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Chapter 14 - Diaspora, Displacement, and Belonging

The Politics of the Family and the Future of Queer Kinship

from Part IV - Key Words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

By
Richard T. Rodríguez
Edited by
Siobhan B. Somerville
Siobhan B. Somerville
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Through an examination of Henrique Cirne-Lima and Josué Pellot’s 2010 documentary film I Am the Queen about transgender Puerto Rican beauty queen pageants in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, this chapter discusses how queer diasporic communities in the US navigate family and kinship in light of racial, sexual, and gender difference. Underscoring the importance of decentering conventional notions of kinship while remaining attuned to the way “given” families may in fact link up to “selected” families for purposes of communal sustenance and endurance, the chapter highlights the film’s aim to represent alternative formations of family and kinship as they relate to diaspora and displacement. Ultimately, Cirne-Lima and Pellot’s film offers a vision of the struggle to belong in the context of the loving competition of the beauty pageant while also accounting for the struggles of historically marginalized and maligned communities such as the transgender Puerto Rican women the documentary represents.

Keywords

FamilykinshiptransgenderChicagoqueerPuerto Ricansbeauty pageantsdiasporaHumboldt Parkdocumentary film
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies , pp. 215 - 227
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

Acosta, Katie L. Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Amin, Kadji. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” In Undoing Gender, 102–30. New York: Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, Elizabeth. The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Franklin, Sarah, and McKinnon, Susan, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkeswood, William G. One of the Children: Black Gay Men in Harlem. Edited by Costley, Alex W.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Leckey, Robert, ed. After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship. New York: Routledge, 2014.Google Scholar
Moore, Mignon. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood Among Black Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, Heather. Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rifkin, Mark. When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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