This panel takes the MLA Presidential Theme, “Family Resemblances,” and turns it on its ear to ask what it means to understand queer kinship through sonic proximities and tonal divergences. Inspired by the recent Unaccountably Queer dossier and thinking with Christine Ehrick’s reflections on vocal gender in Radio and the Gendered Soundscape in Latin America, we explore how sound and gender studies resonate, interrupt, and amplify one another in contemporary Latin(x) American literature and culture. We ask: How might queer and gender theory sound? What kinds of kinship become possible when we listen for the static, pops, and feedback that breach the keynotes of heteronormativity? How might listening as an embodied and relational practice amplify and sustain queer and feminist contestations to patriarchal norms? In lieu of resemblance as shared origin, we listen for resonance—not harmony, but proximity, interference, echo. Sound and gender, brought into restless relation, open new conceptual ground for thinking queer intimacy, survival, and the shifting architectures of kinship.

Drawing on Teagan Bradway’s concept of “queer metarelationality,” we approach non-heteronormative relationality as intentional, fragmentary, and in constant negotiation. Queer kinship lingers in moments when accounts falter, voices stutter, and narratives lose their center—not as failures, but as generative ruptures where relation takes shape through its very indeterminacy. Through analyses of performance, narrative, film, and material poetics, the panel explores how queer expression and feminized listening practices unsettle normative structures of belonging. In “Sonic Activism,” Isabella Vergara analyzes Esto no tiene nombre and Conmoción (1991-96), zines by the Colombian-American poet Tatiana de la Tierra, as sites of sonic activism that produce dissonance and queer Latina coalition-building. Drawing on Julia Bryan-Wilson’s concept of visual activism and Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s theorization of the sonic color line, Vergara shows how the zines activate affective force through tonal fragmentation, graphic density, and linguistic layering to craft an unruly material poetics that sustains kinship through circulation, interruption, desire, and risk.

The panel’s focus then shifts to Mexico, where the staccato beat of what Sayak Valencia dubs “gore capitalism” pierces the nation’s soundscape in the form of hypermasculine violence. Kristina Stajic’s “En el límite de lo sonoro” reads Lobo (2017) by the Mexican novelist Bibiana Camacho and La noche de fuego (2021) by the Salvadoran-Mexican director Tatiana Huezo, to propose that aural intimacy becomes a form of survival in a rural Mexico marked by forced disappearances and gendered violence. Drawing on Ana María Ochoa’s theorization of sound as an ambiguous space where fixed meanings may be transformed, Stajic argues that the sonic tapestry of these works reconfigures notions of subjectivity and affords new modes of listening in/to Mexico’s sociopolitical present. Turning to representations of Mexico’s capital city, Tamara Mitchell’s “Synesthetic Listening and Queer Response-ability” attunes to the ways that Guadalupe Nettel’s sonic novel, La hija única (2020), wields listening as a means of sensing the often-invisible forms of gendered violence permeating contemporary society. She shows how two listening practices—auscultation and acousmatic hearing—render this violence perceptible. In dialogue with Sarah Ensor’s Queer Lasting and Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, Mitchell traces how an embodied, synesthetic listening emerges in the novel to foment modes of queer relationality that supplant heteronormative logic.

Finally, Christina Baker’s “Dragged Attachments” considers the Chicana artist Xandra Ibarra’s video work, F*ck My Life, which performs a strident break from her alter ego, La Chica Boom. Set to the Cuban singer La Lupe’s “Esta es mi vida” and channeling the Mexican actress Lupe Vélez, in FML, Ibarra transforms into a ‘cucarachica’ in a cuir, burlesque negotiation of selfhood that Baker reads alongside Leticia Alvarado’s notion of “abject performance.” Attuning to FML as a sonic cuir set/circuit in dialogue with Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds, Baker shows how Ibarra’s performance drags her brown, femme, Latina forebears into the present, binding herself to their legacy through excess and rejection.

In this way, we turn our attention to how sound invites ethical encounter—exposing the porousness of selfhood, the shifting ground of gender, and the dependencies that constitute any “I.” Demands for vocal coherence—whether in tone, pitch, or readability—reveal themselves as mechanisms of control, and we theorize these feminist and queer sonic practices as subtle but forceful acts of refusal.

‘Range of Perspectives:’ 12-minute interventions by scholars across distinct ranks (PhD student, postdoc, tenure track) from disparate institutions (mid-sized public, small private, large public universities) examine an array of forms, including film, narrative, performance, and sapphic zines. The artists we consider include Mexican, Central American, Latinx, Caribbean, and South American creators, who identify as both queer and cisgendered thinkers.