A Return to El Mundo Zurdo: Anzaldúan Approaches to Queer of Color Worldmaking and the Violence of Intersectional Heteronormativity

Abstract

Utilizing the path of conocimiento as a theoretical lens, the author provides a discourse analysis of El Mundo Zurdo to offer understandings gained from the communicative processes of grieving and healing from the intersectional violence of heteronormativity. Specifically, the author analyzes the discourses found within three special issues/forums published on the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, to flesh out the shared and unshared cultural values, beliefs, and norms under intersectional contestation within the LGBTQAI community. Further, the author critiques the violence of intersectional heteronormativity by remembering and archiving the processes that queer people undertake to make livable worlds that exist alongside the master narrative. As a different temporal structure, queer worldmaking, when actively worked on and against through a process of resistance, reflexivity, and agency, interrogates rhetorics of race, violence, and normative temporalities. The temporal turn in the disciplines of rhetoric and communication studies, if it is indeed a turn, must be an embodied or performative turn as well; otherwise, categories of difference, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, will continue to be met with violence in academic publication venues, tenure/promotion and hiring practices, and in other larger, macro spheres of power and control.

Keywords:

• Intersectionality
• performance rhetoric
• queer temporality
• queer worldmaking
• violence of heteronormativity

Notes

1 AnaLouise Keating, an Anzaldúan scholar and Chicana feminist scholar, explains that El Mundo Zurdo represents “relational difference” and is consider one of Anzaldúa’s “earliest, least discussed concepts” (Anzaldúa, Reader 322). This research not only builds on this concept within Latinx, Chicanx, and women’s studies but also introduces this concept to the discipline of communication studies. For Anzaldúa, El Mundo Zurdo had many ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions, but when the term is “applied to alliances, it indicates communities based on commonalities, visionary locations where people from diverse backgrounds with diverse needs and concerns coexist and work together to bring about revolutionary change” (Anzaldúa, Reader 322).

2 Discussing the promise and challenges of queer theory, Gust Yep explains that “queer worldmaking is the opening and creation of spaces without a map, the invention and proliferation of ideas without an unchanging and predetermined goal, and the individual freedom and collective possibilities without the constraints of suffocating identities and restrictive membership” (“Violence” 35).

3 Gust Yep describes the violence of heteronormativity as follows: “[H]eteronormativity is a site of unrelenting, harsh, unforgiving, and continuous violence for LGBTQ individuals. Such violence is everywhere: in the individual psyche and in collective consciousness, in the individual perceptions and experiences and in the social system and institutions” (“Violence” 25).

4 Normalization, according to Gust Yep, “is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values” (“Violence” 18).