Post-Borderlandia

Honorable Mention, 2018 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association
2019 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist​

Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people are not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification.

Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands,” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition.

T. JACKIE CUEVAS is an associate professor in the department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Cuevas is the coeditor of El Mundo Zurdo 4: Selected Works from the Meetings of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, and she has published in journals such as Latino Studies.

"Post-Borderlandia is a necessary read for scholars of both Latinx literature and queer/trans studies, offering exciting new takes on classic texts and drawing attention to lesser-known cultural artifacts."

"Post-Borderlandia is a valuable book for scholars in the fields of Hispanic and Chicanx cultures and those who study gender and queer theory; this work combines all in a way that is both insightful and fascinating for the reader....Cuevas takes Anzaldua’s work and expands upon it beautifully, bringing her ground-breaking work of the 1980s into a more contemporary context that will be of interest to many scholars."

"Cuevas’s invigorating appraisal and persuasive readings of under-examined yet pivotal texts and writers, refreshing refusal to adhere to the sex/gender binary, and stunning ability to link history with critical theory breathes new life into Chicano/a literary and queer studies."

"Building on and moving beyond the work of Gloria Anzaldua, Post-Borderlandia interrogates the queer Chicana literary archive through the lens of gender variant critique. Arguing that gender non-conformity shapes understandings of queerness in Chicanx literary texts, this original and provocative book theorizes a movement beyond the binaries of white lesbianism and heteronormative Chicanidad, examining the normative projects of borderlands theory and queer of color critique to claim post-borderlandia as a site where gender variance opens up new potentialities for Chicanx subjectivity. A beautifully written, challenging, and ground-breaking text."

"Post-Borderlandia indeed creates an archive showing that gender variance is central to Chicana literature. Further, it shows that such intersectional non-normativity is, in the words of Rosario Castellanos quoted by Cuevas, “Otro modo de ser humano y libre” ‘Another way of being human and free’"

"Cuevas makes a critical intervention into the body of scholarship concerning Chicana/o/x LBGTQ literature....Readers will certainly find value in Cuevas’s analytical acumen [and] some may wonder which other Chicanx texts could have been brought under this lens: how might a gender variant critique be marshalled to examine Chicanx and non-Chicanx characters and open new possibilities within Chicana/o/x cultural productions? In this way, Cuevas has done the significant work of illuminating what had long been ignored."