Queer Border Crossers: Pragmatic Complicities, Indiscretions and Subversions

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldúa’s words provide an apt preface to the concerns of this chapter with borders, and the people who cross them, those whom she calls los atravesados. In a Spanish-English dictionary, the source verb ‘atravesar’ means ‘to cross, to pierce, to lay across, to go through (a situation or crisis)’ and also ‘to obstruct and to interfere’.2 With Anzaldúa, I view queer border crossers as transgressors of boundaries whose disruptions of normative categories may be contradictory, provocative and alien, but have critical and transformative possibilities.