Adela C Licona
Adela C. Licona is Vice Chair of the Graduate Minor in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory, Associate Professor of English, and affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies, Institute of the Environment, and Mexican American Studies. Her research and teaching interests include non/dominant rhetorics, cultural, ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies, visual rhetorics, social justice media, critical youth studies, community literacies, action-oriented research, borderlands studies, environmental justice, and feminist pedagogy.
She has published in such journals as Antipode, Transformations, Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Additionally, she has co-published a number of community research briefs with community educator-activists, youth, and graduate students. These policy-relevant briefs have circulated beyond the university across local communities. Adela is co-editor of Precarious Rhetorics (OSUP, forthcoming), Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and author of Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY Press, 2012).
Adela has served as the co-director of the Crossroads Collaborative, a Ford Foundation-funded think-and-act research, writing, and teaching collective designed for action-oriented research on youth, sexuality, health, rights, and justice. Together with graduate students, she is co-founder of Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric, FARR, a group of progressive feminist scholars committed to public scholarship and community dialogue. She was the 2015-16 Co-Chair of the National Women’s Studies Association, NWSA, Conference and is a member of the NWSA Governing Council. She is Editor Emeritus of Feminist Formations, and she serves on the advisory/editorial boards for Feminist Formations, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, a project of Spoken Futures.
https://adelaclicona.com/academia/
She has published in such journals as Antipode, Transformations, Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Additionally, she has co-published a number of community research briefs with community educator-activists, youth, and graduate students. These policy-relevant briefs have circulated beyond the university across local communities. Adela is co-editor of Precarious Rhetorics (OSUP, forthcoming), Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and author of Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY Press, 2012).
Adela has served as the co-director of the Crossroads Collaborative, a Ford Foundation-funded think-and-act research, writing, and teaching collective designed for action-oriented research on youth, sexuality, health, rights, and justice. Together with graduate students, she is co-founder of Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric, FARR, a group of progressive feminist scholars committed to public scholarship and community dialogue. She was the 2015-16 Co-Chair of the National Women’s Studies Association, NWSA, Conference and is a member of the NWSA Governing Council. She is Editor Emeritus of Feminist Formations, and she serves on the advisory/editorial boards for Feminist Formations, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, a project of Spoken Futures.
https://adelaclicona.com/academia/
less
Uploads
This collection features cross-disciplinary contributions from leading scholars, including the editors, to emphasize a materialist-rhetorical approach while also drawing on feminist studies, women of color feminisms, affect studies, critical disability studies, critical race and ethnic studies, medical humanities, sexuality studies, queer migration studies, and human rights and humanitarian studies. While theoretically rich, this volume intentionally features chapters that explore precarious rhetorics as they operate in practice—whether in borderlands, politics, public policy, or the quotidian spaces of human activity.
Published as a chapter in Susan Talburt’s edited collection, Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics (Praeger, 2018).
Our initial research questions are concerned with the ways in which youth slam performance in this space contains the potential for not only response to, but urgent and active movements against, regressive contexts, such as the legislative moves in Arizona that have limited young people’s comprehensive access to narratives of sexuality, health, and rights.
我们于本文中探讨 “拉丁裔威胁” 的种族化建构, 如何作为美国将移民驱逐出境的体制实践的意识形态基础, 同时催化了更为广泛的警备维安实践, 并导致了拉丁裔的能动性与不动性。我们透过对爱荷华州佩里的拉丁裔进行民族志观察与深度访谈, 探讨 “内部边界” 作为对美国心脏地带而言的边界政治和边境修辞的延伸, 探究被强加的能动性和不动性, 并认定拉丁裔所採取的策略性不动性与改变的能动性。
En este artículo exploramos el modo como las construcciones racializadas de una “amenaza Latin@” sirven de apuntalamiento ideológico para las prácticas del régimen de deportabilidad estadounidense, al tiempo que alimentan prácticas de policibilidad de mayor alcance, con consecuencias para movilidades e inmovilidades Latin@s. Con base en observación etnográfica y entrevistas a profundidad con los Latin@ en Perry, Iowa, presentamos una discusión acerca de “la frontera de adentro” como una extensión de políticas fronterizas y de retórica de fronteras para el núcleo continental estadounidense, exploramos las movilidades e inmovilidades impuestas, y también registramos las inmovilidades y alternomovilidades tácticas emprendidas por los Latin@s.
Key Words
deportability, immigrant mobilities and immobilities, Latinos, new gateways, policeability,
驱逐出境, 移民的能动性与不动性, 拉丁裔, 新的门户, 警备维安。
deportabilidad, movilidades e inmovilidades de inmigrantes, latinos, nuevos portales de entrada, policibilidad
Resumen: Esta ponencia explora las dinámicas socioespaciales en Perry, una pequeña comunidad rural que ha experimentado cambios rápidos desde la década de los 90,mayormente debido a crecimiento de la comunidad Latin@. Nuestro enfoque es en lo que llamamos la producción social de visibilidades e invisibilidades Latin@s, las practicas espacialesde individuos, familias, comunidades, e instituciones, que resultan en mayor o menor visibilidad de distintos segmentos de la comunidad Latin@, con consecuencias políticas positivas o negativas, y también con consecuencias para la sobrevivencia/el sustento, y también con consecuencias para la integración. Discutimos el concepto de la “fronterainterna” como una extensión de las políticas y retoricas de la frontera hacia los espacios del interior de los Estados Unidos. También exploramos como el establecimiento de un régimen de deportabilidad crea condiciones de genero y de raza que hacen a l@s Latin@s mas o menos visibles con consecuencias especificas. Concluimos esta ponencia explorando las implicaciones políticas y teóricas de nuestro análisis para lo que llamamos las geografías del poder en los espacios en donde viven y trabajan l@s Latin@s, para las relaciones sociales, los lugares,y los discursos que constituyen y al mismo tiempo son constituidos por dichas geografías.
Keywords: Latin@s, immigrants, visibility and invisibility, regime of deportability, border within, geographies of power
Read full article and watch video.
TENDER R/AGE :: RABIA TIERNA is an interventionist art project that participates visually, textually, and sonically in the collective outcry against the forced separation of migrant and refugee children from their families at the US/Mexico border. Forced separation is not a new practice but one with a long and brutal history connected to colonization, slavery, internment, and imprisonment. This project connects these histories to the specific cruelty being enacted spectacularly on children at present. The photographic setting is designed to highlight the monstrous border policies of forcibly caging children in indefinite and inhumane detention and, as such, evokes the cruelty of the “tender age” facilities and tent cities being produced as part of the ever expanding Migration Industrial Complex. #NEVERAGAINISNOW #NOCAGES
This collection features cross-disciplinary contributions from leading scholars, including the editors, to emphasize a materialist-rhetorical approach while also drawing on feminist studies, women of color feminisms, affect studies, critical disability studies, critical race and ethnic studies, medical humanities, sexuality studies, queer migration studies, and human rights and humanitarian studies. While theoretically rich, this volume intentionally features chapters that explore precarious rhetorics as they operate in practice—whether in borderlands, politics, public policy, or the quotidian spaces of human activity.
Published as a chapter in Susan Talburt’s edited collection, Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics (Praeger, 2018).
Our initial research questions are concerned with the ways in which youth slam performance in this space contains the potential for not only response to, but urgent and active movements against, regressive contexts, such as the legislative moves in Arizona that have limited young people’s comprehensive access to narratives of sexuality, health, and rights.
我们于本文中探讨 “拉丁裔威胁” 的种族化建构, 如何作为美国将移民驱逐出境的体制实践的意识形态基础, 同时催化了更为广泛的警备维安实践, 并导致了拉丁裔的能动性与不动性。我们透过对爱荷华州佩里的拉丁裔进行民族志观察与深度访谈, 探讨 “内部边界” 作为对美国心脏地带而言的边界政治和边境修辞的延伸, 探究被强加的能动性和不动性, 并认定拉丁裔所採取的策略性不动性与改变的能动性。
En este artículo exploramos el modo como las construcciones racializadas de una “amenaza Latin@” sirven de apuntalamiento ideológico para las prácticas del régimen de deportabilidad estadounidense, al tiempo que alimentan prácticas de policibilidad de mayor alcance, con consecuencias para movilidades e inmovilidades Latin@s. Con base en observación etnográfica y entrevistas a profundidad con los Latin@ en Perry, Iowa, presentamos una discusión acerca de “la frontera de adentro” como una extensión de políticas fronterizas y de retórica de fronteras para el núcleo continental estadounidense, exploramos las movilidades e inmovilidades impuestas, y también registramos las inmovilidades y alternomovilidades tácticas emprendidas por los Latin@s.
Key Words
deportability, immigrant mobilities and immobilities, Latinos, new gateways, policeability,
驱逐出境, 移民的能动性与不动性, 拉丁裔, 新的门户, 警备维安。
deportabilidad, movilidades e inmovilidades de inmigrantes, latinos, nuevos portales de entrada, policibilidad
Resumen: Esta ponencia explora las dinámicas socioespaciales en Perry, una pequeña comunidad rural que ha experimentado cambios rápidos desde la década de los 90,mayormente debido a crecimiento de la comunidad Latin@. Nuestro enfoque es en lo que llamamos la producción social de visibilidades e invisibilidades Latin@s, las practicas espacialesde individuos, familias, comunidades, e instituciones, que resultan en mayor o menor visibilidad de distintos segmentos de la comunidad Latin@, con consecuencias políticas positivas o negativas, y también con consecuencias para la sobrevivencia/el sustento, y también con consecuencias para la integración. Discutimos el concepto de la “fronterainterna” como una extensión de las políticas y retoricas de la frontera hacia los espacios del interior de los Estados Unidos. También exploramos como el establecimiento de un régimen de deportabilidad crea condiciones de genero y de raza que hacen a l@s Latin@s mas o menos visibles con consecuencias especificas. Concluimos esta ponencia explorando las implicaciones políticas y teóricas de nuestro análisis para lo que llamamos las geografías del poder en los espacios en donde viven y trabajan l@s Latin@s, para las relaciones sociales, los lugares,y los discursos que constituyen y al mismo tiempo son constituidos por dichas geografías.
Keywords: Latin@s, immigrants, visibility and invisibility, regime of deportability, border within, geographies of power
Read full article and watch video.
TENDER R/AGE :: RABIA TIERNA is an interventionist art project that participates visually, textually, and sonically in the collective outcry against the forced separation of migrant and refugee children from their families at the US/Mexico border. Forced separation is not a new practice but one with a long and brutal history connected to colonization, slavery, internment, and imprisonment. This project connects these histories to the specific cruelty being enacted spectacularly on children at present. The photographic setting is designed to highlight the monstrous border policies of forcibly caging children in indefinite and inhumane detention and, as such, evokes the cruelty of the “tender age” facilities and tent cities being produced as part of the ever expanding Migration Industrial Complex. #NEVERAGAINISNOW #NOCAGES
Adela C. Licona is an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona, and an affiliated faculty member in Gender and Women’s Studies, Institute of the Environment, Mexican American Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies. To follow Adela’s photography, visit MiVidaLandscapes.blogspot.com.
Writing
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s most recent book is Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed 2014). Her new book of poems, Stairway to Heaven, will be out from Penguin in 2016. She is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of Zigzagger, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and What You See in the Dark. He lives in Tucson.
Emma Pérez has published a history book, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, and three novels: Gulf Dreams; Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory; and Electra’s Complex. She is a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
This piece takes place in two (physical and web) locations: Guaymas, Sonora here in Terrain.org, and the Salton Sea in Proximities.
Editors: Aneil Rallin, Robert Koch, and Trixie G. Smith
Feminist pedagogy is defined as a set of epistemological assumptions, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships grounded in feminist theory. To apply this philosophy in the classroom, the editors maintain that feminist scholars must critically engage in dialogue and reflection about both what and how they teach, as well as how who they are affects how they teach. In identifying the themes and tensions within the field and in questioning why feminist pedagogy is particularly challenging in some educational environments, these articles illustrate how and why feminist theory is practiced in all kinds of classrooms.
In exploring feminist pedagogy in all its complexities, the contributors identify the practical applications of feminist theory in teaching practices, classroom dynamics, and student-teacher relationships. This volume will help readers develop theoretically grounded classroom practices informed by the advice and experience of fellow practitioners and feminist scholars. – Publisher description
This article highlights Education/Connection/Action (ECA), a locally developed community pedagogy deployed at a youth activism summer camp that served as a site for a community/academic teaching and research collaboration. Youth considered connections between a set of issues, including a local ban on Ethnic Studies, the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and Youth Sexuality, Health, and Rights. They drew from lived and learned literacies to inform participatory media projects that critically and creatively addressed restrictions on access to local knowledges and information with particular relevance to youth sexuality, health, and rights (broadly defined). In highlighting youth voices, desires, and needs across distinct youth communities, their collaborative productions demonstrated coalitional potential and a collective call for change. We, the youth, believe abstinence-only is not acceptable. Comprehensive sex education is not promoting sex, but knowledge. It's better to be aware, informed, and prepared instead of ignorant and fearful of change. We are a new generation. We are change, tolerance, and understanding. No longer streets gathered of polychromatic lowriders and the competition of Macho Men stuck through cities and cries of " no homo. " We need purified love, acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, and bravery for change. We, the youth, want love, no more ignorant love.
When Rebecca wrote her editorial for the first issue of 2009, she primarily focused on changes external to Feminist Formations. Already at that time, though, changes were beginning to occur for the journal itself. First, over the summer, the editorial board changed the title from National Women's Studies Association Journal to Feminist Formations. This new title more clearly matches our expanded focus. Specifically, we mean to signify that we encourage transnational exploration of issues that relate to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in a wide variety of contexts. Second, in conjunction with that title change, we developed a new mission: Feminist Formations (formerly the NWSA Journal [1988–2009]) cultivates a forum where feminists from around the world articulate research, theory, activism, teaching, and learning, thereby showcasing new feminist formations. An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, we publish innovative work by scholars, activists, and practitioners in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Our subject matter includes national, global, and transnational feminist thought and practice; the cultural and social politics of genders and sexualities; and historical and contemporary studies of gendered experience. The journal values established and emerging lines of inquiry and methods that engage the complexities of gender as implicated in forms of power such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, migration, ability, and religion.
We have assembled an outstanding list of editorial and advisory board members who, through their scholarship and activism, are poised to help us fulfill this mission. Their wisdom has strengthened us in the past and will enable [End Page vii] us to enrich our ongoing and future contributions to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Rebecca's 2009 editorial also focused on the common purposes that we share with the National Women's Studies Association, referring particularly to building feminist community and being committed to promoting both experienced and emerging scholars. While the journal board and the NWSA continue to share common goals, we determined this past year that we can grow independently toward our visions. Feminist Formations will continue to have a presence at the NWSA conference and will partner with them and other feminist organizations in the future when it is generative to do so. Additionally, we wholeheartedly welcome the participation of NWSA members in the journal's development. The various formations that feminism can create are indeed multiple, and both the journal and the organization will continue to contribute to those formations.
We have been working intensely to enrich the resources of Feminist Formations throughout this transition. Toward this end we have an invigorated Web presence. Please visit our Web site, www.cehd.umn.edu/Feminist-Formations, to learn more about the journal and other resources available for you. There, you can also join our Facebook page and check out the many ways to participate in the journal. Additionally, you can look at our new "Formations and Locations" section that will feature short descriptions about feminist endeavors around the world. You can also see a sample article and look at previous tables of contents to find valuable resources for your research, teaching, and activism.
While most of the articles published in this volume were accepted under the NWSAJ's mission, they certainly highlight feminist formations in a variety of contexts and deepen our understandings of gendered lives in myriad contexts...
The task of mobilizing resistive identities within this historic moment of regressive politics looms large to feminist critics, theorists, and activists. We are challenged to forge connections across borders of difference within our communities and around the globe. We can no longer rely on some benign sense of "sameness" to build our identities and serve as the basis of our communities. As long as static identities serve as the unexamined foundation of our alliance base, feminist scholars and activists risk reproducing the same exclusions that we seek to remedy. Further, as long as the individual serves as the unspoken text of our senses of ourselves, we will remain blinded from the transformative power that resides in mutual belonging. More than ever, we need connections that hold a powerful charge, which can compel us to vision, propel us into action, and enable a more possible "feminism."
This cluster of essays in the NWSA Journal is devoted to the task of naming and claiming the conditions of possibility for such connections. We have titled our cluster "Moving Locations: The Politics of Identity in Motion." We use "moving" to evoke the layers of meaning enfolded in the term. "Moving" is spatial and affective—suggesting motion, expansiveness, and the sensation of being compelled forward. We can move from a place where we have been stuck; a work of art or poetry can move us; we can become mobilized to act for justice. We evoke "location" in the wake of Adrienne Rich's early feminist work in which she held herself accountable to her own privileged location as a white Western feminist from the United States (1986). We seek to move Rich's notion of location beyond the genuflection to which it has been reduced within academic feminist discourse (in which the author lists the various axes of power that constitute her identity) to consider location's more nuanced possibilities.
Part of the problem is that much feminist work still operates from notions based in the individual (such as "experience," "agency," "consciousness," "woman") and through rather static notions of identity (Herndl and Licona 2005/in press). To theorize identity categories as a set of practices that constitute and/or discipline a community allows us to become more acutely aware of the exclusionary or inclusive relational practices that tell us who we are. To theorize agency/experience/consciousness/"woman" as collective processes, as movements that arise out of collective struggles and oppositional forms of belonging, is to reconfigure the face of feminist resistance.
The term "location" may be more fully utilized if we refigure it in the spatial, temporal, corporeal, and community bases out of which it emerges (see Massey 1994; Mohanram 1996; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000; Shome 2003). While location and identity often become conflated, a location is both more and less than an identity when understood as shifting over time and across space. We may not be the "same" person in different geographical contexts; what an "identity" means may shift from place to place, and the communities that define us are apt to shift over time. What it means, for instance, to be "queer" varies from bar to bedroom to workplace; what it means to be "American" shifts from India to the United States to Mexico; racialized, gendered, and classed identities may shift from ghetto to boardroom to gated community to classroom. Such locational meanings are contingent upon the communities to which we belong. The meanings we assign to any given identity category emerge through the relational practices in which those categories get played out in our daily lives. Aimee Carrillo Rowe's essay, "Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation," moves "the politics of location" in the direction of community. By interrogating the conditions of belonging out of which our positionalities emerge and shift, Carrillo Rowe poses a coalitional notion of the subject—interpellated by hegemonic forms of belonging, but also capable of reversing interpellation to create resistive, or "differential" belongings.
To help us to clarify the multiple contributions to alliance formation that differently positioned feminist subjects can provide, Sheena Malhotra...
In This Bridge We Call Home, AnaLouise Keating explains that her collaborative work with Gloria Anzaldúa is a call to new expressions of coalition predicated on a spiritual activism that "begins with the personal yet moves outward, acknowledging our radical interconnectedness" (2002, 18). Our efforts in this cluster have been to demonstrate our own interconnectedness and to invite still more connections across academic and nonacademic borders. During our panel presentation on "Moving Locations" at the June 2003 National Women's Studies Association conference, we identified the connection between spirituality and activism. The audience there was hungry for more conversation on this topic. We have attempted to incorporate spirituality as an energy that moves through the pen to the pages of our work to reflect our visions of social justice. In keeping with the values of feminist praxis demonstrated and advocated in our articles, we decided to contribute an "After Words" to our collaboration. These After Words are a third-space expression of integrated practice—the bridgework between theory and practice as well as between hearts, minds, bodies, and souls—in the pursuit of meaning. We offer readers a glimpse into the two years of work that produced the now neatly contained articles in our cluster, as well as the messiness of our lives just beyond the page as that which also informed our efforts and our be-longings throughout this project.
Anzaldúa states that for nepantleras, "to bridge is an act of will, an act of love, an attempt toward compassion and reconciliation, and a promise to be present with the pain of others" on our shared journeys (2002, 4). These reflections reveal the transformative potentials and promises of our work and the hopeful futures we long for. Acknowledging our cosmic connection, we dedicate these reflections to Gloria Anzaldúa who continues to inspire each of us.
Feminist Formations, Volume 24, Issue 1, Spring 2012, pp. vii-xii (Article)Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Milagros Peña's Latina Activists across Borders: Women's Grassroots Organizing in Mexico and Texas (2007) focuses on consciousness-raising work imagined and pursued by women in Mexico and along the Mexico–US border. Peña's comparative study offers readers' insight into women activists who create non-government organizations (NGOs) to address self-identified community needs.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law, and Social Movements addresses the significant ways in which the Latino and Latina populations have shaped the political, legal, and social institutions of the United States, with new and updated scholarship on political movements and organizations, important legal cases, minority-rights laws, and immigration legislation. The over 450 articles featured range from expansive survey essays, to biographies that document the lives of important individuals in Latino and Latina history, to interdisciplinary entries focused on essential themes and issues. Supplemented by over 50 images and a bibliography of suggested readings for each entry, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law, and Social Movements ensures that this timely, increasingly prominent subject receives the reference coverage it deserves.