Nicaraguan Gay and Lesbian Rights and the Sex of Post-Sandinismo

Struggles of liberation take many forms, are born from many terrains, and conceived by many minds. Historical circumstance engenders the shape revolutions will take as much as it engenders the acts revolutionaries will carry out. In the history of Nicaragua myriad forces have converged to create a state calling out for change; a call which has been answered in various forms. My purpose here is to illustrate the multiple factors which informed lesbian rights movements in Nicaragua in the late 1980s. I take as my starting point the notion that historical context, and ideologies which shape historical context, both served to facilitate and foreclose the possibilities available to lesbian organizing. I will begin by sketching a brief history of Nicaragua in order to understand the legacy against which the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional articulated its material and ideological positions; positions which later became embodied in the mythical making of Sandino. From these ideological foundations, I will trace the material changes the FSLN implemented during its tenure of rule. Utilizing the refrain of women\u27s liberation as a window, I will examine the formation of a gay and lesbian rights agenda. In discussing lesbian rights organizations and the conservative backlash they continue to endure, I hope to weave ideological tropes within substantive, political change

Sexual borderlands: Lesbian and gay migration, human rights, and the metropolitan community church

This article considers several questions surrounding sexual migration, binational same-sex couples, legal precedent, and the role of religious communities in lesbian and gay migration to the United States. With theoretical aspects of human rights serving as a starting point, the article then moves to a consideration of the legal dynamics of migration, the history of U.S. (im)migration law in relation to lesbian and gay asylum claims, and the Uniting American Families Act (2005). Drawing from the concept of sexual migration, the article proposes that religious or spiritual communities may provide important networks and ideological resources for lesbian and gay migrants who subscribe to religious values, particularly in a context of politically incendiary claims surrounding homosexuality and immigration. The analysis centers on the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), suggesting that with its socially legitimatized status, MCC may provide philosophical foundations necessary for effectively addressing human rights for lesbian and gay migrants

Anthropocenic Ecoauthority: The Winds of Oaxaca

This article analyzes the development of wind parks across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) and, in turn, how a politics of resistance and local perceptions of environmental peril have challenged renewable energy transitions. In the fraught debates surrounding the massive Mareña Renovables wind park, dramatic distinctions have emerged between local perceptions of ecological conditions and forms of environmental knowledge calibrated to global climate remediation. These divergences indicate distinct ways of imagining and articulating “anthropocenic ecoauthority”—a series of experiential, scientific, and managerial truth-claims regarding ecological knowledge and future forecasting in an era of global anthropogenic change. Whether enunciated by resident communities, state officials, corporate representatives, or environmental experts, ecoauthority gains its particular traction by asserting ethical claims on behalf of, and in regards to, the anthropogenically altered future of the biosphere, human and nonhuman. The article concludes with a discussion of how biopolitical and ecoauthoritative positions coincide, suggesting that although the original sites of biopolitical intervention have been population and the human species, the energic, atmospheric, aquaspheric, and lithospheric shifts that have been dubbed the Anthropocene demand that we account for life in its local dimensions as well as on the scale of the greater planetary bios

Life Above Earth: An Introduction

This began as a wondering about wind, how it mattered, how it materialized across lives, and how it seemed to refuse to be represented—only becoming visible through its effects on other beings and other things: branch, bird, cloud, kite, sail, smoke. Wind finds itself with no terrestrial home, no borders to maintain, no ownership to be claimed.1 Its pressured and oscillating gases are the kinetic energy of the sky. Wondering into the wind leads us upward. It is an invitation to lose one’s footing. The curatorial force behind this first Openings and Retrospectives is to release our discipline from the earthly domains it has historically occupied, to float us to new ethnographic spheres and spaces untethered to worldly surfaces. If Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014) has called for a “decolonization of thought,” this collection is meant as a deterrestrialization of thought. Life Above Earth is an exploration of vitalities, materials, and movements that are skyward, spacey, and atmospheric

Epistemic Engineering and the Lucha for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua

From 1992 to 2007, Nicaragua had the dubious distinction of maintaining the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas. Based upon several years of field research with activists involved in what they have called the lucha for sexual rights, this article considers the “epistemological engineering” of Nicaragua's sexual rights struggle. It discusses two distinct frameworks that have informed the work of advocacy: “Orgullo Lésbico-gay” (Lesbian and Gay Pride) and “Una Sexualidad Libre de Prejuicios” (Sexuality Free from Prejudice)—both of which have different ideological origins and epistemological purposes. As managers of political logics and strategists of social struggle, activists have utilized political performances and publicly disseminated discourses in order to craft the way in which the struggle will “come out,” and ultimately how sexual rights will be understood by the larger Nicaraguan body politic. Through this process, activists have developed the epistemic dimensions of sexual rights in multiple registers, including those of universal liberation and minority rights, as well as earlier iterations of a communitarian ethos, including Sandinismo

The Legible Lesbian: Crimes of Passion in Nicaragua

This article considers a precedent-setting murder case in Nicaragua that rendered a conviction based upon the victim's ‘sexual option’ and status as a ‘lesbian.’ A significant achievement for advocates in Nicaragua, the case was also a victory for sexual and human rights proponents globally. This article queries how the sexualization of culture can be viewed through the spectacle of Aura Rosa's life, death and symbolic resurrection. Analyzing the discourses and practices of Nicaraguan activists, international rights campaigns, the state, and local media, I argue that the post-mortem process of re-figuring the victim as a ‘lesbian’ is imaginable only within a discursive field saturated with human rights paradigms including those of sexual rights. Central to these practices are notions of vulnerable bodies, ascriptions to particular models of modernity and an emerging ‘epistemology of the hate crime.

Ecologics

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power

Sexual adjudications and queer transpositions

Each of the articles included in this special issue of the Journal of Language and Sexuality asks us to imagine queer im/migration, asylum and sexual citizenship in multiple dimensions and to probe the discursive operations that establish the parameters of sexual subjectivity. This review article argues that these processes are illustrative of “sexual adjudication:” the discursive coordinates, legal logics and linguistic sensibilities that produce the category of the sexual migrant, the sexual refugee and the sexual asylum seeker. The discussions featured here engage questions of how sexual epistemics work in both sending and receiving countries, as well as the role of borders in constituting narratives of sexual subjectivity. In addition to analyzing the theoretical overlaps and reciprocal conversations between the articles included in the special issue, this essay provides a historical, comparative context by situating these discussions within larger theoretical and terminological questions regarding queer im/migration, asylum and subjectivity

Ecologics

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power