Research Associate Xhercis Méndez Works to Create Diverse Intellectual Spaces and Educational Experiences

Dr. Xhercis Méndez, (she/her/ella), is Vice-Chair and Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Queer Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her research focuses on the constitution of the sex/gender binary as it intersects with science, religion, and practices of colonialization throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.

Through a tracing of various colonial vestiges in our understandings of both sex and gender, her work radically reevaluates the methods and frameworks through which gender researchers have been taught to observe, interpret, and analyze the lives, bodies, and experiences of women, queer, and nonbinary practitioners of color in non-western religious systems. Her work brings together Women of Color and Decolonial Feminist scholarship, science studies, Afro-Latine/diasporic religion, philosophies, and epistemologies.

As a Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religions and a WSRP Research Associate for 2022–23, Méndez works to create intellectual spaces where a diversity of experiences can find a voice.

Below, Méndez discusses researching her book project, “Conjuring Nonbinary Futurities,” teaching HDS students, and the power of mentorship.

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I was born in Paterson, New Jersey, raised in Cleveland, and have lived the longest in California. My family comes from Puerto Rico. I am a U.S. citizen with an immigrant experience, having a mother who didn’t and doesn't speak English. I left home at thirteen to go to Phillips Academy here in Massachusetts for high school and have been traveling ever since. So, I claim Cleveland, California, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico as “where I’m from.” This movement across different geographies is an important part of my personal formation because each one of these spaces requires a different way of being from me. Each one of these spaces has shaped my ability to stretch and adapt as well as informed who I have become.

The book I am currently working on, “Conjuring Nonbinary Futurities,” begins by centering Santería, an Afrodiasporic/Latinx religion also popularly known throughout the Caribbean as Ocha or Lucumí, to examine the binary assumptions that travel with sex/gender as a category of analysis. It looks at gender as a category of analysis and asks: What is it that we are looking for when we say we are doing a gender analysis? What might we lose or miss when we apply a binary conception of sex/gender to non-western practices that may be operating from more expansive logics? To what extent might we be participating in obscuring more nonbinary formations, becomings, and possibilities through the act of research? It is with these questions in mind that I consider my research to be about decolonizing methodology and reexamining the kinds of tools we inherit in academia to understand other people’s worlds.

During my graduate program in the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture Program (P.I.C.) at Binghamton University, I started thinking about decolonial feminist methods and what a decolonial feminist approach might look like in practice. As an important point of departure, P.I.C. encouraged us to begin with thinkers outside of the Western European canon. This was very radical at the time. Because of it many of us were not considered legitimate philosophers within the academy, especially those of us who opted not to center Europe in our approaches. For me, the program offered an opportunity to really think about what it would mean to decolonize philosophy and theory, and invited all of us to take a closer look at the Eurocentric assumptions that were traveling with the categories we were using to understand our own communities. This also inspired me to take a closer look at the practices within my own communities that were generally dismissed as not worthy of study.

I'm a dancer, so I started by considering dancing—salsa in particular—to ask are there alternative understandings of gender and sexuality available in the music and dance that one could imbibe without knowing? In looking into the history of salsa, I discovered that many of its most famous singers were practitioners of Santería and that aspects of that religiosity had been woven into much of the social music and dance I grew up listening to. Talk about rupturing the sacred/secular binary, it is very common for us to be dancing at a social club and hear a song that conjures or is dedicated to the deities, or orishas as they are known, in this religious pantheon.

Recognizing that this religious cosmology is organized differently from my Catholic upbringing, I started exploring what these practices had to offer in terms of different conceptions of the body, formations of gender, understandings of power, and modes of empowerment. I began to wonder if I could take for granted the assumption that power was organized around the perception of sexual difference or if another logic was organizing hierarchies of power within this practice.

For example, in one of the chapters of my book, I examine the correspondences that have been made between the Orishas in the pantheon and Catholic saints. Saint Barbara is paired with an Orisha named Changó. While Saint Barbara within Catholicism is understood to be pure and chaste, Chango within Santería is considered a “masculine” and very sensuous deity. He’s a king and a warrior that is associated with fire and lightning. His colors are red. While many scholars have considered this correspondence an instance of “gender crossing,” my research suggests that there is another logic at work that has been obscured by this type of claim. The logic that is being obscured is that of constructing altars wherein a practitioner will gather the objects and colors that collectively come together to represent an Orisha’s story.

When you observe the iconography of Saint Barbara you will see that it includes many of the objects and colors that are part of Changó’s story. Saint Barbara often wears red and appears with a crown and sword. A lightning bolt also appears in her iconography and Changó is the deity of lightning. So, the question becomes: When we look at the iconography, are we seeing Saint Barbara, are we seeing the objects and colors that represent Changó's story, or something else altogether?

In order to make the claim that this is an instance of gender-crossing, I would have to dismiss the logic that goes into altar building altogether to focus in on sexual difference as the primary logic that organizes the correspondence. And yet, the only way I might look at an image of Saint Barbara and see Changó, is if I’m tuning into the objects and color that represent Changó. Rather than assume that sexual difference organizes all spaces at all times, this example allows us to tune into a different logic, a nonbinary logic, being made available through Santería’s practices. Notably, the objects that collectively represent Changó in the image are not sexed or gendered, they are nonbinary, and the correspondence in this instance seems to have little to do with any human forms, sexed or otherwise. Identifying nonbinary elements such as these within practice, offer us opportunities to disrupt many of the taken for granted binaries within research and the tendency to frame power in oppositional terms, such as “Men” versus “Women.”

This research is personal to me as the co-parent of twins who are now 12 years old. One of the twins identifies as nonbinary and has identified this way since they were little. As of right now they do not see their possibilities, hopes, and dreams reflected in what society has delineated as appropriate for either boys or girls. Unfortunately, there is little support for the exploration and fluidity they wish to inhabit, and they find themselves responding to a world thoroughly organized by a sexual binary and notion of sexual difference that is oppositional in nature. Watching their pain as they try to navigate being hyper visible and stared at, daily misgendering, and finding bathrooms, I can’t help but to want to do my part to mitigate and disrupt the constraints and harms enabled by the binary regime and to expand the options available for their future.

Last semester I taught a course here at HDS called, “When the Orishas Trouble Gender: An Exploration of Decolonial and Nonbinary Feminist Methods.” This course was an opportunity for me to introduce students to authors who the students had not encountered before—introducing decolonial feminist theories and Indigenous feminist’s proposals to decolonize. The majority of the students who took the class were either queer, non-binary, or trans-identified, so the conversations we had were not simply theoretical—they were embodied and pressing.

We began with a framing question: What do we mean when we say we're trying to decolonize? What does that look like in practice not just in theory? And throughout the course, we asked more nuanced questions such as: In what contexts is “queer” liberatory? And how do we know when we are unwittingly undermining what might be more spacious and egalitarian formations in non-western spaces?

I identify as a queer Latina woman, so on a very personal level, I know what it means to come to that identity as a liberatory one and as one that pushes up against heteronormativity and what it means to be a “woman.” And even as I understand that I still think it’s important for us to raise questions about how and when we seek to export what seems liberatory here to other spaces. Rather than presuppose that what is liberatory here will be liberatory elsewhere, the class was invited to ask more questions about the assumptions they have of communities outside of the United States. In other words, what do you know about spaces outside the U.S. beyond what you might have learned from mainstream media outlets or social media? This was an invitation to move beyond surface level understandings.

One of the things that I really appreciated in teaching this course at the Divinity School is that there was space for talking about non-western practices without having to justify them as legitimate ways of being. As a classroom we worked together to create a space to think beyond binaries and monotheisms, and students were motivated to explore how thinking in this way might positively impact their own approaches to research and to marginalized communities.

As a student, I had teachers who positively affirmed me in my line of questioning, mentoring me to think deeply and sit with hard questions. I was a nontraditional student, having gone back to undergrad to finish my bachelor’s degree after taking a 10-year break. My plan was to be a high school math teacher because I was good at math. At the time a lot of the Latinx youth in my East L.A. neighborhood were not passing the math portion of the high school exit exam. So, I figured I could help make a difference in the community’s graduation rates by becoming a math teacher. My professor, Dr. Vivian Price, had another path in mind and suggested I go on to grad school. I remember thinking, “Why would I go to grad school? Who cares what I might have to say about anything?” She was not deterred by my self-doubt but instead introduced me to the McNair Scholars Program, and in telling me about grad school, she reoriented me to the world of research. I wonder what would have been different if I hadn't encountered her when I did.

My mentors have motivated me to do the kind of work that gives back to my community of origin as well as my chosen communities. There are so many students like me: first gen, underclass, system impacted, who don't have enough people reflecting back to them what they are capable of. As a teacher and researcher, I am committed to creating intellectual spaces where diversity, collaboration, and community are valued and where my students get to see themselves and their communities reflected in the scholarship and uplifted for their contributions.

—Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto, HDS correspondent