Spatializing Sexuality in Jaime Hernandez's Locas

Focusing on Jaime Hernandez's Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, part of the Love and Rockets comic series, I argue that the graphic landscape of this understudied comic offers an illustration of the theories of space in relation to race, gender, and sexuality that have been critical to understandings of Chicana sexuality. Set in a barrio outside Los Angeles, the comic allows us to understand how this particular urban space shapes the body as both material form and surface entity. It writes a queer Chicana sexuality into visibility, yet refuses to reify it, and thus avoids many of the pitfalls of identity politics. While the heterosexual, patriarchal norms that govern the barrio space attempt to write Hopey and Maggie's queer bodies into the margins of the neighborhood, the girls' bodies also queer the space, disrupting the codes that govern it and remapping the barrio. Attending to both the sociopolitical context of the strip and the formal conventions of the comic, the essay shows how the interplay of bodies and space produces a queer urban Aztlán in which alternative forms of sociability and new understandings of familia and Chicana sexuality are enabled

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