Queerness, Racialization, and Latinidad

Abstract

Laura Grappo's first book, Conjured Bodies: Queer Racialization in Contemporary Latinidad, is an innovative exploration of the ways that the ambiguities of Latino identity have broader implications for race politics in the United States. Grappo argues that Latinos are both excessively visible and easily erased, and that the vexed status of Latinos in US culture not only puts Latino subjects into positions of precarity but also can function to bolster whiteness and promote anti-Blackness. She also shows how gender and sexuality are active components of these processes.The book comprises four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. In the introduction, Grappo situates herself in ongoing conversations within Latino studies about race, racialization, and Latinidad. In addition, she offers a theoretical justification for the notion of “conjuring,” or the ways the malleability of Latino identity and brownness get deployed and marshaled for purposes that impact Latinos and other racialized groups. In the first chapter, Grappo explores the famous case of the San Antonio Four, in which four young queer Latinas were catapulted into the “satanic panic” of the late 1980s and early 1990s and ended up incarcerated for child molestation. In the chapter she explores a documentary about the case, Southwest of Salem (2016), and what happened to one of the women in the aftermath. Her smart analysis of the documentary offers an important corrective to the taken-for-granted scholarly assumption that the film does only positive representational work. Moreover, her move to analyze one of the women's advocacy work after incarceration, as situated in Texas and along the Mexico-US border, is truly original and is convincing in the way that Grappo argues for the instrumentalization of some queer Latinos in the service of state projects while still relegating so many others to death and isolation.The second chapter takes the infamous case of Lorena (Gallo) Bobbitt of penis-severing notoriety. Here, too, Grappo details the instrumentalization of Latina/o/x identity, showing how in the 1990s and again in the 2010s in the wake of #MeToo when Gallo's story returned to the public eye, Gallo's proximity to whiteness, her immigration status, and her gender performance worked together not so much to make her seem a worthy victim (although her sentence was light), but to simultaneously promote immigration policy that attended to domestic violence and bolster white feminist appeals to addressing sexual and domestic violence. The analysis in this chapter is truly innovative, as Grappo deftly moves through different time periods and sets of discourse. Although the argument about the instrumentalization of Latina immigrant womanhood is convincing, Grappo might have pulled the argument about queer racialization through more fully.Chapter 3 considers what happened to the US football player Aaron Hernandez, who in 2017 committed suicide while incarcerated for murder and was posthumously discovered to have had severe brain damage from taking too many hits on the field. Here, Grappo delicately and respectfully handles the questions surrounding Hernandez's sexuality as rumors circulated at the time that he may have been a closeted gay or bisexual man. Grappo is careful not to fall into the predictable traps of using repressed sexuality as a justification for violence. Instead, she shows how his race, gender, and sexual identities intermingled with his athletic prowess and wealth to form a narrative about Hernandez in the media that fashioned his criminality and untimely death as logical outcomes while minimizing the damage to his brain that football caused. Importantly, Grappo introduces notions of anti-Blackness in this chapter, showing how the ambiguity of non-Black Latino identity makes it possible for anti-Black discourses to constitute figures like Hernandez because he was a large football player, known to be aggressive, and stereotypes associated with these characteristics are often saved for Black male athletes.Chapter 4 further articulates Blackness with the ambiguities of Latinidad. Grappo begins with a discussion of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who claimed transraciality and identified as Black, and Caitlyn Jenner, the US decathlete who announced her gender transition in 2015. Grappo discusses these cases to make a sophisticated argument that claims to a transracial identity are not analogical with being transgender, but the fluidity of Latinidad makes some claims to transracial identity at least theoretically possible. In this way, the fluidity of Latino racial identities can be deployed in the service of problematic analogies that suggest if transgender is possible, transracial should be too. In the second part of the chapter, she considers how debates about the racialization of Afro-Latinos often animates anti-Blackness, naming anti-Blackness as constitutive of Latinx identity. Here she focuses primarily on another athlete, Sammy Sosa. Sosa, an Afro-Dominican baseball player, received much criticism after his retirement for using skin lightening creams and being evasive about it. This chapter perhaps makes the most creative, original argument of the entire book.In the conclusion, Grappo makes a forceful intervention into recent thinking in Latinx studies, particularly around the concept of “brownness,” as put forth foremost by the late José Esteban Muñoz. Although I wish Grappo had cited Muñoz's 2020 posthumously published book, The Sense of Brown, instead of or in addition to the earlier articles she cites, I am nonetheless convinced by the caution she issues about a tendency to promote a concept of brownness as a sense over and against the realities of phenotype. In light of the analyses she's offered that show the stakes of the ambiguity of Latinidad, Grappo rightly wonders, “If Latinx subjectivity produces brown feelings, can the experience of brown feelings produce Latinx subjects?” (162). Thus, Grappo's wariness about this idea of brownness is a powerful reminder of the stakes of theory and the necessity of always keeping theoretical musings in tension with the dangerous political realities of the day.As with any first book, there were some underdeveloped places. I longed for additional scaffolding to take me through the arguments, particularly in the transitions between chapters. I would have also liked for Grappo to more accurately situate the beginnings of anti-Latinx discourse in the United States, not in the 1990s, as she suggests (10), but at least in the early twentieth century. Although the 1990s may have been a time of extreme anti-Latinx sentiment thanks to the effects NAFTA had on south-north migration and the nativism that emerged with the loss of working-class jobs in the United States, anti-Latinx sentiment characterized much of the twentieth century, at least since the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924. This is well documented by historians, and it would have been worth it to pay more attention to that historicity. Nevertheless, for graduate and undergraduate courses on race and sexuality, the book is incredibly teachable and should make a lasting impact in both queer and Latinx studies.