Introduction to the special issue: Transnational discourses of peripheral sexualities in the Hispanic world

Abstract

This special issue examines how the fluid historicity of peripheral sexualities are driven by their dynamic transformations, displacements, and reformulations throughout history, having been produced, interrogated by, and represented through discourses of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and more recently are shaped by the forces of globalization and migration, among other influences. Scholars foster new critical dialogues on the artistic, literary, and linguistic forms through which these sexualities have been articulated and on the new centers that peripheral sexualities often establish in the evolution of human sexuality, societal norms, and creative uses of language. The studies demonstrate how intersections of sexualities and ideologies form critiques of normativity, whether that normativity be heteronormativity, homonationalism(s), or other orthodoxies linguistically tied to sexualities. Central to the explorations in this volume is an attention to how language is deployed in multiple media and genres, from visual and performance pieces that disrupt and reaffirm traditional colonial relationships, to politically engaged literature that grapples with questions of identity, agency, and memory, to subversive films that question revolutionary paradigms or reimagine them for a postnational world. These studies focus on examples from Spain, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia, and Puerto Rico that engage the dynamics of periphery and center, national and transnational, and the liminal spaces mediating between these polarities, all spaces constituted by language and sexuality.