Public Writing

A case for the “e” in gender-neutral Spanish

Abstract: Language transforms over time, but rarely do people experience an intentional moment to participate in democratic language experimentation and possibility. In other words, to not just fight for creating a new word, but to also argue for—and model—an encompassing change in grammatical structure that explicitly challenges a patriarchal worldview. That means not just arguing for inclusive or gender-neutral terms—but in the case of Spanish—for also changing a binary gendered language that centers men and the masculine—even when referring to a mixed-gender group of people. In Mexico, specifically, I have noticed this fascinating competition between multiple queer political agendas and feminisms that promote different gender-inclusive or gender radical language use. We are already seeing an increasing adoption of the “x” to turn words like Latino into Latinx. While an important expression of queer recognition, I make the case to use an “e” to turn words like Latino into Latine instead. Using the “e” in reference to gendered subjects both furthers gender equality and is easier to incorporate into daily spoken Spanish. Purposeful rule-based changes in grammar could transform queer language play into a full out Spanish-language educational intervention for future Spanish speakers.

Manuscripts in Preparation

“Urban Borderlands After Dark: negotiating difference and hybridity in an L.A. salón”

“Creative Destiny: A Theory of Relational Placemaking”

“Queering Disaster Strategies: LGBT+ Health and Social Reaction in Mexico City to the Ongoing COVID-19 Crisis” with Ariceli Alfaro

Academic Publications

Chica, Christina Marie. (2024). Gayfriendly: Acceptance and Control of Homosexuality in New York and Paris. Contemporary Sociology, 53(6), 562-564.

First Paragraph: In Gayfriendly: Acceptance and Control of Homosexuality in New York and Paris, Sylvie Tissot positions herself cautiously against linear progress narratives to take on gayfriendliness as a contingent process and to map out, spatially and relationally, its boundaries. Through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Park Slope and Marais neighborhoods of New York and Paris, respectively, Tissot joins scholars examining the dominant rather than the dominated. She demonstrates how the increased banality of gays and lesbians creates the conditions for cis-straight people in these neighborhoods to simultaneously accept and distance themselves from homosexuality through various strategies that reinscribe their heterosexuality and limit LGBTQ+ expression.

NOTE: If you can’t access the article because of a paywall, just ask me for a copy.

Chica, Christina Marie. (2022). The Magical (Racial) Contract: Understanding the Wizarding World through Whiteness in Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World. University Press of Mississippi

Abstract: Race is foundational to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I argue that we can understand the structural context of race in our world and the Wizarding world philosophically by drawing on Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997) to illuminate what I call the Magical Contract. I use Mills’s philosophical scaffolding to demonstrate the logic behind the magical racial order where Wizards—like White people—sit atop a racial hierarchy with other magical beings—like non-White people—positioned below them.  I deploy additional scholarship to argue that 1) human mixing across blood status (pure, half, Muggle) approximates the historical and sociological process of immigrant assimilation into Whiteness rather than interracial acceptance, and that 2) true miscegenation—reproduction between humans and non-humans—is exceptional and largely repudiated. I provide a heuristic aided by concepts and examples from legal studies, sociology of migration, political science, and history to understand the Wizarding world.

Note: For a personal copy of my chapter to only read and not distribute, click here

Chica, Christina Marie. (2021). Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking. Sociology Compass.

Abstract: I call for a globally informed sociology of comparative placemaking that integrates historical and contemporary processes and includes the ephemeral, institutional, and personal. By placemaking, I am referring to the explicit or tacit cooperation among people to create, maintain, and give meaning to places in space through bodily occupation given differential resources and constraints. I review select place, space, and community-based literature about urban, Black, migrant, LGBTQ, and international populations to think about how we can build upon and integrate multiple theoretical, methodological, and epistemological insights to form an explicit placemaking research agenda. A US focus on neighborhoods contrasts with a comparative examination of global urban networks, social polarization, and transformation of the built environment in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies (Ren, 2018). I argue for a placemaking research agenda that bridges insight from US Urban Sociology with Global Urban Studies to consider how various structures and actors constrain and facilitate place projects. With a globally reaching and comparatively informed sociology of placemaking, we can illuminate our multi-structured story of place and agency in context. We can answer questions about how and why we co-create and are simultaneously disciplined by the process of creation.

Chica, Christina Marie. (2019). Queer Integrative Marginalization: LGBTQ student integration strategies at an elite university. Socius.

Abstract: The author draws on the oral histories of 44 LGBTQ Princeton alumni who graduated from 1960 to 2011 to examine student strategies for negotiating marginal identities when integrating into an elite university. Even with greater LGBTQ visibility and resources at the institutional level, LGBTQ students’ experiences and strategies suggest that we question the larger social narrative of linear progress. Across time, students navigate space by highlighting difference to belong as queer students in explicitly LGBTQ circles or muting difference to belong as token queer students in heteronormative circles. Integration of an LGBTQ person does not necessarily mean incorporation of an LGBTQ identity and vice versa. These strategies are largely contingent upon students’ social positions: intersectional identities, structural location, and available models. Student strategies are structurally tempered by queer integrative marginalization: the process of select predominantly elite LGBTQ people’s achieving special status among the heteronormative mainstream.

Chica, Christina. (2014). Queer Latino Experience in Education: The Influence and Perception of ‘Machismo’ on Young Men. Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal 19: 57-60.

Abstract: This excerpt from my junior independent work examines the influence of sexual identity, ethnicity, traditional gender roles, and concepts of masculinity on the educational experiences of Latino men. While my larger project also examines correlations among gender roles, sexuality, and educational attainment using data from the General Social Survey, this article focuses on my qualitative findings of in-depth interviews with college students. These findings led me to conclude that non-heterosexual identity in college men increased ambition and a desire to do well in school in order to seek positive reinforcement and overcompensate for carrying an undesirable social identity. For many interviewees, identifying as an outsider contributed to the ability to disconnect themselves from certain social expectations (i.e., traditional gender roles) that helped them escape negative situations (i.e., poverty, violent neighborhoods, unsupportive family) through educational advancement.