Abstract

Through ancestral and submerged sensual repertoires, through healing practices, spoken word poetry, and other forms of psychic praxis, Latina and Xicana feminist theorizing resists the westernizing idioms of cognitive impairment. This chapter examines the ways that the coloniality of gender—as an injunction to inhabit heterosexualist, human-centered, notions of sanity—exclude Latina and Xicana experience and knowledge from the realm of cognitive accuracy. It suggests that heterosexualism creates conditions for hallucinations to arise within Latinx communities. Specifically, it explores healing traditions several centuries long as they shape contemporary Latina and Xicana theories and their ties to hallucinating perception. Positing that hallucinating knowing carries the healing properties of spiritual practices among mixed-race indigenous-Latinx peoples, this chapter gathers evidence of gender-nonconforming subjectivities and the more-than-human remedies that they concoct in their negotiation of perceptual repertoires. More-than-human knowing ultimately illustrates the role of perceptual cross-referencing, or transitioning, between tangible and intangible domains.