Imagining Latinx Intimacies addresses the ways that artists and writers resist the social forces of colonialism, displacement, and oppression through crafting incisive and inspiring responses to the problems that queer Latinx peoples encounter in both daily lives and representation such as art, film, poetry, popular culture, and stories.
In a time when walls and borders are being erected, Edward Chamberlain’s urgency to build bridges connecting differences, becomes an imperative effort to create safe spaces for new coalitions to flourish. Physical or imaginary, these geographies are necessary to sustain a sense of belonging, healing, community and self-development that will ultimately empower Latinx groups. Chamberlain’s book contributes, therefore, to a growing literature on Latinx and queer studies by shedding light to new aesthetic and political interventions based on intersectional intimacies.
Imagining LatinX Intimacies highlights queer social relations and the analysis of different types of space in contemporary literature and film by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and Chilean American lesbian and gay artists in the United States. Edward A. Chamberlain’s provocative readings of geography, family, and society illuminate how art creates community, challenges orthodoxies, and works to transform our lives.
Imagining LatinX Intimacies highlights queer social relations and the analysis of different types of space in contemporary literature and film by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and Chilean American lesbian and gay artists in the United States. Edward A. Chamberlain’s provocative readings of geography, family, and society illuminate how art creates community, challenges orthodoxies, and works to transform our lives.
Through an analysis of intimate, quotidian, and unassuming spaces, Imagining Latinx Intimacies presents a timely analysis of Latinx LGBTQ artists and authors creating new artistic and virtual spaces to cultivate intimacy, community, and connections. Chamberlain deftly illustrates how Latinx LGBTQ people challenge the imposition of U.S.-based heteronormativity while creating spaces that celebrate and nourish queer intimacy.
Imagining Latinx Intimacies explores brilliantly the connectivities between Latinx gender and sexual identities and the formulation of new sites of intimate spatiality, redefining what it means to be queer and Latino/a/x in Latin America and across the Latin American diaspora in the US. Through insightful and probing analyses of poetry, short fiction, personal narrative, film, and visual art, Edward Chamberlain examines alternative queer/Latinx worlds in the making from reformulations of home space to the crafting of public spaces of intimacy and community resistant to racism, homophobia, transphobia, displacement, and the effects of colonisation. A major contribution to comparative queer studies that investigates new spaces of belonging that have emerged as critical responses to damaging and oppressive social relations.
Imagining LatinX Intimacies provides a thoughtful application of queer experience and theory to multimodal artistic examples of queer Latinx relationships. Chamberlain provides an interdisciplinary discussion about the myriad, and often innovative, ways that Latinx queers create intimacy in diverse spaces. Drawing on artistic exemplars, such as film, novels, paintings, poems, and memoirs, Chamberlain urges readers to consider new ways to (re)conceptualize family and relationships for Latinx queers.
Edward A. Chamberlain is Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma, USA