Queering the Border: Essays

by Emma Pérez

“You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words.” In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Pérez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality.

A Chicanx queer lesbian “who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions” that limit women’s choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues—including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men—that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences.

Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.

163 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2022

About the author

Emma Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas/El Paso, has written numerous essays in feminist theory and is author of the novel, Gulf Dreams.

Reviews

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emma Pérez has had such an enviable career as a writer/academic. Beginning with her novel Gulf Dreams, the important essay “Notes from a Chicana Survivor,” and her incredible work The Decolonial Imaginary, she’s made such an impact on Chicanx studies and Chicana feminist thought. I was hoping in this collection of older and some newer writings I could see a new stage in Pérez’s thinking. But most of it for me was a rehash of her (still important) ideas from her monograph. Her essay on what she calls “the will to feel” was interesting and suggestive but still in development. I don’t guess we’ll see another full-length from her in which she’ll be able to flesh it out.