Queer and trans of color critique engages the ways sexuality and gender themselves gain meaning in the context of systems of racial differentiation and, reciprocally, how struggles for justice, abolition, freedom, and decolonization must attend to sexuality and gender as both vectors of domination and sites of liberatory imagination and expression. This chapter considers how attributions of savagery, criminality, and inassimilable alienness to racialized populations in the United States are shaped by narratives of these groups’ inability to enact proper gender and sexuality. The chapter further considers how queer and trans of color critique addresses the specificities in how particular racialized groups are defined through systems of sexual and gender normativity and how they have engaged those systems in multidimensional ways, attending to queer and trans work in Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies. It traces differences and disagreements within those fields and tracks dialogues among/across them.

While recent scholarship in the Latinx nineteenth century has emphasized the print culture processes informing Spanish-language textual production, the field has also been energized by a focus on prominent authors. This article traces the tension between emphasizing a representative subject (author) versus the way print culture provides insight into lived experiences in sociopolitical contexts. The piece turns to debates over the novel Jicotencal and the attraction of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and José Marti as representative figures to trace scholarly developments over the last two decades. Looking toward future directions, the chapter envisions ongoing attention to archival holdings and intersections with critical projects such as queer and Indigenous studies. The last section emphasizes the importance of translation for research in the Latinx nineteenth century.

An introduction to the study of race in American literature.