‘Over There’ and ‘Back Then’: An Odyssey in National Subjectivity

Abstract

In this paper I explore the ways in which Latinas, young US-born Mexican-descent teenage girls, construct national belonging through difference: corporeal, spatial, and temporal difference between themselves and their Mexican contemporaries, young Mexicanas. Specifically, I analyse their representations of Mexico and Mexicanas, in narratives of their own and others' travels, and experiences of living, ‘over there’ and ‘back then’. I argue that, in and through an engagement of body image with national narratives and transnational hierarchies, the young women intervene in and reproduce hegemonic narratives of nation and gender. In so doing they simultaneously construct a transgressive modern national subjectivity for themselves and a regressive domestic subjectivity for the young Mexicanas, both of which are fixed in place and ordered differentially in time.