11 - Queer America

Summary

In A Queer Mother for the Nation (2002), Licia Fiol-Matta looks critically at the political and literary career of Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral. Fiol-Matta analyzes, in particular, the “queer” aspects of Mistral's life: a series of affairs with women, a non-normative gender presentation perhaps best described as “female masculinity,” and a spectacularly nonreproductive maternal identity. Mistral's career as internationally renowned educator and poet depended upon her paradoxically maternal but celibate role as “Schoolteacher of America.” Fiol-Matta's study considers how these non-normative features of Mistral's life were deployed to abet state-sanctioned heteronormativity, patriarchy, and a racialized nationalism. Dominant understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and nation were consolidated - in Chile and across Latin America - not in spite of but through Mistral's demonstrable queerness.

From the perspective of the late 1980s, perhaps, one could make the case that in the United States, such a queer consolidation of dominant discourses was unthinkable. Queerness, in the United States, seemed at the time to mark the very limits of citizenship. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, new forms of public dissent and civil disobedience had emerged, increasingly understood as “queer activism.” In the academy, likewise, new forms of critical analysis developed, called – from the early 1990s on – “queer theory” or “queer studies.”