SUNY, Genders in the Global South

Consuming Citizens offers a fresh conception of twentieth-century Mexican cultural production by critically tracing the underside of mestizo modernity. Examining a diverse corpus that includes poetry, song, avant-garde film, and more from the 1920s to '80s, the volume uses queer, feminist, and psychedelic theories to understand counterculture-and especially different acts of consumption-as a way of creating culture and alternative social structures. Practices of consuming media, sex, and drugs become means of generating community among subjects who have been marginalized by the nominally inclusive mestizo nation. Consuming Citizens thus rethinks nationalism, citizenship, and society in relation to, and as creations of, countercultural bodies.

Shows how representations of sapphic desire can subvert or sustain prevailing norms of gender, sexuality, and power in Mexican texts from the 1980s to the 2010s. Drawing inspiration from the 2020 Marcha Lencha-"Lesbian March"-in Mexico City, Alejandra Márquez expands the concept of lenchitudes into a critical framework for thinking about gender and sexuality more expansively and inclusively, beyond essentialist identity categories. Assembling a lesbian archive that stretches from the publication of Rosamaría Roffiel's cult classic Amora in 1989 to the 2010s, Lenchitudes argues that sapphic representation in contemporary Mexican narrative subverts but also reinforces patriarchal norms. Sapphic narratives, Márquez argues, are not inherently queer but rather can uphold binary gender roles, heteronormativity, and monogamy. Bridging literature and activism, and putting theorists such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz into conversation with Latin American scholarship, Lenchitudes boldly joins ongoing debates about the place of queerness, or lo cuir, in Latin America.