"Shifting the Site of Queer Enunciation: Manuel Muñoz and the Politics of Form"

a workshop with

Ernesto J. Martínez

Monday, November 28, 2005
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Carmen Sanjuán-Pastor, Graduate Student in Spanish and Portuguese, Stanford University

Professor Martínez's paper will be available in advance of the workshop. For a PDF of the reading, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: To familiarize oneself with the literary production of queer writers of color is, arguably, to witness the importance of crafting a subjective voice for the abject desiring body. One need only peruse the work of writers as diverse as Richard Bruce Nugent and Gil Cuadros, Anne Shockley and John Rechy, Gloria Anzaldúa and Essex Hemphill, among others, to see firsthand the importance of writing one's desires, experiences, and politics into history and sociality. Having said this, when and how do queer writers of color differ from these important traditions and what conceptual and critical consequences arise from such departures? This paper offers a preliminary answer to this question by turning to the work of queer Chicano writer Manuel Muñoz and arguing that his debut collection of short stories, Zigzagger, develops a provocative, multi-focal narrative approach to queer experience and identity. This peculiar approach astutely decenters queer speaking subjects in order to equitably disperse narrative responsibility for queer experience and identity. By shifting the anticipated "location" and articulation of queerness--moving it from the queer subject proper to the queer subject's siblings, friends, parents, and neighbors--Muñoz not only transfers some of the burden of queer representation, but also exposes the web of relationships that constitute queer experience and queer identity in any given context. Indeed, Muñoz's approach breaks away from understandings of the social that deny queer subjects of color their relational interconnections with various people, histories, and ways of thinking.

Ernesto Javier Martínez, Assistant Professor of English and of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton University, received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1998 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2005. Professor Martínez teaches courses on American multi-ethnic literature, LGBTQ studies, US Latina/o Literature, and literary theory. He is currently working on a book, entitled Queers of Color and the Ethics of Social Literacy, which examines the contributions of queer ethnic literature to contemporary theory. He is also co-editing, with Eric-Christopher Garc’a and Michael Hames-García, an anthology of gay male Chicano/Latino criticism.

Carmen Sanjuán-Pastor is a 4th year Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. Her interests pivot around issues of gender construction and sexual identity, the representation of cultural marginalities and exclusions, and the articulation of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses in urban spaces such as Madrid, Buenos Aires and Mexico City.