Resistant Bodies in the Cultural Productions of Transnational Hispanic Caribbean Women

Reimagining Queer Identity

By (author) Irune del Rio Gabiola

Hardback - £75.00

Publication date:

27 December 2016

Length of book:

168 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498520775

Resistant Bodies in the Cultural Productions of Transnational Hispanic Caribbean Women: Reimagining Queer Identity examines the art created by several Caribbean women who use literature, film, graphic novels, music, testimonios, photographs, etc. to convey social justice, democracy, and new ways of re/imaging marginal identities. In using Chela Sandoval’s theories on methodologies of the oppressed, Irune del Rio Gabiola argues how the tactics Sandoval offers can be productively applied to the cultural productions analyzed. The author explores how the protagonists of all the cultural productions this book focuses on developing tactics to create new possibilities and alternatives for self-fashioning. Particularly, del Rio Gabiola reconsiders concepts such as shame, failure, unbecoming, hermeneutics of love or flexible bodies as methodologies of the oppressed that propose decolonizing emancipatory techniques in a transnational arena.
Irune del Rio Gabiola’s work analyzes the lesbian body as a site that re-envisions notions of un/becoming, queer family, space, and belonging. Drawing on Chela Sandoval’s ‘methodology of the oppressed,’ del Rio Gabiola carefully examines the work of Caribbean writers and artists and demonstrates how their particular representation of queer and transgendered bodies productively disrupts dominant notions of national identity and authority. This book brings together remarkable works from a diverse array of media (i.e. novel, graphic novel, hip hop, performance art) connected to their shared thematic attention to issues of gender, sexuality, and transnational mobility. del Rio Gabiola convincingly argues that these works, collectively, invite us to reimagine the power of the lesbian body.