Afterword: Scanning the Chicana lesbian body politic: knowledge, practice, identity

Abstract

Chicana Lesbians The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About ushered in the fulfillment of editor Carla Trujillo’s vision for an anthology that would recognize and demystify the existence of Chicana lesbians. Our deep and critical affection for Trujillo’s anthology prompts us to acknowledge the expansive potentiality of Chicana Lesbians yet also recognize the historical specificity of its relevance and legibility. While our deep affection urges us to reflect on the myriad ways to love on an object like Chicana Lesbians including how this text has been read, engaged, and critiqued, we also acknowledge—just as Trujillo opined in the anthology’s introduction—that we, too, want and need more. A reappraisal of this text requires that we recognize how scholars, activists, and artists may unwittingly be relying on thematic approaches and methods of construction popularized in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Rather than perceive these inclinations on purely nostalgic, unimaginative, or regressive terms, we instead understand these tendencies as callings­ to return to earlier submerged moments and techniques. Such phenomena surface via a Covid-19 pandemic temporality, slowing time and thus shaping how to reevaluate the palimpsestic outlines of Chicana lesbian cultural and scholarly production. Guided by these traces, we are arguing that Trujillo’s anthology formed what would become the Chicana lesbian body politic forged at the crossroads of Chicanismo, women of color feminism, lesbian identity politics, working-class consciousness, and transnational solidarity sensibilities. Chicana Lesbians provided some early queerly racialized sexual grammars that continue to circulate in the present evidenced through the authors’ uses and references in both volumes of this special issue.