisely because memory itself is a disruption of chrononormativity’s presupposition of linearity or progress. For, as Elizabeth Freeman states, “Queer temporalities… are points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and future others: that is, of living historically” (xxii). Dwelling in the possibility of those queer temporalities is the work of memory. I explore memory’s importance in the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Daisy Hernandez (respectively, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza and A Cup of Water Under My Bed: a memoir), and in doing so, posit an approach to reading queer Latinx narratives which escapes the temporality of linear progression and makes room for the intersecting axes of queer and Latinx identities.

subject

Chrononormativity

Daisy Hernandez

Gloria Anzaldua

Latinx

Queer

Temporality

contributor

Franco, Dean (committee chair)

Lee, Jieun (committee member)

Hena, Omaar (committee member)

date

2020-05-29T08:35:53Z (accessioned)

2020-05-29T08:35:53Z (available)

2020 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/96812 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis