Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Homecoming Queers treats issues central to the formation of queer Latina identity, subjectivity, and representation. The book makes strong interventions in the transdisciplinary locations that comprise Latina/o literary and cultural studies and cultivates the furthering of our engagement in making social change."Tiffany Ana Lopez, University of California, Riverside
Review
"Offering a whirlwind thematic tour of the most iconic contemporary Latina lesbian performers today, Danielson organizes this critical voyage around the central question of how latinidad and sexuality complicate the concept of home. This book makes a valuable contribution to Latina/o and queer studies and demonstrates the complexity of Latina representations of belonging and homecoming. Recommended."Choice
Synopsis
Homecoming Queers provides a critical discussion of the multiple strategies used by queer Latina authors and artists in the United States to challenge silence and invisibility within mainstream media, literary canons, and theater spaces. Marivel T. Danielson's analysis reveals the extensive legacy of these cultural artists, including novelists, filmmakers, students and activists, comedians, performers, and playwrights. By clearly discussing the complexities and universalities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class intersections between queer Chicana and U.S. Latinas, Danielson explores the multiple ways identity shapes and shades creative expression. Weaknesses and gaps are revealed in the treatment of difference as a whole, within dominant and marginalized communities.
Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.
Synopsis
Originally published in 1932, Kathleen Tamagawa’s pioneering Asian American memoir is a sensitive and thoughtful look at the personal and social complexities of growing up racially mixed during the early twentieth century. Born in 1893 to an Irish American mother and a Japanese father and raised in Chicago and Japan, Tamagawa reflects on the difficulty she experienced fitting into either parent’s native culture.
She describes how, in America, her every personal quirk and quality was seen as quintessentially Japanese and how she was met unpredictably with admiration or fear—perceived as a “Japanese doll” or “the yellow menace.” When her family later moved to Japan, she was viewed there as a “Yankee,” and remained an outsider in that country as well. As an adult she came back to the United States as an American diplomat’s wife, but had trouble feeling at home in any place.
This edition, which also includes Tamagawa’s recently rediscovered short story, “A Fit in Japan,” and a critical introduction, will challenge readers to reconsider how complex ethnic identities are negotiated and how feelings of alienation limit human identification in any society.
About the Author
Marivel T. Danielson is an assistant professor of literature and cultural studies at Arizona State University.
Table of Contents
Queering Home
Speaking Selves
Moving Violations
The Birdy and the Bees
Complicating Community
The Erotics of Home
Dancing with Devils
Live Theory