Queering Mestizaje

Queering Mestizaje employs theories of postcolonial cultural studies (including performance studies, queer and feminist theory) to examine the notion of mestizaje - the mixing of races, and specifically indigenous people with European colonizers - and how this phenomenon manifests itself in three geographically diverse spaces: the U.S., Latin America, and the Philippines. Alicia Arrizon argues that as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites. Arrizon offers new, queer readings of the hybrid, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldua, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Walter Mignolo and Vera Kutzinski, while challenging accepted discourses about the relationship between colonizer and colonized. ""Queering Mestizaje"" is unique in the connections that it makes between the Spanish colonial legacy in the Philippines and in the Americas.