This article explores how the film Mosquita y Mari lays claim to a sitio y lengua (space and discourse) from which migrant and diasporic lesbians transgress dominant codes of representation. The protagonists of the film do not ask for visibility; instead, they speak through silence and embodied gestures, offering a different approach to queer Latina sexuality that strategically manoeuvres through the burdens of representation. This cinematic register is what I engage as unspoken desires. When Mosquita and Mari imagine alternative futures, they rely on acts of care and mutual support – all the while, leaving their desires unspoken and thus, revealing the potential to create more possible worlds. Overall, I demonstrate that by creating their own sitios y lenguas, through embodied language and silence, the girls reclaim their difference in a world that renders them impossible.
This article was recipient of the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Latino Caucus Graduate Student Writing Award.
This article analyses the messy queer relationships that shape la familia in Tanya Saracho’s show, Vida. It highlights how the show reckons with mess as an affective structure in the lives of queer Latinx subjects, whose racialized sexualities and genders produce intricate subject positions from which to negotiate power. By offering ‘messy queer familias’ as an analytic paradigm, the article tracks the ways in which pleasure, desire, shame and melancholia converge and diverge in the storylines of the two Chicana protagonists, Emma and Lyn. I suggest that Vida tells a messy story about queer Latinx lives, and purposefully so, in order to shine light on messy relations of power. Analysing the manifestation of ghosts, queer kinship practices, the glimmers and wonders of a queerceañera, and melancholic mother-daughter relations, I argue that Vida’s characters make space within la familia for queerness to thrive.
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