Women of color—across literary, musical, and theoretical traditions—mobilize performance, space, and embodiment to resist patriarchal, racialized, and heteronormative systems that attempt to contain or define them. Bringing together analyses of U.S. Black feminist performance, Queer Chicana spatial theory, and Latina pop and hip-hop cultures, this panel considers how women use artistic forms to negotiate cultural surveillance and produce alternative modes of identity, desire, and agency. Though emerging from distinct cultural and historical contexts, the three papers collectively explore how gendered subjectivity becomes a dynamic, performed response to systems that render women’s emotions, bodies, and linguistic practices legible only when they conform to established norms.

Existing work in feminist affect studies, Chicana feminist theory, and Latinx performance studies has given scholars conceptual tools for understanding emotion, spatiality, and sexuality as political terrains, yet these fields are rarely brought into sustained conversation. This panel fills that gap by offering a comparative, interdisciplinary framework that places nineteenth‑century literature, twenty‑first‑century visual albums, Chicana poetic theory, queer Latina rap, and transnational pop performance in dialogue. Together, these papers reveal how performance functions as a critical feminist epistemology.

Situating this conversation within foundational theories by Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, and Gloria Anzaldúa, these papers respond to contemporary debates about racialized emotional legibility, the politics of Queer Chicana identity, and the evolving representation of Latina sexuality in U.S. media. Feminist scholars have long explored the politics of affect and embodiment, but the panel demonstrates that these frameworks must expand to account for new cultural forms and performances—from Beyoncé’s highly mediated visual storytelling to Becky G’s translanguaging and Snow Tha Product’s spatialized queer poetics.

The session is structured to fit within a standard 75‑minute format: each of the three presenters will speak for approximately 15 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes at the end for open discussion. The discussion period is intentionally unstructured to invite comparative dialogue across the papers, encouraging attendees to draw connections among the shared themes of space, visibility, emotional legibility, and gendered performance.

Nicholas Dertinger’s paper examines how often women’s emotional expression is framed as madness within patriarchal systems and how that framing is negotiated through gendered performance across literary and popular cultural forms. Bringing together Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” from Lemonade (2016), I argue that both works stage femininity as a performance shaped by medical, domestic, and cultural surveillance. In each text, women’s emotional responses—grief, anger, jealousy, despair—are regulated, pathologized, and rendered illegible unless they conform to patriarchal expectations of composure and restraint.

Building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the borderlands as embodied, spatial, and sexual sites, Marina Malli traces their legacy in the music of Snow Tha Product. Malli argues that Snow’s depiction of a Queer Chicana subjectivity is inextricably linked to space inhabitation, as showcased in the lyrics “Ni de aquí ni de allá”4 to describe bisexuality, and “Mire, aquí ni santas ni putas/ Ni pa' allá ni pa' acá, aquí no hay rutas”5 to indicate Chicanx womanhood. Not unlike Anzaldúa, Snow’s spatial praxis is seen in her occupying the liminal space of the border, embodying in her music the liminal (im)possibility of the in-between, “neither here nor there.”

Javier Ramírez Franco’s paper turns to Becky G to argue that her performances of hypersexuality—while navigating racialized patriarchal norms—become frameworks for autonomous sexual agency. Anchored by the 2025 documentary Rebecca, which focuses on her career, and her video for "Mayores featuring Bad Bunny", Franco additionally propose that her performance of Latinidad rejects notions of linguistic purity as a marker for Mexicanidad through her translanguage that draws from English, Spanish, and Spanglish. The paper proposes that Becky G models a shift in Latina representation, recasting sexuality and bilingualism as sites of empowerment rather than constraint.

The presenters on this panel represent multiple stages in an academic career—graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, and faculty member. Additionally, their research is situated in different modern languages, and they represent multiple gender identities.