UC Santa Cruz

Desiring a Better Life: Heteronormativity, Mobility, and Generational Negotiations Among Latinas examines how heteronormativity (normative gender and sexuality) and undergoing a mobility experience of either migration or higher education shapes Latinas' gender and sexual subjectivities as well as generational conversations of sex, pleasure, and dating among mother-daughter dyads. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 53 college-going daughters and 11 of their migrant mothers, digital and in person ethnographic observations with 7 daughters, and a discourse analysis of 78 Tik-Tok videos utilizing the hashtag “#hotcheetogirl,” I offer heteronormativity matrix of domination, a framework rooted in intersectionality, Black feminist thought, and transnational feminist theory, for examining how multiple, historical, context-specific formations intersect to shape the social construction of heteronormativity. As such, my first chapter examines how national U.S. and regional power relations in Los Angeles produce the gender and sexual pathologization of low-income Latinas. The second chapter employs this framework to analyze how these relations rely on and. reproduce several discourses of heteronormativity, including the “hyperfertile” Latina immigrant, “disposable” immigrant, “chola,” and "hot cheeto girl,” and delineates the implications it has on daughters’ mobility trajectories.

This project also encourages mobility scholars to consider how migratory and educational experience shapes generational gender and sexual formations. I do this in Chapter 3 by utilizing a heteronormativity matrix of domination to delineate how the sexual politic of uno nunca sabe (you never know what bad thing(s) can happen) that migrant mothers draw on to teach their daughters about sex reflects how mothers’ migratory journeys and first-hand experiences with heteronormativity and other structural inequalities in Latin America and the U.S., shape Latina daughters’ college-going experiences and subjectivities. In Chapter 4, I employ my theoretical framework to examine how daughters’ new desires and pleasures as a result of going to college provide further insights into the various axes of power shaping heteronormativity. Similar to their mothers, daughters’ mobility experience and discourses of heteronormativity inform the ways in which they talk to their mothers about sex. Many daughters encourage their mothers to explore new desires and sexual pleasures. Overall, this project contributes to Sociology, Sexualities, Gender Studies, and Feminist Studies as it reveals that gender and sexuality are critical sites for resisting and reproducing intersecting inequalities, such as poverty, racism, and nation-making projects like settler-colonialism and imperialism.