Femme! ¿Y Qué?
Sat, Nov 7 - 8:00am - 9:45am Building/Room: The Renaissance DC Hotel / Meeting Room 11
In Session Submission: Queer Belongings: Alternative Modes of Citizenship and Community
Author: *Sandra K. Soto (University of Arizona (AZ))
Abstract: In this moment of FtM- and MtF-pronoun shifts and vibrant queerings of gender altogether (genderqueer, genderfuck), the monosyllabic and well-worn “femme” designation can ring vanilla, anachronistic, flat, essentialist and bland. In “¡Femme! ¿Y Qué?” Sandra K. Soto challenges herself and others to think hard about both the ongoing political work that “femme” can perform and the suggestive theoretical apertures that “femme” can provide. This challenge hinges on three overlapping aims. First, Soto draws on Raymond Williams’s notion of “structure of feelings” to disrupt the reductive tendency of viewing sexual pleasures and sexual subjectivities as either fully determined by political economies or as simply superfluous to the “serious,” “political” demands of theorizing the exigencies of social relations and citizenship under transnational capitalism. For Soto, as for the growing number of queer theorists invested in politicizing affect and rendering feelings public, sexuality is a much more complicated and excessive affair than is allowed for in the determinist accounts of many contemporary theorists. The second aim of this presentation is to de-homogenize femme scholarship and creative texts by illustrating the particular force femme gains when it is elaborated through a lens of racialized sexuality. Soto here offers an in-depth discussion of two examples in the important 1997 publication femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls (edited by Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker): Lisa Ortiz’s “Dresses for My Round Brown Body,” and Gaby Sandoval’s “Passing Loquería.” The presentation concludes largely with Soto’s own critical/personal ruminations on her Chicana femme identity as a mode of belonging. Here Soto makes three uses of her title’s ¿Y Qué? She means for it first of all to perform its in-your-face speech act in the sense of “So What?! What are you going to do about it?” At the same time, she means to take the “So What?” seriously as a theoretical problematic, as indicated in her first aim. Finally, “Y Qué” is the actual name of the working-class cantina that she describes as the site of her homespun tejana Chicana femme identity.
American Studies Association Annual Meeting 2009
for all my femmes out there, my girl sandy’s gonna throw down in dc this weekend.
