While Latina literature cannot be understood as an absolute phenomenon but rather as a heterogeneous cultural practice drawing from the diverse genealogies of women’s specific ethnic backgrounds, the attempt to challenge gender norms, heteronormativity, and power relations must be considered paramount. As demonstrated in the influential writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, the act of writing is a powerful tool of liberation that embraces the potentiality of collective creativity and oppositional consciousness, what this essay terms the insubordination of Latina literature. This approach foregrounds texts that formulate discursive acts in which literary and political categories propose radical social and cultural transformations. I begin by examining the works of Anzaldúa and Moraga, whom I consider prominent contributors to a U.S. Latina literary renaissance emerging after the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements. In the essay’s second half, I trace the development of U.S. Latina literature in the 20th century’s last two decades and the 21st century, reading Latina literature in the context of queer, lesbian, and feminist epistemologies.

This chapter examines the gender and sexual politics of the Iranian Students Association (ISA), the US affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union) (CISNU), which was the largest anti-shah opposition formation during the 1960s and 1970s. While the participation of CISNU in the creation of pan-Third Worldist solidarities has been established, Iranian foreign student activists have been left out of narratives of the emergence of Third World feminism as an outgrowth of women’s commitments to the anti-imperialist movements of the era. The author argues that the efforts of some ISA members to challenge gender hierarchies, and to place the struggle for women’s equality on the immediate organizing agenda – rather than postpone this goal until after the arrival of socialism – represent gestures toward an anti-imperialist feminism that was severely constrained by historical and ideological circumstances. Nonetheless, these gestures are important for subsequent generations of Iranian diasporic feminists to parse, as they contain ideas crucial for reimagining transnational feminist solidarities today. Through close readings of interviews with former ISA members and movement literature, the author traces a genealogy of Iranian revolutionary gender consciousness rooted in an analysis of the intersections between patriarchy, empire, and dictatorship.