April 18, 12-2pm

Professor Sandy Soto Brown Bag Talk

De-Mastery of Desire: Reading Chican© Like a Queer

Women's Studies Conference Room

Chicana/o literary and cultural texts have long been approached through two overlapping presuppositions: they offer instructive reflections of the material social processes that racialize and oppress peoples of Mexican descent living in the US; they help constitute and mobilize an oppositional Chican© public for politically contesting racism in the US. What happens when the burdens of transparent reflection and of an identity politics squarely focused on race are lifted from the texts and from the readers/viewers? When reflection is shattered? When Chican© representations thwart our desires for mastery (of knowledge, of agency)? When what they offer up instead is the unknowable, unthinkable, unsayable? In “De-Mastery of Desire: Reading Chican© Like a Queer” Sandra Soto takes up these and other questions.