CHSTU 356 A: The Chicano Family

Chicana writer and queer theorist, Cherríe Moraga writes, “The family is the place, where for better or worse, we learn how to love.”

This course explores the role and function of Chicana/o family with recognition of its complexity and varied expression. In as much as family sits at the heart of cultural identity and belonging, the family also signals a site of rupture. This tension renders the family a rich area of study as the cultivation of an “ideal family” reveal the mechanisms which ascribe meaning to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, labor and class. In this course we will consider paid and unpaid labor within family systems, activism which calls upon the mobilization of the family, and queer and alternative kinship formations as mechanisms of survival and resistance. Drawing from Chicana feminist and Queer of color theory, we will contextualize interfamily relationships as well as the relationship between families and identity, and families and society.