Queer/ing intimacies: radical love and friendship in Chicana feminist literature

Abstract

Queer/ing Intimacies: Radical Love and Friendship in Chicana Feminist Literature challenges colonial and heteropatriarchal conceptions of intimacy that limit our capacity to fully understand ourselves and each other. While sexual politics and sexual identities are the primary lenses from which most scholars engage queer Chicanx/Latinx studies, my exploration of Chicana feminist literature has revealed expansive representations of queer relationality that may encompass, but are not fundamentally defined by, sex or sexual attraction. In this project, I focus on and theorize intimacy rather than sexuality alone because intimacy attends to affective and psychic forms of relationality that are often undervalued or ignored by sex-centered approaches to queer studies. In response, this project asks: How can we read and understand queer relationality beyond the realm of sexuality? How do intimate friendships and platonic networks of care challenge heteronormative structures and colonial logics? How do politicized sites of emotional and spiritual connection foster queer intimacy? And to what ends? Focusing on the lesser-studied areas of queer love and friendship, I argue that Chicana feminist renderings of queer intimacy: 1. challenge limiting definitions of “queer” tethered to sexual desire, 2. intervene in colonial relationship formations organized around cisgender-heterosexual reproduction, and 3. elevate queer love and friendship as sites of social disruption and reimagining. Joining the fields of lesbian feminist studies, decolonial feminist studies, and queer a/sexuality studies, this project forwards queer futures that honor both sexual and nonsexual queer intimacies and their radical interventions against heteronormativity.