Bernadette Marie Calafell

What Is This “Post-” in Postracial, Postfeminist… (Fill in the Blank)?

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

Reading Latina/o images: interrogating Americanos

This essay explores the visual and discursive elements of Americanos, a published collection of photographic images of Latina/o life in the United States. While clearly a mass‐market text intended for enjoyment and edification, Americanos also serves as a mass‐mediated rhetoric through its location and its representation of Latina/o life and cultural practices. We argue that, in this role, Americanos serves the project of a critical rhetoric by articulating a vernacular rhetoric, and we explore how the verbal and visual fragments in Americanos invent a Latina/o community while reifying Latina/o differences. We conclude that Americanos implicitly critiques how Latina/o identities have been flattened and distorted by dominant discourses.

Contesting Neoliberalism Through Critical Pedagogy, Intersectional Reflexivity, and Personal Narrative: Queer Tales of Academia

In this article, we use personal narrative to explore allies and alliance building between marginalized people working in and through higher education, with an eye toward interrogating the ways in which ideologies of neoliberalism work to maintain hierarchy through the legitimation of othering. Inspired by Conquergood (1985), who calls scholars to engage in intimate conversation rather than distanced observation, we offer our embodied experiences as a way to use the personal to reflect on the cultural, social, and political. Our narratives often recount being out of place, moments of incongruence, or our marked otherness. Through the sharing of these narratives, we will demonstrate the possibility for ally building based in affective connections forged through shared queer consciousness, paying particular attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideologies, such as individualism and postracism, may advance and impede such alliances.

Envisioning an Academic Readership: Latina/o Performativities Per the Form of Publication

As we write this introduction, we are envisioning you reading it. As scholars of color, we have been trained within mostly White universities in which we were assigned mostly White-focused research articles and told that these were our universal intellectual canons. As students we completed our readings, wrote our papers, and attended our conferences, all the while asking ourselves individually and to each other, ‘‘Did these scholars ever envision us reading their works, us citing them in our own work, and us attending their public talks?’’ We often answered to ourselves and to each other, ‘‘No.’’ Luckily for us, we were also retrained to include audiences of color in our writings. This retraining came from the scant amount of scholars of color who were our mentors, but it also came from some of our White mentors. As we were retrained, we were asked to include reading audiences at the nexus of many identity valences, some of which represented our own and some of which did not: queers, feminists, the physically challenged, the undocumented.. .. In our own scholarship and in the work of the scholars that we admire, we find that not every audience is always well considered. However in our most cherished academic writing, the inclusive attempt is there for a breadth of audience readers even when the topic may be a narrow subject. This Latina/o Performativities special issue developed out of need. While Latinas/ os are the largest ‘‘minority’’ group in the United States, little academic work in the Communication field has been attendant to our communities, thus neglecting how these communities are both adding to and changing the academy’s theories and practices. This absence was this special issue’s impetus and drove our call for essays that theorized and explained the intersection of performance and latinidad. Just as there is no utilized English translation equivalent for ‘‘latinidad’’ (i.e., latinivity?), there is also no Spanish translation equivalent for ‘‘performance.’’ Moving from the

Pro(re-)claiming Loss: A Performance Pilgrimage in Search of Malintzin Tenépal

This performance ethnography examines the authors pilgrimage to Mexico City in search of Malintzin Tenépal. The essay seeks to contribute to the Chicana feminist project of reclaiming the narrative or voice of Malintzin Tenépal by means of autoethnographic narrative, as opposed to more standard prose or poetic forms. By embodying Malintzins story through her own, the author creates or reclaims her own voice and narrative through a performative process of “working through” a loss or grief that is projected as both personal and social.

Buscando para nuestra latinidad: Utilizing La Llorona for Cultural Critique

Abstract This essay analyzes the contemporary constructions of Latina/o identity, Latina/o gender and Latina/o nationality as evidenced in the self-proclaimed “first major studio comedy to reflect the Hispanic cultural experience in America,” Chasing Papi. The contradictions between the films progressive mission and the films representations are teased out by a cross-reading of the films usage of the popular Chicana/o mythic figure, La Llorona. Invoking La Lorona as muse and means, we find that the Latin Lover stereotype succeeds in its anti-assimilationist task while concurrently furthering confusion on who and what is a U.S. Latina/o. However, the authors also demonstrate how cultural cross-readings can provide hope out of delimiting discursive constructions.

Monstrous Femininity Constructions of Women of Color in the Academy

This article centers the experiences of women of color in academia by placing my narrative alongside literature about shapeshifters/werewolves and racism and sexism in the academy. I use my narratives as a queer feminist of color in the academy to draw parallels between these experiences to explicate how women of color are constructed as monstrous Others. Through the performative rendering and naming of this parallel or metaphor the author hopes to evocatively implicate and draw readers into action or spaces of resistance.

Identities on Stage and Staging Identities: ChicanoBrujo Performances as Emancipatory Practices

We examine Chicano on the Storm, performed in 1991 by Richard Montoya of the theater group Culture Clash, and Border Brujo, performed in 1990 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña to explore the ways that the performances stage identities. We contend that the performances advance commentaries about the cultural milieu shaping Chicana/o identities and the notion of a foundational “Chicano” identity by performing psychic trauma so that struggles and tensions may be exorcized. Subsequently a ChicanoBrujo subjectivity is possible. Both performances yield insights about the confluence of culture, performance, and narratives that position us to advance the contours of a decolonial performance practice that melds insights from cultural performance scholarship with that of emancipatory cultural concepts derived from Mexican oral tradition.

The Future of Feminist Scholarship: Beyond the Politics of Inclusion

My feelings about the status of feminist scholarship and Womens Studies in Communication as it approaches forty are conflicted. I celebrate the journal as a space for publishing work that centers ...

Brownness, kissing, and US imperialism: contextualizing the Orlando Massacre

The mass murders committed during Latin Night at Pulse, an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, on June 12, 2016 provide us with an important moment to reflect not only on the increase of violence and hate crimes in the United States, but also on the relationship between US imperialism and queerness. The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured another 53 before he was eventually killed by police after a three-hour standoff. The majority of those murdered were Latinx. Reports indicate that Mateen was upset by the sight of two men kissing all the while engaging in sex with men while married to a woman. The sight of this kiss was said by his relatives to be his motivation to commit the crime. Certainly, statements from Mateen’s family demonstrate the power of public same-sex kissing that Morris and Sloop have explored. In this brief essay, I will further the discussion provided by Morris and Sloop to consider how, as Pérez argues, “The shaming of brown bodies is fundamental to dominant US cultures, among them now a dominant queer culture.” What are the multiple layers of meaning public same sex kissing signify when put within the larger context of US imperialism and homonationalism? I am concerned, as I have been in the past, with considering the affective politics that bring together those of us who fall under the category of brown. Like Pérez, I understand brownness as “a kind of constitutive ambiguity within US racial formations.” This brownness “is opportunistically and systematically deployed at times of crisis—as instanced by the intensified race profiling authorized by 9/11.” Brown people are not privy to the official national affect connected to white middle-class subjectivities and citizenship. Our performances are read as failures in a game that “is rigged insofar as it is meant to block access to freedom to those who cannot inhabit or at least mimic certain affective rhythms that have been preordained as acceptable.” The citizenship of brown folk in the United States, particularly those who are Arab and Latinx, is continually called into question both at the governmental level and in daily microaggressions in a political environment that becomes increasingly dangerous for us. I do not write to excuse Mateen in any way. I am invested in pushing the discussion deeper to consider how the intimate relationship between US imperialism and homonationalism should be implicated in any discussion of the Orlando murders. The disposability of brown bodies both domestically and across the globe in the “war on terror” concerns me, as does the potential appropriation of this act of violence in the name of homeland security and redrawing lines around citizenship.