A Return to El Mundo Zurdo: Anzaldúan Approaches to Queer of Color Worldmaking and the Violence of Intersectional Heteronormativity. Issue 4 (1st October 2020) - Gutierrez-Perez, Robert
Abstract: Utilizing the path of conocimiento as a theoretical lens, the author provides a discourse analysis of El Mundo Zurdo to offer understandings gained from the communicative processes of grieving and healing from the intersectional violence of heteronormativity. Specifically, the author analyzes the discourses found within three special issues/forums published on the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, to flesh out the shared and unshared cultural values, beliefs, and norms under intersectional contestation within the LGBTQAI community. Further, the author critiques the violence of intersectional heteronormativity by remembering and archiving the processes that queer people undertake to make livable worlds that exist alongside the master narrative. As a different temporal structure, queer worldmaking, when actively worked on and against through a process of resistance, reflexivity, and agency, interrogates rhetorics of race, violence, and normative temporalities. The temporal turn in the disciplines of rhetoric and communication studies, if it is indeed a turn, must be an embodied or performative turn as well; otherwise, categories of difference, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, will continue to be met with violence in academic publication venues, tenure/promotion and hiring practices, and in other larger, macro spheres of power and control.