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 Chicanx butch lesbians and Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people as not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification.

Expanding on Gloria Anzaldua’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.