Abstract
This essay examines chisme as a form of feminist knowledge production. Various scholars have theorized gossip as an oral practice of sharing information to affirm and/ or police membership in social groups. Using Josefina López’s play Real Women Have Curves (1996), this essay queers chisme as an antinormative feminist practice, defining it as a culturally specific homosocial form of bonding that reconfigures emotional security beyond the boundaries of heteronormative kinship structures. I begin by exploring the historical and political processes linked to global capitalism, the feminization of labor, and heteronormative US immigration policies, illustrating how these systems of containment discipline Mexican women to specific heteronormative networks of emotional security. I then articulate chisme as a “slippage” of this imposed discipline by theorizing the ways in which chisme deploys its own performative erotic power within global capitalism, allowing immigrant women to create an alternative definition of emotional security that centers community, fights back against patriarchy, and produces feminist knowledge. In this way Mexican immigrant women’s discourses are not only feminist acts but also political countersites of revolutionary love.
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