Queer Storytelling and Temporality in Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties by Felicia Luna Lemus

The essay focuses on temporality in Lemus's novel, including the critique of generational logics that reinforce the hegemonic family's reproductive normativity. Following Sandra K. Soto, I read the novel "like a queer," shifting the focus from the character's racialized sexual identity to the vehicle for queer storytelling itself: the first-person narration. I argue that it is possible to discern in the very formal elements of Leticia's narration a calling forth of alternative temporalities and kinship groupings. As narrator, Leticia never completely breaks with generational tropes; nevertheless, I suggest that she often torques them in queer directions. Drawing on the foundational theoretical work of José Esteban Muñoz, I follow some of Leticia's disidentificatory and even utopian practices vis-à-vis maternally transmitted tales and address the possibility that her narration, the ending in particular, not only brings old stories to life in the narration's present, but bends it away from linear time. The manner in which Leticia retells these inherited stories tampers with generational succession as well, reconfiguring the hierarchical and vertical transmission of knowledge within Leticia's matriarchal Mexican and working-class family in a horizontal genderqueer transmission and reception

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Kinship · Literature · Narrative · Queer · Sociology · Storytelling · Temporalities · Temporality · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy