Emma Perez, Queering the Borderlandsfrom her novel, Forg.docx

Emma Perez, "Queering the Borderlands"
from her novel, Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory:
"They came in groups. Tlascaletecas and Otomi with the
Spanish and the Spanish
with the Mexicans and the Mexicans with the Apache, mixing
into a brown race
journeying through land expansive with blood-red horizons,
until they stopped and
looked around and settled into what was already in their blood.
Movement.
Settlement and movement. Back and forth they trekked, rivers
and streams blending
and inter-breeding with tribes and making families and villages
from beginning to
end of deserts and plains and groves. Tribes of families and
villages of mud-huts
sank into the landscape where buried vessels and bones became
the soil and the
clay and the water."
1. the borderlands: the both imaginary and embodied geography
of the southwest
US and northern Mexico. Cf. Gloria Anzaldua. The "marginal"
aspect for each side of
the border is re-imagined, so that "borderlands" refers to both
the geographies and
the cultures which the border crosses. The experience of those
marginalized, in this
conception, becomes central, especially in terms of gender.
Then again, "queer

borderlands": cf. Cherrie Moraga; Anzaldua's borderlands re-
thought specifically in
terms of [email protected] gender and sexuality in addition to
class, ethnicities, nationalities.
2. Perez is emphasizing a gaze that is geographic, spatial,
apparently fixed in space;
and yet also mobile, impermanent, changing.
3. drawing on Foucault: "the borderlands have been imprinted
by bodies that
traverse the region, just as bodies have been transformed by the
laws and customs
in the regions we call borderlands"; for Foucault, she writes,
bodies are "engraved
and transformed through laws, customs, and moralities"; but he
does not directly
address coloniality, in which Native Americans became the
property of the
colonizing Spanish, for example.
4. Decolonial thought. She does not refer to Walter Mignolo,
whose work on "de-
colonial studies" has been essential in differentiating the
concerns of this field from
those of "post-colonial studies." The issue is that we are not
simply "after"
colonization; we are still moving out of it.
5. She concentrates on an idea of "a decolonial imaginary." She
thinks that this
category "can help us rethink history in a way that makes
agency for those on the
margins transformative" (123).
6. For Perez, "the norm" is not simply a social construct that
can be oppressive; it is
a colonial construct, a "colonial imaginary," part of the way that
empires establish
themselves as "national" realities through symbolic systems.
Even if we rebel

against these "norms," the ways in which we re-imagine history
in more radical
ways means that they may depend on, and help re-invent, the
colonial imaginaries
which more radical histories are intended to upset.
7. She feels the need for a different kind of gaze, and space: "a
rupturing space, the
alternative to that which is written in history" (123).
8. "We must uncover the voices from the past that honor
multiple experiences,
instead of falling prey to that which is easy - allowing the white
colonial
heteronormative gaze to reconstruct and interpret our past"
(123).
9. Her own history has been erased in this way. So in her novel
Forgetting the
Alamo, or Blood Memory, as her "queer vaquera baby butch
gazes upon the land that
her family settled upon, she is re-fashioning that space, re-
establishing her
relationship to that land as a tejana and as a queer who will no
longer have rights to
land and history. And so, we will make her up or locate
documents to uncover a
history of sexuality on the borderlands that is hidden from the
untrained eye (124).
10. I think she mis-reads Foucault: I don't think that Foucault
argued that laws
regarding sexuality were more "liberatory" before the
nineteenth century. They
were perhaps not as extensive, certainly not as "networked" in
terms of medical
practices and law (as depicted in the film Proteus).

11. Sexual politics enfolded with racial politics (126), as we
have seen elsewhere;
but differently in different places. One important study of
recent years (Nayan Shah,
Stranger Intimacies) shows the ways in which policing of
Southeast Asian men's
sexualities in California worked, as immigration from India,
Pakistan, and elsewhere
in Southeast Asia brought them into California's agricultural
industries.
12. How to research "invisible" groups? In terms of logics of
"deviance"? (127)
13. Oral interviews and ethnography? (127)
14. Reception studies of queer audience responses to popular
cultural figures like
Selena?
15. Histories of the Chicano movement as exclusive in terms of
sex and gender
rather than as minoritarian?
16. Or through art, literature, cultural re-imaginings? Re-
imagining the 16th century
Mexican nun Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz as having queer or even
lesbian desires, for
instance, can help us construct narratives in which
heteronormative sexuality can
be confronted (128).
17. "A decolonial queer gaze would permit scholars to
interrogate medical texts,
newspapers, court records, wills, novels and corridos with that
fresh critical eye"
that would not reproduce the same colonial history yet again.
18. UTEP's Ph.D. program in "Borderlands History":
institutional efforts
19. What about the gaps or silences? "I am arguing for a
decolonial queer gaze that
allows for different possibilities and interpretations of what

exists in the gaps and
silences but is often not seen or heard" (129), while honoring
difference.
How might we apply some of these insights around spatiality
and mobility, and
inventing or reinventing a "rupturing space" to Mosquita y
Mari?
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The Open Web Application Security Project is an online
network that produces uninhibitedly accessible articles,
procedures, documentation, in-
struments, and advances in the field of web application security.
OWASP is another sort of association. Our freedom from
business pressures
enables us to give unprejudiced, viable, practical data about
application security. OWASP isn't subsidiary with any
innovation organization, in
spite of the fact that we support the educated use regarding
business security innovation. Like many open-source
programming ventures,
OWASP produces numerous sorts of materials in a shared, open
way. The OWASP Foundation is a not-revenue driven entity that
guarantees the
venture's long-term achievement. Mark Curphey began OWASP
on September 9, 2001. Jeff Williams filled in as the volunteer
Chair of OWASP
from late 2003 until September 2011. Starting in 2015, Matt
Konda led the Board. The OWASP Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-
benefit association (in the
USA) built up in 2004, supports the OWASP framework and
tasks. Since 2011, OWASP is likewise enrolled as a non-benefit
association in Belgium un-
der the name of OWASP Europe VZW.
One of the OWASP vulnerabilities is security misconfiguration.
This vulnerability alludes to inappropriate usage of controls
expected to guard appli-
cation information, for example, misconfiguration of security
headers, error messages containing sensitive data (data
spillage), and not fixing or re-
designing frameworks, structures, and parts. Dynamic
application security testing (DAST) can identify
misconfigurations, for example, flawed APIs.
As indicated by OWASP Security misconfiguration is the most

regularly observed issue. Strong security requires secure and
great configuration
server, database, custom code and kept up to date. If the best
possible setup isn't set, at that point the attacker can get to
privileged information.
References
NPR Staff (25 May 2014). "Going Dark: The Internet Behind
The Internet". Archived from the original on 27 May 2015.
Retrieved 29 May 2015.
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page
1
2
3
2
1
4
5
1
Student paper
The Open Web Application Security
Project is an online network that
produces uninhibitedly accessible
articles, procedures, documentation,
instruments, and advances in the
field of web application security.

Original source
The Open Web Application Security
Project (OWASP) is an online net-
work that produces uninhibitedly ac-
cessible articles, systems, documen-
tation, apparatuses, and innovations
in the field of web application
security
2
Student paper
OWASP is another sort of associa-
tion. Our freedom from business
pressures enables us to give unprej-
udiced, viable, practical data about
application security.
Original source
OWASP is another sort of associa-
tion Our opportunity from business
weights enables us to give fair, vi-
able, financially savvy data about ap-
plication security
3
Student paper
OWASP isn't subsidiary with any in-
novation organization, in spite of the
fact that we support the educated

use regarding business security
innovation.
Original source
OWASP isn't subsidiary with any in-
novation organization, in spite of the
fact that we bolster the educated
use regarding business security
innovation
2
Student paper
Like many open-source program-
ming ventures, OWASP produces nu-
merous sorts of materials in a
shared, open way. The OWASP Foun-
dation is a not-revenue driven entity
that guarantees the venture's long-
term achievement.
Original source
Like many open-source program-
ming ventures, OWASP produces nu-
merous sorts of materials in a syner-
gistic and open way The OWASP
Foundation is a not-revenue driven
element that guarantees the ven-
ture's long haul achievement
1
Student paper

Mark Curphey began OWASP on
September 9, 2001. Jeff Williams
filled in as the volunteer Chair of
OWASP from late 2003 until Sep-
tember 2011. Starting in 2015, Matt
Konda led the Board. The OWASP
Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-benefit
association (in the USA) built up in
2004, supports the OWASP frame-
work and tasks.
Original source
· Imprint Curphey began OWASP on
September 9, 2001 Jeff Williams
filled in as the volunteer Chair of
OWASP from late 2003 until Sep-
tember 2011 Starting in 2015, Matt
Konda led the Board · The OWASP
Foundation, a 501 non-benefit asso-
ciation (in the USA) built up in 2004,
underpins the OWASP framework
and undertakings
1
Student paper
Since 2011, OWASP is likewise en-
rolled as a non-benefit association in
Belgium under the name of OWASP
Europe VZW.
Original source

Since 2011, OWASP is likewise enlist-
ed as a non-benefit association in
Belgium under the name of OWASP
Europe VZW
wikipedia 67%
Student paper 100%
4
Student paper
Archived from the original on 27
May 2015.
Original source
Archived from the original on No-
vember 28, 2015
5
Student paper
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/M
ain_Page

Original source
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/M
ain_Page
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Volume 24, Number 2
& 3,
2003, pp. 122-131 (Article)
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2004.0021
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of
California @ Riverside (29 Jul 2015 19:58 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/fro/summary/v024/24.2perez.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/fro/summary/v024/24.2perez.html
G&S Typesetters PDF proof
PART 4: EXCAVATING
Queering the Borderlands
The Challenges of Excavating the Invisible and Unheard
emma pérez
I begin with a passage from my novel in progress titled

Forgetting the Alamo,
Or Blood Memory. I write fiction not only because I have a
passion for litera-
ture, but also because I am frustrated with history’s texts and
archives. I’ve al-
ways wanted to find in the archives a queer vaquera from the
mid-nineteenth
century whose adventures include fighting Anglo squatters and
seducing will-
ing señoritas. Impatience led me to create a tejana baby butch,
named Micaela
Campos, who must avenge her father’s death at the battle of San
Jacinto, just a
month after the fall of the Alamo:
By dusk she came upon the ranch and the land that her father
had settled.
Eleven sitios. Nearly forty-nine thousand acres. A lot of land
for a young
boy whose people had inched their way up the valley two
centuries prior,
moving slowly at first from the central valley then north each
time the
rivers shifted, each time they shifted further north to boundless
prairies

crossing rivers and streams. Monclova had been home for
awhile, two
hundred years felt like plenty of time, so they picked up and
moved north
crossing el Rio Bravo, traveled some more, and stopped and
settled in for
what they thought would be another two hundred. They came in
groups.
Tlascaletecas and Otomi with the Spanish and the Spanish with
the Mex-
icans and the Mexicans with Apache, mixing into a brown race
journey-
ing through land expansive with blood-red horizons, until they
stopped
and looked around and settled into what was already in their
blood. Move-
ment. Settlement and movement. Back and forth they trekked,
rivers and
streams blending and inter-breeding with tribes and making
families and
villages from beginning to end of deserts and plains and groves.
Tribes of
families and villages of mud-huts sank into the landscape where
buried

vessels and bones became the soil and the clay and the water.1
I began with this passage in order to inscribe a gaze on the
borderlands that is
geographic and spatial, mobile and impermanent. The
borderlands have been
122 frontiers/2003/vol. 24, nos. 2 & 3
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 122
Derek Day
Muse
imprinted by bodies that traverse the region, just as bodies have
been trans-
formed by the laws and customs in the regions we call
borderlands. In the His-
tory of Sexuality, Michel Foucault challenges us to look closely
at bodies and
how they are engraved and transformed through laws, customs,
and moralities
imposed upon them through centuries.2 He is not as direct about
coloniality,

but we can still borrow from a critique that exemplifies how
land is imprinted
and policed by those traversing and claiming it as they would
claim a body —
both becoming property for the colonizers. Native Americans
became as much
the property of the Spanish as did the land that came to be
known as the Span-
ish borderlands.
To unravel colonialist ideology, I put forth my notion of
decolonizing his-
tory embedded in a theoretical construct that I name the
decolonial imaginary.
This new category can help us rethink history in a way that
makes agency
for those on the margins transformative. Colonial, for my
purposes here,
can be defined simply as the rulers versus the ruled, without
forgetting that
those colonized may also become like the rulers and assimilate
into a colonial
mind-set. This colonial mind-set believes in a normative
language, race,
culture, gender, class, and sexuality. The colonial imaginary is a

way of think-
ing about national histories and identities that must be disputed
if contradic-
tions are ever to be understood, much less resolved. When
conceptualized in
certain ways, the naming of things already leaves something
out, leaves some-
thing unsaid, leaves silences and gaps that must be uncovered.
The history of
the United States has been circumscribed by an imagination
steeped in un-
challenged notions. This means that even the most radical of
histories are in-
fluenced by the very colonial imaginary against which they
rebel.3 I argue that
the colonial imaginary still determines many of our efforts to
revise the past,
to reinscribe the nation with fresh stories in which so many new
voices unite
to carve new disidentities, to quote Deena González and José
Esteban Munoz.4
If we are dividing the stories from our past into categories such
as colonial re-
lations, postcolonial relations, and so on, then I propose a

decolonial imagi-
nary as a rupturing space, the alternative to that which is
written in history.5
How do we contest the past to revise it in a manner that tells
more of our sto-
ries? In other words, how do we decolonize our history? To
decolonize our his-
tory and our historical imaginations, we must uncover the
voices from the past
that honor multiple experiences, instead of falling prey to that
which is easy —
allowing the white colonial heteronormative gaze to reconstruct
and interpret
our past.
In my own work, I have attempted to address colonial relations,
of land and
bodies, particularly of women, particularly of Chicanas in the
Southwest. I ar-
gue that a colonial imaginary hovers above us always as we
interpret our past
and present. I argue that we must move into the decolonial
imaginary to de-
Pérez: Queering the Borderlands 123

09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 123
colonize all relations of power, whether gendered or sexual or
racial or
classed.6
In my study of Chicanas, I’ve put forth the notion of the
decolonial imaginary
as a means not only of finding women who have been so hidden
from history,
but also as a way of honoring their agency, which is often lost.
The premise that
Mexican women are passive wives who follow their men had to
be contested.
Now, I’m asking, how is the decolonial imaginary useful for
lesbian history
and queer studies? If we have inherited a colonial white
heteronormative way
of seeing and knowing, then we must retrain ourselves to
confront and re-
arrange a mind-set that privileges certain relationships. A
colonial white het-
eronormative gaze, for example, will interpret widows only as

heterosexual
women mourning husbands. In his book, Disidentifications:
Queers of Color
and the Performance of Politics, Munoz argues that queers of
color are left out
of representation in a space “colonized by the logics of white
normativity and
heteronormativity.” For Munoz, disidentification is the third
mode of dealing
with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate
within such a
structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a
strategy.7 For me,
disidentification is that strategy of survival that occurs within a
decolonial
imaginary. In other words, the queer-of-color gaze is a gaze that
sees, acts, rein-
terprets, and mocks all at once in order to survive and to
reconstitute a world
where s /he is not seen by the white colonial heteronormative
mind. As my
queer vaquera baby butch gazes upon the land that her family
settled upon, she
is refashioning that space, re-establishing her relationship to

that land as a
tejana and as a queer who will no longer have rights to land and
history. She
will be erased by the white colonial heteronormative mind. And
so, we will
make her up or locate documents to uncover a history of
sexuality on the bor-
derlands that is hidden from the untrained eye.
How do we train the eye to see with a decolonial queer gaze that
disidenti-
fies from the normative in order to survive? The history of
sexuality on and in
the borderlands looks heteronormative to many historians who
scrutinize
marriage records, divorce records, and even court cases on
adultery. To dis-
identify is to look beyond white colonial heteronormativity to
interpret docu-
ments differently.
Historians have explored race, class, gender, ethnicity, and
nation, region;
however, sexuality, and more specifically, queer history, has
only recently

joined the ranks of serious scrutiny. Generally, historians of
sexuality in the
United States and Europe have offered key books and articles
that examine the
lives of women and men in New York, Buffalo, London, San
Francisco, and
even the South. For example, historians like Martin Duberman,
Martha Vici-
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 124
nus, George Chauncy Jr., Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy,
Madeline D. Davis, Lil-
lian Faderman, Randolph Trumbach, Lisa Duggan, and John
Howard uncover
queer histories in the United States and Britain while the
Southwest border-
lands is quite nearly untouched.8 Historical studies that focus
upon Chi-
canas /os and Mexicans of the Southwest primarily highlight
immigrant and
labor studies, social histories of communities, and biographies

of heroes or
heroines. The study of gender and sexuality, however, are
central in works by
Deena González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican
Women of Santa Fe,
1820 – 1880; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn
Mothers Went Away:
Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500 – 1846;
and Antonia Cas-
taneda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of
Conquest: Amerindian
Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California.” 9 Queer
histories of the
Southwest and of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are that much
more marginal;
however, there are as many questions as there are sources for
interrogation.
Cultural and literary texts, newspapers, police records, widows’
wills, court
dockets, medical records, texts by sexologists, religious tracts,
as well as corri-
dos — all of these and more must be reinterpreted with a
decolonial queer gaze
so we may interrogate representations of sexual deviants and

track ideologies
about sex and sexuality.
We must begin by asking, For whom and by whom has sexuality
been de-
fined? Who was having sex with whom when laws began to
police the practice
of sex? Foucault contends that discourses of sex and sexuality,
specifically the
history of those discourses in Europe, were transformed from
somewhat more
libratory in the eighteenth century to far more repressive in the
nineteenth
century. Victorian England made a space in which deviant
sexualities could be
repressed on the one hand and could proliferate on the other.10
The mixed
scheme of moralities spread through the Western world, and the
borderlands
between Mexico and the United States were no exception,
particularly after the
U.S.-Mexico War of 1846 – 48, when droves of white Anglo
Saxon Protestants
brought with them a white colonial heteronormative ideology.
Sexuality, then,

cannot be defined without attention to epochs and centuries,
each of which
imprinted borderland queers in its own way. Racialized
sexualities on the
geographic border we know as El Paso del Norte has its own
underpinning,
however.
An examination of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries on the
border of El Paso/Juárez offers one window into twenty-first-
century lesbian
and queer identities. (I use each term of identity cautiously,
given that each
identity is charged with its own politics and history. While
“queer” has for
many become the overarching identity for all who are
nonheteronormative,
“lesbian” is sustained as the self-identity for women who
choose to be with
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 125

other women — physically, psychically, and politically.) The
late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries are key for a couple of reasons.
One reason is
that the late-nineteenth century is encoded with Victorian
values of repressive
sexuality. Sex acts became policed in ways they had not been
before. In her
book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of
Homosexuality in
American Culture, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that “it is not
historical coin-
cidence that the classification of bodies as either homosexual or
heterosexual
emerged at the same time that the United States was
aggressively constructing
and policing the boundaries between black and white bodies.”
11 Somerville re-
fers to the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, which
established a
“separate but equal clause” that legalized the segregation of
blacks from whites.
I would further note that in the Southwest, in these geographic

borderlands,
Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned the segregation of brown from
white.
Moreover, I would take her premise and argue further that it is
not histori-
cal coincidence that the classifications of homosexual and
heterosexual ap-
peared at the same time that the United States began
aggressively policing the
borders between the United States and Mexico. The change from
the Texas
Rangers, who policed Indian and Mexican territory in the
nineteenth century,
to the Border Patrol, created in 1924 to police the border
between the United
States and Mexico, occurred at the moment when a new form of
anti-Mexican
sentiment emerged throughout the nation. The sentiment was
linked to anti-
immigrant acts that would become laws against non-Northern-
Europeans. As
the borders in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico
were pushed
against by too many Mexicans crossing the Rio Bravo, trekking

back and forth
through land they had crossed for centuries and paying little
attention to any-
thing but rising river banks, the borders become more and more
closed and
only opened up when a labor shortage demanded cheap laborers.
Meanwhile,
a brown race was legislated against from fear that it could
potentially infect the
purportedly pure, white race in the United States. Eugenicists
and sexologists,
according to Somerville, worked hand in hand.12 Consequently,
the border
was closed as a result of scientific racism clouded by a white
colonial hetero-
normative gaze looking across a river to see racial and sexual
impurities.
Throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and even as late as the 1900s,
Mexicans crossed
from Juárez to El Paso and back again with ease. Not until 1917
did a law im-
pose requirements on those crossing a political border. A head
tax of eight dol-
lars per person and the ability to read restricted the crossings.13

I would ask,
How did the emergent and rigid policing of the border between
the United
States and Mexico in the early twentieth century reinforce a
white colonial het-
eronormative way of seeing and knowing that fused race with
sex? Further in-
vestigation will illustrate that the ideologies constructed around
race and sex
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 126
were linked to justify who was undesirable as a citizen in the
United States. Im-
moral and deviant behavior included anything that was not a
heterosexual
marriage between a woman and man. In the El Paso of 1891,
adultery could
lead to the arrest of both man and woman. Of course, someone
would have to
file a complaint to have them arrested, usually an unhappy third
party. The

courts listened and adjudicated many cases of adultery in which
Mexican
women and men were thrown into jail because they “unlawfully
live together
and have carnal intercourse” outside of marriage.14
Another way of tackling primary research for an “invisible”
group is to
study the category of “deviance” and how deviant behavior has
become a
politicized queer identity in the twenty-first century. It is not a
coincidence
that Chicana lesbian historian Deena González unearthed the
lives of widows,
or women who lived alone during the nineteenth century.15
González was al-
ready thinking outside and beyond a heteronormative
interpretation when she
perused nineteenth-century documents.
Oral interviews and ethnography are the methods available to
those who do
not want to ferret through pre-twentieth-century tracts to find
queer histories.
For the late twentieth century, activist-scholar Yolanda Retter

has conducted
extensive research on the lesbian communities of Los Angeles
from the 1970s
through to the 1990s, relying on oral interviews, as did Kennedy
and Davis.
Chicana lesbian historian Yolanda Chávez Leyva has also
conducted a series of
oral interviews on the lives of Chicana lesbian activists in
Tucson, Arizona.
Sociologist Deborah Vargas has interrogated queer audience
responses to
tejana singer/performer Selena and the drag artists posing as
Selena. Theorist
and historian Maylei Blackwell has interviewed a Chicana
feminist activist
from the 1970s who was ostracized from the Chicano movement
because she
was a feminist, meaning a lesbian to many homophobic
Chicanos in the early
movement.16
Chicana lesbian cultural critics Luz Calvo, Catriona Esquibel,
Sandra Soto,
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and others continue to problemetize
how we think

of queers in, on, and of many borders.17 The border reyna,
Gloria Anzaldúa,
could not have known the impact her book of poetry and essays
would have on
the field called borderlands, which was initially coined the
“Spanish Border-
lands” in the early twentieth century by University of California
historian Her-
bert Eugene Bolton.18 Studies by queer cultural critics and
theoreticians
influenced by Anzaldúa’s work continue to proliferate. Creative
writers have
also been theorizing the borderlands and its deviant, non-
normative popula-
tion for the last few decades. In her historical novel, El Paso
border writer Ali-
cia Gaspar de Alba’s queering of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz has
caused
consternation among those who cannot imagine a nun having
sex with an-
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 127

other woman. Many of Gaspar de Alba’s short stories are
reflections of the bor-
der twin cities El Paso and Juárez. Other border queer writers,
like John Rechy
and Arturo Islas, also from El Paso, construct powerful
narratives in which
their protagonists confront heteronormative sexuality.19
Historical research on and of borderland queers is not as
abundant. Part of
the problem is that the queer gaze has only recently become
sanctioned. Queer
history, after all, is a new, growing field. Despite the practice
of queering our
daily lives, academic institutions and disciplines have
discouraged that “oh so
disturbing” queer gaze. Our epistemological shift, however, has
already begun
to challenge rhetoric and ideologies about racialized sexualities.
To queer the
border is to look at the usual documents with another critical
eye, a nonwhite,
noncolonial, nonheteronormative eye. A decolonial queer gaze

would permit
scholars to interrogate medical texts, newspapers, court records,
wills, novels,
and corridos with that fresh critical eye. Graduate students at
the University of
Texas at El Paso (UTEP) are scrutinizing some of these records
in order to con-
struct the queer history of the border. In the History
Department, I offered for
the first time a graduate seminar on “Gender and Sexuality on
the Border,” in
which queer history was explored. In the seminar, graduate
students con-
ducted research on El Paso/Juárez, tracking gay, lesbian, and
queer histories
through the centuries. Because the majority of historical studies
on gender and
sexuality ignore the geographic border between the United
States and Mexico,
these graduate students and I realized that it is difficult to
assess how to pursue
research on queers in this region. We also concluded that
“queer” history in-
cluded anyone who was considered “deviant,” therefore we

expanded whom
we studied and how we conducted our studies. We found
ourselves “queering”
the documents. This was a daunting task; however, the students
were creative
as they challenged white heteronormative sexualities in studies
that explored,
for example, Juárez transvestites in their work place,
prostitution in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lesbian oral histories
of the El Paso
community, gay and lesbian activists of El Paso, and Mexican
American
women’s agency in the colonias of El Paso. Some of these
studies are ongoing.
UTEP’s Ph.D. program in Borderlands History, the only one of
its kind in the
nation, is regionally specific to the United States and Mexico,
and therefore is
drawing students of color who are Chicana/o and Mexican
nationals. A core
faculty in the department is training students whose research
interests include
gender/sexuality/race /ethnicity in the borderlands, the Mexican

Revolution,
histories of Colonial Mexico, the Southwest, Latin America and
Spain, as well
as comparative world borders.
But what about the gaps and silences? I know that nineteenth-
century te-
janas lived and roamed the “wild West” and probably knew how
to handle a
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 128
six-shooter and ride a horse, and I’m sure there were those who
passed as men
and those who loved women. As much as I would love to
stumble upon diaries,
journals, and letters written by queer vaqueras of the nineteenth
century, I
must challenge my own desire for the usual archival material
and the usual way
of seeing, as well as honor that which women scholars before
me have uncov-

ered. While I’ll not always find the voices of the subaltern, the
women, the
queers of color, I will have access to a world of documents rich
with ideologies
that enforce white, colonial heteronormativity. A white
heteronormative imag-
inary has defined how researchers and historians as well as
cultural critics have
chosen to ignore or negate the populations who are on the
margins, outside of
normative behavior, outside of twentieth-century nuclear white
heterosexual
family systems. I am arguing for a decolonial queer gaze that
allows for differ-
ent possibilities and interpretations of what exists in the gaps
and silences but
is often not seen or heard. I am arguing for decolonial queer
interpretations
that obligate us to see and hear beyond a heteronormative
imaginary. I am ar-
guing for decolonial gendered history to take us into our future
studies with
perspectives that do not deny, dismiss, or negate what is
unfamiliar, but in-

stead honors the differences between and among us.
notes
1. Emma Pérez, Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory,
forthcoming.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An
Introduction (New York:
Pantheon, 1978).
3. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas
into History (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5 –7.
4. Deena González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican
Women of Santa Fe,
1820 – 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and
José Esteban Munoz,
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1999).
5. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 6.
6. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary.
7. Munoz, Disidentifications, xii, 11.
8. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr.,
eds., Hidden from

History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New
American Library, 1989);
George Chauncey Jr., Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture,
and the Making of the Gay
Male World: 1890 – 1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy
and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The
History of a Lesbian Com-
munity (New York: Routledge University Press, 1993); Lillian
Faderman, Odd Girls and
Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth
Century America (New York:
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 129
Columbia University Press, 1991); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and
the Gender Revolution:
Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London,
(Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1998); Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex,
Violence, and American

Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and John
Howard, Men Like That:
A Southern Queer History (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1999). Also worth not-
ing is the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project
compiled by Liz Stevens and
Estelle B. Freedman, which was produced as a video, She Even
Chewed Tobacco (New
York History Project, 1983). Susan Lee Johnson refers to one of
the more prominent les-
bians featured in the pictorial collection, a mixed-race Mexican-
Anglo woman, Elvira
Virginia Mugarrieta, also known as “Babe Bean,” and Jack
Garland, born in Stockton,
California, in 1870. See Susan Lee Johnson, “ ‘A Memory
Sweet to Soldiers’: The Signifi-
cance of Gender,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the
History of the American
West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 255 –78.
9. González, Refusing the Favor; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus
Came, the Corn
Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New
Mexico, 1500 – 1846 (Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Antonia Castañeda,
“Sexual Violence in the
Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the
Spanish Conquest of
Alta California,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions
in Chicana Studies, ed.
Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley:
University of California Press,
1993), 15 – 33.
10. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 – 4.
11. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and
the Invention of Homo-
sexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), 3.
12. Sommerville, Queering the Color Line, 31.
13. For fundamental background to the history of the Southwest,
the making of the
U.S.-Mexico border, and subsequent immigration laws, refer to
Rodolfo Acuna, Occu-
pied America: A History of Chicanos, 3rd ed. (New York:
Harper and Row, 1988); Juan
Gómez-Quinones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600 – 1940
(Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 1994); David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors:
Mexican Americans,
Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley:
University of California
Press, 1995); and Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows:
Mexican Women in Twentieth
Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
14. El Paso County Court Records, 1881– 1920, The State of
Texas v. Guadalupe Vega
and Margarita R. Pérez, adultery, April 17, 1841, 887,
University of Texas, El Paso Spe-
cial Collections.
15. Deena González, “The Widowed Women of Santa Fe:
Assessments on the Lives
of an Unmarried Population, 1850 – 1880,” in On Their Own:
Widows and Widowhood
in the American Southwest, 1848 – 1939, ed. Arlene Scadron
(Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 1989).
16. Yolanda Retter, “On the Side of Angels: Lesbian Activism
in Los Angeles, 1970 –
09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 130

90” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1999); Yolanda
Chávez Leyva, “Listening
to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History,” in Living
Chicana Theory, ed. Carla
Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998); Deborah Vargas,
“Cruzando Fronteras:
Selena, Tejano Public Culture and the Politics of Cross-Over”
(paper presented at the
annual meeting of the American Studies Association,
Washington, D.C., Octo-
ber 1997); and Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories and
Retrofitted Memory: Chi-
cana Feminist Subjectivities between and beyond Nationalist
Imaginaries —An Oral
History of the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc” (paper presented as
qualifying essay, History of
Consciousness: University of California, Santa Cruz, May
1997).
17. Luz Calvo, “Postcolonial Queer Fantasies” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of California,
Santa Cruz, 2000); Catriona Esquibel, With Her Machete in Her

Hand (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, forthcoming); Sandra Soto, “Sexing
Aztlán: Subjectivity, Desire
and the Challenge of Racialized Sexuality in Chicana/o
Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Texas, Austin, 2001); and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano,
The Wounded Heart:
Writing on Cherrie Moraga (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2001).
18. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New
Mestiza (San Francisco:
Spinsters /Aunt Lute, 1987); and Herbert Eugene Bolton, The
Spanish Borderlands: A
Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1921).
19. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sor Juana’s Second Dream: A Novel
(Albuquerque: Uni-
versity of New Mexico Press, 1999); Alicia Gaspar de Alba, The
Mystery of Survival and
Other Stories (Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1993); John Rechy,
City of Night (New York:
Grove Press, 1963); and Arturo Islas, No (New York: Avon
Books, 1991).

09-N2914 12/2/03 12:48 PM Page 131
Mosquita y Mari (Aurora Guerrero, 2011): Thinking through the
film in relationship to a
"decolonial imaginary" and as diagramming a "queer
borderlands": queer poetic desire as
both powers and as needs
I. Key scenes:
Yolanda and Mari begin to share each other's "powers" -
inchoate powers or uses of the
erotic in Lorde's sense? - with one another, and come to explore
and establish "a
rupturing space" in which to express their own feelings, desires,
and memories: Chapter
3, 19:22.
Yoland and Mari "take off" as friends: Ch. 4, 29:28; etc.
Yolanda's friends' relentless heteronormativity: Chapter 3,
22:05
Yolanda's parents, the Olveras, exhausted.Chapter 4, 29:04.
Yolanda imagines herself otherwise, through memories of her
parents that they have
never really shared with her: Ch. 4, 33:22
Mari shows her understanding of "transactional" economies: Ch.
5, 42:38

Mari's precarious position undermines the strength of the girls'
friendship;
a "queer borderlands" - arguably seen most powerfully in their
hangout, a "rupturing
space " (Pérez, 123) where they without knowing it begin to
challenge colonized and
colonizing norms when they fashion it out of junk cars and
shared experience - gives way
again to the more rationalized and disciplined space of the
streets where desire is
subjugated, for instance, in the gendered division of labor that
is sex work; the queer
borderlands, the rupturing space where a decolonial gaze had
been generated, allowing
otherwise unarticulated desire and memory to become felt, is in
turn "colonized" when
Mari brings her john into her and Yolanda's sacred hangout,
violating it forever.
II. Thinking of each character in terms of audiovisual narrative
(which gives us our
specific aesthetic experience of the work, which is a narrative,
but a narrative
presented in sound and image); as well as allegorically (what
that aesthetic
experience means applied to the larger world in which we live,
especially, for us,
given the context provided by Pérez).
IIA. Given the way the audiovisual narrative emphasizes
specific characteristics for
each girl and her backstory, we can observe that allegorically
speaking, each girl
has a kind of “power” that she can share with the other; in this
way, each needs the
other, and comes to desire the other; and each sharing of powers

will have unknown
risks because of the complex spaces and movements of the
neighborhood in which
they live, go to school, remember their and their families' pasts,
and dream of their
futures.
Mosquita:
Powers: She is a geometer: she gets good grades especially in
this science of measuring
and mapping space. Yolanda has "the gaze"; her talent for
envisioning spatiality also
suggests geometric space as that marked off by national
borders; and in this space, she
has plans for a path forward to college: that is, from her "space"
she can see a future, a
path of development.
Sharing: Yolanda will teach Mari how to succeed in rationalized
spaces where “measure”
is crucial, like school, and in the process, how to value her
mind.
Risk: Sharing the power of her "geometric gaze" with Mari
means taking an affective
risk: forming a “desiring space” with Mari rather than simply
occupying a rational space
with her, Yolanda's resulting complicated feelings will impact
her own performance in
school. Yolanda risks losing her "point of view" and her "future
vision." Of course, her
parents will fear that she is losing her way in school because of
a boy; later, her mother

will seem to get a clue about what is actually going on.
Mari:
Powers: She shows up with headphones in the first scene; later
she wears a T-shirt with
headphones printed on it; and finally, after sharing music with
Yolanda, a disillusioned
Mari will throw away her cherished Disc-man CD player, not
even pawning it. These
characteristics suggest Mari's "sonic movement"; like musical
sound, and whether on her
bike or off it, Mari is good at moving through rationalized,
regulated spaces that can
otherwise be limiting; she can get around obstacles and find
non-traditional paths and
places (like jumping the fence leaving school or finding an
entrance into the abandoned
auto shop); and she is good, as a result, at being in her own
body, at handling herself on
the streets; along with her power of movement, she has
memories of a broader, cross-
national movement; finally, with her father gone, and her mom
struggling to make rent,
she will learn to understand the ways in which mobility in
"transactional" economies can
be valued, like working to make money for rent; or like taking
money for sex.
Sharing: She will teach Mosquita to stand up straight, and to
say "I" through the act of
positioning her body for "the gaze." Mari teaches Yolanda “self-
naming.” Also she
teaches Yolanda how to express voice.
Risk: Mari's understanding of how to position herself for the

"gaze" also means that she
can see herself as a sexual object that can be bought; subjecting
herself to objectification
in a transactional economy means risking losing her voice, her
ability to say "I am."
IIB. Each has "needs" that have to do with each girl's desire not
quite conforming
to the ways other see or hear them; each girl “others” the other
in a generative way,
leading to unexpected growth and learning, if not to “coupled-
ness,” or to a sense of
belonging per se, at home, or at school, to a sense of having a
future, of belonging to
one's own future destiny.
Mosquita:
Needs: space; she is trapped in a highly regulated,
heteronormative spatiality: Yolanda
has the gaze, and masters geometry, but her growing sense of
her erotic self makes her
feel that she is suffocated in the everyday spaces in which she
lives. Everything begins to
seem the same. There's no room outside the spaces of
heteronormative family and
friends; her parents have little idea of her emerging desires, and
friends "alternative"
activities don't offer her alternatives to express those desires
either.
Even though Yolanda's parents are both present, they are too
exhausted trying to improve
their family's economic position, trying to protect Yolanda from
the harsh transactional
reality that at its most bare means the same kind of poverty they

came to the US trying to
escape.
Her parents can't even really afford to share their romantic
memories of one another with
Yolanda, in fear that she will "grow up too soon" (risk her
educational future by
becoming pregnant). Meanwhile, her friends' interest in partying
with boys feels
ultimately like a violation of the desire she has begun to
experience in her time with
Mari.
Mari:
Need: money; this in terms of a larger, heteronormative,
gendered division of labor; body
as site of and resource for transactional economies:
Mari can't keep her job flyering, and Pablo won't help her
"move up" into his "grander"
version of flyering that he calls "promotion." Especially with
the loss of her father, she
and her mother are both hindered in terms of a gendered
division of labor, a gendered
economy.
Her memories of her grandmother in Mexico show her a
different way of overcoming
such a gendered division of labor in a powerful, even magical
(mythically matriarchal)
way (hearing the wind blow between the feather of a flying
bird's wing). But the space
and transactions of Huntington Park don't correspond to this

powerful lesson of memory.
III. Moving towards a thesis.
Mosquita y Mari as narrative of embodying spatiality and
mobility in national-
colonial space and in a queer Borderlands:
Mari:
"borderlands" mobility (sound, voice in the present; memory of
the past); but national
immobility (no documentation; she "divided in space" and in a
sense divided from her
memories; Yolanda helps her "spatialize" a "queer borderlands"
and to move with the
shared power it gives them both, but neither this respite of
memory and desire nor going
to school can help Mari make rent at this age; and she
regretfully allows herself to be
reduced to a transactional object that can be controlled,
contained, re-inscribed into a
"colonizing" project.
Mosquita:
national (or national-colonial) spatiality (green card, at least;
plans for the future); but
borderlands immobility (little access to the affective movements
of desire or memory that
Mari does seem to have, and which her parents are too scared or
too "internally
colonized" to share with her).
Bringing their powers and needs together in terms of a largely
unplanned instance of

what Lorde might have called "the uses of the erotic," Mosquita
and Mari's willingness to
see and hear one another, and to give vision and voice to one
another, makes them
capable of creating, for a short time, what Perez calls a
"rupturing space" which in this
film leads to an exhilarating sense of being able to move
together in a musical way; and
to be able to share touch with one another in an intimately
musical way. Ultimately,
though, that queer borderlands of their own erotic creation
cannot be contained in its
marginal form, and as it expands, it will come up against the
very limits and forces that
made it so transformative in the first place. Finally, it will
dissipate, undone by the larger
world it has already begun to impact. But the girls will
remember, and as the final scene
of the film suggests, will now see each other very differently -
more fully human, with
more depth and insight - than they would be able to if they had
never become intimate
friends.
IV: In teams, create an abstract using Perez to propose your
version of a paper topic
on Mosquita y Mari.
Sullivan notes

Clips:
Ch. 5, ca. 40 min.
Ch. 7, ca. 56:30 min.
Ch. 7, ca. 1:01 min.
Ch. 1, ca. 0:00.
Ch. 8, ca 1:10.
Laura Sullivan, “Chasing Fae: "The Watermelon Woman" and
Black Lesbian
Possibility”
1. Sullivan argues that this groundbreaking film uses both
"deconstructive" and
"realist" techniques "to examine the way that identity in
contemporary U.S. culture"
of the 1990s "is shaped by multiple forces, primarily race,
gender, and sexual
orientation." The film both "de-centers" and "represents" the
"identity and history
of a figure most invisible in the textual production of the
dominant culture - the
black lesbian" (448).
2. It does this work by combining narrative and documentary
forms in a kind of
"meta-fiction" in which "Cheryl" at times addresses the camera
to talk about her film
project: a film within a film, thus, a meta-narrative or meta-
fiction. Thus, Cheryl's
struggle in the story to make a film about “Fae Richardson”
works as a kind of
reflexive version of the film itself. This is a common quality of
meta-narrative or
meta-fiction: a film within a film, or a story within a story,
makes us think reflexively
about the film or story we are seeing or reading, and it makes us

think about not
only what we are seeing or reading, but how. In this way, highly
reflexive narratives
can often be seen as explicitly asking their viewers or readers
about how and why
they see the world as they do: such stories ask us to participate
in a critical way with
the presentation of the story.
3. So, here, Sullivan is arguing that this film about recovering a
black, lesbian actress'
story is also reflexively about the way we value a black, lesbian
director; Cheryl's
determination to find "Fae" and make a film about her is
reflexively a sign of Cheryl
Dunye's determination to become a director. Thus, there is a key
moment in the
film: when Cheryl says that "I am a black, lesbian director," this
moment stands out
especially once we later notice the closing title that tells us that
the Watermelon
Woman is a fiction - she never really existed.
4. Thus, telling a story about race, gender, and sexual
orientation in film history, is
also a way of "performing" and of "transforming" the race,
gender, and sexual
orientation of film production. A key transformation happens in
both the fictive and
reflexive aspects of the film: Cheryl makes a film about the a
forgotten black actress,
who was made to be invisible and forgotten turns out to have
lived a vibrant life, full
of love and community; Cheryl Dunye makes a film about
making sure that not only

will she herself not be forgotten, but she will have the authority
that will prevent
that from happening.
5. But wait - isn't "class" a major shaping force in the film? We
might think of some
scenes from "Watermelon Woman" in which class is depicted as
the kind of shaping
force to which Sullivan refers. How well does Sullivan's
argument deal with class
issues or economic issues?
6. One important way class gets addressed in the film is through
Cheryl's
exploration of why she has a strong curiosity about, even a
desire for, a woman who
played multiple "mammy" roles in classical Hollywood cinema.
Sullivan argues that
in this film, Dunne exposes viewers to the history of seeing
black women as servants
and as "welfare mothers," and she exposes this history in a way
that also asks us to
critique it, rather than to accept it. Here, Sullivan mentions the
a clip that Cheryl
plays for "us" - a clip of Fe Richards playing a slave who
comforts her southern
mistress. (5:00) In this sequence, Sullivan argues, Dunne as
director "comments on
the historical continuity of the oppression of black women"
(449); the legacy of
slavery continues today, Sullivan argues the film shows, but
also, the stereotypes
derived from slavery continue to determine "acceptable" or
"normal" images of

black women, which negate the lived experience of women, and
helps to limit black
women's options for becoming producers of contemporary
culture (450).
7. Like other films by black women in this period, the film
addresses black women
as black persons, but that makes some people uncomfortable -
people who need to
know that history, too. So the film, instead of just relying on
"direct identification" in
which a film about black lesbians appeals primarily to black
lesbians, also tries to
create an "active viewer," tries in other words to create a
complex set of "viewing
mechanisms" by which to connect to the film and be actively
involved with its
primary subject matter of black lesbians in film history (450).
One key result, then,
is we have scenes in which "the black mammy" figure is
complicated as not simply a
negative stereotype, but, provocatively, an object of desire for a
black lesbian.
8. Sullivan points out this complex framing of a black lesbian
figure in relation to
film history in a key clip: Cheryl miming the words and
gestures of Fe in her
"mammy" role in Plantation Memories. This sequence, though,
is actually repeated
twice: the second time, in the final credit sequence, just before
we are told "Fae" was
entirely fiction.
What do you make of this sequence and the fact that it is
repeated twice? We

discussed this in lecture in terms of the use of "reflexivity" in
the film, and in terms
of challenging the non-black lesbian audience's "desires" for
this problem to be
"solved" for them by Cheryl's making the image of the
"mammy" only a matter of
"her" desire to be a director.
9. At the same time, though a primary emphasis is given to
black lesbian desire,
friendship, productivity, sociality, history, the film also takes
great pleasure in
emphasizing the sex scene between Cheryl and Diana: as
Sullivan points out, it
"documents the existence of interracial lesbian romances."
(40:00). How would you
compare the sex scene here to the ones in Nitrate Kisses?
10. Even though the film emphasizes difference in terms of
historical experience, it
also challenges any final or essentialist claim that difference
should be limiting or
confining: Cheryl clearly feels differently about documenting
Fae than either Shirley
or June, Fae's lover for the last 20 years of Fae's life. For
Cheryl, it is important to be
able to identify with a black lesbian who had an affair with a
white woman, as it is
important to be able to belong to a history of black lesbians who
fought to create
and maintain their own communities and cultures. (453).
11. Sullivan finally comes around to "class identity" on page

454, where she finds it
as complex as anything else in the film.
12.The film thus uses a range of "realist" techniques for their
"readability," and the
power here is that realism can be encourage identification and
politicization (456),
but it also deconstructs realist and documentary cinemas,
showing that these effects
are guaranteed by unstable, unreliable references and signs: we
are seduced
through the realism, but in a way that makes us question
cinema's ability to
"naturally" represent the world and history.
ENGL122N: Queer Aesthetics
Notes: Michel Foucault: Abnormal ([1974-1975] 2003), with
emphasis on Chapter 11
Even though "queer identity" is now routinely visible (and
audible), as we saw in relation to any
number of contemporary digital video works (The Internet's
music video "Cocaine," or Perfume Genius'
“Hood” or dating shows like MTV's Are you the One?), still the
expression or depiction of sexual identity
routinely incites questions, charges, allegations, anger, or
concern in relation to "norms": what is normal
behavior, and how it should appear, and how it should be
distributed, and what it can and can, should or
should not, communicate. Queer identity "goes viral", then,
even as "queer actions" are still seen as
"contagious" for legal or medical reasons. How does "normal"
come to have legal and medical standards

attached to it? If gender and sex difference and variegation are
still not even clearly understood, how is it
that some kinds of gender or sex variation are considered
normal and others not? How do we even
understand what is abnormal and what is normal sexually? How
do we say that an individual is abnormal,
as opposed to an event, an act, or a statement? Can an identity
be abnormal, and if so, when did it become
possible to diagnose personal identity as either normal or
abnormal?
For Michel Foucault, one of the most influential 20th century
historians of social institutions like
the medical clinic or the prison, as well as of sexuality and
subjectivity, abnormal sexuality depends (of
course) on the prior diagnosis of an abnormal individual.
Without standards of what is abnormal, you can't
determine that someone fits those diagnostic criteria. What is
abnormal, then, depends on knowledge about
the body being formulated and categorized in relationship to
medical or legal institutions. That sexuality
can be claimed to be abnormal indicates that these criteria are
historical, specific to certain times and
places, even if they are globally influential. To say that this or
that bodily action or behavior is abnormal
means that knowledges about what is normal and what is not
have been put in place by particular
individuals, institutions, and authorities.
Thus, before “sexual” identity can be diagnosed as abnormal,
the idea of an “abnormal individual”
must already be established, but this idea and its definition arise
in certain places and not others. Foucault
sees the claim of “abnormality” as evidence of the way that
medicine and law have interacted in Western,
industrializing cultures, even as these cultures had imperial

reach and far-flung colonies. Sexual
abnormality, for Foucault, would finally be understood in
relation to racial categorizations that produced
racism, which also had legal and medical knowledges to
validate it. The sexually “abnormal individual”
then is someone who, committing some act which must be
explained and accounted for before the legal
authorities, calls for a medical knowledge to be invoked. And
this knowledge is based on not only the acts
of the individual, but what the individual can say, or can be
made to say, about them. What is different
about sexual categorization, then, is that ensuring that sexual
norms are being upheld requires individuals to
become witnesses of their own supposed transgressions, reifying
individually and subjectively the
overarching legal and medical categorizations that determine
that the individual is abnormal. The invert, or
deviant, or pervert, must disavow his or her own sex-gender
variation as variation and instead avow it as
inversion, deviance, or perversion. In order to be categorized as
abnormal, the person thought guilty of
sexual abnormality must in some way or another, confess what
would otherwise be sexual variation as legal
transgression or medical symptom.
Foucault argues in this chapter that constructions norm and
abnormality in a diffuse network of
social relations encompassing law and medicine are the basis
for transformations in the way psychiatry
understands its object. Key to these transformations are the
growing psychiatrization of the child and of
childhood, where ideas about “development” and “dysfunction”
are increasingly understood in terms of
instinct or illness that can be judged as normal or pathological,
often in response to a family's fears of
responsibility for its own childrens' acts. Thus, Sophie Adam is

somehow implicated in Charles Jouy's
sexual assult of her; he is found mentally incompent, but not
legally responsible; she is placed in an asylum
for reasons that don't seem entirely clear other than that Jouy's
rape of her has demonstrated her to have
experienced some problem of normal sexual development from
which the village must be safeguarded.
Meanwhile, Jouy himself is found to be an imbecile, based not
on some invisible instinct towards
aggression but on the basis of his physical characteristics,
which Foucault suggests are nothing more than
those of someone who was “the last of workers” - the person
who would do the jobs others could afford to
reject, for one quarter of the pay along with a few necessities
like clothes. Jouy's body, then, was mapped,
compared (falsely) to presumptive bodily norms, and made a
medical subject of. In the process, because of
his imbecility, he could not be legally charged for rape (which
in any case Sophie also seems to have been
found partially responsible for, even if in only de facto terms).
(approx. pp. 292 – 302). Meanwhile,
psychiatry has become even more powerful on the basis of its
ability to diagnose childhood and adulthood
irrespective of manifestations of madness: as Foucault argues,
the new psychiatry of the mid-nineteenth
century no longer needs actual symptoms of madness if it can
instead claim childhood itself as a model of
norms and development for behavior (303). Taking childhood as
a primary object of study allowed what
Foucault calls the “generalization” of psychiatry, whereby it
becomes a science of “behavioral and
structural infantilism” (307). Making the appearance of illness
and treatments specific to these symptoms

secondary also allow the new psychiatry it to cohere with, and
contribute to, and benefit from, other
sciences like neurology and general biology (306): “Around
1850 – 1870, psychiatry gave up at once
delirium, mental alienation, reference to the truth, and then
illness” (308). Now it considers behavior on the
basis of normative development mappable from the retroactive
construction of the child forward to the
developmental behavioral achievements or dysfunctions of the
adult. Thus departing from any empirical
basis and heading towards the diagnosis of hidden, unconscious
behavior blocking or shoring up normative
behavior, psychoanalysis is just a short step away, presumably.
In this process, psychiatry and psychological sciences will come
to rely on a practice of
confession. Ultimately, these practices of legal and medical
confession grew, says Foucault, out of the ways
that various different branches of Christian pastoral practice
allowed for sins to be dismissed or repented.
The remission of sin by the individual depends historically on
the possibility of “confession.” Psychiatry
would transform spiritual, legal, or medical confession by
making diagnoses and cures available and
effective on the basis of re-interpreting the confessions of the
psychiatric patient herself.
This kind of power by which a network of discourse changes
plays out, then, on the body, where
by pleasure circulates or floats through social contexts, and it
requires certain kinds of knowledges that map
or remap the relations of instinct and its mechanisms,
economies of pleasure, and development or
dysfunction (imbecility, etc.) (305): it is "biopolitical" and
works through figures of knowledge, or
"epistemes."

“Episteme”; a figure of knowledge as produced in historical
periods; “biopolitics” rises from a
prior “anatomo-politics”; anatomo-politics has to do with the
power of a sovereign (king or queen etc.) over
the bodies of their subjects; biopolitics arises out of anatomo-
politics but has to do with the power that a
nation-state invests in the lives of its citizens or national
residents. This characterization of different modes
of power that arise historically is a different way of looking at
the transformation from states dominated by
(usually religiously-affiliated) aristocracies to "modern" states
where state leadership is a matter of some
form of representative politics or authoritarian dictatorship. It
was a controversial idea: for Foucault,
similar mechanisms of biopower can be seen operating in both
"representational democracies" and
dictatorships alike.
In Abnormal, Foucault argues that sexual abnormality becomes
apparent in relation to three
institutional “discourses” which rise or fall in relation to one
another, operating together or diverging over
long periods of historical time. These three discourses are those
of:
1. the sacred and the spiritual, in the form of the church,
providing the roots of confession.
2. power and the law, given in the form of the judiciary and
penal systems, providing
frameworks for punishment.
3. and truth and knowledge of the body, given in the form of
medical knowledge; providing the
ability to say what is good conduct in relation to standards of

health.
Religion, law, medicine: discourses of confession, punishment,
and health all interact to provide a
determination of abnormal individuals, and any determinations
of abnormal individuals all also present the
need for some idea, however inconsistent, of sexual abnormality
to become operative.
Explaining the convergence of psychiatry and the judicial
system, Foucault claims that these
mechanisms began to function together, in a decisive way, in
the middle of the 19th century for Western
nation-states.
On what basis does this interThe judiciary system is a system of
power, a power mechanism built
around punishing. The psychiatric discipline is a mechanism of
knowledge, built around constructing
knowledges of how people recognize their own behavior and
conduct, and how they see that conduct.
These “mechanisms” as he calls them would be not simply
institutions on the one hand and ideologies on
the other, but modes of producing truth in relation to bodies.
So, Foucault says, (138) “the power
mechanism -- the penal system with its need for knowledge” and
“the knowledge mechanism – psychiatry
with its need for power” became conjoined.locking come to
happen? These two systems relate to one
another on the question of “instinct,” which they have in
common. In the earlier 18th and 19th centuries, the
treatment of social disorder had been based around ideas of
particular acts which were alien to the person
who committed them, and from the common social consensus in

which people lived. Still earlier, states
had confronted crimes which constituted transgression against
god or royalty. But in the mid-19th century,
states began to be faced with monstrous acts of murder that
were no longer transgressive for any particular
reason or any particular symbolic value. He describes the
Henriette Cornier case, in which a neighbor
murders a child, and says that it was only “an idea” which
brought her to this act. Faced with such
apparently motiveless yet horrifying, murderous acts, psychiatry
began to expand its power, not only
analyzing the fact of someone’s crime in relation to what would
be either a rational regime of behavior
commonly understood, or the value of life as given by god or
king, and now began to analyze the “nature”
of the criminal’s crime in relation to their identity as a person:
they are now thought to have possessed
some instinct for crime, and that supposed propensity for crime
now would be pathologized and studied on
the basis of a life-long identity developing, unseen, out of
instinct, from the time of childhood, and
manifesting as crime. In this way, psychiatry begins to discover
the roots of madness and criminality in
childhood, and in so doing expands the fields of what it can
study and the knowledge it can produce; it
lends these new epistemological procedures and potentials to
the penal system, which in turn lends power
to psychiatric medicine, so that the system of punishment can
gain the legitimacy of the truth that
psychiatry can produce on the basis of its discovery of
biological, developmental instinct. (138 – 163)
As a result, by 1875, three emergent frames of reference for
psychiatry become clear. This period
is approximately the time when studies of homosexuality, as
such, appear – Westphal undertakes the first

study of sexual “inverts” as a medical problem in Germany in
1870; the masochist is diagnosed between
1875 and 1880 (310). What are these three frames of reference
in which sexual abnormality was
diagnosed?
1. First, Foucault argues, an administrative frame of reference
appears, where madness no
longer appears as a departure from common truth, but against
the background of a restraining
order, i.e., a judicial demand. The courts develop away from
the monarchic model, and towards a
model of public administration.
2. Second, a familial frame of reference has developed, so that
madness is understood in
relation to feelings, affects, and the obligatory relationship of
parent and child. The family comes
to monitor the child’s behavior as the state comes to offer
punishments for child delinquency. The
example that Foucault gives here is that of masturbation, which
since the 17th century had become
an act which parents must monitor against.
3. Finally, a political frame of reference has appeared, in which
madness appears “against
a background of stability and social immobility” (156). Since
public administration and the family
structure now provided an assumption of “stability,” anything
which disturbed this stability would
appear as pathological. Psychiatry now finds a new set of
objects which it must try to correct.
In this way, psychiatry and law begin to take over, in the middle
of the 19th century, concerns which had
previously fallen to the church to sort out: the relationship of

sovereign power, legal agency, and
individual bodily conduct became problematized in specific
ways.
Sexuality is now one of the ways that bodily conduct now could
be understood in relation to
“instinct,” that is, involuntary behavior. (This seems important,
since the entire question of homosexuality
still tends to be framed as either a voluntary behavior that may
be socially acceptable or legally
permissible, or not, or as involuntary behavior that may be
controlled or not.) Sex crimes, now understood
as acts resulting from pathological instincts contributing to a
sustained, individual identity, take over from
the idea of carnal sin or mental alienation.
The implication is this: what Foucault describes in his later
study, The History of Sexuality, as the
“confused category” of sodomy is not simply borrowed from
theories of moral sin to help to define medical
and legal normality in the nineteenth century; instead, what the
moral violation “sodomy” names is re-
framed: from a problem of act and event, the way in which
"sodomy" had been understood in the 18th
century (as in the sweeps driving men out of the Netherlands, or
in the first, casual sexual encounters
between Claas Blank and Rijkhaart Jacobz in Proteus), to a
problem of instinct and identity, resulting in the
invention of the medical category of "homosexuality" in the
mid-19th century (more like the later scenes in
Proteus, in which Claas and Rijkhaart struggle with whether to
confess, knowing that admitting a gay
identity will only subject them to further punishment, but also

knowing that if they don't confess, they may
hurt each other by neglecting the depth of their feelings for one
another).
Thus, for Foucault, from the point of the mid-nineteenth
century, it wasn't simply that an act or
series of acts by individual persons might be subject to more or
less ad hoc policing in the name of
maintaining order under a sovereign ruler, but rather that an
entire identity-population would be
pathologized as "sexually disordered" in the name of public
administration and family health. Biopolitics
operates on populations, in states where techniques for
calculating, say, population demographics, are being
deployed in the service of law or medicine.
But how are such crimes of abnormal sexuality supposed to be
identified, if their basis is not in a
particular act but instead in an identity? Sex becomes
something that a person must confess: here,
psychiatry takes over from religion the expressive power of
confession (168). In previous times, madness,
or, the abnormal individual had been a concern either of
transgression against the royal, or against god. The
sacramental structure of penance, in the Middle Ages and
lasting into our own day, Foucault argues, had
fixed features. First, it is through confession that sins are
forgiven; remission of sins occurs through
confession. One must confess, and one must confess
everything. “Nothing must be left out.” By 1975, the
time in which Foucault delivered this research, he can identify a
range of disciplinary practices in which
sexuality now can be seen to rely on confession.
“Confession and freedom of expression face each other and
complement each other. If we go to

the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, or sexologist so frequently to
consult them about our sexuality,
and to confess the nature of our sexuality, it is precisely to the
extent that all kinds of mechanisms
everywhere – in advertising, books, novels, films, and
widespread pornography – invite the
individual to pass from this daily expression of sexuality to the
institutional and expensive
confession of his sexuality to the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, or
sexologist. Today, we have, then,
a figure in which the ritualization of confession has its
counterpart and correlate in a proliferating
discourse on sexuality” (170).
In other words, there exist economies, both monetary and
affective, of sexual expression. It’s not at all the
case that repression of sexuality indicates there is less sexual
activity, rather, repression is part of the way
that sexuality is produced and the way it proliferates - through
the discourse of the psychiatrist's office as
well as through intimate acts in private settings or in other
institutions (schools, etc.). On the one hand, we
must confess our sexuality as the record of a specific kind of
problem. On the other hand, there is more and
more circulation of materials referring to or representing
sexuality as problematic. These two apparently
opposed phenomena actually are generated together, according a
larger normalization of the “instincts”
which occurred as the need to punish and the need to diagnose
led to an increasing integration of the
operations of legal and medical systems.
Historically, this long-developing normalization can be seen as
deriving from the late Medieval
period into the modern period. Within these periods, we see
different pathological figures rise in

importance and fade away. Foucault describes these figures
who rise and fall in cultural importance as
discourses of normalization shift between church, state, and
medicine: the witch (as the bad Christian in
Medieval times; the great monster, he who commits heinous
crimes against the state, and so is destroyed in
the great symbolic spectacles of torture and mutilation of early
modernity in the 17th century); the little
masturbator, or the recalcitrant child in the 18th century; and
finally, in the middle 19th century, the
proliferation of such abnormal figures as the “pervert.” Now,
people who formerly would have been
treated as committing acts of sexual deviance or transgression
as sodomites, mollies, or other gender and
sex deviants, are treated as pathological identities, instead of as
people with proclivities or “tendencies” for
certain acts or pleasures. Law and medicine cooperate to make
“instinct” a central axis through which they
can interact. With the figure of the invert, especially, it is clear
that sex crimes focus on the expression of
pleasure – an “instinct” for “unnatural pleasures” is
pathologized, against the idea of a “normal,” “stable”
family home.
Foucault thus argues that by the period of the mid-19th century
which he is discussing here, the
problem of sexual pleasure has become newly understood as
having a relation to the economic and social
productivity of the family unit. The family is a cultural site
where pathology is produced, if the family is
not carefully monitored by the state, and if the child is not
carefully monitored by the family. This point is
important for Foucault – it is not simply that power works top

down, as ideological structures of the state
controlling people’s thoughts or beliefs; rather, disciplines of
power and knowledge circulate through the
social fabric, and enable the rise of particular discourses and
bring about the importance of particular
figures whose cases exemplify the ways old problems pass away
and new problems appear.
“The act of generation or reproduction is just one of the forms
in which pleasure, the economic
principle intrinsic to the sexual instinct, is in fact satisfied or
produced. For that reason, as
producer of a pleasure not intrinsically linked to generation, the
sexual instinct can give rise to a
series of behaviors that are not governed by generation” (286).
One 19th century theorist of abnormality Foucault cites
provides a list: “Greek love,” “bestiality,”
“attraction to a naturally insensitive object,” “attraction to the
human corpse,” as “producers of ‘pleasure’”
(286). Homosexual acts here are a “primitive” holdover that is
grouped together with sexual fetishization
of objects, necrophilia, and other violations of “natural”
instincts. Of course, people still “argue” today that
once we legalize "gay marriage," we might as well allow people
to marry animals!
An important conclusion that Foucault draws here is in this
lecture is that as “instinct” is
normalized, pleasure takes on a role never before understood in
such a specific way – pleasure becomes an
object of medical investigation that can be psychiatrized. And
so, in the late Victorian age, the theory of
pleasure occurring outside of familial reproduction (against the
new backdrop of Victorian sciences such as
thermodynamics, psychiatry, evolution, genetics, eugenics, and

others, although Foucault mentions mostly
psychiatry in relation to the rise of eugenics) comes to be
understood as a problem of degeneration. This
new understanding of crime as degeneration has become a
matter for the law to sort out, if psychiatry can
deliver over the required medical knowledge of the pathology
(286).
Finally, in the late 19th century, there arose a new notion of
degeneration, arising from the linkage
of medical knowledge and political power, also fitting into an
ethnic model of racism, and it supports the
rise of a new medico-social discipline: eugenics. At the end of
the 19th century, Foucault argues, the
pathologization of pleasure goes along with the capability to
diagnose degeneracy, and both of these
possibilities arise after instinct is first taken up by legal
discourses and medical discourses. And so,
psychoanalysis results on the one hand, to treat abnormal
pleasure; and eugenics arises on the other, to treat
abnormal genetics.
Today, eugenics has little "official" support in Western
scientific academies; it has today passed
away as a racist pseudo-science. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis has
been giving way to pharmaceutical
treatments such as anti-depressants or hormone therapy, to new
forms of "integrative medicine" combining
scientific lab testing with alternative "neutraceuticals"
(nutritional supplements) or to new forms of medical
talk such as “cognitive-behavioral therapy,” none of which are
very concerned at all with anything
resembling confession or self-witnessing in the way that
psychoanalysis or much psychology had been
previously. In the midst of this recent set of changes, The
American Psychological Association

depathologized homosexuality in 1974; homosexuality in the US
was effectively decriminalized by a 2003
Supreme Court decision (allowing for the “gay marriage” debate
to achieve critical mass). A new horizon
for the functioning of power and knowledge in and as sexuality
has emerged. What materials or material
forces constitute this new horizon?
Since Foucault delivered these lectures on abnormality, the
human genome has been decoded, the
internet has been commercialized, and genomic sciences have
become cybernetically oriented. More
broadly, contemporary genomics has become a transdisciplinary
science in fact reaching a level of
descriptive power at which it can define historical, present, and
future possibilities for entire communities,
nations, societies, civilizations, even technologies. On the
other hand, advances in gender and sexuality
understanding now allow the body to be understood in relation
to gender not evidenced in anatomical form;
and medical technologies have made feasible surgical and
hormonal changes of gender expression on a
relatively widespread basis. The result is that a body not
correctly or adequately matched to the subject’s
“brain” (actually, soul, affect, or desire?) produces a now
cataloged condition of gender identity disphoria
treatable by gender reassignment techniques (of course these
surgeries date to the earlier part of the 20th
century, and Foucault was well aware of this possibility). The
interlocking of law and psychiatry has now
begun to be more complex as DNA analysis specifically and
genomics and computation more broadly
provide the means by which disease is diagnosed, crimes are

solved, history is understood, and both new
organisms and new machines are designed. Foucault’s notion,
broadly, was that between the 18th and 19th
centuries, a new form of politics replaced an older form in
Western cultures: biopolitics, the politics of
maintaining (or disinvesting) state interest in entire populations
of people, replaced an earlier “anatomo-
politics” that revolved around the figure of the sovereign.
Foucault’s goals are clear in laying out his study
of abnormality: ours, he thinks, is the age of “biopolitics,” an
age in which the very processes of “life
itself” become political instruments.
But in turn, it seems that genomic analyses as well as
simulation-oriented network cultures
produce a profoundly new temporal investment that goes beyond
the biological life of the subject. On the
one hand, the point of genomic analysis is in effect to diagnose
an individual’s evolutionary history in the
language of DNA analysis; and on the other hand, the
deployment of the internet on a global basis means
that entirely new behaviors whose temporality is mediological
rather than phenomenological or biological
result in “viral video,” internet contagion, and so forth, not only
enhancing the importance of the embodied,
biopolitical subject, but also breaching a new kind of behavior
that only exists in what we might call time-
intensive hyperindustrial forms and processes. Just as anatomo-
politics was replaced, but never entirely
displaced, by biopolitics, so now a new biopolitics that
determines– perhaps, a “biopolitics of epochality”?
- compounds and confuses the biopolitical developments of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Perhaps the transsexual of the mid-to-late 20th century was the
new homosexual of the 19th

century, whose appearance in medical and legal regimes
prompted new medical and legal responses; and
further, perhaps the transgender person of the late 20th and
early 21st century becomes the now
prominently "visible" analog of the gay, lesbian, or bisexual
person resisting the medicalization of gender
as political identity, just as an earlier generation of queer
subjects resisted the medicalization of sexuality
by coming “out of the closet” in the mid-20th century - although
now, this resistance happens while
additionally coordinating (or dis-coordinating) their sexed,
gendered appearance both “online” and “IRL.”

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