#queer latinidad

[queerlatinidad-blog]

Cuando aún las abuelas te aman #elpoderdelmachismo

-dmw

[joteria-y-poesia]

This is not a story about love,

This is a story of anger and frustration, euphoria and ecstasy. its about us owning the night, sharing our presence with the moon and all its light; becoming familiar with its many phases as we went back and forth  Sometimes full sometimes empty sometimes all but never none

We gave each other what little we had of ourselves and hoped it was enough to last us through the night. Like knots we became tangled, struggling to become undone, as the stubborn dents we left in each other, marked what we could not erase.

We could not stop; continued without ever knowing what we wanted - other than each other in that very second. We transcended borders, boundaries, lines. unraveled concepts of love, revealing the inevitable cycle between chaos and creation through every encounter

Like a mountain, We formed through the opening of the earth accompanied by the destruction of all we knew as stable. Like a volcano, we erupted burning everything down in our path, embracing the newly formed rocks our lava created but never calling them home. Like the wind we are free but unstable, unreliable, ungrounded. We a hurricane; we a tornado; we a soft breeze, caressing each other as we pass on by as nothing more than acquaintances sometimes.

This is not your ordinary narrative of friends and lovers Friends first, always lovers; In between and all around,  We explored each other and ourselves at the same time. Behind closed doors, four walls witness in silence the ways in which we became an ocean and dove in. Cleansing our minds. celebrating our bodies. tasting the waters that retained the remnants of past lovers exchanging stories. experiences of gains and losses, life and death, joy and grief

We knew of love without having known tended each others wounds without intending we came and became without ever speaking ourselves into existence

R.T.C

[joteria-y-poesia]

En el Nombre de Nadie

Por la señal de la santa cruz Before I learned how to talk, I learned how to percinarme How to paint a giant cross on my body with the image of a man on each end. I learned that my body was never meant to be my own; It was a temple that was not mine I learned that my sole purpose in this world  was to serve men and sacrifice my wants and needs for theirs I learned that catechisms and baptisms were a bigger stepping stone in life Before loving my body and myself

De nuestros enemigos I was outed to my parents when I was 18 years old that same night we prayed the rosary three times ruega por ella ruega por ella ruega por ella My dad told me I needed help that it was ok to be confused but not for too long he blamed my moma for not talkin to me about what it means to be a mujer he told me I needed to read the word of God His word So I did and it told me to kill myself And that I was never meant for this world My existence was reduced to nothing but sodomy before  I could even look at my naked body in the mirror much less find it “sexy” He taught me the language of shame and I spoke it as if it were my native tongue

Libranos Senor, Dios nuestro Every time they tried to save me I died a little I had to meet with priest after priest “but how feminine do you feel?” they’d ask giving me a scale 1-10 to measure all my flaws Sundays became a time to repent and reflect on what I couldn't change  I drank the blood of christ wishing it would cleanse me  drank more and learned what it meant to be numb

En el nombre del Padre I learned that God does not judge  unless you are a mujer My life, dictated by men padre y hijo who refused to call themselves machistas only because they'd never lay a hand on a women but every golpe behind their words said otherwise as I neatly folded away my “no’s” into the pockets of my shame and spoke a silence that kept me safe and kept them happy they wanted to pray the gay away so I became my own religion instead:

Por la senal de la santa Jota de nuestras compañeras líbranos de estas chingaderas en el nombre del pinche padre y del puto hijo Fuck your machismo!  y de ese pinche abismo  me salvo yo

R.T.C

[forsythia37]

dear healthcare provider

Dear Healthcare Provider:

I just wanted to thank you for being kind and generous with me today, your difficult patient who didn’t want to talk much and tried to dictate their own care and frowned during the entire appointment, feeling exposed, hurt, scared, worried about cost and humiliation.

See for me, being sick or injured, as a trans person, as a person underinsured by medicaid, as a person living under the dead limb of student debt in an economic storm--sick or injured is the most vulnerable place I can be. The scariest place I know is up on that examining table, every inch of skin I expose to you during our medical encounter a mile of inroads I have given you. I am weary, I am wary. I am taut to snap back if you show yourself a trap, a bully with a stethoscope, a critic on call.

Thank you for intuiting that I was not grumpy for the sake of grumpy, but worried about cost, slipping me a much-needed supply for my healing that would have been a squeeze in my budget, a budget already stretched thin on imagined money, loans and credit cards. I am up to the neck in debt and forever climbing, even while knowing that some day soon there are medical expenses coming that should be (but won’t be) covered by insurance, and that those things will cost me more than a whole year of college, more than a third of my annual income in my yet-to-entered field, my yet-to-be-gotten job.

Thank you for intuiting that I was not being stoic for machismo, but stoic because the masculinity I was socialized to does not go to the doctor til that dying breath, and while I am working on cowboying down and learning that having my masculinity recognized in the world does not mean self-neglect, I live with my father in my head calling every injury and illness overreacting, so if I am unprepared to tell you how and when I hurt, it is because there is a devil on my shoulder telling me self doubt is the best reaction to somatic pain. It is a long road, and my heart is only beginning to learn how to listen to the rest of my body.

I work in healthcare because of how hard it is for me to access it. So thank you for taking down the gate for an hour, so I too might have that thing we all need, care for the carer.

Respectfully, A trans nurse

[thisistherising-blog]

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is was if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

[nyupress]

This Throwback Thursday, we're unearthing this classic from 2003: Queer Latinidad, by Juana Maria Rodriguez. Give us some of that steamy discursive action!

[swbutch]

"This breaking down of categories, questioning definitions and giving them new meaning, moving through spaces of understanding and dissension, working through the critical practice of "refusing explanation" is precisely what queerness entails. 'Queer' is not simply an umbrella term that encompasses lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, two-spirted people, and transsexuals; it is a challenge to constructions of heteronormativity."

Juana María Rodríquez, Queer Latinidad