Curations of a nepantlera: Forever Betwixt and Between Inés Estrada’s Impatience (2016)

Abstract

This article takes as its subject Impatience, a self-published collection of short and medium-length comics made between 2012 and 2016 by Mexican comics artist Inés Estrada. Inspired by the queer curations of Gayatri Gopinath (2018), I develop a curatorial reading of Estrada’s comics in dialogue with the work of Chicana theorist and writer Gloria E. Anzaldúa. I draw especially on Anzaldúa’s take on the Nahuatl concept of nepantla and her theory of the nepantlera, that is, those who offer strategies for tactically navigating the transitional, whether that is via their writing, healing practices, art, and/or activism. My close reading of three comics in the collection, namely “The multiverse is inside of you / You are inside of the multiverse”, “Cenote”, and “Víbora”, examines how Estrada gives form to the epistemological, affective, and embodied materiality conveyed by Anzaldúa’s nepantla. My aim is to situate the account of the human presented by Impatience within a transtemporal genealogy of Latina and women-of-colour feminist and queer thought. In keeping with this, I argue that Estrada’s collection envisions the human body as a material entity that communes with the nonhuman and the environment, and it does so by experimenting with the specificities and formal capacity of the comics medium.