Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique

Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people are not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification.
Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands,” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition.
T. JACKIE CUEVAS is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Cuevas is the coeditor of El Mundo Zurdo 4: Selected Works from the Meetings of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, and she has published in journals such as Latino Studies.