Presented By: Latina/o Studies
“flip. peasant. spanish.: Gender, Defective Spanish, and Linguistic Incapacity in the Comparative US-Mexican-Philippine Borderlands”
Please RSVP to obmora@umich.edu to receive copy of chapter. Snacks will be served!
Drawing on comparative ethnic studies, this paper examines the comparative affinities between Chicana/o and Filipina/o racialization in the US-Mexico Borderlands through a postcolonial disability optic. By including the Philippines as a borderlands where US transpacific imperialism and Spanish colonialism have historically overlapped – the very same colonial projects that have informed the various formations of the US-Mexican corridor – I propose a re-consideration of the border as an “herida abierta”, as iconized by Gloria Anzaldúa, as a Chicana disability theory that helps to explain the comparartive racializations of Filipino postcoloniality. Through a consideration of Brian Ascalon Roley’s Filipino-Chicano novel, American Son (2001), alongside Borderlands/La Frontera, I develop the concept “linguistic incapacity” to examine the vulnerabilities of linguistic colonialism and the racial embodiments and defects of language.
I use Anzaldúa canonical chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, which proposes the liberation and maintenance of defective disabled Spanishes (“somos las del español deficiente), as a lens to understand American Son’s representations of wounded “castrated” Filipino masculinities within a US-Mexican borderscape. I interpose the critiques of “racial castration” of Asian American queer studies alongside the wounded tongues of Chicana feminist theory to suggest that in American Son the disability of castration is rehabilitated through the mixed-race mis-recognition of Filipinos as Latinos in a US racial imaginary. The “castrated mestizo” represents the intersection of Chicano and Filipino embodiment. I attempt to understand the polysemous Filipino body, whose provenance is a “Hispanic Asia”, through the optic of Chicana feminist theory. This inevitably leads me to the question of “Flip Spanish” - a “wild tongue” that is not characterized by the preservation of anomalous Spanish but rather through its absent presence, a condition I term “linguistic incapacity”. What can absence, linguistic defect, and language deficits tell us about the comparative racial projects of US imperialism? What can the “racial errors” of misrecognition bring to disability theory? Finally, what can comparative ethnic studies gain from expanding its modes of inquiry to include disability? What does comparative Filipina/o and Latina/o scholarship look like?
Drawing on comparative ethnic studies, this paper examines the comparative affinities between Chicana/o and Filipina/o racialization in the US-Mexico Borderlands through a postcolonial disability optic. By including the Philippines as a borderlands where US transpacific imperialism and Spanish colonialism have historically overlapped – the very same colonial projects that have informed the various formations of the US-Mexican corridor – I propose a re-consideration of the border as an “herida abierta”, as iconized by Gloria Anzaldúa, as a Chicana disability theory that helps to explain the comparartive racializations of Filipino postcoloniality. Through a consideration of Brian Ascalon Roley’s Filipino-Chicano novel, American Son (2001), alongside Borderlands/La Frontera, I develop the concept “linguistic incapacity” to examine the vulnerabilities of linguistic colonialism and the racial embodiments and defects of language.
I use Anzaldúa canonical chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, which proposes the liberation and maintenance of defective disabled Spanishes (“somos las del español deficiente), as a lens to understand American Son’s representations of wounded “castrated” Filipino masculinities within a US-Mexican borderscape. I interpose the critiques of “racial castration” of Asian American queer studies alongside the wounded tongues of Chicana feminist theory to suggest that in American Son the disability of castration is rehabilitated through the mixed-race mis-recognition of Filipinos as Latinos in a US racial imaginary. The “castrated mestizo” represents the intersection of Chicano and Filipino embodiment. I attempt to understand the polysemous Filipino body, whose provenance is a “Hispanic Asia”, through the optic of Chicana feminist theory. This inevitably leads me to the question of “Flip Spanish” - a “wild tongue” that is not characterized by the preservation of anomalous Spanish but rather through its absent presence, a condition I term “linguistic incapacity”. What can absence, linguistic defect, and language deficits tell us about the comparative racial projects of US imperialism? What can the “racial errors” of misrecognition bring to disability theory? Finally, what can comparative ethnic studies gain from expanding its modes of inquiry to include disability? What does comparative Filipina/o and Latina/o scholarship look like?
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