The Im/Possibilities of Gendered/Racialized Im/Mobilities

Dr. Lisa Flores 
Professor, Department of Communication
Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, CMCI
University of Colorado, Boulder

Thursday, April 14th | 2:00 - 3:30pm
LNCO 2120, Reading Room

In between mobility and containment is a juncture that is neither mobility nor containment that is neither mobility nor containment, neither possible nor impossible. I enter that juncture through frames of im/possibilities and im/mobilities as I build a theory of rhetorical race making at the U.S./Mexico border. Located in the 1950s, this talk situates race as a discursive effect that is both relentlessly mobile and always stopped. I trace the rhetorical race making that occurs in this im/possible im/mobility and argue that the controlled and contained movement of massive numbers of Mexican bodies that permeated U.S. mainstream discourse in the 1950s gathered its strength from a gendered tension between virility and sterility.