UC Riverside

Gothic studies often understands the figure of the ghost as seeking resolution to unfinished business while monsters are understood for their “otherness,” but in Latinx and Chicanx literary and cultural texts, ghosts and monsters instead move back and forth across borders or stay contained within homes as permanent embodiments of trauma that teach the next generation how to survive. Through gender studies, literary studies, and cultural studies, my project Domestic Enclosures: Liberation, Monstrosity, and Transformation in Latina Speculative Expression analyzes the (im)mobile bodies of monsters, plants, ghosts, and werewolves within texts including poetry, prose, and zines. Under capitalism and colonization, the state usurps people of color’s relationship to their own bodies, both infantilizing BIPOC folks while robbing youths of color of the innocence that their white peers are afforded. Working within this contradiction, Domestic Enclosures asks readers to consider how childhood, for girls, queer and gender nonconforming kids, is marked by moments of anxiety and possibility due to knowing one’s body will be contained, pushed aside, or threatened in spaces such as the home, the legal system, and school. While gothic studies and Chicana feminist thought have described the domestic sphere as a paradoxical “prison,” Chicana cultural productions themselves reveal, through their use of gothic conventions, how the paradoxical prisons of the home, classroom, and the border are premised upon the imprisonment of the mind body spirit. Utilizing the speculative as a hermeneutic to query how narratives of queer Latina and Chicana childhood negotiate death and transformation, my project’s archive includes narratives that have been dubbed “gothic” as well as texts that have not been read as gothic but use gothic conventions. My project joins emergent scholarship that retools literary genres, such as the gothic and magical realism, to examine quotidian acts within racialized, gendered, and queer contexts.