MAS 301 introduction to mexican american and latina/o studies

MWF 9-10 am #40200 GEA 127 Anahi Ponce

This course looks at how the U.S.-México border serves as an integral site for the fields of Latina/o/x and Ethnic studies broadly in understanding constructions of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and the various social movements that emerge from them. Queer and Feminist scholars have theorized the ways in which women and queer of color subjects within the borderlands are most attune to these tensions. This has infamously been made evident by borderlands scholar Gloria Anzaldúa in her conception of the new mestiza, whose “tolerance for ambiguity” not only takes shape as a form of hybridity but does so as a means for survival. Looking to how these tensions manifest themselves online thus becomes a fruitful endeavor in further theorizing how Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness has gone digital. In this class students will explore these disjunctures as they have manifested themselves historically in theorizing about borders as they are constructed geographically, theoretically, and now digitally. Looking at instances of online and social media organizing, the use of information communication technologies, and larger discussions surrounding the history of race and technology, students will examine the proliferation of borders in the digital space and investigate how digital borderlands practitioners continue to make use of as well as push back against them.