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Queering the Border: Essays
“You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words.” In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Pérez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality.
A Chicanx queer lesbian “who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions” that limit women’s choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues—including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men—that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences.
Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.
A Chicanx queer lesbian “who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions” that limit women’s choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues—including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men—that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences.
Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.
163 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2022
About the author
Emma Pérez
63 books15 followersEmma Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas/El Paso, has written numerous essays in feminist theory and is author of the novel, Gulf Dreams.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 27, 2026
I wonder, did you get your kink on, Sor Juanx? On austere nights, did you grip a flogger or paddle and slap inside your thigh, imagining her or someone like her? Self-flagellation has its perks but it is a lonely gesture for a well-versed lover. And penance? No, Juana, repentance is for fools, don’t you agree? Tendencies unfamiliar to the common taste are still judged harshly. Come with me now and we’ll visit carnal dungeons and stations of the cross where women dance and writhe and stretch pliant arms and leg taut against a wooden scaffold, keen to play candid games.
May I tie your wrists and ankles to a steel crosspiece and with pointed lashes wake your spirit?
Femaleness, on the other hand, is socially constructed to be collective, intuitive, creative, life-affirming the other. But women who accept the symbolic law of the father perpetuate it and in essence become like men, women in drag. They might as well be men because they defy bonding with women, allude that men are superior and therefore more worthy of their intimacy.
"The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in US is the betrayer."
-Gloria Anzaldúa
Once when I met Gloria for dinner in Santa Cruz, she looked at me with a glint in her eye and said, "Te ves bien butchona." I was so pleased with her compliment that shortly after that evening, I went shopping for more butch-like attire. A Chicana jota whom I respected had encouraged me after all. I'm sure it wasn't a coincidence that I ran into Gloria at the Gap when I bought my favorite blue work shirt in the men's department. I've had that shirt for nearly a decade. What was once blue is now faded powder blue. The cuffs are frayed, the pockets ripped, yet I refuse to throw it away. Not until recently, when I remembered that Gloria had been present the day I bought that shirt, did I realize why I still need to see it hanging in my closet. The shirt reminds me of the playful glint in Gloria's eye.
She not only understood the cultural insinuations of butch-femme identities, but she also reattirmed those cultural manifestations through her idiom, mita y mita'
half and half. She pointed out, "I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within (Borderland/La Frontera 1987, 19).
—Emma Pérez
May I tie your wrists and ankles to a steel crosspiece and with pointed lashes wake your spirit?
Femaleness, on the other hand, is socially constructed to be collective, intuitive, creative, life-affirming the other. But women who accept the symbolic law of the father perpetuate it and in essence become like men, women in drag. They might as well be men because they defy bonding with women, allude that men are superior and therefore more worthy of their intimacy.
"The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in US is the betrayer."
-Gloria Anzaldúa
Once when I met Gloria for dinner in Santa Cruz, she looked at me with a glint in her eye and said, "Te ves bien butchona." I was so pleased with her compliment that shortly after that evening, I went shopping for more butch-like attire. A Chicana jota whom I respected had encouraged me after all. I'm sure it wasn't a coincidence that I ran into Gloria at the Gap when I bought my favorite blue work shirt in the men's department. I've had that shirt for nearly a decade. What was once blue is now faded powder blue. The cuffs are frayed, the pockets ripped, yet I refuse to throw it away. Not until recently, when I remembered that Gloria had been present the day I bought that shirt, did I realize why I still need to see it hanging in my closet. The shirt reminds me of the playful glint in Gloria's eye.
She not only understood the cultural insinuations of butch-femme identities, but she also reattirmed those cultural manifestations through her idiom, mita y mita'
half and half. She pointed out, "I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within (Borderland/La Frontera 1987, 19).
—Emma Pérez
April 5, 2023
Emma Pérez has had such an enviable career as a writer/academic. Beginning with her novel Gulf Dreams, the important essay “Notes from a Chicana Survivor,” and her incredible work The Decolonial Imaginary, she’s made such an impact on Chicanx studies and Chicana feminist thought. I was hoping in this collection of older and some newer writings I could see a new stage in Pérez’s thinking. But most of it for me was a rehash of her (still important) ideas from her monograph. Her essay on what she calls “the will to feel” was interesting and suggestive but still in development. I don’t guess we’ll see another full-length from her in which she’ll be able to flesh it out.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews