UC San Diego

This dissertation sets out to trace the material and social relations and legacies of racialized gender and sexuality from 1870 to the contemporary moment in the hemispheric Southwest through Mexican American (Californiana, Tejana, Hispana) and Chicana narrative by examining multiple empires and governances, Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. This dissertation aims to trace the sexual economies of the Southwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to interrogate how gender and sexuality is materially used for production and reproduction and how historical relations inform notions of racialized gender and sexuality for Chicana bodies in the contemporary moment. This study traverses a long historical period not to trace a colonial historical moment, but rather, to trace a colonial and then imperial legacy of productive to unproductive racialized sexualities between dominant and subordinate populations in the Southwest. It intervenes in Chicana/o Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American literary history as it traces the shifts in economic systems and sexual economies and how those shifts after 1848 produce gender and sexual norms. In addition to this examination, this dissertation utilizes decolonial and Chicana feminist theory to interrogate how Mexicana gender and sexuality is informed by black and native bodies and how sexual economies produce material relations and racialized gender and sexuality. The literary narratives of the Mexican American and Chicana works I examine trace matters of sexualization, sex, and gender in the late nineteenth, early twentieth, and the contemporary moment, particularly the critical role sexual and gender arrangements have in creating categories of differentiation and distinguishing the subjugated from the subjugator. The social classification that racialized gender and sexuality regulates is not a fixed and/or ignored act, but rather a perversely critical one. Imperial governance in the nineteenth-century depended on the regulation and surveillance of sexual economies and their changing histories of productivity. This is the first significant point this dissertation makes. Wrestling with is the ever- evolving comparative framework between Mexican American/ Chicana, Native, and Black Studies and the co-constitutive relations between these different "groups" throughout history, I argue that the tensions and literary strategies used in the Mexican American narrative and legal cases I examine uncover the contradictory and co-constitutive position of Mexican American female. Lastly, the dissertation has a long historical lineage, which frames the last chapter and the discourse of the excessive Chicana in the contemporary moment. Tracing a history of gender and sexual norms in the Southwest that informs the processes of differentiation and the regulation and management of certain bodies, I utilize multiple historical flashpoints to untangle how racialized gender and sexuality informs proper subjects of the borderlands and forgets the historical elements persistent in forgetting how violent structures were formed up and against deviant and excessive racialized bodies