People used to work so hard to be free, but we’re lucky here. All we have to do is forget.
—Thompson in Monáe 2018
Abstract
Under the Trump administration, with its claims about “fake news,” speaking truth to power has become simultaneously more pressing and more difficult. “LatinX” has emerged in this context and become a symbol online and in academia for a new collective identity. This paper argues LatinX is deployed to replace, rather than complement, long-standing struggles to recognize gendered identities. This replacement silences the gendered political subject, erodes the basis for posing group claims and undermines struggles to recognize the significance of gender inequality and sexual violence. This paper calls for crafting a collective identity based on a “law of three (or more)”—for example, a/o/x—to reflect our everyday border struggles and hybrid culture.
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Notes
Guidotti-Hernández (2017) suggests Latinx was born on social media in the early 2000s.
Looking at efforts at gender neutrality in France, Timsit (2017) points out that linguistic determinism, the idea that language determines thoughts, and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis “was deemed incorrect by the linguistic community in the 1960s and 70s.”
The reference to sexual and racial violence and morality’s role in lodging demands to end them (in the form of slavery) are intentional.
They suggest “Latina/o/x should be used when the gender of the populations is not known” (Salinas and Lozano 2017, p. 11).
May 2016 was a critical month in the campaign for several reasons that include Trump pulling ahead of Clinton in polls, Republicans deciding they would rather vote for a man, and the intensification of Democratic Party primary elections (Clinton became the party’s nominee on June 6).
“Just an FYI that UC Press, which has many books by Latinx scholars like Natalia Molina, Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Laura Pulido, María Cristina García, Miroslava Chávez-García, Adrian Burgos, and Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara, is having a huge sale,” 9 May, 9:41 p.m.
On the one hand, users claim Latina/o/x is “grammatically clumsy.” On the other hand, they claim LatinX is as inclusive as other identities that are clumsier, such as LGBTTQQIAAP.
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Acknowledgements
I acknowledge Prudence Cumberbatch’s patience, listening as I reflected on the meanings and performances of LatinX. She is not responsible for what I have written here.
