Creative Kin-Making Practices Among Queer Youth and Womxn of Color, 1950-2020

Abstract

My study examines the creative kin-making practices of three community sites to demonstrate the ways kinships and kin-making practices traverse space and time. I locate pachucas, young women of the zoot suit era as demonstrating creative kin-making through their cultivation of a distinctly Mexican American, urban, working class identity. In the development of the subculture of pachuquismo, pachuca identity represented rebellious expressions of femininity and sexuality. A parallel subculture of the mid twentieth century, the butch/femme lesbian communities, also demonstrate the development of political identities of sexuality. The butch/femme communities of the mid twentieth also emerged in the underground spaces of of urban settings, occupied primarily by working class women. I argue that as these women claimed their right to occupy public space, and as they negotiated with the meaning making of identity, both as racialized and gendered subjects through the development of these subcultures, they, created future possibilities of identity exploration, particularly for youth of color in the contemporary moment. Rock Camps operate as a final site of kin-making through creative practices. Music camps for gender marginalized youth facilitate the exploration of gender, sexual, and racial identity formation. The setting of camp nurtures relational identity formation in the kinship formations of bands and within the camp community. I analyze digital and printed archives, oral histories, ethnographic research, and autoethnography in this project to demonstrate not only the kinship formations that developed within these sites of community, but also how the kinship formations remain active in the feminist organizing of the contemporary moment.