ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the figure of the “Latina/o subject” as it presents a problem for aesthetics and queer criticism in psychoanalysis. Particularly, this political vexation intensifies at the moment where the Latina/o subject’s inconclusive understanding of itself intersects with the political theater of the AIDS crisis. The chapter opens up questions regarding the affective and psychic terrain of Latinidad, by highlighting two major texts in the field of Latino studies that argue that we understand Latinidad as constituted by a politics of loss and dissensus. By foregrounding “loss” as a way to put political and psychoanalytic theory into conversation within Latino studies, the paper shows the ways that Whiteness can be thought of in tandem with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the master signifier and how the desire for whiteness is a desire for wholeness and mastery. One queer Chicano writer lends insight to this mutually constitutive juncture, the late Chicano poet and scholar, Arturo Islas, who died of AIDS complications in the early 1990s and is a major focus of the chapter.
The author argues that Islas’ desire for white men, often expressed in his personal journals and uncollected early fiction, was situated in excess of the well-polished writings that eventually were published and make up the majority of his corpus of text. In other words, what gets lost is the textual evidence of an internal contradiction constituted by a desire for Whiteness, where Whiteness is understood not as phenotype but as the unconscious fantasy for wholeness.
