Staging Darker Desires: BDSM and the Coloniality of Affect in Latina Feminisms and Lorna Dee Cervantes’sCiento

Abstract

While much of Latina feminist scholarship focuses on how colonial imaginaries subtend the white male Eurocentric gaze, there persists an aporia regarding how Latina desire is haunted by coloniality. This article addresses this absence by placing into conversation Chicana and decolonial Latina feminisms—including the work of María Lugones, Cherríe Moraga, Emma Pérez, and Lorna Dee Cervantes—to conceptualize the “coloniality of affect” and examine BDSM play as a potential methodology for disidentifying with gendered structures of domination shaping radicalized desire. The coloniality of affect names how forms of affect, including romantic love and erotic desire, are never innocent but profoundly moored in social worlds in what María Lugones calls the “modern/colonial gender system.” The first section brings into dialogue decolonial Latina and Chicana feminisms to excavate a heretofore largely invisible genealogy of critical thought that articulates the coloniality of affect and charts out the disidentificatory potential of BDSM. The second section expands this genealogy by analyzing Lorna Dee Cervantes’s articulation of the coloniality of affect and engagement with BDSM in the representative poem “100 Words for Compass” from Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (2011). I argue that BDSM play may constitute a technology of decolonial thinking and praxis by making visible and reckoning with the coloniality of affect and obviating distinctions between private, or “infra-political,” and public politics. By foregrounding the “darker” desires of the Latina social body, I enrich nascent conversations in love studies and ongoing ones around affective politics about what it means to feel differentially.

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