“Queer/Trans/Feminist Fronteras” examines the sexual politics of borderlands and border crossings in contemporary Latin American cultural production. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa laid the groundwork for thinking about the entanglements between the geopolitical borders dividing nations and the sexual, racial and cultural borderlands inscribed in the minds and bodies of marginalized people. “The Borderlands,” she writes, “are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.” These borderlands are no less physical than the literal border separating Mexico from the United States: rather than a metaphor, the sexual borderlands experienced by women, queer and trans people appear as ramifications of the colonial violence that left a “1,950 mile-long open wound” on the landscape of the Southwest.

Borders are recurring figures in queer theory and politics, though not always in ways attuned to the imbrications of sexuality and colonialism. When sexual otherness is treated as a borderland experience defined by its marginal position vis-à-vis heteronormative society (Fuss), “the border” becomes abstracted from its spatial moorings and instead signifies a fungible site of transgression, escape, inclusion or discovery (Brady). This is particularly apparent in separatist imaginaries that reproduce settler-colonial relations in their projections of queer and feminist utopias onto “frontier” territories walled off by new borders (Fawaz; Jennings). Other areas of queer studies could benefit from reflection on the entanglements between corporeal and spatial borders. If the political weight of sex lies not in its ability to reaffirm identity, but to shatter the borders of the individual and potentiate new forms of being in common (Davis and Dean), how is this un-bordering of the self haunted by the geopolitical and racial borders traversing the places and bodies where it unfolds? What does a politics of self-shattering mean for subjects already marked by colonial fissures, such as Anzaldúa’s mestiza, Peruvian cholas (O. Rodriguez; Wiener), champurria Mapuches (Catrileo), or Black transnational migrants (Drullard)?

This panel engages with a range of Latin American “border feminisms” (Meloni) as well as scholarship on queer and trans migrations (Gómez-Peña; La Fountain-Stokes; Rizki; JM Rodríguez; Valencia) to re-entangle the sexual politics of borders with site-specific racial and geopolitical borderlands. The four presentations explore how queer and trans representations disrupt, transgress, reinscribe or expose the borders of the nation, family, and the body. The speakers—two professors and two graduate students from North and South America—consider these questions across diverse geographic contexts, limiting their remarks to ~12 minutes to allow ample time for unstructured discussion.

María Alexandra Arana Blas begins by analyzing how queer Peruvian literature has reckoned with the Asian-Peruvian diaspora. Using the concepts of ornamentalism, “racist love,” techno-orientalism and “Asia-Latin America as method,” she discusses Enrique Planas’ novel Kimokawaii (2015) and the fanzine Las exploradoras de la luna (2021) as examples of texts that interrogate national and sexual borders through characters who question capitalist and imperialist structures of time, space and the human.

Elizabeth Russ turns to Dominican writer Rita Indiana’s novel Nombres y animales (2013), a coming-of-age/coming out story about a 14-year-old girl whose personal struggles and friendship with a Haitian immigrant become intertwined with the complex transnational relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Gesturing toward the Haitian/Dominican borderland as a marginal space both fraught with dangers and permeated with possibility, the novel exposes and contests the borderlands of race, gender, sexuality and (trans)national identity.

Mathilda Shepard continues this discussion by analyzing Tell Me When You Die (2015), Borderhole (2017) and Goodbye Fantasy (2019), three experimental films by US filmmaker Amber Bemak and Colombian performance artist Nadia Granados that explore how their transnational lesbian relationship is haunted by the spectral presence of “the border between Colombia and the United States.” Using pornographic vision to penetrate political, corporeal and virtual borders, Bemak and Granados perform spectral mediations that disrupt fantasies of queer utopia.

Marcus Valadares centers the borders of religion and the family in Advento de Maria (dir. Vinicius Machado, 2020), a Brazilian coming-of-age film about a transgender girl named Maria and her friendship with her Black neighbor, Lena. Although Maria is initially rejected by her family and the Catholic church, Lena offers her the possibility of exploring new bodily and spiritual experiences through the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. Maria’s contact with Candomblé allows her to bend the borders of Catholicism and her family, creating space for herself within these circles and challenging trans marginalization in Brazilian cinema.