X marks the spot

I

In late 2015, I was invited to deliver a keynote address for a conference targeting undergraduate men of color students enrolled at small liberal arts colleges throughout the United States. The theme of the conference was “Race, Class and Sexuality for High Achieving Men of Color in Higher Education,” and my colleague at the Claremont Colleges who invited me asked whether I could deliver a talk that was personal, detailing my journey as a Chicano gay man born and raised in the working-class city of Santa Ana, California, who then pursued a doctoral degree and became a professor of literary and cultural studies. In my opening remarks, I tried to make clear what I hoped my words might inspire for those in the room:

What I have to say today is hopefully more than just what one might elect to study if they choose to pursue a PhD in the humanities to intellectually engage with the topics falling under their purview; rather, I hope my reflections illustrate how class, race, gender, and sexuality more often that not have a profound impact on one’s personal and professional development. And unlike the mistaken beliefs of some that holding on to these categories serves to sustain divisions between people, I hope to show that, on the contrary, they hold great potential to bring people together across their respective differences.

At the lecture’s end, there was the customary time for questions from the audience. The first hand that went up belonged to a student from a prestigious liberal arts college in the Midwest. I had noticed this student while I was delivering my paper and their frustration with me (and with what I was saying) was clearly evident as reflected by their physical discomfort and audible sighing. “I have a problem,” began the student, “with your use of gendered pronouns.” Maintaining that my sustained utilization of “Latina and Latino” and “Chicana and Chicano” was unsettling for someone who identified as gender nonconforming, they proceeded to school me on the need to embrace the X as a means of inclusivity.

Thanking them for their feedback, I explained that while I was indeed familiar with the recent move to “Latinx” or “Chicanx” (and even “Xicanx”), I had not thought to incorporate these terms in my talk because they did not suitably figure into the narrative I had written, or lived, a narrative that was principally autobiographical and in direct reference to my personal history as a student. In other words, I reasoned that I did not find the use of the X warranted in this specific context since I myself did not identify as Latinx or Chicanx nor did I feel it appropriate to apply these labels anachronistically. Unsatisfied with my response, the student continued to upbraid me because, as I was told, I represented the thinking of many queers who did not understand what it was like for someone like them to wake up one morning feeling like a man, another morning feeling like a woman, and then on other mornings feeling like neither.

Like this student, many scholars, cultural workers, and activists have come to adopt the X to replace the gendered A and O (previously conjoined as “a/o” or “@”) when indexing the lives and expressive practices of Latin American populations in the United States. While the previously fashioned “Latina/o” and “Latin@” (and Chicana/o and Chican@) sought to counter the singular use of the masculine O (which collapsed women under the weight of a presumed inclusiveness), the current application of the X in place of those letters and symbols that (sometimes inadvertently) stabilize masculine and feminine pronouns aims to undermine both binary constructions of gender and essentially assigned, exclusively contoured categories in favor of non-binary identification or gender neutrality, nonconformity, and inclusivity. Yet, this move has not been met without resistance. Some maintain that using the X signals a queer and/or feminist politics that contests normative gender formations, while others believe that it promotes an elitist identity politics that quickly elides the continued significance of gender—even for queer constituencies—and has little currency beyond English-speaking, academic, and class-ascendant communities.

This essay hopes to critically assess the shift to the X and its attendant ambitions to articulate new formations of language, history, and cultural politics. Taking cue from Suzanne Oboler’s (1995) important book Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States in asking what’s at stake in labeling, particularly for lives incessantly impacted by matters related to gender and sexuality, I intend to trouble an easy embrace of the X by asking what it crosses out or eliminates from consideration when we traffic in contemporary identity politics. And, if I am to stand by my words in the keynote address I delivered at the conference mentioned earlier (especially with respect to holding on to categories like class, race, gender, and sexuality which, instead of serving to sustain divisions between people, may on the contrary, hold great potential to bring people together across their respective differences), then I intend on taking seriously what the X does—or does not do—in its aim to re-articulate individual and collective identification in the name of gender expansive reformism. What follows are a series of anecdotes and critical meditations which can only hope to add to the important conversations currently being carried out in the name of Latinx and signal the high stakes of identity at a historical moment in which it cannot not matter.

II

So far, a great deal of debate about the move toward Latinx has occurred online. A plethora of Internet articles, blog and Facebook posts, and tweets have led the way for informing people about the use of the X as a mode of inclusivity and the need to recognize and respect the refusal or reconfiguration of gender. Take, for example, Tanisha Love Ramirez and Zeba Blay’s (2017) HuffPost piece “Why People are Using the Term Latinx.” They write,

Though it is understood that many people may not identify as Latinx for various reasons, we feel it is important that we respect others who do and who want to be referred to as such. For what it’s worth, using Latinx in general is a way to be more inclusive of identities that go beyond the every day gender and racial norms that are rapidly shifting and being redefined in today’s culture. It’s not a perfect term, but for many people out there, it’s the beginning of a linguistic revolution. “[Latinx] is just one word,” explains [queer, non-binary femme writer Jack Qu’emi] Gutiérrez. “We adapt to survive in this kind of environment, you know, we also adapt our language. It’s vital to just expressing who we are and being able to explain to others in our own community, ‘Hey, we’re here. This is how you can be respectful of us. Acknowledge us.’”

As much as the article is pedagogically instructive, the authors’ belief that “using Latinx in general is a way to be more inclusive of identities that go beyond the everyday gender and racial norms that are rapidly shifting and being redefined in today’s culture” would be more compelling if they had not insisted upon a generalized use given how such a move runs the risk of eclipsing the particular politics of recognition for which they purport to be advocating. Indeed, I read this as an assimilationist move as opposed to a demand for respect regarding one’s refusal of or reconfiguration of gender. To insist that everyone identify as Latinx (which I’ve heard is a practice some professors of Latina/o/x studies require of their students otherwise face penalization) seems to me one way not to be respected but subsumed under a letter that anyone can claim. While Jack Qu’emi Gutiérrez asserts that Latinx is “just one word,” I would hope that this just one word is not merely intended for use as shorthand, thus diminishing the possibility of respect for non-binary, gender nonconforming, and gender-neutral individuals. Rather, I would hope that embracing Latinx might actually mean more than advocating for a casually and compulsory utilized signifier.

And what about the queers who don’t identify as Latinx—those with “various reasons” for not doing so? Does this render them less political, or less warranting of respect because of their desire to hold on to gender? Recall, if you will, the emergence of “queer theory” as a critical enterprise. Italian feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis—who coined the phrase in 1991 for a conference held at my graduate alma mater UC Santa Cruz—would soon distance herself from the canonization and utilization of queer theory in the academy, opting instead to hold on to the category lesbian given that queer theory, as she put it, had “become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry” (De Lauretis, 1994). One certainly cannot deny the incredible body of vital scholarship produced under the heading “queer theory” since de Lauretis first introduced the concept, but her challenge to its widespread usage—its tendency toward a catch-all deployment that oftentimes sidesteps lesbian and racial specificities as well as consideration of non-heteronormative genders and sexualities—should compel us to think critically about how a term’s connotations of radical insurgency can easily be resignified toward accommodationist politics that erase history and occlude difference.

I refuse to lose sight of these histories and differences that correlate with the identificatory terms we use to name others and ourselves. This does not mean that “queer” must be interminably tethered to a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) past lionized by certain quarters of activists and scholars (see Thomas Piontek’s (2006) invaluable and provocative call to “forget Stonewall”) in the way that Latinx need not obediently genuflect before earlier labels like “Latina/o” and “Latin@.” However, the spliced genealogical roots generating these terms demand acknowledgment. As Oboler maintains,

insofar as all people of Latin American descent are today identified by the state as Hispanics in the United States, the experiences of more recent Latin American immigrants cannot be understood without serious consideration of the context of historical discrimination shaped in relation to Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. (p. 16)

III

Having recently relocated to a university in California designated as a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) after teaching for 12 years at a majority White research institution in the rural Midwest, I continue to find myself elated by the sheer amount of support from colleagues who are and who are not located in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x studies but wanting to hire more faculty working in the field. Indeed, in one of my departments (I currently hold a joint appointment), a full professor who is not in the field took the lead in initiating a request from the dean’s office for a full-time equivalent (FTE) line to help bolster this area of specialization that has for years been in high curricular demand by both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of scheduling difficulties in bringing together everyone with an investment in this line, we decided to exchange ideas and edit a working job description via Google Docs.

The colleague taking the lead on the proposal elected to use Latinx in the title and in the body of the job description. I decided, however, to change Latinx to Latina/o/x, thinking that if we wanted to hire a specialist in Latina feminist studies (and perhaps let it be known that women candidates were encouraged to apply since there are currently two cis Latino men on the faculty within our department), we should ensure the integration of the “a” and not allow it to be swept under the rug of the X. After all, the jury is still out on whether the X appropriately acknowledges women who continue to embrace feminine pronouns in their scholarship and self-naming, especially in recognition of the hard-won and incessant struggles to disentangle the A from the historically masculine O. The subsequent version of the draft after I made these changes, however, revealed the elimination of A/O/X and replaced with the previously applied X.

Admittedly, I was angered by this move (although I have yet to ask my colleague why they altered my changes and decided to stick solely with the X). Was it for the express purpose of shorthand (i.e. making things easier with the singular X rather than form an unwieldy term consisting of too many pronouns)? Was it the impetus to fall in line with the recent trend in the academy to embrace Latinx in the name of gender neutrality, nonconformity, and inclusivity? Or was it both? How serious was this call for a scholar who does “Latinx studies,” that is, someone whose work engages gender nonconformity and neutrality? Or was it merely used as an umbrella term, a move that to this day gives me pause whenever I encounter it?

My colleague’s effort to correct me brings to mind a number of incidents in my academic career that have significantly impacted me with regard to identity. The first is when a group of students from California pursuing graduate studies at the Midwestern University where I taught took issue with the fact that the biannual graduate student conference sponsored by the Department of Latina/o Studies did not have Chicana/o in its title. Their attempt to rename the event “the Chicana/o and Latina/o graduate student conference” (and also correct the students from the Midwest who refused to embrace Chicana/o) was an effort, they believed, to bring in a term they felt had historical significance (Chicana/o) to counteract one that did not (Latina/o). By then I had learned that, as in the signifying currency embedded in the term Chicana/o in place like California, Latina/o commanded a unique history in the Midwest that did not make it a term without history. Indeed, in their demand for Latina/o studies at the university, student activists (mostly from Chicago) insisted upon the regional significance of the term Latina/o to guide the establishment of the unit on campus.

As Suzanne Oboler argues, “ethnic labels by their very nature are used ahistorically, yet they incorporate specific social contradictions that their emergence and dissemination may originally have intended to quell” (p. 16). Although arguably not ahistorical, despite the charge of it as such, Latina/o has persisted as a term to account for elements that Chicana/o could not. And yet, the Latina/o embraced in the Midwest, while used in distinction from Chicana/o, could not exist without elements of Chicana/o identity given how Chicana/o fuels the emergence of Latina/o in the historical contexts of social movements, labor rights struggles, and the articulation of racial, ethnic, and cultural politics. I understand the student mentioned at the start of this essay as insisting upon Latinx in the same way that the Midwest students insisted upon Latina/o. Their Latinx may indeed been cast as ahistorical, but the student knew that Latinx was intimately connected to the Latina/o I was using. To be sure, similar to how Latina/o requires those elements evolving within the historical registers of categories like Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, or Cuban which fuel its mobilization, Latinx requires both the genealogical foundations that give rise to its emergence as well as a rearticulated sense of history to account for the particular features that make its utilization necessary.

Yet, like the adoption of Latina/o in mainstream media circuits and marketing campaigns that more often than not strips the term of its complex layers of historical significance, I am witnessing Latinx being pushed in a direction in which its attachment to gender/queer politics is quickly waning. Here I cannot help but recall a Facebook post by my friend, the writer and editor, Ricardo A Bracho who, on his wall on 27 March 2017, asked,

Do organizations/academic departments/centers/nonprofits that use Latinx but are entirely made up of Latina/Latino individuals, who would get called cis by wielders of that term, and absolutely no trans or genderqueer or nonbinary Latinx think that the x absolves them or actually welcomes in the x-aligned/identified? I think it high time for giving up that particular ghost/faking of funk/anti-history/memory/futurity in your liberal gender plurality fronting.

I’m also reminded of the recent special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies titled “Queer Theory Without Anti-Normativity” in which editors Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A Wilson (2015) aim “to think queer theory without assuming a position of antinormativity from the outset” (p. 2). I was curious as to how queer theory could be possible without its grounding in an antinormative discourse; more to the point, what was the point of queer theory in the first place if its goal was to no longer contest, for example, gender and sexual norms but rather fall in line with them? I wasn’t alone in my thinking, and it was quite a relief to come across queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s response to Wiegman and Wilson on the website Bully Bloggers. Halberstam (2015) writes,

So, to clarify the argument here: if you still believe in the socially engaged academic and if, like them, your work continues to circle back to performativity, cruel optimism, intersectionality, queer of color critique, queer negativity, critiques of homonormativity, disciplinary critique and the undercommons, this mini-movement is not for you. And for those of you who are still wondering what the answer is to the question posed by this volume of differences in the first place, namely “what is queer studies without antinormativity,” I think I have an answer for you—it is disciplinary, neoliberal, no stakes, straight thinking. You’re welcome!

My goal isn’t to liken the “mini movement” of “queer theory without antinormativity” to those championing the use of the X, but I wonder, in light of both Halberstam’s and Bracho’s critiques, if the initial subversive intent of embracing Latinx now runs the risk of co-optation by neoliberal agendas. Certainly, this was not the goal of the brown trans activists, scholars, and artists who see their embodiment reflected in the X. But if Latinx is going to be handed over as a user-friendly identity, then we need to recognize its complicity with a politics of diversity that need not draw attention to the hierarchical order reinforcing its structural foundations.

Yet, would crossing out the Latinx for Latina/o/x (once again) solve the problem? Would a scholar who identifies as non-binary, gender neutral, or nonconforming feel that they were merely tacked on to a list and prefer to eliminate gender designations all together? What about women, both cis women and trans women, who elect to keep the feminine designation? And then again, what about gender-identifying trans people who are uncomfortable claiming the X? To help answer the last question, I sent a message to a former student—Guillermo Piñeda—who identifies as transgender and who I recalled critiquing the X on his Facebook wall. I couldn’t recall what he found troubling about the X so I asked him whether he could remind me. Guillermo’s response is as follows:

I feel like part of the reason why the X was used is similar to the reason why some folks began using the X to write out Chicano like Xicano (basically trying to relate to indigenous languages) which is a half-ass attempt on their part to claim indigeneity. My other reason is that the X is not accessible to Native Spanish Speakers so it’s a function that is purely American in its creation. If I were to call myself Chicanx or Latinx in Mexico, my family would look at me funny and think I’m trying to say the name of some brand tissue instead of stating my identity. I therefore started using the E when writing Latino/a/e because it would transition more easily, and linguistically it makes more sense than putting an X. There wouldn’t be a strong divergence from the way words decline when using the E versus using the X.

As we can see, the answer for Guillermo isn’t simply abandoning the X in order to move back to the a/o or the @; rather, he elects to embrace the E on the grounds that it makes more sense linguistically while contesting the normative binary of a/o. But, Guillermo’s point about his family’s potential confusion over the use of the X may also manifest were they to ask him to explain the E, perhaps whether spoken or written. Furthermore, what if his family was to question not simply the gendered letter attached to the pronoun used by Guillermo but the label (Latino/a/e) itself?

IV

The belief by some that the X epitomizes a more radical politics recalls for me the time I came home from college after joining Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Although I had heard the terms “Chicana” and “Chicano” while growing up (a few of my aunts identified as Chicanas during the 1970s), and while I was familiar with MEChA as a high school student since there was a chapter on my campus, it wasn’t until I moved 500 miles away from home and met a group of Mexican American peers who quickly became my support network in the otherwise alienating environment of the University of California at Berkeley that I began to adamantly identify as Chicano. My embrace of Chicano was very much in line with what the organization is known for: grasping an identity shaped by the imperatives and objectives of cultural nationalist affiliation. But I also belonged to La Familia, a support group for queer Latina/o students.

These groups did not exist in isolation for me, but lines marking their distinct agendas were regularly drawn. While members of La Familia would participate in MEChA protests (when we went to the local Safeway and filled our shopping carts with canned goods, went through the check-out lane, had the cashier ring up the merchandise, then announce upon given a total, “We’ll remember to bring our money when you remember to stop selling grapes!”), I recall MEChA meetings being interrupted by Chicana/o queers demanding recognition and support from our straight-identifying brothers and sisters.

I am compelled to think that my book, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Rodríguez, 2009), on the interrelated subjects of cultural nationalism and the family, would never had been written were it not for the impact of these two groups on my life, which would in turn lead to my scholarly—and personal—itinerary. From the purview of the book, I can now see the struggle of La Familia members attempting to wrest away the powerful concept of family from hetero-Chicanos/as as the principle argument of Next of Kin. Furthermore, the debates that raged in MEChA—about nationalism, socialism, gender and sexuality, commitment to “the community,” and coalition politics—all play a starring role in the book as well.

Fittingly, La Familia and Aztlán were the Chicano movement’s most salient organizing symbols, and they continue to figure prominently in Chicana/o/x studies. In a related vein, the presence of La Familia and MEChA at Berkeley during my undergraduate years evinced the residual traces of earlier, Chicano/a movement articulations of the family and Aztlán. They served as examples of how coalitions across difference were possible (particularly across lines of gender and sexual identity), and how they were flatly refused because of so-called priorities. We need to fight for poor raza first, I recall a peer saying with the utmost passion. But I thought, what about the poor queer raza who were told to stay closeted and not flaunt their sexuality since in the struggle that was inconsequential (or for some, “decadent”) in light of the “real” concerns we were to contend with?

Despite the complex politics that stemmed from Chicana/o spaces—no matter how queer they may have been—they were also places that intentionally and unintentionally excluded those who could not, did not, or refused to identify with the term Chicana/o. Whether they were Central American, South American, Mexican American (or, as some preferred, Mexican), Puerto Rican, closeted, or not ready or willing to connect with people under the signs “Chicana/o,” “queer,” or even “Latina/o,” there were students who could very well be classified in ways that some of us chose to identify but for whatever reason refused these ready-made spaces of fellowship. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t critical of those who chose not to align themselves with those of us in MEChA or La Familia. But after the fire of self-discovery began to be quenched, I realized that people do not always “come to identity” in the same direction, and they might possibly never grasp identity in the same way we often expect them to.

Anthropologist Patricia Zavella’s (1993) important essay, “Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with ‘Chicana’ Informants”, made me realize this, and it connected with the Black British cultural studies scholarship (namely, by Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, and Kobena Mercer) on anti-essentialist (as well as anti-anti-essentialist) identities which has guided my thinking since my first year as a graduate student in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Reflecting on her ethnographic work on Chicana working mothers in New Mexico, Zavella details how her informants often refused not only the ethnic labels she tried to assign them but also the identity categories all together. Alternatively, Zavella recounts how she was attacked and her scholarly integrity questioned when presenting her “findings to fellow Chicano and Latino colleagues” on these women who chose to identify as “Spanish” or “Spanish American” (p. 67).

Wanting to respect how these women identified, Zavella realized that the terms that had gained currency in an academic context did not smoothly translate for some non-academic settings. Moreover, the terms that had been fashioned by and agreed upon by a community of scholars functioned as an act of exclusion for those incapable of contributing to this idealized collective effort. Zavella writes,

More telling, and a dilemma I only came to see recently, is that my Chicano/Latino colleagues and I were operating with a rigid construction of ethnic identity. While Chicano activists generally agreed on the necessity of using Chicano, this in turn muted the internal political and theoretical differences among Chicana (and Chicano) scholars. Thus I realized that I needed to deconstruct the “Chicana” part of Chicana feminism with which I identified and reflect upon how Chicana feminism itself was framed. (p. 70)

Zavella’s realization that identity categories tend to fall short when accounting for the complexities of people’s lived realities is crucial. Furthermore, as there is indeed power in (self-)naming, the delegation of power that allows one to name in the first place more often than not depends on one’s social location. Additionally, categories that we often take for granted and use freely because they’ve been normalized in the contexts that we’ve been deeded access based on our selective admission (albeit at times provisional), may not be embraced by individuals who see little use or relevance for them. This has been my experience with Chicano and Chicana, and it no doubt operates in the same way for Latinx.

Undoubtedly, Latinx is a term that holds deep meaning for those excluded from the seemingly fixed, gendered terms Latina and Latino. But the term—like the Chicana in Zavella’s Chicana feminism—cannot be assumed to apply in all situations or for every attempt to account for those who refuse or annul gender inflexibility. Again, Zavella writes,

In paying careful attention to our informants’ sense of their selves, I came in time to see my own Chicana feminist blinders. As we are becoming all too aware, when one claims, or has attributed a categorical difference based on ethnicity, the power relations involved are readily apparent. My status as Chicana feminist researcher, then, created two audiences that I should be sensitive and accountable to. Increasingly, I share our Spanish informants’ sense of struggle and unease in grappling with this ‘name game,’ realizing that I too construct ethnic identity depending on the context. (p. 72)

The “name game,” in all frankness, is one I’ve grown increasingly tired of playing. Moreover, part of my resistance to our most recent name game with the sweeping usage of Latinx has been over the way the term washes over—if not waters down—the struggles of those it supposedly incorporates within its parameters. In ways that I’m weary of just anyone embracing Latinx—like queer—at the expense of non-normative people and communities whose lives are constantly (especially now more than ever) at risk, I am vigilant in not smothering people in blanket terms for gains that have more relevance for those with the privilege to name.

The horrific incident at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016—in which a 29-year-old man named Omar Mateen shot and murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others—has come to be regarded as impetus not only to solidify the use of Latinx but also to see it as signifying more than queer Latinos/as/x. In the article “Trans and Queer Latinxs Respond to Pulse Orlando Shooting” on the website BGD, activist Jorge Gutiérrez declares,

We as queer and trans Latinx people need to see what happened in Orlando as a reminder that our human dignity, our lives, are connected to the liberation of Black people, Muslim people, of women, of Trans people. We cannot move forward without working with these communities to end white supremacy, patriarchy. When we say “Latinx” it includes Asian folks, Black people, Muslims, Native Americans. For us, we’re one culture but with very diverse experiences. (Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, 2016)

I deeply admire Gutiérrez’s rallying call to unite disempowered communities in light of the Orlando tragedy. But what are the implications of insisting that Latinx not only encompasses people who may have no historical attachment to it whatsoever but also those Latin American–descended people who may not have necessarily embraced it? While Pulse was indeed hosting “Latin Night,” thus bringing together people who identified with or desired people connected to the designation “Latin,” the convergence of bodies did not hinge on the drive to assemble under the auspices of Latinx but for the desire to dance, drink, fuck, love, gossip, grind, and occupy the hot and sweaty space of the club, a desire that was violently robbed of those whose Saturday night was intended as a reprieve from everyday life.

V

In this final section, I refer back to my teenage years, a time that was filled with a combination of frustration, anxiety, despair, and excitement. It was also a time when gender became something that I was forced to acknowledge and confront. At the time, I admired its multifarious forms, but I was also fearful for my inability to conform to a gender identity expected for a Mexican American kid growing up in a working-class context. I struggled as 14-year-old trying to be like the other boys around me but not feeling compelled to take up sports nor verbally express sexual interest in girls. Indeed, there was something different about me but I didn’t quite know how to make sense of that difference. I knew, however, that it was not easy for me to “butch it up” in the way many of my male peers could and I didn’t quite know what my options were as a result of this. However, it was at this time that I was introduced to the X—not unlike the generation of queers drawn to Latinx—as a site of gender defiance.

With thanks to a wide range of British pop stars—many of whom I’m currently writing about for my recent book project titled Latino/U.K.: Transatlantic Intimacies in Post-Punk Cultures—I found in their lyrics and music videos new ways to express myself that didn’t require fashioning my gendered self in circumscribed ways. Like other teenagers drawn to this new cultural and musical phenomena embodied by performers like Boy George, Holly Johnson, Annie Lennox, Marilyn, Jimmy Somerville, and Pete Burns from Dead or Alive, I learned to reject what film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu calls “straightjacket sexualities” (Shimizu, 2012). One of my favorite music artists, however, was (and admittedly still is) Adam Ant. Emerging from the late 1970s London punk scene and starring in gay British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s (1977) classic punk film Jubilee, Adam (née Stuart Leslie Goddard) wore lots of makeup, struck many a sexy pose (oftentimes shirtless, other times in leather and lace), and messed with gender in his visual presentation as well as in his lyrics. One of my all-time favorite songs of his (performed with the Ants before he went solo) is “Prince Charming,” which include the queer empowering and affirming lyrics (particularly for a gay boy constantly reminded that he wasn’t masculine enough): “Prince Charming/Ridicule is nothing to be scared of/Don’t you ever, don’t you ever/Stop being dandy, showing me you’re handsome.”

The first Adam Ant 7 single I purchased (and didn’t tape from the radio) was “Vive Le Rock” in 1985. I had recently started working at the local swamp meet where I earned US$20 for spending a 10-hour day stacking fruit and vegetable crates in the back of a large truck. While I was drawn to “Vive Le Rock” for the lines “And if the enemy don’t see it your way/Be smart, play dead, live to fight a new day” (and, of course, watching Adam perform in the video for the song was another draw), the B-side would soon receive more playtime on my turntable. This track, “Greta X,” was eye-opening for me. Although I can’t claim to have instantly known what “T.V.” (i.e. transvestite) meant when I first heard it, I was well aware that gender codes were being scrambled in this song, and Adam was singing about his embrace of the feminine vis-à-vis a drag persona. As he sang, “In femininity there’s pride/We’ll marry soon/I’ll be the bride … What’s your gender?/No one knows.” Long before Judith Butler (1991) apprised me (after Esther Newton apprised her) that “drag is not an imitation or a copy of some prior or true gender” but rather “drag enacts the very structure of impersonation by which any gender is assumed” (p. 21), Adam Ant taught me that one need not subscribe to only one of two presumed genders. Indeed, by claiming the name Greta in “Greta X,” Adam rejected the hard and fast expectation of masculinity while adopting the X as a sign of liberating ambiguity. To be sure: “What’s your gender?/No one knows.”

I conclude with this song not to uphold it as a flawless example of gender nonconformity but as a moment in my own life when the X—that is, the one in “Greta X”—signified a refusal of gender conventions while at the same time upholding the typically denigrated elements of femininity (“In femininity there’s pride” insists Adam). Thus, I want to insist that if X is to continue being adopted by those seeking alternatives to rigid genders and sexualizes, it must also always mark the spot of queerness, a space of unending gender resignification and reconstitution in marked contrast to the tenets of normativity and assimilation. Some may feel that embracing Latinx is simply a trend. I, however, want to champion the X as drawing attention to and not overshadowing non-binary and gender neutral and nonconforming individuals. But to do that, we cannot simply use Latinx without acknowledgment of its discrepant gender politics, nor can we map it on to people’s lives, histories, and bodies uncritically. For if the X is to simply become something to which anyone can easily lay claim, we will need to aggressively pose the question: Why adopt it at all if the ultimate goal is to cross out any traces of queer assertion and affirmation?