“In the Borderlands you are the Battleground…”
This essay explores the Pulse Night Club Shooting that took place on June 12, 2016 in Orlando, Fl, U.S.A. I make the case for a reading of the deadly event as more than an LGBTQ hate crime and establish a more complex framework that appreciates the ethnoracial, spiritual, and queer dimensions that foregrounded the event. I maintain June 12 is emblematic of a battleground of a sacred space (Latin night at the gay bar) for queer bodies of color, which necessitates a different model of theorizing, one that can crystalize the sexuality of terrorism, the whiteness of homonationalism, and thereby the importance of creating sacred space for Latinx queer subjects, many of whom, in the context of June 12, form part of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
DOWNLOAD“Musing: Inhabiting Philosophical Space: Reflections from the Reasonably Suspicious”
A first-person perspective on the experience of marginalization and exclusion in academic philosophy. One of my first pieces of academic writing, this essay continues to resonate with many who have been silenced in the discipline.
DOWNLOAD“Stylized Resistance: Boomerang Perception and Latinas in the Twenty-First Century”
This essay explores the complexity of the perceptual epistemological structures that comprise boomerang perception in the work of Maria Lugones. I focus on the lived experiences of Latinas and consider the ways in which boomerang perception plays out as part of social and cultural life by specifically looking at the way in which Latinas have become part of a commercialized
homogenized identity. I argue that such constructions evoke a fake/ real dichotomy that is rooted in the internalization of boomerang per- ception, which can be resisted through the insights offered by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa on conocimiento.
“Writing Belonging: An Antillean Conversation Between Luisa Capetillo and Ofelia
Rodríguez Acosta”
This essay comparatively reads the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta offer unique and under-appreciated perspectives on what I term the assemblages of belonging that resist the regulatory normalization of sexuality and the reduction of the maternal body as the source of home and place making in the context of Puerto Rico and Cuba respectively. Belonging is assembled through tactics that are always already decentered given the status of womanhood and its interpellations in the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century, which was performatively accomplished through the acts of writing and reading.
DOWNLOAD“Writing to be Heard: Recovering the Philosophy of Luisa Capetillo”
Luisa Capetillo (1829-1922) has been heralded as the first feminist writer of Puerto Rico. In this paper I recover the philosophy of Capetillo as part of a Latin American and Caribbean philosophical tradition and center the importance she on places sexuality in class politics. Specifically, I focus on her attention to the intersection between gender equity and class
emancipation as well as the role of education in unlearning the social norms that engendered the marginalization of working people and working women.
“Feminisms of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean”
This essay explores the philosophical productions of women from the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Here the Caribbean is understood as a multiplicitous and polyphonic space that exists amidst modernities engendered by colonization. I present the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Petronila Angélica Gómez, Ochy Curiel, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Yomaira Figueroa as fertile philosophical starting points from which to frame a feminist tradition of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean that appreciates the multiple and often conflicting body of ideas that emerge from within a sea of islands.
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